Gypsies in Orlando

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'In Company of a Gipsy': The 'Gypsy' as Trope in Woolf and BrontëAuthor(s): ABBY BARDIReviewed work(s):Source: Critical Survey, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2007), pp. 40-50Published by: Berghahn BooksStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41556199 .

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In Company of a Gipsy': The 'Gypsy' as Trope in Woolf and Bronte

ABBY BARDI

[T]hus, attended by a lean dog, riding a donkey, in company of a gipsy, the Ambassador of Great Britain at the Court of the Sultan left Constantinople.

Virginia Woolf, Orlando 1

Halfway through Virginia Woolf 's Orlando (1928), the title character, who lives for over three hundred years, wakes up and discovers that he has become a woman. Although Woolf evidently does not intend us to take this novel entirely seriously, it is clear from the contemporaneous A Room of One 's Own 2 that she is quite serious about deconstructing the boundaries of gender; in Orlando, she calls its categories into

question by depicting them as permeable, even arbitrary. In so doing, she flies in the face of her Victorian forebears, as was her wont, critiquing and complicating the prevailing model of male/female as

binary opposition.3 Orlando's sudden, mysterious transformation from male to female initially appears to reflect this binary: 'Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman, and has remained so ever since' (139). However, his/her transition is

complicated when Orlando enters into a somewhat indeterminate state, escaping from both Constantinople and gender by running away with a 'gipsy tribe' (140).

In representing Gypsies,4 Woolf was drawing upon a literary trope that had been well established in the previous century. Gypsies play significant roles in a variety of works, including Jane Austen's Emma

(1815), Sir Walter Scott's Guy Mannering (1815), Emily Brontë's

Wuthering Heights (1847), Matthew Arnold's 'The Scholar Gypsy' (1853), and George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) and The

Spanish Gypsy (1868).5 At mid-century, George Borrow's

autobiographical novels of Gypsy life, Lavengro (1851) and Romany Rye (1857), fuelled interest in a culture that was seen as mysterious, closed to outsiders and exotic, and was often eroticised.6 The Gypsy

Critical Survey Volume 19, Number 1, 2007: 40-50 doi: 1 0.3 1 67/CS.2007. 1 901 05 ISSN 001 1-1570 (Print), ISSN 1752-2293 (Online)



The 'Gypsy' as Trope in Woolf and Brontë 4 1

Lore Society, founded in 1888, formalised this growing interest and led to considerable scholarship.7 For non-Romanis, the Romani

population of Britain represented an Other that was simultaneously foreign and indigenous; despite research into their culture on the part of Borrow and the generation of 'Gypsiologists' that succeeded him, both in Britain and on the continent, Gypsies remained fundamentally inaccessible, and their identity was complicated by a lack of accurate information about them.8 As Janet Lyon has argued, the 'fabled

insularity of "Gypsy" communities was proof of a radical alterity' and she asserts that the literary 'Gypsy' is a 'multivalent' ' gadze (non- Romani) creation'.9 It is this ' gadie creation' and not an accurate

portrayal of the Romani people that is ubiquitous in nineteenth- as well as early twentieth-century literature.

Kirstie Blair has argued convincingly that in Orlando , Woolf draws

upon a twentieth century trope of the Gypsy that 'haunts texts about desire between women in this period',10 as well as idiosyncratic references to Gypsies by Woolf 's lover, Vita Sackville-West, of whom Orlando is an affectionately parodie biography. In Sackville- West's

correspondence with her other lovers, particularly the novelist Violet Trefusis, Blair reads their numerous mentions of Gypsies as

representations of lesbian desire and finds evidence that Woolf

adopted Vita's trope of 'gypsiness' in their relationship. 1 1

Throughout Orlando, Woolf is playfully alluding to the family history of the Sackville- Wests: Vita's mother, Victoria, was the illegitimate daughter of Lord Sackville and a Spanish Gypsy known as 'Pepita'.12 When Orlando marries the dancer Rosina Pepita, reputedly a Gypsy, this revises Lord Sackville 's association with the real Pepita; and Orlando's vexed relationship with property - which the Gypsies are said to abjure - echoes Vita's relationship with the Sackville estate, Knole. The complex and seemingly androgynous relationship between Orlando and her husband Shelmerdine mirrors that of Vita and her husband, Harold Nicolson, and Vita's and Virginia's own playful relationship to gender.

In the trope of the Gypsy, I argue, Woolf finds resonance with the protean quality with which she represents gender; like gender in Orlando, Gypsies constitute a floating signifier whose signified, scholarship notwithstanding, managed to elude the grasp of their gadze observers. Their contested identity is apparent from their first appearance in the British isles in the early sixteenth century,13 and it is perhaps because of the semantic vacuum they presented that an identity



42 Critical Survey, Volume 19, Number 1

was constructed for them by writers, lawmakers, Gypsiologists and others. That Gypsies represented escape, freedom, and 'aberrant

femininity' has been noted by literary critics;14 as Deborah Nord has

argued, 'gypsydom function[ed] imaginatively as an "escape" from

English conventionality at the borders of English society itself'.15 The historian David Mayall states that 'foreign origin was the basis around which images were drawn of [the Gypsies as] a romantic people, living an idle, natural, al fresco life'; they were thought to be 'dark, supple, agile and handsome, possessing a temperament that was wild, fierce, and defiant',16 and possessing 'a sexual appetite matched only by their wanderlust'.17 Judith Okely, in her anthropological study The Tmveller- Gypsies, examines the prevalent stereotype of the Gypsy woman as 'sensual, sexually provocative, and enticing' and 'thought to be sexually available and promiscuous in her affections'.18 Representations of

Gypsies as objects of desire are complicated by equally powerful negative stereotypes. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, legislation was continually enacted that characterised Gypsies as 'vagrants, rogues, beggars, and vagabonds';19 the nineteenth century 'reformer' George Smith 'of Coalville' described them as 'a people who "live like pigs and die like dogs'".20 Mayall states that while romantic

conceptions of Gypsies are common, they are often accompanied by images of 'criminality, parasitism and deceit, with the nomadic Gypsy strangers appearing as a threat and danger to health, property, and

person'.21 The history of Gypsy identity in Britain was complicated by this strange confluence of negative and positive stereotypes that informed on the one hand, the phenomenon of 'Gypsiology' and on the other, centuries of anti-Gypsy legislation and oppression.22

In Orlando , it is from this pastiche of stereotypes that Woolf appears to draw in representing the Gypsies as exotics whose existence on the

perimeters of European culture offers Orlando a respite from the confines of both aristocratic society and gender. This article will argue that similar disruptions of gender binaries are legible in references to

Gypsies in Charlotte Bronte's Villette (1853), in which Gypsies are associated with challenges to social, sexual and gender norms. I do not claim that Woolf was consciously basing her representation of Gypsies on Bronte's, though it is worth noting that Woolf said of Brontë, 'we are steeped through and through with her genius'.23 But I would

suggest that Bronte and Woolf were both 'steeped' in the same

prevailing stereotypes about Gypsies - their association with sexuality, with freedom and openness, and with challenges to the increasingly



The ' Gypsy 'as Trope in Woolf and Brontë 43

rigid categories of social and sexual roles. By examining Brontë 's use of the Gypsy trope in Villette through the lens of Orlando, this article

hopes to shed some light on the function of the Gypsy trope and its effects on gender in both novels.

In both Orlando and Villette, the Gypsy trope signals that gender has been destabilised. This is explicit in Orlando : during her interlude with the 'gipsy tribe', Orlando temporarily inhabits the space between

gender binaries in an ambiguous state between her previous life as a man and her new female identity. The ambiguity is reflected in her

apparel: she 'dresse[s] herself in those Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either sex' (139). When she leaves the Gypsies, however, her clothes manifest a definite transition; now 'in the dress of a young Englishwoman of rank', she reflects that up to this point, 'she had scarcely given her sex a thought' and opines that 'perhaps the Turkish trousers, which she had hitherto worn had done something to distract her thoughts' (153). Here, Gypsyness calls attention to the extent to which for Orlando, and for Woolf, gender is to a large degree, perhaps entirely, performative. Orlando characterises the gender of the Gypsies themselves in ambiguous terms, stating that 'the Gypsy women, except in one or two very important particulars, differ very little from Gypsy men' (153). The implication is that while there are anatomical differences between

Gypsy men and women, and these differences are 'very important', the cultural gap between men and women that is so cavernous in

European society is not significant among the Gypsies because their costume is so similar; their difference in terms of biological sex may be 'important', but the difference in terms of socially constructed

categories of gender is minimal. When Orlando moves back into European society, however, gender

there is foregrounded. As Orlando leaves the Gypsies and assumes the dress of an Englishwoman, she (for she is clearly female now) realises the significant role her clothing plays in her change of gender: 'it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the Captain offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on deck that she realised, with a start the penalties and privileges of her position' (153). She lists the disadvantages of being a woman: these primarily have to do with the maintenance of her appearance, which is conflated with the maintenance of chastity: 'there's the hairdressing - That alone will take an hour of my morning there's staying and lacing; there's washing and powdering; there's changing from silk to




lace and from lace to paduasoy; and there's being chaste year in year out' (157). Whereas the culture of the Gypsies has provided Orlando with a respite from the strictures of sex roles, European society insists upon conformity to a demanding female role whose costume enforces the limitations placed on female sexuality.

Certainly, Orlando deconstructs gender as a way of playfully masking homoeroticism, or what Karen Lawrence terms 'the polymorphous possibilities of bisexuality'.24 In depicting the

Gypsies' androgyny as lacking in erotic power, Woolf is not making an argument that a heterosexual, binary model of gender is a

necessary component of desire; rather, I would argue, she suggests that for Orlando, sexuality resides in an acknowledgement of the tremendous complexity of gender. Not only is Orlando herself both man and woman, but her husband, Shelmerdine, with whom she has a child, appears to be so as well: 'An awful suspicion rushed into both their minds simultaneously: "You're a woman, Shel!" she cried. "You're a man, Orlando!" he cried' (252). This complication of

gender has an immediate erotic effect on them: 'For each was

surprised at the quickness of the other's sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman, that they had to put the matter to proof at once' (258). For Orlando, it would appear that it is not the absence of gender that constructs sexual desire, but gender's multiplicity.

In Villette, too, Gypsies function briefly but significantly as a vehicle for the déstabilisation of gender and social roles: references to Gypsies occur during a key episode, Lucy Snowe's visit to an art gallery where she views Rubens' painting of Cleopatra. Here, as in Orlando, the Gypsy trope performs an operation in which gender appears to become suddenly unstable. Two of the three times in which the term 'gipsy' appears in Villette are in connection with Lucy's examination of Cleopatra, whom she characterises as a 'huge, dark-

complexioned gipsy-queen'.25 There is an historical logic behind this conflation of the Gypsy and the Egyptian, as Gypsies were

erroneously thought to have come from Egypt.26 More significantly, Brontë's description of Cleopatra as a Gypsy reveals a conflation of

Gypsies with an Orientalised, eroticised other. As Lucy critiques the

painting, she confronts Cleopatra's sexuality; her language suggests the painting's eroticism: terming it 'considerably larger . . . than the life', she characterises the figure's largeness, and by inference, its



The ' Gypsy 'as Trope in Woolf and Brontë 45

sexuality, in terms of Cleopatra's abundant body: 'She was, indeed, extremely well fed: very much butcher's meat - to say nothing of bread, vegetables, and liquids - must she have consumed to attain that breadth and height, that wealth of muscle, the affluence of flesh' (275). One suspects that it is the painting's 'affluence of flesh' that troubles Lucy; as the increasingly sarcastic description continues, she notes that the Cleopatra 'lay half-reclined on a couch: why, it would be difficult to say', and adds, that because she appeared to be 'in hearty health, strong enough to do the work of two plain cooks' and 'could not plead a weak spine', that 'she ought to have been standing, or at least sitting bolt upright' (275). Apparently, it is not only Cleopatra's sloth but her blatant sexuality that makes Lucy uncomfortable; she says that Cleopatra 'ought to have worn decent garments; a gown covering her properly, which was not the case', and adds sourly that 'out of abundance of material - seven and twenty yards, I should say, of drapery - she managed to make inefficient raiment' (275). The word 'inefficient' seems to suggest that Lucy's disapproval stems from the profligate use of fabric; however, the word 'decent' reveals that her real concern is with covering Cleopatra's fleshliness. Here, Lucy advocates the use of fabric to conceal sexuality, much the way the Turkish trousers function for the Gypsies in Orlando ; her complaint is that despite the 'abundance of material', it does not do so.

Despite her disapproval, Lucy continues to gaze boldly at the 'gipsy queen', an inappropriate act for a woman, as evidenced by the reaction of M. Paul Emmanuel, that threatens to destabilise her gender. This disruption is suggested when Emmanuel arrives and registers shock at Lucy's proximity to Cleopatra: 'How dare you, a young person, sit coolly down, with the self-possession of a garçon, and look at that picture?' (277). Emmanuel's use of the term 'garçon' suggests that the painting has infused Lucy with a masculine 'self- possession' (though it is juvenile - he does not say

' un homme'). He questions not only the painting's appropriateness, but Lucy's assumption of a male prerogative in viewing it.

The disrupting effects of 'the indolent gipsy-giantess' (278) on gender are further suggested by the appearance of Colonel de Hamal, who also gazes upon the painting. While previous references to de Hamal have not described him as feminine, suddenly, while in front of the Cleopatra, he appears to be effeminised: Lucy describes his 'head too pretty to belong to any other' and goes on to call it a 'very




finished, highly-polished little pate' (281). She rhapsodises sardonically over him: 'What a figure, so trim and natty! What womanish feet and hands! How daintily he held a glass to one of his

optics! with what admiration he gazed upon the Cleopatra! and then, how engagingly he tittered and whispered [to] a friend at his elbow!' (281). It appears that the 'gipsy-giantess' has an impact on the gender of all gazers, rendering de Hamal 'womanish' and Lucy boyish.

Whereas Bronte's depiction of the effects of costume - or the lack thereof - on the performance of gender is implicit, Woolf 's narrator in Orlando addresses this issue quite directly:

The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath .... Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above (189).

The narrator goes on to list some of the ways in which Orlando herself is a combination of allegedly male and female traits, stating that 'it was this mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gave her conduct an

unexpected turn' (189) and adding, '[wjhether, then, Orlando was most man or woman, it is difficult to say, and cannot now be decided'

(190). This philosophy of gender has much more in common with the

indeterminacy of the Gypsies' gender during Orlando's interlude with them than with the binary approach to gender later demonstrated when she returns to London. Like Brontë, Woolf has represented Gypsyness in a key moment as a sign of the breakdown, at least

temporarily, of accepted gender binaries. However, while Woolf's depiction of the Gypsies' destabilising

effects on gender is similar in some ways to Brontë's, it differs greatly in terms of their association with sexuality: whereas the power of the

'gipsy-giantess' in Villette resides in her palpable eroticism, in

Orlando, there is nothing remotely sexual about Orlando's associations with the Gypsies. Although she is a woman alone, the

only threat they appear to pose to her is to her life, not to her

'chastity',27 and while she considers marrying and settling among them, she is forced to abandon this idea because of her philosophical differences with them, so there is never any possibility of sexual relations between them. Indeed, Orlando's stay with the Gypsies



The 'Gypsy' as Trope in Woolf and Brontë 47

appears to offer her a respite not just from gender, but from sexuality. While Orlando's life as a man has been filled with women who were said to be 'dying for love' of him, as well as with 'passionate embraces' from mysterious women, and her life as a woman is replete with flirtatious sailors and persistent suitors, her time with the Gypsies presents her with no opportunities for similar liaisons. Here Woolf, unlike Brontë, works against the traditional stereotype of Gypsies as 'free-living and free-loving'; in fact, they seem to be asexual, as if the lack of significant gender difference that Orlando notes is an impediment to their sexuality. While gender for Woolf is a performance, it is one that is essential to eroticism.

In the light of both Orlando and Villette, it is useful to look at the intersection between Gypsies and the erotic performance of gender in Brontë 's earlier work, Jane Eyre (1847). Here, too, Brontë employs the Gypsy trope in a pivotal scene when Mr. Rochester dresses as a Gypsy woman and purports to tell Jane's fortune in order to gain access to her uncensored view of him. This act is a transgression against social and gender boundaries through which he hopes to enter into a realm that would ordinarily be denied him, Jane's private discourse. Cross-dressing in a Gypsy disguise enables Rochester to throw off the limitations of his maleness and his class in an attempt to penetrate the secrets of female discourse. Here, as in Orlando , the Gypsy is associated with an escape not only from the restrictions imposed by society, but from gender itself; but as in Villette , and unlike in Orlando, Mr. Rochester's performance as a female Gypsy is tinged with eroticism, signalling as it does the breakdown of boundaries of propriety that dictated that a man should not be closeted alone with a woman. In dressing as a Gypsy and overturning gender, Rochester has imperiled the social mores that have operated to preserve Jane's chastity.

In all three of these works, escape from the confines of gender is empowering to the person who experiences it. In Jane Eyre, the Gypsy disguise enables Rochester to temporarily transgress the social restrictions based on his class and gender. In Villette, the gipsy-queen's sexuality confers the prerogative of the male ('garçon') on Lucy. For de Hamal, who is effeminised by his brush with the 'gipsy-giantess', cross-dressing functions as a form of empowerment: when he is ultimately revealed to be wearer of the nun disguise that has gained him access to the school, it becomes apparent that he, like Rochester, has been able to move across boundaries that are both mental and



48 Critical Survey , Volume 19, Number 1

physical into places that are ordinarily the province of females.

Similarly, Brontë herself, writing under a male name, was empowered by her literary cross-dressing; the use of the pseudonym 'Currer Bell' secured for her the publication of both Jane Eyre and Villette. Her

biographer Elizabeth Gaskell asserts that 'Currer Bell' had an identity separate from 'Charlotte Brontë', whose 'duties' as a woman forced her to live life in 'two parallel currents - her life as Currer Bell, the

author; her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman', and remarks that these currents did not always 'run smoothly parallel'.28 In her life as in her writing, Brontë must have been acutely conscious of the complex possibilities of performative gender; and in her novels, as in Woolf 's

Orlando, the Gypsy trope lays bare the disguise-like nature of subject position, and its dependence upon costume, upon perception. In a

century in which the project of what Mary Poovey terms 'the

ideological work of gender'29 was bent on rigidifying gender binaries, Brontë is able to draw upon the figure of the Gypsy to suggest that this

binary is far more complicated than her society imagines. I would argue that for both Woolf and Brontë, the Gypsy trope

represents a ready-made challenge to the nineteenth century project of disciplining gender and sexuality with which Woolf, in reacting against her Victorian predecessors, grapples; for Woolf and Brontë, Gypsy figures, in their multiple challenges to the status quo, disrupt this project. In making the case for Brontë as Woolf 's antecedent here, I am not suggesting that the Gypsies in Orlando appear because of a direct connection to Brontë 's novels. Rather, I would argue that both writers are drawing from the multiple possibilities opened up by the

indeterminacy of Gypsy identity and its analogies to gender, and that it is Gypsies' inherent semantic ambiguity that helps enable the dislocation of social mores and the deconstruction of accepted notions of gender and sexuality, and ultimately, of race, class and

empire, when they enter a text.

Notes

1 . Virginia Woolf, Orlando : A Biography (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1 929 [1956]), 140. Subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically within the text.

2. The lecture that was to become A Room of One 's Own was delivered in October, 1928.

3. See Thomas Laquer, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1990).



The 'Gypsy' as Trope in Woolf and Brontë 49

4. I am using the term 'Gypsy', rather than Rom or Roma, throughout this essay to represent literary, as opposed to historical, constructions of the Romani people. Like Gypsy identity, these terms are themselves contested, and it is difficult to ascertain which are 'correct'.

5. Interestingly, D. H. Lawrence's novella, The Virgin and the Gipsy , was written in 1926, two years before Orlando , but was not published until 1930, after Lawrence's death.

6. According to David Mayall, Borrow's work inspired 'a wide range of Gypsiologists' and 'is thought to have brought the cult of Gypsyism into widespread popularity'; Gypsy Identities 1500-2000: From Egipcyans and Moon-men to the Ethnic Romany (London: Routledge, 2004), 156.

7. See Angus Fraser, 'A Rum Lot', in 100 Years of Gypsy Studies , ed. Matt Salo (Cheverly, Maryland: The Gypsy Lore Society, 1990).

8. See Mayall, Gypsy Identities , for a discussion of contestations and multiple constructions of Gypsy identity by non-Romani groups.

9. Janet Lyon, 'Gadže Modernism', Modernism/Modernity 1 1 .3 (2004), 5 1 7-38 (5 1 8). 10. Kirstie Blair, 'Gypsies and Lesbian Desire: Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis,

and Virginia Woolf', Twentieth-Century Literature 50.2 (Summer 2004), 141-66 (142). 11. See Blair, 'Gypsies and Lesbian Desire', 156-57. According to Blair, Sackville-

West and Trefusis went so far as to learn Romany so as to have a 'secret (or semisecret, given widespread interest in Romany) vocabulary to express desire and love' (151).

12. See Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West (Hardmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), 2.

13. These debates continue to the present day: see Mayall, Gypsy Identities (54-63 and 1 88, pas siiti).

14. See George K. Behlmer, 'The Gypsy Problem in Victorian England', Victorian Studies 28 (Winter 1985), 23 1-53; and Katie Trumpener, 'The Time of the Gypsies', Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992), 843-84; Deborah Nord, "'Marks of Race": Gypsy Figures and Eccentric Femininity in Nineteenth-century Women's Writing', Victorian Studies 41 (Winter 1998), 189-210; and Michelle Mancini, 'The Pursuit of Gypsyness in Nineteenth-century Britain', unpublished dissertation (University of California, Berkeley, 2000).

15. Nord, "'Marks of Race'", 190. 16. David Mayall, Gypsy-travellers in Nineteenth-century Society (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1988), 71. 17. Ibid., 76. 18. Judith Okely, The Traveller-Gypsies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1983; rpt. 1998), 201-202. 19. David Mayall, English Gypsies and State Policies (Hertfordshire: University of

Hertfordshire Press, 1995), 31. 20. Quoted in Mayall, English Gypsies , 35. See also Okely, who quotes an eighteenth

century farmer who described local Gypsies as 'miscreants' and their 'loose women' as 'a parcel of Rogues and Trollops', The Traveller-Gypsies , 201.

2 1 . Mayall, Gypsy Identities , 1 . 22. It must be noted that the sorts of negative stereotypes found in references to Gypsies

in British legislation resembled those that informed the Nazi persecution of Gypsies during World War II.

23. Virginia Woolf, "Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights' in The Common Reader : First Series (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925; rpt. 1953), 160.



50 Critical Survey , Volume 19, Number 1

24. Karen R. Lawrence, 'Orlando's Voyage Out', Modern Fiction Studies 38 (Spring 1992), 253-77 (255).

25. Charlotte Brontë, Villette , ed. Mark Lilly (London: Penguin, 1979), 276. Subsequent page references will be cited parenthetically within the text.

26. See Mayall, Gypsy Identities , 67-68. 27. This is a ludicrous concept for someone who has been having sexual dalliances for

several hundred years. 28. Quoted in Linda H. Peterson, 'Charlotte RiddelFs A Struggle for Fame : Myths of

Authorship, Facts of the Market', Women s Writing 1 1 (2004), 99-1 15 (109). 29. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-

Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).



Gypsies in Orlando

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