Qu(e)ercus Robur: Orlando and the Oak Tree

This essay examines the presence of the oak tree within Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando through a queer ecology lens. By drawing comparisons between Orlando and the oak tree’s dualist identities — the oak as both having physical and poetic forms and Orlando as expressing both male and females general characters — and considering the oak as an active agent within the novel, the author argues that Woolf’s positioning of the natural world can be an example of queer ecological frameworks that reveal and consider not just the queer nature of the novel, but indeed the queerness of nature within it.