Orlando Gender Roles Essay

Gender Roles: A Cultural Phenomenon Gender roles have been in the spotlight lately throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but gender role issues have been a prominent problem for countless years in many different societies around the world. One work of art that highlights gender roles is the film Orlando (1992), which was directed by Sally Potter and adapted from Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando. Woolf’s Orlando was published in 1928 and tells a tale where the plot spans over 300 years to show case gender bending throughout history. While critics claim that Orlando remains the same person when he changes into a woman, he in fact develops a whole new personality and different way of seeing the world when he is female through the use of parallelism seen from Orlando living as a male versus living the life of a female.
There is a young man named Orlando who changes sex half way through the film (in the 1700’s) to represent how women are treated as incomplete characters that need men to fulfill their destinies, but eventually female Orlando and others find their own free will (Dowell 16).
There is one aspect of two scenes where this is demonstrated within the film; once early on in the film when Orlando is still male and once later on in the film when Orlando is female. This parallel shows how Orlando is a different person when male and female; the outcomes are both very different when seen through a male’s perspective versus a female’s perspective. Although Orlando embodies both the male and the female sex within these scenes, the meaning of the scene itself remains