- Title Pages
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
- Roundtable: Woolf and Violence
- Intersections: Surveillance, Propaganda, and Just War
- Modernism and Memorials: Virginia Woolf and Christopher Isherwood
- Taking Up Her Pen for World Peace: Virginia Woolf, Feminist Pacifist. Or Not?
- The Sex War and the Great War: Woolf’S Late Victorian Inheritance in Three Guineas
-
Sky Haunting: The British Motor-Car Industry and the World Wars
1 - The 1914 “Expurgated Chunk”: The Great War in and out of The Years
- “beauty, simplicity and peace”: Faithful Pacifism, Activist Writing, and The Years
- Virginia Woolf, Katharine Burdekin, and Britain’s Cosmopolitan Musical Culture
- Death in the Air: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Townsend Warner in World War II
- Teaching Privileges: Three Guineas and the Cost of Global Citizenship
- From Guineas to Riyals: Teaching Woolf in the Middle East
- Fashionable Misconceptions: The Creation of the East in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
- From London to Taipei: Writing the Past in “Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream” and Mrs. Dalloway
- An Estranged Intimacy with the World: The Postcolonial Woolf’s Planetary Love in The Voyage Out
- “Shakespeare’s Sister”: Woolf in the World Before A Room of One’s Own
- Leonard Woolf: Writing the World of Palestine, Zionism, and the State of Israel
- “And the donkey brays”: Donkeys at Work in Virginia Woolf
- Companion Creatures: “Dogmanity” in Three Guineas
- Virginia Woolf’s Object-Oriented Ecology
- The Bodies In/Are The Waves
- Stretching our “Antennae”: Converging Worlds of the Seen and the Unseen in “Kew Gardens”
- “The Problem of Space”: Embodied Language and the Body in Nature in To the Lighthouse
- “Whose Woods These Are”: Virginia Woolf and the Primeval Forests of the Mind
- Negative Feminism and Anti-Development in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out
- Upheavals of Intimacy in To the Lighthouse
- The Reconciliations of Poetry in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts; or, Why it’s “perfectly ridiculous to call it a novel”
- Virginia Woolf, Composition Theorist: How Imagined Audiences Can Wreck a Writer
- The Precarity of “Civilization” in Woolf’s Creative Worldmaking
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
- Appendix
Fashionable Misconceptions: The Creation of the East in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Fashionable Misconceptions: The Creation of the East in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
- Chapter:
- (p.104) Fashionable Misconceptions: The Creation of the East in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
- Source:
- Virginia Woolf: Writing the World
- Author(s):
Matthew Beeber
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
This essay argues that Woolf’s portrayal of Constantinople and of the East is a misrepresentation; there is no evidence to suggest that the fashion or culture of Turkey or the Ottoman Empire was ever more androgynous than that of England. Woolf’s purposefully inaccurate portrayal of Turkish fashion in Orlando serves as a critique of a Victorian literary tradition which portrayed the colonized East as feminized, androgynous, and Sapphic. This essay first discusses the role of satire in Orlando and the novel’s position in relation to the English literary tradition. Then, it examines the depiction of Eastern fashion in the Constantinople scenes of Orlando: the eroticization and over-sexualization of the East and the xenological discourse which dominated Victorian perceptions of the Other. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Turkish Embassy Letters provides insight into the Victorian misconceptions against which Woolf levies a critique through her satirical portrayal of Turkish fashion in Orlando.
Keywords: Virginia Woolf, Orlando, Turkish Embassy Letters, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Fashion, Androgyny, Orientalism, Satire
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- Title Pages
- Introduction
- Acknowledgments
- Virginia Woolf Standard Abbreviations
- Roundtable: Woolf and Violence
- Intersections: Surveillance, Propaganda, and Just War
- Modernism and Memorials: Virginia Woolf and Christopher Isherwood
- Taking Up Her Pen for World Peace: Virginia Woolf, Feminist Pacifist. Or Not?
- The Sex War and the Great War: Woolf’S Late Victorian Inheritance in Three Guineas
-
Sky Haunting: The British Motor-Car Industry and the World Wars
1 - The 1914 “Expurgated Chunk”: The Great War in and out of The Years
- “beauty, simplicity and peace”: Faithful Pacifism, Activist Writing, and The Years
- Virginia Woolf, Katharine Burdekin, and Britain’s Cosmopolitan Musical Culture
- Death in the Air: Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Townsend Warner in World War II
- Teaching Privileges: Three Guineas and the Cost of Global Citizenship
- From Guineas to Riyals: Teaching Woolf in the Middle East
- Fashionable Misconceptions: The Creation of the East in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
- From London to Taipei: Writing the Past in “Wandering in the Garden, Waking from a Dream” and Mrs. Dalloway
- An Estranged Intimacy with the World: The Postcolonial Woolf’s Planetary Love in The Voyage Out
- “Shakespeare’s Sister”: Woolf in the World Before A Room of One’s Own
- Leonard Woolf: Writing the World of Palestine, Zionism, and the State of Israel
- “And the donkey brays”: Donkeys at Work in Virginia Woolf
- Companion Creatures: “Dogmanity” in Three Guineas
- Virginia Woolf’s Object-Oriented Ecology
- The Bodies In/Are The Waves
- Stretching our “Antennae”: Converging Worlds of the Seen and the Unseen in “Kew Gardens”
- “The Problem of Space”: Embodied Language and the Body in Nature in To the Lighthouse
- “Whose Woods These Are”: Virginia Woolf and the Primeval Forests of the Mind
- Negative Feminism and Anti-Development in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out
- Upheavals of Intimacy in To the Lighthouse
- The Reconciliations of Poetry in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts; or, Why it’s “perfectly ridiculous to call it a novel”
- Virginia Woolf, Composition Theorist: How Imagined Audiences Can Wreck a Writer
- The Precarity of “Civilization” in Woolf’s Creative Worldmaking
- Notes on Contributors
- Conference Program
- Appendix
