She seemed to vacillate; she was man;

she was woman; she shared the secrets,

shared the weaknesses of each.

Orlando (1928)

by Virgina Woolf

Orlando differs from Virginia Woolf's other novels, since it is an attempt to represent the character of a real person, the writer Vita Sackville West, with whom Virginia had a growing erotic friendship. Through the extraordinary character of Orlando, the author analysed the evolution of the concepts of masculinity and femininity over the course of four hundred years. Thus she presented a feminist view of history from the Elizabethan age to World War. The relationship between biographical and historic writing, between memoir and history, became one of the most important features of this book which, in the author's intention. "should be truthful but fantastic".

Revolutionising biography

The book is a biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the 20th century with the main character, Orlando, covering this timespan and changing from one sex to another. From the beginning it deals with the question of freedom from the restrictions of both gender and genre, since it escapes the conventions of the novel and ridicules the biographical genre, with its narrative presentation of the subject from birth to death.

The novel shows how transgressive the biography of a woman can be, it satirises the narrator's pretensions to objectivity and mocks the ways in which history is categorised. In doing so, Woolf implies that the course of a life entails the production of complex narratives of identity, change and development. Her aim is therefore to show the dichotomy between factual biography and real life.

The character of Orlando

Orlando is a self-conscious participant in the biographer's quest for personality and her thoughts frequently overlap with the narrator's. The analysis of her character is convincingly achieved. Although she takes over 300 years to reach the age of thirty-six, Orlando does not change. Her essential qualities are already formed when she is an Elizabethan boy of sixteen: she is beautiful, clumsy impetuous, fond of solitude and nature, devoted to literature. It is by this means that Woolf underlines Orlando's androgyny: she is not altered by the sex change, but by her perceptions and her social behaviour. For example, the only age to which Orlando cannot adapt her bisexual personality is the Victorian age, which forces men and women into unnatural rigid marital roles.

Orlando is an aristocrat who struggles to find a way of expressing life in art. Her attempts to write evolve according to the historical periods through which she lives. When an Elizabethan, she writes tragedies; as a 17th century ambassador she meditates upon tombstones; during the 18th century she becomes a lover of the picturesque and in the 19th century she has to react against the spirit of the age which demands "the most insipid verse she had ever read in her life". So the book itself is a framework for Orlando's poem and her difficulty in writing it.

Style

The novel suggests Virginia Woolf's need for continuous literary experimentation. The style is in between satire and lyricism. The witty and satiric tone is used to evoke each historical period, the lyrical style tries to reach the heart of Orlando's personality and the nature of life itself.

Woolf also enacts the comedy of the biographer's search for the subject, as Orlando slips in and out of view through the centuries, playing the shifting role of "insider" and "outsider". The narrative echoes Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy with silences, pauses, digressions, and parentheses which totally disrupt it. Woolf also incorporated photographs of Vita Sackville-West and of her ancestors to represent Orlando in the different moments of her life and career. The effect is one of theatricality rather than biographical and historical reality.

Language

The central rhetorical device in Orlando is simile: "everything was partly something else". The language of simile and metaphor is one of approximation. which allows the exploration of appearance and reality and of the character's transformations. The clothes imagery runs through the novel: clothes are not only a means by which historical ages are differentiated; they suggest that sexual identity may be a matter of costume, performance and disguise.

Themes

A major theme in the novel is the translation of life into literature. This issue is explored from three different points of view: there is the life of a writer which is the story of writing; the turning of life into text and vice versa, which characterises biography in general; and finally the problem of literary representation, which tries to turn world into word.

The theme of transformation is represented as oscillation from one state of being to another, in states of flux and repetition. Through this Woolf links forms and concepts of subjectivity to historical periods, and explores the relationship between durable and mutable selves.

The oscillations of sex and gender hint at the theme of the crisis of categories. The concept of androgyny implies that the sexual ideal is a combination of male and female attributes which are known and given from the start. Moreover, Orlando's multiple selves and fragmented experience fit in with the modern age's sense of disunity.

Throughout the novel Woolf alludes to the depth of the unconscious. Orlando lives through the centuries but never contains the totality of time; she forgets as much as she remembers. The self is composed not only of multiple identities but of multiple temporalities, and the existence of the unconscious suggests a continuity of identity through time.

[ Spiazzi, Tavella, Only Connect, Module F, The Modern Age, Zanichelli, pp.F182-F183]