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“Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture“Gypsies” and Property in British Literature

“Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture: “Gypsies” and Property in British Literature [Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) is manifestly a novel about the ambiguity of gender: in it, a young man changes, during a three hundred-year-plus lifespan, into a woman.2 In the course of Orlando’s transition from male to female, gender’s multiple possibilities are shown to be far less stable than the rigid binaries of the nineteenth century against which Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group reacted would suggest.3 What is less clear is that Orlando, like so many of its nineteenth-century predecessors, is a novel about the ambiguity of property, about the way the apparent solidity of ownership of an inherited ancestral estate such as Orlando’s (modeled on Vita Sackville-West’s Knole4) could dissolve from the clarity of primogeniture into indeterminacy, turmoil, and litigation. As gender is revealed to be as filmy and mysterious as Orlando’s transformation from male to female, the distribution of property is shown to be equally amorphous, linked to principles no more certain than those of gender.5 It is in the midst of the transition from male to female, from property owner to litigant, that Orlando replicates the plot of many English ballads6 and runs away with a “gipsy tribe” (140), seeking respite from the exacting demands of gender and ownership and the complicated relationship between the two.7] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

“Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture“Gypsies” and Property in British Literature

Part of the Studies in European Culture and History Book Series
Editors: Glajar, Valentina; Radulescu, Domnica
Bardi, Abby
“Gypsies” in European Literature and Culture — Oct 14, 2015
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References (13)

Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan US
Copyright
© Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Nature America Inc. 2008
ISBN
978-1-349-37154-9
Pages
105 –122
DOI
10.1057/9780230611634_6
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) is manifestly a novel about the ambiguity of gender: in it, a young man changes, during a three hundred-year-plus lifespan, into a woman.2 In the course of Orlando’s transition from male to female, gender’s multiple possibilities are shown to be far less stable than the rigid binaries of the nineteenth century against which Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group reacted would suggest.3 What is less clear is that Orlando, like so many of its nineteenth-century predecessors, is a novel about the ambiguity of property, about the way the apparent solidity of ownership of an inherited ancestral estate such as Orlando’s (modeled on Vita Sackville-West’s Knole4) could dissolve from the clarity of primogeniture into indeterminacy, turmoil, and litigation. As gender is revealed to be as filmy and mysterious as Orlando’s transformation from male to female, the distribution of property is shown to be equally amorphous, linked to principles no more certain than those of gender.5 It is in the midst of the transition from male to female, from property owner to litigant, that Orlando replicates the plot of many English ballads6 and runs away with a “gipsy tribe” (140), seeking respite from the exacting demands of gender and ownership and the complicated relationship between the two.7]

Published: Oct 14, 2015

Keywords: BRITISH Literature; British Isle; Henry VIII; Ideological Work; Exacting Demand

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