Abstract
Abstract Critics used to read Orlando as a feminist text of Woolf’s idea about androgyny, as a mock biography of Vita Sackville-West’s family, and as Woolf’s ideal form of biographical novel. However, the fantastic elements in Orlando—Orlando’s sex-change, free movement in different times and spaces, automatic writing of his/her poem “The Oak Tree”—not only correspond to the characteristics of traditional literary fantasy in general, but also problematize the way of representing reality. This thesis intends to re-read Woolf’s only literary fantasy in term of Tzvetan Todorov’s and Rosemary Jackson’s definitions and analysis of this problematic generic form. In the spectrum of literary fantasy, Orlando challenges male/female, real/imaginary, orthodox/unorthodox traditional dichotomies constructed by and convicted in the patriarchal society through the manipulation of those fantastic elements on the one hand; on the other hand, it hybridizes diverse generic forms to embrace other possible ways for the repressed minority to articulate their voices and to reconstruct their histories. The scenes of the uncanny reveal the unbalanced desire contexts in Orlando, from whom we perceive the repressed, forbidden and unsatisfied desires of women in the world Orlando visits. In addition to transgressing the traditional literary boundary, Orlando also demonstrates Woolf’s idea that women’s writing can be an alternative travel writing which helps women novelists broaden their world views.