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The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of The Temporality of Modernist Life Writing in the Era of
Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Einar Wegener’s Transsexualism: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Einar Wegener’s
Man Into Woman Man Into Woman
Pamela L. Caughie
Loyola University Chicago
, pcaughi@luc.edu
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Caughie, PL. "The temporality of modernist life writing in the era of transsexualism: Virginia Woolf’s
Orlando and Einar Wegener’s man into woman" in Modern Fiction Studies 59(3), 2013.
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Caughie 501
the temporality of
modernist life writing in
the era of transsexualism:
virginia woolf's orlando
and einar wegener's man
into woman
Pamela L. Caughie
Consider what immense forces society brings to play upon
each of us, how that society changes from decade to decade
. . . ; well, if we cannot analyse these invisible presences,
we know very little of the subject of the memoir; and again
how futile life writing becomes.
—Virginia Woolf, "A Sketch of the Past"
In a conversation with Bruno Latour, historian and philosopher
of science Michel Serres provides a metaphor that captures modernist
life writing's temporality. Our experience of time, says Serres, re-
sembles a crumpled handkerchief rather than a at plane, where the
past folds in on the present, pressing on it at difference places, and
the present folds in on the past, pressing on it from behind in that
the present redacts our understanding of what the past has become
(60).
1
Virginia Woolf shares this understanding of the proximity of
f
MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 59, number 3, Fall 2013. Copyright © for the Purdue Research
Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Einar Wegener’s Man Into Woman502
the present and the past in her classic life writing narrative, Orlando,
as in her memoir, "A Sketch of the Past," begun in 1939, where she
dates each reminiscence to include the present moment in which she
writes as "a platform to stand upon" (75). In writing a life, and in
reading life writing, one unavoidably encounters the past from some
present vantage point, some immediate stimulus that revisions that
past, and thus the present as the past's future, gathering up mo-
ments in time that resonate with the present moment. In this sense,
Orlando's composition of "The Oak Tree" over three centuries is not
fantastic, a temporal aberration, but emblematic of how writing and
reading work. "The present when backed by the past," writes Woolf,
"is a thousand times deeper than the present when it presses so close
you can feel nothing else" ("Sketch" 98). Likewise, the past when
backed by the present is far deeper, more yielding than when visited
as a discrete period, as if only a moment in time.
In this essay, I read Woolf's 1928 mock biography, Orlando,
whose eponymous protagonist changes from a man into a woman
midway through her life, in relation to the discourse of transsexual-
ism in the modernist era. In particular, I compare Orlando with the
contemporaneous Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Change
of Sex, the biography-memoir of Danish artist Einar Wegener, who,
as Lili Elbe, can lay claim to the title of the rst transsexual. Although
transsexualism as we study it today emerged out of early-twentieth-
century scientic discoveries and technologies, such as synthetic
hormones and advances in plastic surgery, it was also engendered by
modernist aesthetics, formal innovations responding to and shaping
a changing social discourse of sexuality and subjectivity. By focusing
on the nexus of scientic experimentation with the real and aesthetic
experimentation with representation as reciprocal cultural forms, I
uphold the power of literature, not just the promise of science, to
reshape notions of gender and identity in the modernist era. Insofar
as it offers new ways to read sexual and gender identity as narrative,
modernist aesthetics makes textual analysis as critical as cultural
history to contemporary transgender studies. Instead of taking the
transsexual as the subject of Woolf's novel, as many critics do, I take
this gure as its object of thought, one that led Woolf to produce a
model of modernist life writing in the era of transsexualism that I
call a "transgenre."
2
Orlando serves as the prototype of the transgenre, one that
recongures in life writing narratives not only notions of gender but
also of time, identity, history, and the very nature of writing and read-
ing. Recently the French, for whom the word "genre" (gender) refers
not to sexuality but to linguistics, have begun to use "transgenre" to
translate the English "transgender." "Transgenre," then, when used
Caughie 503
in French, foregrounds linguistic differences and distinctions in works
about gender. I adopt the French "transgenre" in English for narratives
treating transgender lives that transgure conventions of narrative
diegesis.
3
Transsexual life writing, as other scholars have noted, dis-
rupts conventions of narrative logic by defying pronominal stability,
temporal continuity, and natural progression. It thereby demands
a new genre, a transnarrative. Woolf reached this insight in writing
Orlando, remarking in her diary that she doubted she would write
another novel after Orlando, that she would need another name for
her ction (Diary 3, 176). Transnarratives cross genres—for example,
medical, psychological, judicial, journalistic, anthropological, philo-
sophical, autobiographical, ctional—as in the case of Orlando with its
generic mix of biography and fantasy, philosophy and literary history,
poetry and prose. They cross—or more accurately, crisscross—tem-
poral moments as the protagonist transitions in gender and in time.
Of necessity, transnarratives emphasize the artice of gender, even
while maintaining its naturalness. The term "transgenre" extends
Sandy Stone's provocative suggestion in her 1991 landmark essay,
"The Empire Strikes Back," that transsexuals be considered "not as
a class or problematic 'third gender,' but rather as a genre—a set of
embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured
sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored" (165). That
potential has been explored by Virginia Woolf in Orlando.
Insofar as it reconceives the very concept and form of life
writing, Orlando radically regures the narrative of transsexualism
presented in Lili Elbe's more conventional tale. Using transsexualism
as an organizing metaphor in the construction of a life, as Woolf does
in Orlando, produces a different understanding of temporality and of
those "invisible presences" that society "brings to play on each of us"
and that Woolf complains have "never been analysed in any of those
Lives which I so much enjoy reading" ("Sketch" 80). Orlando breaks
down arbitrary historical divisions, renews the past in the present,
immerses us in time, dramatizes how life and literature acquire a
shape, and a value, within multiple pasts and always in relation to
a present moment. Woolf makes the art of prose ction, specically
temporality and narration, central to identity. When in the early stages
of writing Orlando Woolf was fascinated by a newspaper article about
a young woman who became a man (Bell v. 2, 132), that moment
provided not so much the subject for her ctionalized biography as
the occasion for re-conceptualizing the subject of life writing.
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Einar Wegener’s Man Into Woman504
Transsexualism in the Modernist Era
The modern is a period, in fact, most likely to produce a
work like Orlando.
—Suzanne Young, "The Unnatural
Object of Modernist Aesthetics"
As gender historians and modernist scholars have noted, the
modernist era witnessed tremendous change in concepts of sexual
and gender identity.
4
Psychoanalysts, sexologists, and endocrinolo-
gists challenged the sacrosanct nineteenth-century belief in sexual
dimorphism in positing a universal bisexuality.
5
Anthropologists wrote
about the tradition of the man-woman, men dressing and living as
women, in various cultures. The modern girl cut her hair, dressed
in pants, smoked in public, and rode the subway, arousing anxiety
about "masculine women and feminine men."
6
Newspaper and later
radio accounts of women living as men, and men as women, were
widespread. The journal Urania was founded in the 1910s explicitly
to resist distinct, and binary, sexual categories.
7
When we consider
the many modernist literary works that treat transsexualism and
what we call today transgender,
8
Woolf's comment "No age can ever
have been as stridently sex-consciousness as our own" (A Room 99)
that I once took as a profound insight into the modernist era seems
a rather banal understatement.
Less noted among modernist scholars is that the term "trans-
sexualism" was coined in 1923 (would that it were 1922!) by Magnus
Hirschfeld, founder of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, where
the rst transsexual surgeries were performed, a fact relevant to
the changes noted above. In his article "The Intersexual Constitu-
tion," Hirschfeld coined "transsexualism" to describe the adoption of
the gender role opposite to birth sex by men and women who held
an unswerving conviction that they were assigned the wrong sex.
Yet already in Transvestites, where Hirschfeld created the category
of transvestism to distinguish cross-dressing from homosexuality,
the lack of a single term to capture the various experiences of his
subjects led him to describe, if not yet name, transsexuals.
9
Despite
such taxonomic efforts to distinguish categories of transvestite, trans-
sexual, and homosexual, inversion, intersexuality, and bisexuaity,
sexual categories were in ux in the modernist era. Confusion among
them reigned then as it does now, with Hirschfeld himself conating
them at times.
When gender historians and modernist scholars caution us
against imposing our contemporary notions of gender and sexuality
on a previous era, they themselves impose a more coherent set of