In the last few decades, however, a number of Woolf scholars and critics have tended to value Orlando less highly than its early readers did. Quentin Bell, for example, damns the work with faint praise as ‘easy, amusing, and straightforward in its narrative’. Although he concedes that ‘of all Virginia’s novels [this is] the one that comes nearest to sexual, or rather to homosexual, feeling,’ he characterizes its protagonist as ‘near… to the glamorous creations of the novelette’.39 Adopting a similar tone, Alex Zwerdling dismissively observes that in Orlando ‘such serious Woolfian themes as androgyny, the passage of time, and artistic dedication are rather archly guyed’, while Jane Marcus curtly remarks that ‘more than “kind explanation” is needed to see in it a modern myth of historical development, what Rebecca West called the “high fountain” of genius’, and most recently John Batchelor judges it ‘not… a major work’ but rather ‘an experiment with a negative result’.40 And indeed, despite the encomia of reviewers, Woolf herself had by November 1929 scornfully described the book as not just a ‘freak’ but, worse, ‘mere child’s play’.41
Yet Woolf’s initial sense of Orlando as ‘extraordinarily unwilled’ but ‘potent in its own right… as if it shoved everything aside to come into existence’ should not be discounted. For besides being a happy ‘escapade’, a charming ‘love letter’, an exuberant analysis of gender roles and a witty meditation on history, this work occupies a particularly interesting and ‘potent’ position in Woolf’s oeuvre: she began to contemplate Orlando shortly after she had completed To the Lighthouse, the elegiac examination of the traditional upper middle class Victorian family that was at least in part intended to exorcize the ghosts of her own parents, her own past; and after finishing Orlando she commented that ‘I want to write a history, say of Newnham or the women’s movement, in the same vein’,42 then turned almost immediately to her first major feminist treatise, A Room of One’s Own. In a sense, it can be argued, Orlando functions as a crucial bridge between these two superficially very different texts.
Woolf herself understood quite well the psychic significance that To the Lighthouse had for her. As she initially conceived the novel, she noted that ‘the centre is father’s character, sitting in a boat, reciting We perished, each alone, while he crushes a dying mackerel’,43 and after she had completed it she observed that ‘when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.’44 In a study of Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis, Elizabeth Abel has argued that ‘Woolf’s two versions of the genesis of her text depict different parental inspirations and distinct compositional processes that reproduce the psychoanalytic disputes over the narrative priority of each parent.’45 Yet it may not be necessary to decide on the ‘narrative priority’ of either parent if one sees that the core project of the novel is both an exorcism of, and an elegy for, the sex roles of ‘father’ and ‘mother’ as they were prescribed during the years when Woolf was growing up. ‘I suppose that I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it out to rest’,46 Woolf mused as she looked back on the composition of To the Lighthouse, and certainly in writing this book she had ‘laid… to rest’ the ghosts of traditionally defined parent figures who had haunted her work from The Voyage Out onwards.
Orlando is in fact the first Woolf novel in which a meditation on the configurations of the family as it is structured around the stereotypical heterosexual couple does not in some sense dominate the plot. Instead, this parodic but ultimately serious ‘biography’ takes as its starting point a character who may be said to have evolved as much from Lily Briscoe, the determinedly single woman artist of To the Lighthouse, as from Vita Sackville-West. What would Lily’s life have been like, Orlando asks, if she had been set free to rove through history and discover that what Mrs Ramsay considered the ‘universal law’ of marriage (along with the sex roles on which that law was founded) was as much an artifice as the clothes she wore or as her own painting of the ‘relation’ of ‘masses’? And what would Lily’s life have become had all history been, for her, a surprisingly free space in which one could easily and insouciantly be woman or man? More, how would the engenderings of history appear to such a radically new kind of being? Would the two histories – the masculine chronicle solemnly produced by Big Ben and the feminine record more diffidently offered by the ‘other clock’ – retain their separateness, remain divided?
After she had explored these issues in Orlando, Woolf never again returned to the kinds of representations of the traditional family that had concerned her in her earlier books. A Room of One’s Own, the work that immediately followed, was of course pioneering not only in its effort to excavate women’s history but in its advocacy of a creative androgyny that recalls Edward Carpenter’s celebration of a ‘third’ or ‘intermediate sex’, as well as in its imaginative resurrection of the lost woman poet ‘Judith Shakespeare’. The Waves (1931), which Woolf was planning even as she wrote Orlando and began composing A Room of One’s Own, focused on six speakers (three women and three men) whose family backgrounds are so blurred that one might almost think each had been parthenogenetically produced. And although in her last two novels, The Years and Between the Acts, Woolf did return to a scrutiny of family dynamics, she there approaches the history as well as the problems and pleasures of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ even more sceptically and sardonically than she had before Orlando had ‘shoved everything aside to come into existence’.
At the same time, however, all these works ask a question that was implicit in the revisionary history, the speculations on time past and time present, that so occupied the creator of a fantastic hero/heroine who lives through 500 years of cultural change. If history can be reimagined and sex roles reconstituted through such a reimagining, what might be the future towards which a newly conceived past and present would lead? This was a topic on which Woolf had also brooded throughout her career, beginning in the early ‘Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’, whose fifteenth-century diarist confesses that each morning ‘with my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is for ever lifting & pulling & letting new spaces of life in upon us.’47 Even at the end of her writing life, as Alex Zwerdling has reminded us, Woolf was still addressing this question. ‘The outline for Reading at Random, the cultural history she left unfinished at the time of her death,’ he notes, ‘is reasonably familiar and straightforward from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. But then comes the injunction “Skip present day. A Chapter on the future”.’ Yet as he also observes, ‘What eluded her was any understanding of how the present could conceivably lead to the future she imagined’ – a future, I might add, in which the liberation symbolized by the lively shape-shiftings of Orlando and the reborn genius of ‘Judith Shakespeare’ would be not only literarily but literally possible.48
Perhaps, however, it was through the intensity of the highly metaphorical, lyrical, even incantatory language with which Orlando concludes that Woolf did begin to imagine at least the inception of a future that would be radically different from the past she had so yearningly revised. Certainly as her record of a changed and changing history mounts to an almost erotic climax on ‘Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight’, she offers us – not just comically but seriously – a vision of transformative promise that amounts to a sort of annunciation, an impregnation of ‘reality’ by the forces of ‘fantasy’. Imperiously invoking her husband while stationing herself beside the totemic natural object that has been her aesthetic subject for centuries (‘ “Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!” she cried, standing by the oak tree’), Orlando bares ‘her breast to the moon… so that her pearls glowed like the eggs of some vast moon-spider’ (p. 227). And as she does so, she sets in motion a ‘moment of being’ that is also a moment of mysterious change.
Below her, Orlando sees what is figuratively speaking ‘the great house’ of the past, where all is ‘lit as for the coming of a dead Queen’. Above her, the ‘fine sea captain’ Shelmerdine hovers, ‘coming nearer and nearer’ in an aeroplane. And then, in an allusion to the annunciatory gesture – the epiphany of dove or swan – through which the supernatural intervenes in human affairs, ‘a single wild bird’ springs up over Shelmerdine’s head. Together, Woolf implies, the past of a dead queen and the present of October 1928, the culture of house and aeroplane and the nature of moon and ‘moon-eggs’, the sea of Shelmerdine the explorer and the earth of Orlando the land lady, all incarnated in the revisionary love of a ‘womanly’ man and a ‘manly’ woman, may conspire to conceive an ‘unwilled’ but ‘potent’ vita nuova.
Sandra M. Gilbert 1992
NOTES
1. Letter to Vita Sackville-West, 9 Oct. 1927, Letters, III, pp. 428–9.
2. Diary, III, 20 Dec. 1927, p. 168.
3. ibid., 14 March 1927, p. 131.
4. ibid., 20 Sept. 1927, p. 157.
5. ibid., 5 Oct. 1927, p. 161.
6. Moments of Being, p. 73.
7. Diary, III, 21 Dec. 1925, p. 52.
8. ibid.
9. Quentin Bell, Bloomsbury (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973, p. 42).
10. Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (University of California Press, 1986, p. 168).
11. Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, I (Hogarth Press, 1972, p. 83).
12. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925; Penguin Books, 1992, pp. 34–5).
13. Edward Carpenter, Love’s Coming of Age (1896; Mitchell Kennerley, 1911, pp. 120–21).
14. George Bernard Shaw, ‘Woman-Man in Petticoats’ in Platform and Pulpit, ed. Dan H. Laurence (Hill and Wang, 1961, p. 174).
15. Havelock Ellis, The Psychology of Sex (Ray Long and Richard R. Smith, 1933, p. 225).
16. Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and the Lesbian Continuum’ in Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 (W. W. Norton, 1986, pp. 23–75); Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (1928; Avon, 1981, p. 52).
17. Diary, III, 31 Aug. 1928, p. 193.
18. Bell, Virginia Woolf, II, p. 132.
19. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818; Penguin Books, 1972, p. 123).
20. Arthur Schlesinger, ‘The Role of Women in American History’ in New Viewpoints in American History (Macmillan, 1921, p. 126).
21. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928; Penguin Books, 1945, PP. 45, 47).
22. Virginia Woolf, The Pargiters, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (Hogarth Press, 1978, p. 9).
23. Leon Edel, Literary Biography (1959; Indiana University Press, 1973, p. 139).
24. ibid., p. 138.
25. On Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso as a major precursor text for Orlando, see Beverley Ann Schlack, Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf’s Use of Literary Allusion (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979, pp. 80–83). For a discussion of the comparable relevance of the Orlando/Rosalind plot in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, see Joanne Trautmann, The Jessamy Brides: The Friendship of Virginia Woolf and V. Sackville-West (Pennsylvania State University Studies, No. 36, 1973, P. 41).
26. See ‘Orlando: An Edition of the Manuscript’, ed. Madeline Moore, in Twentieth Century Literature (No. 25, 1979, pp. 337–9).
27. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928; Penguin Books, 1945, p. 112).
28. For a more detailed discussion of parallels between Vita’s life and Orlando’s, see Schlack, op. cit., and Trautmann, op. cit.
29. Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973, p. 107).
30. For Vita’s own history of Knole and its extravagances, see Vita Sackville-West, Knole and the Sackvilles (Heinemann, 1922); see also the notes to this edition.
31. For an interesting (though somewhat different) analysis of Orlando as a ‘deconstruction’ of conventional biography and history, see Rachel Bowlby, Virginia Woolf (Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp. 128–45).
32. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (1925; Penguin Books, 1992, p. 140).
33. Diary, III, 22 March 1928, p. 177; 21 April 1928, p. 180.
34. ibid., 31 May 1928, p. 185.
35. ibid., 27 Oct. 1928, p. 200.
36. Rebecca West, New York Herald Tribune, 21 Oct. 1928, 11, pp. 1, 6.
37. Diary, III, 22 Sept. 1928, p. 198.
38. ibid., 18 Dec. 1928, p. 212.
39. Bell, Virginia Woolf, II, pp. 139–40, 118–19.
40. Zwerdling, op. cit., p. 56; Jane Marcus, ‘Introduction: Virginia Woolf Aslant’ in Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant (University of Nebraska Press, 1983, p. 2); John Batchelor, Virginia Woolf: The Major Novels (CUP, 1991, pp. 16, 18).
41. Diary, III, 5 Nov. 1929, p. 264.
42. ibid., 7 Nov. 1928, p. 203.
43. ibid., 14 May 1925, pp. 18–19.
44. Moments of Being, p. 90.
45. Elizabeth Abel, Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis (University of Chicago Press, 1989, p. 45).
46. Moments of Being, p. 90.
47. Shorter Fiction, p. 48.
48. Zwerdling, op. cit., p. 327.
Further Reading
PRIMARY
Vita Sackville-West
The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, ed. Louise DeSalvo and Mitchell A. Leaska (Hutchinson, 1984).
Knole and the Sackvilles (Heinemann, 1922).
Virginia Woolf
The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 5 vols., ed. Anne Olivier Bell (Hogarth Press, 1977; Penguin Books, 1979).
The Essays of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., ed. Andrew McNeillie (Hogarth Press, 1986).
The Letters of Virginia Woolf, 6 vols., ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (Hogarth Press, 1975–80).
Moments of Being: Unpublished Autobiographical Writings of Virginia Woolf, ed. Jeanne Schulkind (1975; 2nd edn, Hogarth Press, 1985).
A Writer’s Diary, ed. Leonard Woolf (Hogarth Press, 1954).
SECONDARY
Susan Mary Alsop, Lady Sackville: A Biography (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978).
Frank Baldanza, ‘Orlando and the Sackvilles’ in PMLA (Proceedings of the Modern Language Association) (No. 70, 1955, pp. 274–9).
Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf: A Biography, 2 vols. (Hogarth Press, 1972).
Edward Bishop, A Virginia Woolf Chronology (Macmillan, 1989).
Louise DeSalvo, ‘Lighting the Cave: The Relationship between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Winter 1982, pp. 195–214).
_____‘A Note on the Orlando Tapestries at Knole House’ in Virginia Miscellany (No. 13, 1979, pp. 3–4).
Leon Edel, Literary Biography, (1959; Indiana University Press, 1973, especially pp. 134–45).
Alice Fox, Virginia Woolf and the English Renaissance (OUP, 1990).
Victoria Glendinning, Vita: The Life of Vita Sackville-West (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983).
David Bonnel Greene, ‘Orlando and the Sackvilles: Addendum’ in PMLA (No. 71, 1956, pp. 268–9).
Ellen Hawkes, ‘Woolf’s Magical Garden of Women’ in New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Jane Marcus (University of Nebraska Press, 1981, pp. 31–60).
Frederick Kellerman, ‘A New Key to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’ in English Studies (No. 59, 1978, pp. 138–50).
Sherron E. Knopp, ‘ “If I Saw You Would You Kiss Me?” Sapphism and the Subversiveness of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’ in PMLA (No. 103, 1988, pp. 24–34).
Betty Kushen, ‘ “Dreams of Golden Domes”: Manic Fusion in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’ in Literature and Psychology (No. 29, 1979, PP. 53–66).
Jean O. Love, ‘Orlando and Its Genesis: Venturing and Experimenting in Art, Love and Sex’ in Virginia Woolf: Reevaluation and Continuity, ed. Ralph Freedman (University of California Press, 1980, pp. 189–218).
Herbert Marder, Feminism and Art: A Study of Virginia Woolf (University of Chicago Press, 1968).
Nigel Nicolson, Portrait of a Marriage (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973).
Phyllis Rose, Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf (OUP, 1978).
Sonya Rudikoff, ‘How Many Lovers Had Virginia Woolf’ in the Hudson Review (32, No. 4, 1979, pp. 540–66).
Beverly Ann Schlack, Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf’s Use of Literary Allusion (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1979).
Clifton Snider, ‘ “A Single Self”: A Jungian Interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando’ in Modern Fiction Studies (No. 25, 1979, pp. 263–8).
Susan M. Squier, Virginia Woolf and London: The Sexual Politics of the City (University of North Carolina Press, 1985).
_____‘Tradition and Revision in Woolf’s Orlando: Defoe and the Jessamy Brides’ in Women’s Studies (1984).
Lytton Strachey, Elizabeth and Essex (Harcourt Brace, 1928).
Pamela Transue, ‘Orlando’, Chapter V of Virginia Woolf and the Politics of Style (State University of New York Press, 1986, pp. 111–26).
Joanne Trautmann, The Jessamy Brides: The Friendship of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West (Pennsylvania State University Studies, No. 36, 1973).
Jean Moorcraft Wilson, Virginia Woolf: Life and London, a Biography of Place (Cecil Woolf, 1987).
Leonard Woolf, An Autobiography, 2 vols. (Hogarth Press, 1967–9; OUP, 1980).
Alex Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World (University of California Press, 1986).
A Note on the Text
Woolf composed Orlando in a high state of exhilaration: ‘I have written this book quicker than any: & it is all a joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think: a writers holiday.’1 She began writing on 7 or 8 October 1927, and set down the last words shortly before 1 a.m. on the night of 17 March 1928.2 She then revised it completely, while retaining most of the narrative structure of the first draft (some details of the passages she later cut can be found in the notes to this edition). A number of extracts from the original manuscript have subsequently been published: the first (a sequence from Chapter V that begins with an apologetic note from Miss Christina Rossetti) by Vita Sackville-West in an article for the Listener in 1955, based on a radio programme.3 Transcripts of many passages that differ in the manuscript from the printed text are provided by Madeline Moore in her article on the subject.4 The manuscript remains in perpetuity at Knole, the Sackville family estate at Sevenoaks, Kent, as part of a bequest to the National Trust from Vita’s sons, Ben and Nigel Nicolson.
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