Orland by Janet Woolf

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Recommended: Gender roles throughout literature

The effect marriage in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando has upon the modern individual will be the focus of this essay, whilst also considering the role the wedding ring plays in defining the terms of marriage. Woolf portrays Orlando as a modern individual largely because she is free from a number of social conventions and familial pressures other women of the time are subjected to. Despite this, it is the pressure of marriage that she cannot escape: even after she has married Shelmerdine, Orlando is thinking of ways to live her life as before. In contrast to her statement of being forced to consider ‘the most desperate of remedies, which was to yield completely and submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband’ (121) Orlando is sincere in her affection for Shelmerdine, suggesting it is the idea of what marriage entails rather than the act itself which provides the pressure to conform and desire for escape. Orlando can be seen as a modern individual in terms of the contemporary, representing the emancipated free woman: this is visible as ‘the cry that rose to her lips was ‘Life! A lover!’ not ‘Life! A husband!’ (120) Without thinking, she automatically associates a husband with restrictions, which, as the text demonstrates, was not always the case in the nineteenth century: a husband would add to freedom whilst a lover could damage her reputation, making her an outsider in the patriarchal and strict Victorian society. Woolf displays this fact through the character of Orlando with marriage as a partial way of achieving freedom. Her decision to pretend to be married in order to live as she had previously done as a man shows marriage as a way to increase liberty; this is enhanced by her union with Shelmerdine, ultimately reflec... ... middle of paper ... ...ctorian England. Works Cited Caine, Barbara. English Feminism. New York: Oxford University Press. 1997. Print. Chesser, Barbara Jo. “Analysis of Wedding Rituals: An attempt to make weddings more sfdsdfffdmeaningful”. Family Relations. Vol. 29, No. 2. (Apr., 1980) pp. 204-209. [JSTOR] Goldman, Jane. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf. New York: Cambridge University Press. fsfdfsdgg2001. Print. Shanley, Mary Lyndon. Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton dfsdfdfsdfUniversity Press. 1989. Print. Simmel, Georg. ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ in Kolocotroni, Vassiliki; Goldman, Jane; Taxidou, sfdfsfdfsdOlga, ‘Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents.’ Edinburgh: Edinburgh ffffffffffffUniversity Press. 1998. Print. Wolff, Janet. ‘Feminism and Modernism’, The Polity Reader in Social Theory.

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