Parler-Entre-Elles

Possibilities of a Less Phallocentric Symbolic Economy in Virginia Woolf's Orlando

Abstract

This paper reads Orlando according to post-structuralist theories of literature and subjectivity, focusing on the textual characteristics and the theoretical possibilities of what Luce Irigaray called a ‘female symbolic.’ I claim that when read with post-structuralist theories of literature and subjectivity, Orlando shows its subversive and disseminative potentials. The disseminative activity is closely connected to certain narrative characteristics, its deconstructive rhetorics, and the role the body and eroticism play in the production of meaning and subjectivity. Orlando is a pleasureable read in which the body becomes a central site, source, inspiration, and medium of meaning. I argue that Orlando creates a textual and libidinal economy that is different both from the typical patterns of modernism and, more generally, from characteristic patriarchal symbolic system of meaning. Relying on some feminist interpretations of Lacan, I will attempt to show how different texts may negotiate different relations to the ‘paternal metaphor’ and therefore create different subjectivities.