Marlan, DawnSouthworth, HelenShoop, CaseyBotkin, Mariah2022-07-122022-07-122022https://hdl.handle.net/1794/27268The first half of this thesis aims to understand the presentation of gender ambiguity in Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando through two motivated treatments of Orlando’s body––one being story and the other discourse––proposing a metaphor of somatic eruption on both a discourse and story level. This corporeal eruption results from the pressure of various limitations, such as sociocultural norms/gender expectations, the body, and language. The second half of this thesis responds to Woolf’s Orlando through the genre of autotheory. The delineation of my own lived experiences complements the themes explored in Woolf’s writing, modernizing and personalizing the topics of somatic eruption and the limits accompanying women’s lived experiences.en-USCC BY-NC-ND 4.0EnglishComparative literatureMemoirPersonal essayNon-fictionThesis/Dissertation0000-0002-4781-5990