1.1 Virginia Woolf and Orlando

Virginia Woolf who was born on January 25th 1882 and passed away on March 28th 1941, is a British female writer, a literary critic, a literary theorist, and a representative of the stream of consciousness. She is hailed as the pioneer of modernism and feminism in the twentieth Century. During the two world wars, she is a central figure in the literary world of London, and at the same time she is also the central member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous novels include Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and so on. In her whole life, Woolf was very industrial, and she has written a large number of novels, essays, diaries and other forms of literature works. Woolf thinks that in the process of writing, the writer has to abandon the complex physical appearances in search of the essence of nature and life to find the meaning of human beings’ existence, and to feel the truth and the philosophy of life.

Orlando is a novel with the most exaggerated and romantic autobiographical features published by British writer Virginia Woolf in 1928, according to Trautmann Joanne in his work Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf (Joanne, 1989). It records the transition of the hero Orlando who was a man in the 16th century and became a woman in the 20th century, and who had a complete dual personality which has contributed to the realization of his value of life. Since its publication in 1928, the novel was regarded as the heterogeneous one among Woolf’s works, for the book shows the vagaries of genders without the boundaries of time and space, as well as the narrator’s mocking tone and playing style which made the traditional critics helpless, so it is difficult to be classified. Fleishman Avrom suggested in his work Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading that the satire and criticism of the gender conflicts in Orlando, confirms the French feminists’ thoughts, especially Kristeva’s theory (Avrom, 1975). The common parts of Virginia Woolf and Kristeva’s idea did not agree with exaggerating the differences between men and women, but they emphasized the genders’ inclusion, which is the positive direction of contemporary feminist literary theory.

1.2 Orlando 

Orlando was a noble handsome boy, and was favored by Queen Elizabeth in the palace. During the rule of King James he lost the favor, lived in the countryside, and was obsessed with literature. After becoming an outstanding Turkish envoy, he went to Constantinople but at that night of rebellion, he spent a night with a dancer, and was sleeping for a few days. After waking up he was unexpectedly into a female body, without the slightest change of his appearance. She returned to the Britain, became a member in the upper class, and met with Pope, Addison, and some other famous writers. Then she married to a captain and had a baby with him. At her middle age, her poetry has won many prizes, and her literary ideas and writing skills are getting more and more mature. The spirit of her also tended to be perfect to some extent. From the sixteenth Century to the year of 1928, Orlando’s life lasted for four hundred years. Daiches David thought that Orlando with humorous and sarcastic style implements Virginia Woolf’s feminist ideas, which were paid attention by the later feminist critics in his work Virginia Woolf (David, 1945). Through the creation of Orlando, Woolf has been free from the feminine’s self constriction of Victorian Age, and confirmed the confidence of women writers under the suppression of male discourse’s hegemony according to Li Chunyan (Li, 2004). She also recognized the limitations of a single sex, which prompted her to seek the common liberation of men and women.

1.3 Androgyny

Androgyny is the combination of masculine and feminine characteristics. Gender ambiguity may be found in fashion, gender identity, sexual identity, or sexual lifestyle. It can also refer to one’s singing or speaking voice. According to Rose Phyllis, in her work Women of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf she suggested that humans beings, androgyny in terms of gender identity is a person who does not fit neatly into the typical masculine and feminine gender roles of their society (Phyllis, 1978). Androgyny may also use the term “ambigender” or “polygender” to describe themselves. Many androgynes are treated as being mentally between woman and man. They may be identified as “non-gender”, “gender-neutral”, “agender”, “between genders”, “genderqueer”, “non-binary”, “multigender”, “intergendered”, “pangender” or “gender fluid”. However, these terms have slightly differences in the definition. A person who is androgynous may engage freely in what is seen as masculine or feminine behaviors as well as tasks as what Roe Sue said in Writing and Gender (Sue, 1990). They have a balanced identity that includes the virtues of both genders and may disassociate the task with what gender it may be socially assigned to. People who are androgynous disregard what traits are culturally constructed specifically for males and females within a specific society, and rather focus on what behavior is most effective within the situational circumstance.