International Literature, Language and Education Research Symposium., Ankara, Türkiye, 20 - 22 Eylül 2024, ss.29-30
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) presents a literary portrait of a queer subject’s search for authentic self in/with nature. Though assigned the role of a noble character on the stage of the symbolic life, Orlando neither conforms to established norms of nobility or civility nor feels at home in his-her present surroundings. Rather, on every occasion, s-he takes shelter in the greenery of nature and nomadically sings along to its bohemian songs. Orland’s such epiphanic flights into the solitude and constant move of nature actually act like a regulating principle for him-her, taking him-her out of the narrative of the symbolic codes and enabling him-her to write a novel narrative beyond all such cutting titles as an ambassador to Constantinople, a duke, a Man of nobility, or a Woman. This study which emphasizes human-nature relationality discusses Orlando from a transecological perspective and argues that as a subject haunted by an unnamable unquietude of a pigeon due to the burden of boundaries trying to fit him-her into either/or divide, Orlando retires into the imaginary space of nature to discover his-her authentic self beyond all categories. With nature being a space where no epistemic adjectives or hierarchical titles are functional, s-he sets out to rewrite him-herself there. In this sense, drawing on the theory of transecology, the study aims to take a closer look especially at Orlando’s interaction with the oak tree under which s-he lies and contends that the oak tree image which is transliterated into the world of the words in the form a poem– “The Oak Tree”—confronts Orlando with his-her authentic self in the absence of categorizations and serves as an anchoring point, letting him-her create a meaningful relation with the rest of the signifiers in the signification chain.