FAQ: Orlando
Key Critical Issues
Updated October 16, 2000
Created July 31, 1998
What are some key critical issues for studying Orlando?
Connection to Vita Sackville-West
-
Lawrence studies Woolf's correspondence with Vita while Vita was travelling
in the Orient in 1926 and 1927, linking it to a theme of travel and female
desire in Orlando. Baldanza traces the historical parallels to
Vita through reference to Vitas
Knole and the Sackvilles, which Woolf exaggerates at will. The facts
of her life and her familys ancestry shape this biography. In all of
these she mixes Vita with her ancestors, including such of Vitas traits
as love of animals and nature, desire for solitude, her long periods of
melancholy in which she would go to bed for days or weeks. Some historical
links:
1) the 16th century Thomas Sackville (co-author of
Gorboduc, 1st English tragedy) to whom Eliz. I gave Knole (he was
her cousin)
2) the passage in which Orlando decides to furnish
Knole (109) includes lists of items bought that resemble the many lists in Vitas
book about Knole
3) Orlandos sexual adventures resemble various
Sackvilles (including Vita). Also Vita is androgynous looking and her
affair with Violet Trefusis is the basis of the Sasha episode; during that
affair. Vita sometimes dressed as a man.
4) Some of the Sackvilles had been ambassadors, and Vita had
just returned from Persia, where Harold had been on the diplomatic staff. Woolf
had herself been to Constantinople.
5) Vitas literary aspirations, and winning a prize for
a poem called "The Land."
6) Vitas family scandal: her grandfather, Lord
Sackville, had five illegitimate children by a Spanish gypsy who already
had a husband. His sons were not allowed to inherit Knole, but his daughter
(Vitas mother) married the heir (his brothers son). In 1910,
the illegitimate heirs brought a widely publicized lawsuit contesting the
ownership of Knole. (That lawsuit ultimately impoverished the Sackville estate
and led to the sale of Knole to the National Trust in 1947.)
Woolfs "search for unity" combining herself, Vita, and the Sackvilles
(Trautmann 83). Trautmann reads the book, not so much as a biography of Vita
as "the symbolic story of the friendship between its author and the most
important member of her audience, V. Sackville-West, to whom the book is
dedicated" (85). [Only one other Woolf book has a dedication, Night and
Day, dedicated to Vanessa Bell.]
Parody of conventional biography (see especially Trautmann, an also Edel):
- the name-dropping Preface acknowledging too many people
- the illustrations (see key to illustrations)
- the index (e.g., Lopokova, Madame; cross-referenced
to Keynes, Mrs. M.L., leading to an analogy about how fast Orlando could
change her skirt: "as if Madame Lopokova were using her highest art" 315).
- the narrative voiceoften pretentious and long-winded (compare this
use of point of view to free indirect discourse in earlier novels; here she
is impersonating a biographer and, as usual, concealing her own presence
as author)
- the reliance on supposed letters, diary entries, etc.,
to piece together the facts.
-
At the same time as using all these accoutrements of scholarship, she makes
no attempt to explain why Orlando lives 400 years or how she changed into
a woman. The only place where the narrator becomes coy and evasive is in
introducing the fact that Orlando has a child (imitating 19th century manners).
Trautmann notes Woolfs appreciative remarks about another biographer,
written at the same time as Orlando: "he has devised a method of writing
about people and about himself as though they were at once real and imaginary"
(qtd. 86, from "The New Biography"; the biographer is Harold Nicolson).
Compared to other Woolf books (especially Room and Lighthouse):
- Orlando "brilliantly embodies the seemingly
contradictory political and aesthetic theories of A Room of Ones
Own in a vision of the comic sublime" (Kari Elise Lokke qtd. in Hussey
205).
- Orlando traces the history of literature and women writers much
like Room (Lee 518).
- Orlando is strongly linked to Room in
the themes of gender and writing (Thompson).
- Where To the Lighthouse "expose[s] her deep feelings" about
her parents while seeking not to directly identify them, Orlando is
"a blatant account of an intimate friend which is extremely self-concealing"
(Lee 516).
- Trautmann also suggests that Woolfs making
a work of art from her beloved friend Vita was akin to Lily Briscoe creating
her friend Mrs. Ramsay in a painting (Lily: "Could loving, as people called
it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one?") and that after writing Orlando,
she "had an even more profound understanding of friendships" which she uses
in The Waves, wherein "Bernard and his friends reflect images of each
other" (84). Bernards relationship to Percival (opposites) is like
Virginias to Vita.
Analysis of genre issues (often gender and genre are linked as in Boehm)
1) Orlando demonstrates Woolfs resistance
to the genre of the novel (Thompson).
2) Orlando is in fact an "anti-novel" (Wilson
).
Analysis of gender issues, especially androgyny and lesbian themes
- "revisits the history and development of English
literature from the Renaissance to 1928 in the spirit of feminist parody
in order to free itand by extension its authorfrom the burden
of this largely masculine tradition" (Daniel Fogel qtd. in Hussey 204).
- the character Orlando celebrates Vitas androgynous qualities
(Trautmann 86) and also combines the Shakespearean characters of the young
lovers Orlando and Rosalind in As You Like It. Both Orlandos are young
aristocrats cut off from their fathers fortune (Floris Delattre cited
in Trautmann 86)
- "Androgyny in Orlando is not a resolution
of oppositions, but the throwing of both sexes into a metonymic confusion
of genders" (Minow-Pinkney 122 qtd in Hussey 205).
- Orlando is "a mad, surrealistic Bildungsroman or perhaps,
one could argue, a female novel of initiation. Orlando seeks identity and
fulfillment first through the guidance of corrupt male literary advisers,
next through an exotic romance set in a frozen carnival, and, finally, through
public service in foreign lands. Each experience increases his alienation
and confusion until, suddenly, Orlando awakes from a dream . . ., female.
Thereafter gender becomes amorphous and time irrelevant. . . . Indeed, throughout
Orlando, clothes, not genitals or personality, symbolize gender change"
(Smith-Rosenberg 288).
- Orlando is a coded text that plays with censorship
issues; "Woolf complies with the letter of the law while outrageously demolishing
the spirit of the law" (Hankins 184). Writers who wanted to deal with lesbian
themes at the time could do so openly and face a trial (like Radclyffe Hall),
change the sex of one of the lovers (as Vita did in Challenge), or
suppress the novel entirely. Woolf mocks the censor (in the person of the
Ladies of Purity, Chastity, and Modesty), puts the sex change openly in the
novel, and also suppresses some lesbian elements (as can be seen in drafts),
while maintaining some openly, as when, after the sex change, the narrator
writes "though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved" (160).
- Orlando's first 100 years are a prologue to birth of female subjectivity;
the "sex change" is orientalized (must take place outside of
England because "English soil is inimical to the emerging female
subjectivity and sexuality" (Lawrence 255).
- There are two coded fantasies here: Vita's, to be androgynous, immortal,
and owner of Knole; and Virginia's, to act on lesbian desire, as she did in
her affair with Vita (Moore).
- Androgyny is a "refusal to choose" (Caughie 486), not a unification
of identity; "not a freedom from the tyranny of sex . . . so much as a
freedom from the tyranny of reference" (489). Caughie relates this to the 18th
century ideas about whether thought and form should be separated (Samuel
Johnson) or are inseparable (Pope), both of which are essentialist
positions. Caughie argues that Woolf's position is anti-essentialist:
"what matters is not the nature of the sign, the transsexual,
but its position and function within a particular discursive situation"
(488).
Woolf's androgyne does not transcend gender so much as she plays with
it, breaking down conventional oppositions and converting it into a matter
of dynamic role-playing. For Woolf, "androgyny in Orlando
is not so much a psychosexual category as a rhetorical strategy" (491).
Hussey and others trace the original conception for Orlando to a diary
entry for "The Jessamy Brides" (Diary, March 14, 1927), based on the Ladies
of Llangollen, a famous pair of 18th century English aristocratic women who
eloped with each other to Wales.
Comparison to the Sally Potter film. The film gives no attention to Vita
whatsoever and in fact omits and changes parts that were important to the
Vita element, e.g., all reference to the gypsy dancer Pepita, who was
Vitas grandmother, and whose son Henry occasioned some of the lawsuits
that impoverished the estate. The film is interested in the main theme of
androgyny, and in political issues such as British imperialism and class
issues, e.g.,
- the line where Orlando has pointed to
her huge home saying "This is where I live," and Sasha asks "All by yourself?"
- Elizabeth Is huge retinue and the elaborate clothing
that all the royalty and aristocrats wear
Works Cited
Back to Virginia Woolf Seminar Home Page