The Bastard's Contention: Race, Property, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf's Orlando

How is it that we've never seen all the bastards in Orlando?¹ Most of us have read the novel as a rich text that, even though it has an excoriation of sexual definition at its base, also manages to engage with a wide range of other issues, including time, history, death, writing, and nature.² But we have not, to this point, considered the bastard, and we should. After all, in the pivotal lawsuit that follows Orlando for three hundred years, bastardy is a crucial factor; the suit claims that Orlando "was an English Duke who had married one Rosina Pepita, a dancer; and had had by her three sons, which sons now declaring that their father was deceased, claimed that all his property descended to them."³ Orlando can only keep the estate because the "children [are] pronounced illegitimate" (Woolf, Orlando, 254–55). This direct allusion to misbegotten heirs and the way the threat of the lawsuit threads its ways through the second half of the novel should alert us to pay attention to the bastards; Woolf uses them to show that primogeniture, race, and nationality—foundations on which English wealth and citizenship were built at the beginning of the twentieth century—were, in fact, flimsy constructs whose boundaries were constantly transgressed. Through the figure of the bastard, Orlando reveals the ways that a supposedly racially pure and monogamously produced English system of authority and control was undermined by those it rejected: bastards, and non-white, non-English progenitors.

To contemporary ears, the word "bastardy" sounds more offensive than "illegitimacy." Nevertheless, "bastard" and "bastardy" were legal terms in England until the middle of the twentieth century, and, historically, these words did not carry the stigma they do today. More importantly, as Jenny Bourne Taylor delineates in her study of bastardy in the nineteenth century, the term "bastardy" has a much richer meaning than the term "illegitimacy"; bastardy's definition also includes that which is adulterated, imitative, and spurious. Taylor argues that legitimacy is based on a binary between legitimate and illegitimate, while bastardy points to the twisted historical basis of the term that is not rooted in a binary. Taylor argues that the bastard is "an identity constructed as an aporia."⁴ In this light, illegitimacy is to legitimacy similar to what homosexual is to heterosexual, while the word "bastard" operates conceptually more like the word "queer"; that is, it opens up possibilities of meanings that would be foreclosed by a simple binary. Of course, the relationship between sexual preference and conditions of birth is in other ways not at all analogous. Terms that denote conditions of birth and sexual orientation carry both social and legal heft, but "illegitimate" and "bastard" are legal categories that have been used historically to define privilege, ownership, and citizenship. In social realms, they have less weight. As histories of bastardy show, the appellation often carried no social stigma at all.⁵ In contrast, categories of sexual preference bear tremendous social force; individuals are often excluded from social groups based on their sexual orientation.

Creating a category that outlines what is or is not bastardy is vital to the legal structure of a country because it is a nation's framing of what is native and alien. "Legitimate" birth invariably strives to create a body of citizens who are defined by two factors: whether their birth is in line with the state's ambitions and whether their birth reinforces existing hierarchies. In other words, the purpose of legitimacy laws has been both to corral the population and to create a pecking order within it. France, England, Spain, and Germany have had very different political structures and so possessed very different legitimacy laws at the beginning of the twentieth century.⁶ Even within English laws, legitimacy laws for centuries have diverged dramatically since they were rooted in two entirely different systems—the Common and the Ecclesiastical.⁷ Ecclesiastical law strove to ensure that unsupported mothers and children would not tax the parishes. Historically, the Christian Church created legitimacy laws that, although they could be...