The queerness in Virginia Woolf’s writing

The year 1885 was bleak for the famed English writers Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf. While Wilde was being publicly tried for his homosexuality—a trial that would eventually lead to his imprisonment and subsequent death—Woolf was grieving her recently deceased mother and undergoing the first in a series of mental breakdowns that would continue to plague her for all of her life. The tragedy of this year is not where the similarities between these two end. Queercoding, homoeroticism, and gender conformity are more than just undertones in the works of both these authors who are widely recognised for their own queer identities. 

The 19th century and the first half of the 20th century saw a rather austere publishing scene, which mirrored the austerity of the social norms of the time. Homosexuality and queerness were considered akin to crimes, even speaking of them in any capacity was equated to a sign of depravity. For Wilde, this meant the homoeroticism in his works had to remain a subtext. In the case of Woolf, however, queerness was perhaps the pivotal focus of two of her most well-known books—Mrs. Dalloway (Hogarth Press, 1925) and Orlando: A Biography (Hogarth Press, 1928).  

Woolf had much more leeway with the themes she expressed in her works and getting them published because there was no one to directly censure her. In 1912, she married author Leonard Woolf and they started their own publishing business, Hogarth Press. It was through this venture that she published all her works, as well as the works of her close friends of the Bloomsbury Group and her long-standing friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. 

Sackville-West would eventually go on to serve as Woolf's muse for Orlando, a novel revolving around the life of a poet who magically transforms from male to female and leads a tumultuous life over the course of three centuries. A prolific writer and diarist in her own right, in Portrait of a Marriage (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), Sackville-West expressed how she often perceived herself to be two people at once—the masculine side of her who craved the company of women and the feminine side who found pleasure in men. At the time of Orlando's publication, it was an open secret that this bisexuality/pansexuality and gender fluidity largely inspired Woolf's character of Orlando. One can read the magical transformation that Orlando undergoes and their subsequent struggle with being a woman as a motif for the transgender/transexual experience, as was done in Paul B Preciado's 2023 documentary Orlando, My Political Biography.  Moreover, there are acute moments of gender confusion in Orlando, particularly in relation to two of Orlando's love interests. Neither of these characters appears to conform to the established gender binary. However, Woolf does not dwell heavily on their gender expressions but rather leaves it open-ended to interpretation in a move that I can only call an ode to postgenderism.  

Sexuality and the confusion with sexuality act as major themes in Mrs. Dalloway. The novel, set over a day, gives us a glimpse into the psyche of Clarissa Dalloway, a 51-year-old homemaker whose seemingly picture-perfect life is the opposite of perfect. Still pondering the kiss she shared with her childhood friend, Sally Seton, and navigating a fractured, sexless marriage with her husband, Clarissa appears to be in an internal struggle with the inner identity she knows she possesses and the external life she knows she has to abide by. Utilising the modernist, stream-of-consciousness form of writing where Woolf thrives, she creates a deep contrast between the heteronormative, patriarchal reality to which her character (and perhaps, herself) has to conform to and her actual queer identity. Mrs. Dalloway does not openly discuss ideas about the sexuality of its characters; the question of sexuality is absent and suppressed, and there is an air of ambiguity around the topic that, in my opinion, makes it even more noticeable when read through the queer lens. The ambiguity might have been a reflection of the confusion Clarissa felt regarding her feelings towards Sally, a confusion she felt because of the stigma surrounding conversations regarding sexuality in 20th-century England. 

With our modern sensibilities, we now categorise Virginia Woolf as a queer icon. At a time when any hint of sexual fluidity would have been a gross transgression, she chose to ignore the unspoken sociopolitical boundaries. Instead, she explored the nuanced relationship that the people around her and herself had with their gender and sexuality through the inner monologues and layered lives of her characters. She styled her stories to be subtle social commentaries and satires on the double standards and hypocrisy of her heteronormative society. Ultimately, she made a place for herself in queer history and in the hearts of millions of queer readers who resonated with her words. 

Adrita Zaima Islam is a struggling student, a failed guitarist, and a poet in need of better poetic ideas. Please send her your condolences at zaima2004adrita@gmail.com.