Orlando

Orlando’s return to England also means a return to stricter gender roles. The ship’s name itself, The Enamoured Lady, is a reminder of English society’s preoccupation with gender and gender performance. Orlando buys new noble women’s clothes, suggesting that she is aware of the role she will be expected to play once back in England.

Her experiences on the ship reveal her growing awareness of the new expectations she must live up to now that her body is female. Captain Nicholas Benedict Bartolus’s sexual overtures cause Orlando to reflect upon the need to protect her “jewel” (113)—chastity—that she now upholds as a woman. Reflecting these new limitations, Orlando bemoans the oppressiveness of women’s clothing while also admiring herself in the clothes. This ambivalence about her gender presentation reflects her continued mixture of both genders

Orlando goes back and forth, sometimes criticizing men, sometimes women. She has no strong identification with either gender and finds fault with both sexes. As a woman, she must now “pay in my own person for those desires” (115) that she had as a young man. Yet she is critical of the “sacred responsibilities of womanhood” (116) to look desirable while being chaste.

But while she dislikes the misogyny she experiences now, she enjoys the extra attention from the Captain. Her romantic interlude with the Captain onshore suggests that Orlando’s sexual appetite is constant across genders, despite female stereotypes. This experience results in Orlando acting more feminine, suggesting she can now understand something of the female experience after using her female poetry in a decidedly gendered act. As a result, Orlando is happy to be a woman so that she is free to “more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the human spirit which are [...] contemplation, solitude, and love” (119). These desires reflect Orlando’s shifting goals to live for herself.

The changes in the London skyline symbolize the dramatic changes to English culture over the decades that Orlando was away. Passing all the iconic structures of London prompt her memories, leading her to reflect on her past experiences and beliefs. Her shock at such a transformed city reflects the changes she has also undergone.

Orlando’s lack of concern about the lawsuits against her reflects how she no longer cares for titles, money, and property. Instead, Orlando looks forward to the anonymity these suits provide so that she can live in solitude. The servants’ insignificant response to her gender change underscores how superficial this change was and how the core of Orlando’s identity is still recognizable.

Orlando’s meditation on her family’s heirloom, Mary Queen of Scots’s prayer book shows how authors leave little pieces of themselves throughout their writing. The queen has left a “blood-stain,” a “lock of hair and a crumb of pastry” (127). But the reader, too, leaves a part of themselves, as “Orlando now added to these keepsakes a flake of tobacco” (127). The religious nature of the prayer book inspires Orlando to look at her own work as a reflection of her own poetic beliefs, which she equates to her religion. As a result, Orlando reflects on her own growth and maturation, which prompts her to restart her own poem to reflect her new identity.

Orlando’s second set of encounters with Harriet underscores the importance of change. Upon first seeing her, Orlando notes how “[n]ot a hair of her head was changed” (131). The reveal that Archduchess Harriet is Archduke Harry is not a transformation like Orlando’s; instead, it is a reveal, as Harry had been a man all along.

Their relationship parodies many aspects of a romance novel of the time. Both Orlando and Harry “acted the parts of man and woman” (132), but neither is successful. Orlando notes, “If this is love, [...] there is something highly ridiculous about it” (132). Harry displays more emotion than is thought “manly” at this time in history, and Orlando refuses to submit to a man. Their incompatibility in the game suggests that they are not a good match. When she places the toad down his shirt, she equates Harry more with the frog than with the prince of fairy tales.

As a result of her stereotypically feminine clothing, Orlando begins to act more like is expected for a woman. The biographer describes how clothes are “more important offices than merely to keep us warm” (138). As suggested by Orlando’s thoughts on the ship ride back to England, clothes place limitations and expectations upon the wearer, and the biographer also notes that they “change our view of the world” (138). The biographer claims to disagree, instead inserting their own opinion that clothes “are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath” and that “a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex” (139). They describe how the sexes “intermix” as every person is a “vacillation from one sex to the other” (139). This claim reveals the biographer’s nuanced view of Orlando and gender more broadly.

When Orlando dresses herself in her clothes from her boyhood, the clothes still “fitted her to perfection” (157). This perfect fit suggests that, despite the changes Orlando has undergone, she is still fundamentally the same person. The sex worker Nell’s identification of Orlando as a man and her acceptance of Orlando as a woman further underscores that gender does not define Orlando’s identity and is a fluid aspect of her person.

The clouds moving over London at the turn of the century foreshadow Orlando’s difficulty conforming to the nineteenth century. Orlando will struggle with the more staid and conservative Victorian era.