Clothing and gender in Virginia Woolf's OrlandoIn her novel Orlando, Virginia Woolf tells the story of a man who mysteriously becomes a woman one night. By shrouding Orlando's actual gender change in a mysterious religious ritual, we readers are encouraged not to question the actual mechanisms of the change but rather to focus on its consequences. In doing so, we are invited to answer one of the fundamental questions of our lives, a question that we so often ignore because it seems so elementary: what is a man? What is a woman? And how do we distinguish between the two? It seems that in ordinary life we ​​are more likely to distinguish a man and a woman based on clothing. This is harder to do in the present day, where women have adapted many traditionally masculine clothing for their own use, but in the time periods in which Orlando is set it was still true that men and women wore distinct clothing. If we consider our daily experience, it becomes clear that this is the medium we use, at least remotely. Other cues like hairstyle, voice quality, etc. come into the equation later, but clothing comes first. A man with long hair is eccentric at worst; a man who wears a dress runs the risk of being beaten bloody for this transgression. People who wish to undergo sex change surgery must undergo a period of living as the opposite sex before undergoing the surgery – the first and most important thing to do invariably here is to purchase a new wardrobe. use to differentiate the two sexes, then it is not surprising that Orlando's sex change occurs when this occurs. In the opening paragraph of chapter four, after Orlando's departure from Turkey, Woolf writes...... in the middle of the paper ......ch woman when in reality it is not very clear what she is. Woolf assumes that her choice of clothing indicates something deeper: "Clothes are but a symbol of something deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of dress and sex of a woman" (188). What if it were only possible for us to change our gender and all the social baggage that comes with it simply by changing our clothes? But Orlando's life is in a certain sense magical, and this makes it possible. Works Cited and Consulted Boehm, Beth A. “Fact, Fiction, and Metafiction: Blurry Genres in Orlando and a Room of One's Own.” Journal of Narrative Technique 22:3 (1992): 191-204.Thompson, Nicola. "Some Personal Theories: Orlando and the Novel." Studies in the Novel 25:3 (1993): 306-17.Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: a biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.