Create an outline for your research paper. In your outline, include your chosen prompt, your working thesis and a list of points you want to make. Each point should include a central claim and evidence from the text, referencing page numbers or chapters.

Below is a sample to give you a better idea.

 

Sample Outline

Working Thesis: Through the characters representation in clothing, Woolf shows that the idea of gender is fabricated by society in order to make women subservient to men.

  1. As a boy, Orlando’s fashion doesn’t reflect societal expectations for a male appearance—he is slightly feminine.
    • “he – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it” (11)
    • “He has thrust on crimson breeches, lace collar, waistcoat of taffeta, and shoes with rosettes on them as big as double dahlias”(16)
  2. Sasha’s clothing reveals how clothing makes gender ambiguous
    • “a figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him Orlando with the highest curiosity” (27-28).
    • “Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question”(28)
    • But the skater came closer. Legs, hands, carriage, were a boy’s, but no boy has those eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea.”(28)
  3. After becoming a woman, Orlando reflects on her physical appearance to discover that social expectations about the female gender are not true.
    • “‘There’s the hairdressing,’ she thought, ‘that alone will take an hour of my morning, there’s looking in the looking-glass, another hour; there’s staying and lacing;there’s washing and powdering; there’s changing from silk to lace and from lace to paduasoy; there’s being chaste year in year out…’” (115-116)
  4. As a woman, Orlando’s clothing changes how others perceive her.
    • “She looked, she felt, she talked like one. Yet, having been so lately a women herself, she suspected that the girl’s timidity and her hesitating answers and the very fumbling with the key in the latch and the fold of her cloak and the drop of her wrist were all put on to gratify her masculinity.”(158)
    • “The plain Dunstable of the matter is, that I’m not in the mood for the society of the other sex tonight.”(159)
  5. Archduke Harry/Harriet’s reveals that clothing reinforces certain imagery of women being timid.
    • “For this lady resembled nothing much as a hare; a hare startled, but obdurare; a hare whose timidity is overcome by an immense and foolish audacity; a hare that sits upright and glowers at its pursuer with great, bulging eyes; with ears erect but quivering, with nose pointed, but twitching.” (83)
    • “… in her place stood a tall gentleman in black. A heap of clothes lay in the fender. She was alone with a man.” (126).
    • “Recalled thus suddenly to a consciousness of her sex, which she had completely forgotten, and of his, which was now remote enough to be equally upsetting”(132)

 

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