I’m teaching Woolf’s Orlando tonight. It’s a riotously funny book …
(If you’re the kind of person who hates hearing about the conclusion of a novel you haven’t yet read, please stop reading here.)
… And it has a happy ending. That’s something you don’t get from every available text in Mod Brit Lit unless your definition of “happy” includes suicide, enucleation, apocalypse, death by vehicular manslaughter and / or alcohol-induced frenzy.
I look forward to teaching Orlando because it’s playful, snarky, sexy, and because it’s full of fabulous passages, such as this one, which takes place right after Orlando changes from a man to a woman:
“Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory—but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’—her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle.”
As I was preparing for this evening’s class, a story from the ACLU appeared on my screen. At first it distracted me, and then it became part of the lesson.
With a headline announcing that “School That Refused to Allow Transgender Student to Be Homecoming King Will Have Gender-Neutral Prom Court” followed by “School Changes Policy After ACLU Intervenes on Student’s Behalf,” I felt Woolf’s ghost wave as she wafted past my desk.
According to the press release from the ACLU, “Oak Reed is a popular student” at a high school in Muskegon, Michigan who has “identified as a male from a very young age.” This didn’t seem to be too grave an issue until recently; he was permitted to wear a male uniform for the marching band, for example, and will be allowed to wear guy regalia for graduation.
According to the story, however, “After his classmates voted for him to serve as homecoming king, the school district said that Reed could not be chosen because his school records indicate that he is female.”
(I should admit that, personally, I’ve never been heavily prom-focused. I spent my own prom dancing the beer-barrel polka with Bonnie as our two boyfriends, both years older and desperate for the event to end, sat on folding chairs in the darkest corner of the Long Island rental hall. My own boys wore uncomfortable tuxes and fiercely uncomfortable smiles to their own proms and that, as they say, was that.)
But the prom saga of Oak Reed—it’s the name out of a storybook, right?—and his quest to be part of the Homecoming Court has, amazingly enough, as happy an ending as Orlando.
The ACLU sent a letter to the school, arguing that to deny Reed the opportunity to be Homecoming King after being duly elected was “gender discrimination.” And the school changed the policy for the upcoming prom, as well as for future homecoming events. “We’re glad that the school district recognizes that its treatment of Oak was wrong, and that it has instituted more inclusive policies,” said Jay Kaplan of the ACLU.
Reed said that he wanted to have a good time with friends and enjoy the dance. That sounds like something of which Woolf would have approved (Remember the dance scene from The Voyage Out? “’But that’s not a dance,’ said some one pausing by the piano. ‘It is,’ she replied, emphatically nodding her head. ‘Invent the steps.’”)
And what should we learn from all of this? Let’s turn, once again, to Orlando.
“So at last she reached her final conclusion, which was of the highest importance but which, as we have already much overpassed out limit of [six hundred words] we must omit.”
