Orlando, Greece and the Impossible Landscape

Tracing the trope of landscape as it appears in Orlando’s experience on Mount Athos – a monastic site upon which women were historically forbidden to trespass – Vassiliki Kolocotroni explores the poet Orlando’s allegorical and pastoral scene-making impulses. Grounded in the thought of classical scholar Jane Ellen Harrison, Orlando’s vision of the Greek landscape enacts a feminist transgression, Kolocotroni argues, at the same time as it problematically appropriates this space and the classical past. This chapter thereby highlights Orlando’s ambivalence as ‘emblem of an impossibility, a female creature on a sacred, forbidding all-male space’.