International Journal of Gender & Women's Studies

Contrapuntal Travelling with Vita Sackville-West to Persia: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando
Dr. Leila Baradaran Jamili

Abstract
Modern travel writing represents itself in the form of travel fictions constructing cultural, social, and somehow racial discourses in the ethnical life of various nations. Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), by using intertextuality and an “ethno-methodological approach,” creates a bisexual adventurer or an in-between character, in Orlando (1928), in order to translate the discourse of travel through a gender analysis of the Eastern culture, customs and beauties for the Western world. Through Clifford Geertz’s ethnographical and cultural studies, this paper focuses on illustrating Woolf’s travelling eyes which move towards the Orient and on portraying Orlando who mirrors the transformation of women’s sense of adventure in the twentieth century, extracted from the outlines of Woolf’s friend, Vita Sackville-West and her experiences of travels in Persia. Orlando is the reflection of Woolf’s telescopic view of the East reformulated by her based on ethnography. It includes the signs of her wide range of reading, particularly Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran (1926), The Land (1926) and Twelve Days (1928). This travel writer loves the uncultivated nature so much that it fascinates her romantic desires; hence, she experiences and perceives the East in a romantic way by being a participant-observer of its nature or by decoding its cultural discourse. Undoubtedly, Orlando is part of a discourse through which Woolf, like an ethnographer, reads the traces of Orient, especially Persia, and rereads them “contrapuntally.”

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