The „Politics‟ of Gender and the Manipulation of Meaning in Sarah Ruhl's Orlando

Abstract

Sarah Ruhl‘s adaptation of the Woolfian text inscribes itself, as well as its predecessor (Sally Potter‘s screen adaptation of the same novel, Orlando: A Biography), in a very important historical context for the modern woman, i.e. the Women‘s Liberation Movement and the empowerment of women characteristic to the 1990s. Woolf, herself a feminist, provides the perfect text for the manipulation of her feminist views into even more powerful feminist messages widely displayed, in this particular case, by means of cinema and theatre. Thus, in an attempt to identify the hidden politics involved in the process of transformation, the present paper sets forth to investigate how and to what extent the manipulation of meaning takes place.