Giving Up the Ghost: National and Literary Haunting in Orlando
In Orlando: A Biography, Virginia Woolf substantiates continuity in Orlando's transhistorical, transgender character through national identity. Through her emphasis on Orlando's elemental relationship to national space and poetic entrenchment in a national literature, though, Woolf reveals Englishness to be composed of exclusions as well as inclusions. She thus illustrates the extent to which national identity is haunted by what she might have called "invisible presences" that inhabit the nation not as subjects and citizens, but as ghosts. Woolf works out her conflicted stance on national identity through hauntings insofar as she builds silences and absences into her narrative of Orlando's Englishness.