Clothes maketh the man? A dialogue with Woolf's "Orlando".

Virginia Woolf (1928; 1995) Orlando: a biography. Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Classics; pp. 92-93.
Virginia Woolf's close friend, Vita Sackville-West, was the model of the androgynous hero of Orlando. The deliberately fanciful story spans a period from the 16th to the 20th centuries and takes the hero, Orlando, from being a handsome boy of 16, through encounters with Elizabeth I to a love affair with a Muscovites Princess; from Ambassador Extraordinary to encounters, now as Lady Orlando, with Pope, Addison and Swift, and childbirth.

[Orlando] was becoming a little more modest, as women are, of her brains, and a little more vain, as women are, of her person. Certain susceptibilities were asserting themselves, and others were diminishing. The change of clothes had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it. Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us. For example, when Captain Bartolus saw Orlando's skirt, he had an awning stretched for her immediately, pressed her to take another slice of beef, and invited her to go ashore with him in the long-boat. These compliments would certainly not have been paid her had her skirts, instead of flowing, being cut tight to her legs in the fashion of breeches. And when we are paid compliments, it behoves us to make some return. Orlando curtseyed; she complied; she flattered the good man's humours as she would not have done had his neat breeches been a woman's skirts, and his braided coat a woman's satin bodice. Thus, there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. So, having now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain change was visible in Orlando, which was to be found even in her face. If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of Orlando as a woman we shall see that though both are undoubtedly one and the same person, there are certain changes. The man has his hand free to seize his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made to his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same.

This provokes me to wonder if the evolution of my gender identity would have even begun had I not gone to the podiatrist. Orthotics require particular shoes and well constructed joggers are of course the best. Wearing joggers every day profoundly changed my choice of clothes. Although I had mostly worn pants since becoming a lesbian, I now found myself wearing simpler clothes and less jewellery. After a while this became very comfortable; I especially liked not having to worry about what to wear, knowing it was most likely going to be jeans and a black T-shirt.

On those occasions when I did dress in a more feminine way, such as Joel's wedding and Zac's christening, not only were the clothes and makeup and jewellery uncomfortable, but I became resentful at all the compliments and fuss that was made of my appearance. 'This is how it works', I thought, 'this is what keeps us doing these absurd things and spending all this money, for the compliments and approval that women and men give you for doing femininity'.

That is the view of some philosophers and wise ones, but on the whole, we incline to another. The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's dress and of a woman's sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual -- openness indeed was the soul of her nature -- something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. For here again, we come to a dilemma. Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications and confusions which must result everyone has had experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd effects it had in the particular case of Orlando herself.

I'm not sure here if Woolf is being ingenuous, or if she is playing with us. Orlando is based on Vita Sackville-West, who several times eloped with Violet Trefusis, and when they lived together Vita dressed as a male. Woolf herself was also sexually involved with Vita. Here within her experience was a woman who demonstrated the vacillation between the sexes that Woolf describes. So why does Woolf insist on the profundity of the difference between the sexes? Or is she playing with us, by stating the prevailing view, but demonstrating the complete opposite? And is there any significance in the fact that in the novel Orlando lives for a couple of centuries as a man before becoming a woman, and her process of becoming a woman takes place in the course of a week in which she lies in a kind of coma? Whereas Vita's transformations were comparatively frequent and temporary. Is this simply a literary convenience for the sake of the plot, or is she perhaps accusing Vita of being a gender dilettante?

For it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman, how did she never take more than 10 minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man's love of power. She is excessively tender-hearted. She could not endure to see a donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. Yet again, they noted, she detested household matters, was up at dawn and out among the fields in summer before the sun had risen. No farmer knew more about the crops than she did. She could drink with the best and liked games of hazard. She rode well and drove six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again, though bold and active as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the most womanly palpitations. She would burst into tears on slight provocation. She was unversed in geography, found mathematics intolerable, and held some caprices which are more common among women than men, as for instance that to travel south is to travel downhill.

This is a lovely passage in the sense that it shows quite eloquently the social specificity of gender stereotypes, yet also how enduring they can be. The time and attention spent on clothes rings true to us today (I wonder if anyone has actually researched the comparison between men and women on the time spent dressing?) as does the male love of power and the tender-heartedness of women. However, I suspect contemporary women have equal capacities with men when it comes to drinking, gambling, and driving, and the figures are showing they are doing better than men in university and the gender gap in mathematics has all but disappeared. I know that Woolf herself was embittered that she was not given the same education as her brothers; I suspect that she is once again playing with gender stereotypes in order to expose their fundamental absurdity.

So what is she saying to us by means of Orlando? To me it seems her message is that the so-called 'profound' differences are largely artificial and perpetuated by social customs particularly focusing on dress. This seems to work in two ways; that when we take on gender stereotypical clothing we take on the stereotypes themselves, whether embodied, mental, or emotional. The other way is that our society demands that our attitudes and behaviours concord with our clothing, with our gender presentation. Perhaps then it is true that 'clothes maketh the man'.