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]