Identities and consequently changed of two characters - Essay Example

..” (Woolf 3). The beginning itself lands Orlando’s character in pressured realms regarding his gender. His confusion and overreactive gesture of fleeing a country merely because he found a particular woman attractive brings out the implosive nature of his idea about his sexuality and gender. As his transformation occurs and Orlando revels in his femininity, the premise of the novel seems to disdain in embracement of the idea of heterosexual relationships. As Orlando’s relationships become more transparent, it is observable that he seems to be characteristic of both genders and finds pleasure and ecstasy in his relationships with both men and women.

The transgender values that Orlando adopts in essence speak with much clarity as regards the beauty of his emotional depth, although he is shown disdaining the company of lovers such as the Archduke. However, it is with Princess Sasha that the man Orlando stays alive. She seems to be the only object of his intensity, and it is she who attracts him despite the fact that he is not sure as to whether she is a boy or a girl since the first time he sees her ice skating. In this instance, it is notable that Sasha is also a character which plays upon the strong theme of gender.

The fact that Orlando was frustrated beyond belief when he perchanced to think that Sasha was a man depicts exactly how sensitively drawn Sasha caused him to be. Her tumultuous multilingual relationship with Orlando symbolizes the need they felt to understand that there are different patterns of thinking and language; however, it is not until Orlando becomes a woman that he truly understands Sasha, and there is a brief redemption of her character after the fall it received in the incident of Orlando finding her with another man: Now, the obscurity, which divides the sexes and lets linger innumerable impurities in its gloom, was removed, and if there is anything in what the poet says about truth and beauty, this affection gained in beauty what it lost in falsity.

At last, she cried, she knew Sasha as she was…” (Woolf 79) The conclusive awakening that is caused by Sasha in the realm of Orlando as a novel sets about distracting from the more materialistic and obviously chargeable themes; they fade into story as props onstage. The clothing and the relationships, and the touch of a political context that was drawn into the novel by Woolf stand undermined with the power of gender issues that Sasha, in her very foreign manner, draws the reader into. Her unification with the female Orlando signifies a release of other tensions which had been subtly built up; it is the innate connection and understanding that a woman would have towards a woman, and all issues of her being “rank” or “coarse flavoured” melt into a haze of distant communication in sexuality and empathy of existence.

This fact helps converge the beginning and ending of Sasha; her obscure and silent character, the origins of whom were unknown, whose parenthood was a matter of doubt too, is set free from the charges of the said obscurity. She ends well, in the facet of recognition as a woman by her lover Orlando, who is as fluid in understanding her as a woman as he was rigid in suppressing her as a man. It may be too generous to say that she is fully redeemed in this sense; she is seen as in as bad a condition as she started out it, with no faith, and it is this social and political streak of judgment which