Abstract
At first glance, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (1928) and Sarah Waters’s Affinity (1999) seem to be very different kinds of novel growing out of different social, cultural and political contexts, yet both quite radically revise generic form in order to represent women’s same-sex desire. Woolf’s novel adopts a highly experimental modernist approach in the creation of a fantastical mock biography of her age-defying, time-travelling, sex-changing and gender-shifting character. Waters’s Victorian pastiche is a historical narrative of failed lesbian love and the delusional effects of desire which subversively displaces the usual heterosexual plot of historical romance. Like Orlando, Affinity is generically hybrid and literally double voiced; it foregrounds double vision and thematic duplicity as well as a self-consciousness about the writing process itself. Kym Brindle’s analysis of the ‘double and double-crossed chain of communication’ resulting from the narrative entanglement of the double diary form with secret, invisible letters elucidates this effectively. As Mark Llewellyn suggests, Waters ‘[i]nterpolat[es] a twentieth/twenty-first century reader’s knowingness into her text’ in order to ‘extend the boundaries of the historical tale she is telling’. Critics also attribute Orlando’s wider readership to Woolf’s adoption of the tropes of historical romance and consider the ways that she too rewrites the romance to extend sexual boundaries. In particular, it is the versions of gender and sexuality norms and expectations specifically consolidated and rigorously policed in the mid to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that the two novels challenge. In Heather Love’s exploration of queer experience in the past, she recognises the literary texts produced in this period as ‘visibly marked by queer suffering […] register[ing] these authors’ painful negotiation of the coming of modern homosexuality’. While Love’s work focuses specifically on male experience, the damaging impact of homophobia and Victorian gender norms her study exposes is also clearly registered in Woolf’s and Waters’s narratives.
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Notes
- 1.
Kym Brindle, ‘Diary as Queer Malady: Deflecting the Gaze in Sarah Waters’s Affinity’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 2:2 (2009/10), 65–85 (p. 65 and p. 66). See also Brindle, Epistolary Encounters in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Diaries and Letters (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
- 2.
Mark Llewellyn, ‘“Queer? I should say it is criminal!”: Sarah Waters’ Affinity’, Journal of Gender Studies 13:3 (1999), 203–14 (p. 213).
- 3.
As a recent example, see Elizabeth English, Lesbian Modernism: Sexuality, Censorship and Genre Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
- 4.
Heather Love, Feeling Backwards: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 4.
- 5.
Woolf attended court and was prepared to speak in defense of the novel in order to uphold ‘freedom of speech’, despite her misgivings about its literary merits. See Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3 1923–1928, ed. by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1978), p. 520.
- 6.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume 1: An Introduction [1976], trans. by Robert Hurley (London: Penguin, 1990), p. 43.
- 7.
Ashley Dawson, The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 174.
- 8.
Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place. Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, (New York and London: New York University Press, 2000), p. 2.
- 9.
Love, Feeling Backwards, p. 30.
- 10.
Llewellyn, ‘“Queer? I should say it is criminal!”’, p. 204.
- 11.
Llewellyn, ‘“Queer? I should say it is criminal!”’, p. 213.
- 12.
Susan Alice Fischer, ‘“Taking back the night”? Feminism in Sarah Waters’ Affinity and Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day’, Sarah Waters (Contemporary Critical Perspectives), ed. by Kaye Mitchell (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), pp. 16–28 (p. 17).
- 13.
Love, Feeling Backwards, p. 20–1.
- 14.
Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography [1928] (London: Grafton, 1989), p. 142. Further references are provided in parenthesis in the text.
- 15.
Love, Feeling Backwards, p. 1.
- 16.
Llewellyn, ‘“Queer? I should say it is criminal!”’, p. 207.
- 17.
Rachel Carroll, ‘“Becoming My Own Ghost”: Spinsterhood, Heterosexuality and Sarah Waters’s Affinity’, Genders 45 (2007), 1–14 www.genders.org/g45/g4g_carroll.html (accessed 18 November 2013), p. 3. Web.
- 18.
Described as a ‘frightful’ ‘stir’ in which her mother ‘scolds so hard, she might be spitting pins’ (p. 176).
- 19.
Sarah Waters, Affinity (London: Virago, 1999), p. 176. Further references are provided in parenthesis in the text.
- 20.
Indeed as it does for Margaret at two key points: as a result of her mother’s intensified policing of her conformity in insisting she attend the dinner party, and as she realises Selina’s betrayal and the end to her plan of escape.
- 21.
See Brindle, Llewellyn and Ann Heilmann, ‘Doing it with Mirrors: Neo-Victorian Metatextual Magic in Affinity, The Prestige and The Illusionist’, Neo-Victorian Studies, 2:2 (2009/10), 18–42, for discussions of the function of the gaze and surveillance in this novel.
- 22.
Heilmann, ‘Doing it with Mirrors’, pp. 28 and 29.
- 23.
Brindle, ‘Diary as Queer Malady’, p. 79 and 78.
- 24.
Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3 1925–30, ed. Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNeillie (London: Penguin, 1982), p. 168.
- 25.
Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, pp. 161, 168.
- 26.
Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, pp. 161, 162.
- 27.
Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3, p. 429.
- 28.
Brindle, ‘Diary as Queer Malady’, p. 69.
- 29.
Ruth Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 202. Though, as Celia Marshik’s study makes clear, ‘documents in Great Britain’s national archives reveal that Woolf came closer to prosecution than she and others realized’. See British Modernism and Censorship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 118.
- 30.
Fischer, ‘“Taking back the night”?’, p. 17.
- 31.
Lucie Armitt and Sarah Gamble also suggest a palimpsestic structure as they consider the ‘superimpos[ition]’ of Margaret’s and Selina’s diaries. See ‘The Haunted Geometries of Sarah Waters’ Affinity’, Textual Practice, 20:1 (2006), 141–59 (p. 152).
- 32.
This could be seen as a preoccupation for Woolf too, since by the time she is writes her novel, Vita Sackville-West has also become a lost love.
- 33.
Love, Feeling Backwards, p. 19.
- 34.
Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, pp. 4–5.
- 35.
As Melanie Micir also argues, Orlando ‘critique[s] understandings of time as a naturalized, internalized, bodily performance of the too easily accepted social scripts that govern our lives’ and invites us to ‘recognize and resist […] the standard, heteronormative, biologically-driven temporal organization of our world’. See ‘The Queer Timing of Orlando: A Biography’, Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Special Issue: Queering Woolf, 82 (2012), 11–13 (p. 11).
- 36.
Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, edited the DNB from its inception in 1885 until 1891; this biographical record was primarily concerned with recording the lives of white, middle-class, heterosexual men.
- 37.
Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3, p. 429.
- 38.
Carroll, ‘“Becoming my own ghost”’, p. 4.
- 39.
Love, Feeling Backwards, p. 21.
- 40.
Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, p. 2.
- 41.
Love, Feeling Backwards, p. 4.
- 42.
Heilmann, ‘Doing it with Mirrors’, p. 73. Brindle also notes Margaret’s letter’s dual function (p. 78).
- 43.
It is worth noting that Margaret is also a serial replacement for Madeleine Silvester, the young woman Selina and ‘Peter Quick’ work to seduce, presumably in order to exploit her financially in a scheme that leads to Selina’s imprisonment. Margaret inadvertently makes the connection between herself and vulnerable daughter, p. 139.
- 44.
Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3, p. 530.
- 45.
Sarah Waters, ‘Desire, Betrayal and “lesbo Victorian romps”’, The Guardian, 5 November 2002 http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/nov/05/fiction (accessed 18 November 2013). Web.
- 46.
Dawson, The Routledge Concise History, pp. 178, 179.
- 47.
Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary, p. 190.
- 48.
Vanita, Sappho and the Virgin Mary, p. 190.
- 49.
This loss in fact prompted a first death-like sleep for Orlando.
- 50.
Waters, ‘Desire, Betrayal and “lesbo Victorian romps”’, n. pag.
- 51.
Brindle, ‘Diary as Queer Malady’, p. 72.
- 52.
Love, Feeling Backwards, pp. 20-1.
- 53.
Love, Feeling Backwards, p. 29.
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Simpson, K. (2016). Quick and Queer: Love-Life-Writing in Orlando and Affinity . In: Jones, A., O'Callaghan, C. (eds) Sarah Waters and Contemporary Feminisms. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-50608-5_3
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