In Virginia Woolf's works, freedom is an often unattainable ideal. Woolf speaks at length about freedom in her lyrics, ranging from the broader freedom of the individual to live as she chooses in her fiction to the creative freedom of the artist in her nonfiction. There are some instances in his work where freedom becomes a possibility both in the life of the individual in general and in that of the artist. The titular character of Orlando is able to live a life that defies definition due to their ever-changing gender, while in the book-length essay A Room of One's Own Woolf provides the writer with a more creative and open-ended form of writing. Both of these works present different types of freedom, personal and artistic, but the catalyst for these freedoms is the same: androgyny. Androgyny, for Woolf, is a liberating state, allowing us to distort or escape what she sees as the most limiting discourse in our society: gender. In fact, Woolf presents androgyny as the state in which the individual is most free. This essay will argue that Woolf's writing explores a concept of freedom, both personal and artistic, attainable only through a distortion and rejection of gender through androgyny, looking at Orlando's subversive life and rejection of gender in A Room of One's Own.Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get Original Essay Sandra Bem defines the androgynous individual as “an individual who does not rely on gender as a cognitive organizing principle and whose personality therefore combines both the masculine and the masculine.” feminine elements".[1] Arguing that the androgynous individual need not “rely on gender as a cognitive organizing principle,” Bem defines androgyny not simply as the mix of masculine and feminine. Rather, androgyny is the freedom and ultimate rejection of gender discourse, the mix of masculine and feminine is simply the product of said freedom. Furthermore, the idea of ​​gender as a “cognitive organizing principle” means that everything about us as individuals is regulated and ordered by gender: the clothes we wear, the acts we perform, the words we use; everything in us has a gender. According to Bem's reasoning, to be androgynous is to be free from gender, to defy the definition of gender, and to exist beyond what Judith Butler calls the realm of cultural intelligibility: an orderly and coherent subjectivity governed by gender. Butler writes that ""intelligible" genres are those that in a certain sense establish and maintain relationships of coherence and continuity between sex, gender, sexual practice and desire."[2] Androgyny is a freedom that allows the individual to challenge and distort Butler's concepts. area of ​​cultural intelligibility. Being androgynous, therefore, means confusing and rejecting the standards normalized in our society, rejecting the default and choosing an incomprehensible alternative. The novel Orlando presents a version of androgyny that subtly challenges the notion of cultural intelligibility. Subtitled “A Biography,” the novel uses the form of biography and the narrative voice of the biographer to present expectations of the culturally intelligible subject, only to contradict that expectation with Orlando's fantastical and amorphous life story. In her essay "The Art of Biography" Woolf writes that the form of biography "imposes conditions, and those conditions are that it must be based on fact".[3] Biography as a form, according to Woolf, is rigid and controlling. In biography there can be no room for doubts or inconsistencies, and therefore the narration of the biography, the voice of the biographer (which we assume is amale voice), is the voice of truth. Orlando opens with a sentence that directly assures the reader that the biographer is a harbinger of the truth: «He – there could be no doubt about his sex, although the fashion of the time did something to disguise it'.[4] This sentence is intended to convince the reader that the biographer can see the truth, that despite what may "mask" reality there is "no doubt" that the biographer is telling honest facts. Orlando's biographer is the voice of truth, expectation and norm. That Orlando could be a woman disguised as a man according to 'the fashion of the time' is not a possibility because this goes directly against the norm that the biographer is destined to maintain. Furthermore, at the beginning of the novel Orlando is undoubtedly male and thus the biographer presents the expectations of the male subject: «From act to act, from glory to glory, from office to office he will have to go, followed by his scribe, until they are reach whatever place lives up to their desire. Orlando, upon closer inspection, was cut out for such a career." [Woolf, pp. 11]The biographer has an expected standard for Orlando and since Orlando, at the beginning of the novel, is "to be looked at", the archetypal nobleman, there is "no doubt" in the biographer's mind that this expectation will be fulfilled. encountered. The genre, rigid and full of norms, has determined what Orlando's life as a noble will be, depriving him of the freedom to choose the life he truly wants, and the biographer, "his scribe", is there to record and define this life. . The biographer in Orlando thus comes to act as a guarantor of a culturally intelligible and coherent subjectivity. It is the biographer's job to verify that Orlando still exists in the realm of the intelligible and to define Orlando's life as truthfully and solidly as possible. As the novel progresses, however, Orlando defies the biographer's expectations and lives freely beyond the realm of the intelligible. cultural intelligibility. It is their 'transformation' from man to woman that frees Orlando from the rigid definitions that the biographer has imposed on him. Before Orlando's transformation the biographer's narrative was rigidly secured in its subject, but following that transformation inconsistencies arise and the rigidity of that narrative begins to collapse. After Orlando's immediate transformation, the biographer says that "we are left with no choice but to confess: she was a woman." [Woolf, pp. 83] 'We have no choice to confess' shows that the biographer, unlike the omniscient figure that Woolf no doubt imagines in 'The Art of Biography', has in Orlando encountered the limits of understanding. Pushed to the limit of cultural intelligibility, Orlando becomes a paradox for the biographer, shown through the oxymoronic "she was a woman." What up to this point was so definite and clear to the biographer in the novel becomes indefinable, his subject so incomprehensible that he states that it is 'irritating [...] to see his own subject, on whom he has expended so much time and effort, slip completely out of anyone's reach." [Woolf, pp. 155] As Orlando grows into androgyny, they experience greater freedom from the limiting discourse of gender and cultural intelligibility embodied by the biographer. The biographer, meanwhile, becomes incapable of hiding or disguising Orlando's unintelligibility, of "attenuating, veiling, covering, concealing, enveloping" Orlando's now entirely subversive existence. [Woolf, pp. 170] Unable to contain or hide Orlando's unintelligibility, his androgynous freedom, the biographer finds himself struggling to maintain a coherent intelligibility within the novel's narrative. As Christy L. Burns writes: "the notion of an essential self [is] comically reduced to a belief that Woolf's less than competent narrator struggles to defend".[5] Subjectivityof Orlando is freed from their androgyny beyond the limits imposed by the role of the biographer. Freedom from the confines of the biographer is achieved by Orlando through the realization of an androgynous life. The search for freedom from convention and expectation is evident in Woolf's exploration of artistic imagination. While in Orlando androgyny is explored through the way the individual can defy definition or containment through an androgynous life, in A Room of One's Own Woolf argues that an androgynous writing style liberates the author and allows him to pursue a more creative and fulfilling form of literature. In the essay, Woolf displays a keen awareness of the limits posed by gender, highlighting how women's traditionally subservient role within society and their historical exclusion from higher education has limited their creative abilities. Woolf, however, is not unaware of how gender as a discourse not only limits women creatively, but also creates a barrier for men. Woolf writes that «Perhaps a purely male mind can create no more than a purely female mind».[6] Gender, for Woolf, is therefore a creative block that prevents artists of either gender from creating art with more substance than an artist of the opposite gender. Gender places limits on the imagination, creating a difficult double subjectivity in which there is a clear distinction between male and female: «in each of us two powers preside, one male and the other female; and in the brain of man man predominates over woman, and in the brain of woman woman predominates over man.' [Woolf, pp. 88] It is starting from this duality of the mind that Woolf offers a solution to the limits created by gender; androgyny. Mary Jacobus writes that Woolf's androgyny is one in which "the division [between male and female] is closed with an essentially utopian vision of undivided consciousness". Jacobus interprets Woolf's androgyny not as the individual exhibiting masculine and feminine traits, but rather where the division between masculine and feminine is destroyed. If there are no longer distinctions between male and female as Jacobus disputes that Woolf imagines, and gender as discourse, as Butler writes, exists because of the relationship between male/man and female/woman, then there is no such thing as gender; the genre is outdated. Woolf therefore presents a type of androgyny that presents an absolute freedom from gender discourse since gender discourse no longer exists. When he writes that "Coleridge certainly did not mean, when he said that a great mind is androgynous, that it is a mind that has a particular sympathy for women," he is saying that the androgynous mind is not one that inhibits both the masculine and the feminine. elements, indeed it surpasses them. [Woolf, pp. 89] She argues that 'the androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that transmits emotions without impediments; which is naturally creative, incandescent and undivided.' [Woolf, pp. 89] Therefore the androgynous mind does not exhibit the best qualities of gender norms: the traditional sensitivity of women and the strength of men. To the androgynous mind these qualities are innate parts of the artist. As Marilyn R. Farwell writes, Woolf's androgyny allows a "freedom from the emotional extremes of sexual stereotypes [that] will lead to complete objectivity".[8] Woolf argues that it is through the complete abandonment of genre, through living freely from that particular discourse, that the artist is given the opportunity to create and imagine without limits and with total objective honesty. Woolf advocates a form of androgyny that closely resembles Bem's: a non-dependence on "gender as a cognitive organizing principle," as it happens that the abandonment of gender distinctions is so easily interpreted by those subjectivities still existing within ofspeech. of gender as the display of both male and female traits when in reality it is just the display of traits without a definition of gender. Therefore in A Room of One's Own Woolf does not advocate the celebration or empowerment of one gender or another, but rather the repression or ignoring of all gender. Woolf argues that for the writer to be successful in her pursuits she must not liberate the femininity in her but rather destroy it to release creativity. Gender in this essay, unlike Orlandobiographer's politics of gender control, is divisive. Woolf writes that "no age could ever have been so stridently sex-conscious as ours", noting that "the suffrage campaign was undoubtedly to blame". It must have aroused in men an extraordinary desire for self-affirmation." [Woolf, pp. 89] Focusing on gender means for Woolf not pursuing freedom from it, but rather reinforcing the ways in which it divides us. Gender norms are designed to defend themselves when challenged; if a writer declares "I am a writer and I want to be taken seriously" it makes a writer write exclusively to "celebrate masculine virtues, reinforce masculine values ​​and describe the world of men", writing with an "emotion". […this] is incomprehensible to a woman.' [Woolf, pp. 92] Gender, therefore, is so divisive that it creates communication problems between the sexes. Woolf writes that «it is fatal for anyone who writes to think about his own sex. It is fatal to be a pure and simple man or woman; you have to be woman-man or man-woman'. [Woolf, pp. 94] To free himself from the creative limitations imposed by genre, the writer must completely abandon his own genre. Woolf's vision of androgyny in A Room of One's Own is a celebration of creative empowerment and a denunciation of male and female partisan emancipation. As Lisa Rado observes, "the empowerment that [Woolf's androgyny] is intended to produce is based on the repression of her own female identity".[9] Subjectivity, Woolf argues, should not be divided by the labels of male/man or female/woman. We should instead ignore these labels and empower genderless creative subjectivity. In a sense, in A Room of One's Own Woolf directly challenges the authority of Orlando's biographer. The biographer constantly attempts to rigidly maintain Orlando's cultural intelligibility: "He - for there can be no doubt of his sex" and "he was a woman" are examples of how the biographer constantly attempts to maintain Orlando as a binary being, " he' or 'she' with the vision of androgyny in A Room of One's Own the biographer, maintaining traditional gender roles, fails to see the true Orlando his creative purpose, to honestly record the subject's life, is compromised by his inability to see beyond gender. His inability to see Orlando as "woman-man or man-woman", but rather see him only as man or woman, one or the other, is perhaps the greatest. biographer's failure and is thus denied the creative freedom to accurately record Orlando's life. As Makiko Minow-Pinkney writes: "Androgyny in Orlando is not the resolution of oppositions, but the throwing of both sexes into metonymic confusion. of genres". they attempt to describe Orlando immediately after the transformation: 'Orlando had become a woman – there's no denying it. But in every other respect Orlando remained exactly as it had been." [Woof, pp. 83] The biographer strives to resolve the opposition of Orlando's sexed body, for the sex of Orlando's body is a topic in which there has consistently been "no doubt" or "denial" with Orlando's subjectivity. For the biographer Orlando is the same and not the same at the same time, the biographer isunable to make any sense of Orlando's cultural intelligibility. By failing to understand Orlando's androgyny, the biographer is denied the creative freedom to be able to write a biography of his subject that is "based in fact." Unlike the biographer, Orlando himself seems to inhabit the rejection of gender that Woolf calls for in A Room. of the Proper. Their life in England is defined by a collage of performative acts that for the biographer signal a constant coming and going from male to female, but for Orlando these performative acts are not gendered. Instead they have liberated themselves from gender, so these acts are genderless, they are simply undefined or unregulated actions. The biographer writes that: 'Curious people of his own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando were a woman, why did he not take more than ten minutes to dress? And weren't his clothes chosen rather haphazardly, and sometimes worn rather shabbily? And then they would say that, nevertheless, it has nothing of the formality of a man, or the love of power of a man. He has an excessively tender heart." [Woolf, pp. 111] The biographer notes how Orlando performs acts that, due to his limiting view of gender, are considered masculine or feminine and which are in direct conflict with his sex. She can't be a woman because she doesn't care how she dresses, but she can't be a man either because she doesn't have the severity or formality needed. It is something halfway between man and woman, but the biographer is unable to recognize or name what it is. Orlando, performing acts that distort the biographer's understanding of them, refuses to pass as man or woman. The writer Sandy Stone writes in passing that "it means to live successfully in one's chosen gender, to be accepted as a 'natural' member of that gender. To pass is to deny mixing. The same thing with passing is the erasure of the previous gender role." [11] Passing in Orlando's case would mean accepting and meeting the expectations of their now gendered female body; taking more than ten minutes to dress and refusing to look unkempt Orlando, by refusing to pass as male or female, is accepting that they used to be male gender and are now female gendered, Orlando lives freely between what was expected of them before the transformation and what is expected of them now Living an androgynous life according to the standards set by Woolf in A Room all to themselves, Orlando lives free from the expectations set for them by society, frees themselves from gender limitations. The freedom to live as one wishes or write as best as one can, depends, according to Woolf, on overcoming gender. Overcoming gender means living androgynously, living beyond the limits created by gender. Woolf often explores the concept of freedom as something difficult to achieve. Perhaps it is only because of the fantastical nature of Orlando's life, which spans many centuries and treats genre with such ease, that freedom is achieved. Likewise, perhaps the idea that genre should be completely abandoned in A Room of One's Own is too utopian or idealistic to have any chance of becoming the standard for the artistic mind. Androgyny, as difficult to achieve as it is to describe, is perhaps too unrealistic a state to be the goal of the individual or artist. Freedom, therefore, is often a fantasy or simply a theory. Nonetheless, Woolf presents a form of androgyny that offers the possibility of freedom from gender, just one of many discourses that often deny us, individuals or artists, the freedom we desire. Works Cited[1] Sandra Bem, 'Androgyny and Gender Schema Theory; a conceptual and empirical integration', in Psychology and gender, ed. by Theo B. Sonderegger, (Nebraska;. 231