After years living in agony and solitude, Orlando begins to reveal what he believes to be

the truth about himself to the rest of the world. Orlando is now a woman, and must take on the

role that comes with the title. The gender binary that exists between men and women is one that

only exists because of gender conforming words like “he/him” and “she/her” in which people use

to limit someone into one gender. What if someone doesn’t fit into either of those small

categories, like Orlando? Orlando believes that the truth is there is not just one gender. Woolf

has created a character so sure of himself that he says, “The change of sex, though it altered their

future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity… His memory- but in the future we must, for

conversation’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his’, and ‘she’ for ‘he’” (138). Orlando is reminiscing the

times where she felt like none of these problems were relevant to her life. She was born a man,

and acted in the role of a man. However, now she has become a woman and must get used to her

new role as a woman.

In a constant search for the truth, Orlando quickly realized that none of us truly seek the

truth. We are all just in desperate need of living in peace within ourselves, something Orlando

never had. Woolf says, “Each seeks peace of mind and subserviency rather than the triumph of

truth and the exaltation of virtue” (149). What this means is that instead of letting people think

for themselves, the truth is hidden behind humans being so subservient to another that they

simply do not have any will to stick to their own beliefs and opinions, as it is easier to follow

what the majority thinks. Orlando also talks strictly about the binary between men and women;

this refers to how one gender is supposed to act and how the other is supposed to react. Orlando

remembers her time as a young man, and how women were so obedient, while men dominated
their roles. For most of Orlando’s experience as a woman, she compares her experience to that of

a man. She outlines the strict binaries that exist when she reflects on her time as a young boy,

afraid of the world. She says, “Yet through all these changes, she had remained, she reflected,

fundamentally the same” (237). Orlando, despite the various gender changes she had been

through in her lifetime, felt the same as she had felt as a man. The truth as expressed vividly

through Orlando’s experiences, did not exist. Orlando believes that the truth is what your

experiences make of it. If you don’t like the way something is, you have the power to change it,

just as Orlando did.