Passionate Debates on ‘Odious Subjects’: Bisexuality and Woolf’s Opposition to Theories of Androgyny and Sexual Identity

Helt argues that Virginia Woolf’s literary depictions of bisexuality oppose theories of desire, eroticism, and identity in terms of sexual ‘types’, such as the lesbian. For Woolf, bisexuality and androgyny are common to most women. In A Room of One’s Own and Orlando, Woolf contradicts theories of the writer or artist as androgynous genius, or as member of the intermediate sex or third sex. Woolf refutes the idea that thinking ‘like a man’ and ‘like a woman’ intermittently is an identifying feature of a rare type; rather, everyone does it, so it is nobody’s distinguishing characteristic. Helt shows that Woolf takes up the consideration of the androgynous mind only to expose its misogynistic conceptual underpinnings and its material impossibility. For Woolf, it is not the possession of an androgynous mind that enables artistic creativity, but one’s ability to contemplate openly all desires and all pleasures, including those socially proscribed.