Meno & Phaedo What It Essay

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An excellent example of a key component in the sexual identity of a woman is the compulsion to get married which most women (particularly during Woolf's day) are bound to experience.

Orlando feels this sentiment as well, which the following quotation demonstrates. Everyone is mated except myself,' she mused, as she trailed disconsolately across the courtyard… I, 'am single, am mateless, am alone.' Such thoughts had never entered her head before. Now they bore her down unescapably (Orlando 1928).

It is noteworthy to mention that this passage precedes Orlando's relationship with Shel. Yet it is highly indicative of the sort of responsibility that most women feel -- that at some point in their lives they are obligated to get married to someone. The weight of these thoughts leads Orlando to feel "disconsolately" and "unescapably" burdened by them. This is one particular instance in which Woolf is actually demonstrating a similarity between the sexes that is underscored by the androgynous nature of Orlando. This passage implies that anyone can feel the negative effects of being a woman, if they were actually put in the same predicament that many women find themselves in. But as Woolf spends the vast majority of "A Room of One's Own" arguing, such predicaments are largely constructed by society and people are able to supersede them by incorporating elements of androgyny, which Orlando does in Orlando: A Biography.

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Woolf is able to use various notions of androgyny to provide solutions to many of the effects of both sexual and gender identities that the author views as problematic. By incorporating both traditional male and female characteristics, Woolf suggests through "A Room of One's Own" and through Orlando: A Biography that people can find true happiness and fulfillment in their lives. In the latter work, she illustrates how men and women are not so dissimilar, especially when they face the same sort of circumstances. What both of these literary works actually share in common, however, is the notion that androgyny engenders a flexibility and fluctuation in one's identity and sexuality that can benefit a person's felicity and creativity. This latter aspect is alluded to by the fact that it is only after Orlando has experienced life as both a man and a woman that she finished her poem, "the Oak Tree," to critical acclaim......

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