울프의 올란도: 들뢰즈/가타리의 “여성-되기”

Orlando cross-dresses as a woman, and chooses “a woman’s sex.” Bored with the restrictions of her femininity, Orlando decides to “cross-dress” as a man and seek adventure. Orlando’s transvestism and transsexuality in Orlando deconstruct the binary gender system, and further open up the space for multiplicity of sex and self. This paper will investigate the implications of Orlando’s desire for becoming a woman, using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “becoming-woman.”

Orlando’s vision of self is not binary but multiple; not dualistic but interconnected; not fixed but flowing. Deleuze and Guattari insist that all binaries privilege one term as standard, “white,” “male,” “adult,” “rational.” “Becoming-woman” is a first shift, destabilizing Western “binary oppositions.” They oppose the linear, self-reflexive mode of thought, “logocentrism” that Derrida and others criticize. As Deleuze and Guattari suggest, Orlando “deterritorializes” the normative models and seek multiplicity of self. Orlando’s change of his/her clothes subverts the hierarchical binary gender structure. The category “sex” is an artifice: gender as a performance is apparent in many scenes in Orlando. Orlando’s transvestism deconstructs the dichotomous vision of self and doubles his/her pleasure.

Orlando attempts to “deterritorialize” and to draw a “line of flight” between states which displace and disorient subjects and identities. He/she subverts the conventional meanings of identity, desire and modes of thinking. His/her vision of the self does not rest upon the dichotomous opposition of masculine and feminine positions, but rather on a multiplicity of self and sexuality. Orlando’s self and sexuality, borrowing Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, are “rhizomatic” (going in all directions, any point connecting with any other point, as opposed to the branching structure of the tree). Orlando as a biographical writer describes his/her multiple selves: “the boy as a poet, the young man as Sasha’s lover,” self as “an ambassador, or the Gipsy, or the Fine Lady….” Her/his selves, as in a rhizome group, are continuously connected with other various objects. The narrator states that “all (Orlando’s) selves were different,” and “she may have called upon any one of them.” In this way, Orlando has “n” selves and “n” sexualities. The final scene of Orlando (in which the narrator describes the flight of “a wild goose”) symbolizes Orlando’s desire to redefine the conventional forms of self and sexuality.

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