“Gypsies” and Property in British Literature

Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) is manifestly a novel about the ambiguity of gender: in it, a young man changes, during a three hundred-year-plus lifespan, into a woman.² In the course of Orlando’s transition from male to female, gender’s multiple possibilities are shown to be far less stable than the rigid binaries of the nineteenth century against which Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group reacted would suggest.³ What is less clear is that Orlando, like so many of its nineteenth-century predecessors, is a novel about the ambiguity of property, about the way the apparent solidity of ownership of an inherited ancestral estate such as Orlando’s (modeled on Vita Sackville-West’s Knole⁴) could dissolve from the clarity of primogeniture into indeterminacy, turmoil, and litigation. As gender is revealed to be as filmy and mysterious as Orlando’s transformation from male to female, the distribution of property is shown to be equally amorphous, linked to principles no more certain than those of gender.⁵ It is in the midst of the transition from male to female, from property owner to litigant, that Orlando replicates the plot of many English ballads⁶ and runs away with a “gipsy tribe” (140), seeking respite from the exacting demands of gender and ownership and the complicated relationship between the two.⁷

It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.

Julia Kristeva¹