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“Kissing a Negress in the Dark”: Englishness as a Masquerade in Woolf's Orlando

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Jaime Hovey
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Abstract

This essay questions the relation between national affiliation and other elements of identity, such as race, gender, and sexuality. Citing British newspaper stories and editorials of the 1920s that sexualized and pathologized the black man, I connect the fear these articles reflect to the fear of the white flapper. Joan Riviere's 1929 psychoanalytic study of femininity and masquerade, which explores the psychic parameters of gendered national belonging, frames my reading of Woolf's use of racial tropes in Orlando (1928), where they function within strategies for granting national belonging to the queerly gendered white Englishwoman. These strategies, which are part of the masquerade, include the narrator's satiric stance and the deployment of secret codes. Despite the text's ambivalences and ambiguities, Orlando's sexuality is finally domesticated by the racial and sexual terms of national belonging.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 112 , Issue 3 , May 1997 , pp. 393 - 404
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1997

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