Despite the clearly satirical tone of Orlando: A Biography, there is also, just as present, a melancholia that permeates Orlando's search for “Life, a lover!” (244). As Suzanne Raitt has observed, Woolf intended Orlando (1928) in part as a “light–hearted comedy” (30), yet, in Woolf 's characteristic style, the instances of lightness are contrasted with deeply melancholic moments. Considering the dark side of Woolf's light–hearted comedy, I propose viewing the novel as an unconventional elegy.

Orlando's mutable sex and ambiguous gender performance add to the parodic nature of the form of the novel but also suggest the parodic nature of gender itself. Woolf resists the notion of fixed representability by creating a character who, by no effort of his own and with no apparent cause, transforms and metamorphoses. It is through the trope of metamorphosis that the satirical biography of Orlando also becomes a study in mourning, unlimited by gender, time, nature, or representability.

Woolf 's examination of the connections between writing, gender, and nature leads us to reexamine traditional notions of grieving as well as traditional notions of gender, thus illuminating the indelible relationship between grief and gender. I see this relationship functioning on two levels: first, one might immediately think of the gendered roles assigned to mourners, especially prevalent at the beginning of the twentieth century, as well as the necessarily gendered experiencing of loss just after the First World War. Secondly, I consider melancholia and gender on a more fundamental level through Judith Butler's theory of melancholic gender, in which both melancholia and primary gender formation are matters of identifying with internalized love objects: gender identification necessitates the sex of the original prohibited object of desire to be internalized as a prohibition (Butler 63). While Butler cites the Freudian models of mourning and melancholia, I believe that Orlando's subversion of traditional notions of gender also allows us to push back against the traditional Freudian model in which grieving “successfully” is to grieve with finality and reconciliation. I suggest an alternative framework of “resistant mourning,” to borrow Patricia Rae's term, in order to allow us to view Orlando as a work of mourning without requiring reconciliation, which Woolf herself resists in the very form of the book and her intentionally unresolved ending.