doi: 10.18178/IJLLL.2020.6.3.264
Orlando Dies under the Oak Tree: How Pastiche will Save us in Postmodern Gender Trouble
Ying Hu 1
,
Yang Mu 2
- 1 School of Literatures, Languages & Cultures, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, EH8 9LH, UK.
- 2 School of English Studies, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, 100083, China.
Abstract
In Virginia Woolf’s novel <em>Orlando</em>, the major character is constantly employing the self-fashioning strategy to strengthen her cultural intelligibility. The oak tree, namely the eye of patriarchal power in the text, supervises and regulates her demeanors. Experiencing the change from The Oak Tree to the oak tree, Orlando embraces her textual decapitation and symbolic death. The limited autonomy of Orlando’s aesthetic choices and mannerisms sheds light on the transsexual dilemma haunting those unintelligible bodies in the face of absolute gender dichotomy. Their self-fashioning strategy is reduced to an approach to be readable subjects and eventually effaced from history. Judith Butler proposes the parodic nature of gender practices and holds that the subversive gender politics cannot occur without recitation of prevalent norms. Orlando’s struggle is a classic example to show the lack of feasibility within the Butlerian logic: the deconstruction of heteronormativity is accessible but forever being accessed. Attempting to handle what parody cannot root out, this paper highlights pastiche as a possible alternative to randomize the gender discourses and the political context. Pastiche, occurring within culture, incurs partial signification of norms, and can possibly bring new life to the horizon of contemporary queer theories.
Keywords
- Orlando
- parody
- pastiche
- gender trouble
How to Cite
Ying Hu and Yang Mu, "Orlando Dies under the Oak Tree: How Pastiche will Save us in Postmodern Gender Trouble," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 129-135, 2020. https://doi.org/10.18178/IJLLL.2020.6.3.264
Copyright & License
Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited (CC BY 4.0).