Of Rainbow and Granite: Androgynous Narrative in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Ali Smith’s How to Be Both

Abstract

This article attempts to conduct a comparative analysis between Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014). Specifically, this study posits Smith’s novel as an appropriate successor to Woolf’s work, as it successfully embraces and expresses the ‘androgynous mind’ theorised by Woolf. This is achieved through the removal of temporal boundaries between past and present, the ambivalence of the protagonists’ sexual identity and, most importantly, through a literary paradigm that is able to explore the need for co-participation between authors and readers and the broader interplay between the literary text and other artistic and cultural sources with which it has a necessary dialogical relationship.

Keywords

• androginy
• duplicity
• reciprocity
• mutuality
• sexual identity