Deterritorialising patriarchal binary oppositions: Deleuze & Guattari, Virginia Woolf, Masculinities and Film Adaptations

Abstract

This thesis aims to problematise the hegemonic set of relations that has been aligned to gender and sex within the framework of binary thought when reading Woolf’s narrative of gender. Woolf’s elusive and intense style, the plasticity and ambivalence of her language and her complex, polyhedric characters make of Virginia Woolf’s literature a literature of her own; a radical literature that is able to draw new undefined landscapes, unsettled territories, dislocating and challenging routes mapped out through her experimental method, her crossing of generic boundaries, and her fluid and limitless characterisations.

This project focuses on Woolf’s male characters as a reaction to the constraints that gender studies have generally imposed upon her writings. Two main objections have been considered; on the one hand, much of the critical effort related to gender and Woolf’s writing has focused on femininity, by ignoring her radical male characters. On the other hand, despite vast female-centred studies and the small amount of studies focused on masculinities there is a number of scholars who have dealt with rigid and fluid male characters (studies that assimilate Woolf’s work on masculinities to the discourse of patriarchy, war, imperialism and fascism; psychoanalytic perspectives on gender; studies that focus on homosexuality; and studies that focus on androgyny). However, most of these approaches to masculinities in Woolf have inscribed gender/sex in rigid binary taxonomies.

My reading of Deleuze’s and Guattari’s collaborative body of work (their fluid conception of individuation and their concept of difference-in-itself) together with my reading of Men’s studies (Connell, Kimmel, Segal) and Difference Feminism (Irigaray, Jardine, Braidotti, Grosz, Olkowski, Colebrook) constitute the theoretical framework for this thesis in order to explore Woolf’s masculinities beyond gender/sex binary oppositions.

This thesis has aimed to contribute to the field of Woolf Studies with an analysis of both Woolf’s criticism of rigid discourses of masculinity and by proving Woolf’s radical concept of gender and her proposal of alternative gender behaviours. My two case studies have been Septimus Warren Smith and Orlando. I have proved these two novelistic characters to be polymorphous and multilayered figurations of gender and paradigmatic examples of the Deleuzo-Guattarian process of becoming-woman (Septimus as the empty BwO and Orlando as the full BwO).

Finally, this thesis evaluates the impact that Woolf’s visionary narrative of gender has had on more contemporary narratives. In order to analyse a more contemporary response to Woolf’s narrative I chose to work with two cinematic texts. This project focuses on Marleen Gorris’s Mrs Dalloway (1997) and Sally Potter’s Orlando (1992) as new texts that extend, reread, implement and reappropriate Woolf’s work to respond to different social demands in relation to gender. It analyses the extent to which the gender narrative of these two cinematic texts fail or succeed in projecting radical figurations of masculinities beyond man/ woman, male/female, heterosexual/homosexual taxonomies. This thesis approaches literature conceptually, from a philosophical perspective. An interdisciplinary methodology has been used. The whole nature of the project is interdisciplinary in its focus on both different media, novels and film adaptations, and in the crossing of literature, film studies, philosophy, and cultural studies. The main focus throughout is Virginia Woolf’s novelistic narrative of gender and two late twentieth century approaches to Woolf’s gender narrative carried out by two film adaptations of Woolf. The analysis of Gorris’s and Potter’s adaptations has been purely narratological. Formalist devices of the cinematic media have been used in narrative terms. That is to say, I have analysed the transformation, adaptation, amplification, or re-evaluation that these two more contemporary cinematic narratives have carried out from Woolf’s complex narrative of gender at two specific contexts with given social demands.

Aquesta tesi analitza la narrativa de gènere que Virginia Woolf articula a partir de les seves novel•les i la compara amb la narrativa de gènere de dues adaptacions cinematogràfiques més contemporànies (Potter, 1992; Gorris, 1997), centrant-se en l’anàlisi dels personatges masculins. Aquest projecte explora la crítica que Woolf adreça a la representativitat rígida de la masculinitat, així com la seva proposta de construccions de gènere alternatives. Per tal d’atendre aquestes alternatives, la tesi defineix un marc teòric que combina la filosofia sobre el procés d’individuació de Gilles Deleuze i Félix Guattari, el feminisme de la diferència (Grosz, Olkowski, Colebrook) i la teoria i crítica de les masculinitats (Connell, Kimmel, Segal). La tesi postula la radicalitat de la visió de gènere de Woolf, en tant que demostra el seu trencament amb el pensament binari. Septimus Warren Smith i Orlando, els dos estudis de cas, representen exemples paradigmàtics d’una concepció de gènere polimòrfica, fluida, múltiple, i polisexual. És així com la tesi avalua l’impacte de la visionària narrativa de gènere de Woolf sobre narratives més contemporànies. Les adaptacions cinematogràfiques Mrs Dalloway (Gorris, 1997) i Orlando (Potter, 1992) són analitzades com a textos que extenen, rellegeixen, implementen i reapropien els textos de Virginia Woolf per tal de respondre a les demandes socials específiques del seu temps.