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A review by spenkevich
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
5.0
‘I contain multitudes,’ wrote the poet [a:Walt Whitman|1438|Walt Whitman|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1392303683p2/1438.jpg], a nod to the contradictions and selves that bud and grow from the branches of the self as we ‘proceed to fill my next fold of the future.’ It is a fluidity of life and personhood which Virginia Woolf observes as ‘these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter’s hand’ as she crafts the long shifting arc of personalities and gender in the titular character of study in her 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography. Orlando, who starts the novel denoted as a ‘He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it’ in a gorgeously poetic reimagining of the Elizabethan age, to later awaken ‘she’ in a life that stretches into the 1920s. As accomplished a novel as Woolf ever wrote, the density of its vibrant prose delivered through a playful tension of biographical writing with stream-of-consciousness is held aloft by a witty humor while soaring on wings of obvious joy and love for both her craft and the novel’s inspiration, [a:Vita Sackville-West|3904620|Vita Sackville-West|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1417920269p2/3904620.jpg], to whom the book is dedicated. It is a sharp criticism of society, particularly the restrictions of women under obdurate patriarchal norms which Orlando’s transition into womanhood holds up in stark contrast to their life as a free-spirited young man. Transcending the binary of gender and interrogating the fluidity of self, time and biography that flourishes once we crack the crust of their socially imposed constructs, Orlando: A Biography is a poetic portrait of perfection and philosophical insights that bore itself deep into my heart for a reading experience of pure bliss.
‘Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.’
Having long loved the works of Virginia Woolf—I have her face tattooed on the inside of my left arm—I was thrilled to finally read a book that was not only dear to the writer but also a formative novel for many of my other favorite authors. Most notably [a:Jeanette Winterson|9399|Jeanette Winterson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1561070665p2/9399.jpg] who provides the introduction to the most recent edition (a variation of the introduction can be read HERE). It has now, too, become one of my favorites. Winterson discusses Orlando as not necessarily the first trans novel—[a:Ovid|1127|Ovid|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651504074p2/1127.jpg], for instance, has the story of Iphis—but an early one that was already far ahead of its time in sexual and gender politics. And one that has lasted a century, published at a time when censoring novels over sexuality wasn’t unheard but, as Winterson explains, ‘Woolf, because she can write, smuggled past the censors and the guardians of propriety the most outrageous contraband.’
This is a historical novel in many ways, one Woolf adopted a prose style reflecting that of the Elizabethan age for the start of her book, though it is also highly steeped in Woolf’s own personal history. While homosexuality remained illegal until 1967 in the UK between men, there was never legal limitations between two women though it was highly frowned upon. It was under this social culture that Virginia Woolf was famously involved with Vita Sackville-West who is a major inspiration for the character Orlando (the title character name, however, is likely derived from [a:William Shakespeare|947|William Shakespeare|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1654446514p2/947.jpg]’s [b:As You Like It|42607|As You Like It|William Shakespeare|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1561383241l/42607._SY75_.jpg|702863] where Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, teaches Orlando how to love). For starters, Orlando realizes after becoming a woman that the pleasures of life are suddenly gatekept, such as being unable to own property or having any social mobility without a husband, a harsh reality Woolf had to face knowing that being without a husband and in a relationship with another woman would be a near social impossibility. Woolf, similarly, addresses these issues in [b:A Room of One’s Own|18521|A Room of One’s Own|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327883012l/18521._SY75_.jpg|1315615], though the groundworks of thought are already present in Orlando, and is the sort social barriers [a:Simone de Beauvoir|5548|Simone de Beauvoir|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1555042345p2/5548.jpg] decries in [b:The Second Sex|9684227|The Second Sex|Simone de Beauvoir|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348744262l/9684227._SY75_.jpg|879666] writing:
I was reminded of how, in [a:James Baldwin|10427|James Baldwin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1343346341p2/10427.jpg]’s Giovanni’s Room, we see the character Hella criticize the ‘humiliating necessity’ that women are disregarded unless she is attached to a man, to ‘be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself,’ which Orlando now must experience. Sackville-West, for instance, was unable to inherit her home in Kent as a woman, and so Woolf begins Orlando’s journey growing up in the very home at Knole. We also see Sackville-West’s inspiration in Orlando knowing that she would dress in men’s clothing and go by the name Julian in order to escort her lover, Violet, around Paris.
Woolf (left) with Sackville-West (right)
‘Different sex. Same person.’
Along with the various avenues of society now closed as a woman, Orlando observes variations of judgment as well. For instance, as a boy, sleeping around was acceptable but as a woman it would be outrageously scandalous, a man writing poetry is one thing but a woman writing is another, such is the meaning behind what Woolf in [b:A Room of One’s Own|18521|A Room of One’s Own|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327883012l/18521._SY75_.jpg|1315615], ‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,’ and the obstacles she faces in her own life. ‘Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence,’ Woolf writes about, ‘as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking’ and Orlando feels closed in this society where, as Beauvoir writes ‘marriage is the destiny traditionally offered to women by society’ with little else. Suddenly Orlando sees that women are thought to exist as accessories for me, or, as Woolf writes in Room:
This is the issue with gender roles as we are shown here, something Orlando aims to be free of through her fluidity and seeing them as falsehood. [a:Judith Butler|5231|Judith Butler|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1238028179p2/5231.jpg] addresses this in her book [b:Gender Trouble|85767|Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion of Identity|Judith Butler|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349037224l/85767._SY75_.jpg|2249813] asserting that gender is performative, formed through repetition plus performance but not synonymous with it. Performative, by means of saying ‘that it is real only to the extent that it is performed’ and thereby not binarily fixed, but also gender roles are largely culturally influenced rather than biologically and tend to be construct labels assigned to maintain a hierarchical society. Such a society, Woolf and Beauvoir would argue, is orchestrated toward maintaining dominance for men at the cost of women’s social and financial agency. But through moving between genders, Orlando shows a freedom from it, such as Sackville-West did in dressing as a man. ‘Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm,’ Woolf writes, ‘they change our view of the world and the world's view of us.’ So what does the change of social attitudes in a change of outward appearance say about the internal self?
‘I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.’
While thinking of the use of clothes as a symbol here, I realized how reading Orlando became a full literary event for me as I began to see the influence of it in many novels I’ve loved and how it is such a touchstone for Winterson’s early works. When Orlando meets Sasha with the entourage of the Russian embassy at the Frost Fair, Orlando is first unsure if she is a man based on her dress, a scene that Winterson would reimagine as one of my favorite moments in all of literature in The Passion when Villanelle first kisses and falls for her lover during the festivities of the Venice casino while dressed as a man. The implication that Villanelle feels most assured sexually when in the role of a man, reflected in her choice of outfit but still undeniably the same self— ‘was this breeches and boots self any less real than my garters?’—is a predominant theme in Orlando’. Clothes are shown by Woolf as a symbol of the construct of gender, representing it as a sort of exterior performance:
Orlando observes how women are highly scrutinized and judged over their dress, with the frivolity of clothes assumed to fill their lives in place of all the society denied to women. But the performance of clothes are also a way to code switch, something we see Winterson similarly adopt in Sexing the Cherry where, when around women, protagonist Jordan reflects that ‘in my petticoats I was a traveler in a foreign country…I was regarded with suspicion.’ and therefore chooses to wear women’s clothes and pass himself as a woman. It is a reversal of expectations as we tend to encounter stories in which a woman dresses as a man to liberate their social movements and gain access to patriarchal privileges. Woolf shows clothes as a sort of gender hierarchical uniform, something Orland notices prominently:
However, these are all constructs Woolf sees as false barriers. ‘At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever.’ A powerful statement indeed.
‘The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.’
Fluidity is inherent in this entire novel, even the idea of linear time. I’ve long believed that, when we move into a meaningful part of life, when something feels it is being written into the book of the self, our perception of time slows down. When once months could pass like weeks, suddenly a week feels like a month as it slows to let the nuance breathe. The way encountering love will expand the calendar of your days which stretch out like a narrative arc, slow the season and let the summer sunlight in. Woolf commonly plays with this idea of the ‘extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind’ which she refers to in Orlando as ‘the shock of time.’
We see time represented by Orlando’s poem, “Oak Tree”, the only poem not immolated in response to insult to his play from Nicholas Greene, due to it being ‘his boyish dream and very short.’ It is with Orlando their whole life, changing with them. Time has a sense of fluidity though, with Orlando able to understand a sense of continuity between the many selves across their lengthy lifetime, yet the jumble of memories which arise through the timeline into a series of loops and disorder. In a life of many selves, memory plays timekeeper but also opens up portals unstuck from time.
It is only through narrative in retrospect that we are able to view time and person as a linear progress.
‘The true length of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute.’
In this sense we must consider the novel’s aim as a “biography.” In a sense, it is a mock biography mocking the concept of biography. The book, however, blends the “real” with moments of magical realism in an attempt to show how, through metaphor, we can often get a better sense of the lived experience of “reality” than through cold facts. It is also a jab at her own father who wrote for the Dictionary of National Biography, and the sense that confining a life to dates and facts does little to allow the magic of existence to be felt. That there is truth in subjectivity, in the blend of ‘rainbow and granite,’ that the poets can find as valuable of meaning in life as the biographers, that there is more to a map of life than the boundaries.
‘some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.’
In short, Orlando is a brilliant book. Perhaps a bit dense, Woolf employs an achingly lovely prose that lulls you in and engulfs you with its beauty. It is quite ahead of its time, addressing concepts such as ‘what is called, rightly or wrongly, a single self, a real self’ in terms of gender roles while also cracking through the illusions of social constructs to let the fluidity of life flow free. A marvelous read from an extraordinary writer.
5/5
‘By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.’
‘Instead of being a single, downright, bluff piece of work of which no man need feel ashamed, our commonest deeds are set about with a fluttering and flickering of wings, a rising and falling of lights.’
Having long loved the works of Virginia Woolf—I have her face tattooed on the inside of my left arm—I was thrilled to finally read a book that was not only dear to the writer but also a formative novel for many of my other favorite authors. Most notably [a:Jeanette Winterson|9399|Jeanette Winterson|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1561070665p2/9399.jpg] who provides the introduction to the most recent edition (a variation of the introduction can be read HERE). It has now, too, become one of my favorites. Winterson discusses Orlando as not necessarily the first trans novel—[a:Ovid|1127|Ovid|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1651504074p2/1127.jpg], for instance, has the story of Iphis—but an early one that was already far ahead of its time in sexual and gender politics. And one that has lasted a century, published at a time when censoring novels over sexuality wasn’t unheard but, as Winterson explains, ‘Woolf, because she can write, smuggled past the censors and the guardians of propriety the most outrageous contraband.’
This is a historical novel in many ways, one Woolf adopted a prose style reflecting that of the Elizabethan age for the start of her book, though it is also highly steeped in Woolf’s own personal history. While homosexuality remained illegal until 1967 in the UK between men, there was never legal limitations between two women though it was highly frowned upon. It was under this social culture that Virginia Woolf was famously involved with Vita Sackville-West who is a major inspiration for the character Orlando (the title character name, however, is likely derived from [a:William Shakespeare|947|William Shakespeare|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1654446514p2/947.jpg]’s [b:As You Like It|42607|As You Like It|William Shakespeare|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1561383241l/42607._SY75_.jpg|702863] where Rosalind, disguised as Ganymede, teaches Orlando how to love). For starters, Orlando realizes after becoming a woman that the pleasures of life are suddenly gatekept, such as being unable to own property or having any social mobility without a husband, a harsh reality Woolf had to face knowing that being without a husband and in a relationship with another woman would be a near social impossibility. Woolf, similarly, addresses these issues in [b:A Room of One’s Own|18521|A Room of One’s Own|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327883012l/18521._SY75_.jpg|1315615], though the groundworks of thought are already present in Orlando, and is the sort social barriers [a:Simone de Beauvoir|5548|Simone de Beauvoir|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1555042345p2/5548.jpg] decries in [b:The Second Sex|9684227|The Second Sex|Simone de Beauvoir|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1348744262l/9684227._SY75_.jpg|879666] writing:
‘Woman is shut up in a kitchen or in a boudoir, and astonishment is expressed that her horizon is limited. Her wings are clipped, and it is found deplorable that she cannot fly.’
I was reminded of how, in [a:James Baldwin|10427|James Baldwin|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1343346341p2/10427.jpg]’s Giovanni’s Room, we see the character Hella criticize the ‘humiliating necessity’ that women are disregarded unless she is attached to a man, to ‘be at the mercy of some gross, unshaven stranger before you can begin to be yourself,’ which Orlando now must experience. Sackville-West, for instance, was unable to inherit her home in Kent as a woman, and so Woolf begins Orlando’s journey growing up in the very home at Knole. We also see Sackville-West’s inspiration in Orlando knowing that she would dress in men’s clothing and go by the name Julian in order to escort her lover, Violet, around Paris.
Woolf (left) with Sackville-West (right)
‘Different sex. Same person.’
Along with the various avenues of society now closed as a woman, Orlando observes variations of judgment as well. For instance, as a boy, sleeping around was acceptable but as a woman it would be outrageously scandalous, a man writing poetry is one thing but a woman writing is another, such is the meaning behind what Woolf in [b:A Room of One’s Own|18521|A Room of One’s Own|Virginia Woolf|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327883012l/18521._SY75_.jpg|1315615], ‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,’ and the obstacles she faces in her own life. ‘Love, the poet said, is woman's whole existence,’ Woolf writes about, ‘as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking’ and Orlando feels closed in this society where, as Beauvoir writes ‘marriage is the destiny traditionally offered to women by society’ with little else. Suddenly Orlando sees that women are thought to exist as accessories for me, or, as Woolf writes in Room:
‘Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.’
This is the issue with gender roles as we are shown here, something Orlando aims to be free of through her fluidity and seeing them as falsehood. [a:Judith Butler|5231|Judith Butler|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1238028179p2/5231.jpg] addresses this in her book [b:Gender Trouble|85767|Gender Trouble Feminism and the Subversion of Identity|Judith Butler|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1349037224l/85767._SY75_.jpg|2249813] asserting that gender is performative, formed through repetition plus performance but not synonymous with it. Performative, by means of saying ‘that it is real only to the extent that it is performed’ and thereby not binarily fixed, but also gender roles are largely culturally influenced rather than biologically and tend to be construct labels assigned to maintain a hierarchical society. Such a society, Woolf and Beauvoir would argue, is orchestrated toward maintaining dominance for men at the cost of women’s social and financial agency. But through moving between genders, Orlando shows a freedom from it, such as Sackville-West did in dressing as a man. ‘Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm,’ Woolf writes, ‘they change our view of the world and the world's view of us.’ So what does the change of social attitudes in a change of outward appearance say about the internal self?
‘I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another.’
While thinking of the use of clothes as a symbol here, I realized how reading Orlando became a full literary event for me as I began to see the influence of it in many novels I’ve loved and how it is such a touchstone for Winterson’s early works. When Orlando meets Sasha with the entourage of the Russian embassy at the Frost Fair, Orlando is first unsure if she is a man based on her dress, a scene that Winterson would reimagine as one of my favorite moments in all of literature in The Passion when Villanelle first kisses and falls for her lover during the festivities of the Venice casino while dressed as a man. The implication that Villanelle feels most assured sexually when in the role of a man, reflected in her choice of outfit but still undeniably the same self— ‘was this breeches and boots self any less real than my garters?’—is a predominant theme in Orlando’. Clothes are shown by Woolf as a symbol of the construct of gender, representing it as a sort of exterior performance:
‘Clothes are but a symbol of something hidden deep beneath…often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above.’
Orlando observes how women are highly scrutinized and judged over their dress, with the frivolity of clothes assumed to fill their lives in place of all the society denied to women. But the performance of clothes are also a way to code switch, something we see Winterson similarly adopt in Sexing the Cherry where, when around women, protagonist Jordan reflects that ‘in my petticoats I was a traveler in a foreign country…I was regarded with suspicion.’ and therefore chooses to wear women’s clothes and pass himself as a woman. It is a reversal of expectations as we tend to encounter stories in which a woman dresses as a man to liberate their social movements and gain access to patriarchal privileges. Woolf shows clothes as a sort of gender hierarchical uniform, something Orland notices prominently:
‘it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the captain offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on deck that she realized, with a start the penalties and the privileges of her position’
However, these are all constructs Woolf sees as false barriers. ‘At one and the same time, therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concoction in the world and society has no existence whatsoever.’ A powerful statement indeed.
‘The flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went. And what the poets said in rhyme, the young translated into practice.’
Fluidity is inherent in this entire novel, even the idea of linear time. I’ve long believed that, when we move into a meaningful part of life, when something feels it is being written into the book of the self, our perception of time slows down. When once months could pass like weeks, suddenly a week feels like a month as it slows to let the nuance breathe. The way encountering love will expand the calendar of your days which stretch out like a narrative arc, slow the season and let the summer sunlight in. Woolf commonly plays with this idea of the ‘extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind’ which she refers to in Orlando as ‘the shock of time.’
‘For what more terrifying revelation can there be that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another. But we have no time now for reflections; Orlando was terribly late already.’
We see time represented by Orlando’s poem, “Oak Tree”, the only poem not immolated in response to insult to his play from Nicholas Greene, due to it being ‘his boyish dream and very short.’ It is with Orlando their whole life, changing with them. Time has a sense of fluidity though, with Orlando able to understand a sense of continuity between the many selves across their lengthy lifetime, yet the jumble of memories which arise through the timeline into a series of loops and disorder. In a life of many selves, memory plays timekeeper but also opens up portals unstuck from time.
‘Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind…’
It is only through narrative in retrospect that we are able to view time and person as a linear progress.
‘The true length of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute.’
In this sense we must consider the novel’s aim as a “biography.” In a sense, it is a mock biography mocking the concept of biography. The book, however, blends the “real” with moments of magical realism in an attempt to show how, through metaphor, we can often get a better sense of the lived experience of “reality” than through cold facts. It is also a jab at her own father who wrote for the Dictionary of National Biography, and the sense that confining a life to dates and facts does little to allow the magic of existence to be felt. That there is truth in subjectivity, in the blend of ‘rainbow and granite,’ that the poets can find as valuable of meaning in life as the biographers, that there is more to a map of life than the boundaries.
‘some we know to be dead even though they walk among us; some are not yet born though they go through all the forms of life; other are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six.’
In short, Orlando is a brilliant book. Perhaps a bit dense, Woolf employs an achingly lovely prose that lulls you in and engulfs you with its beauty. It is quite ahead of its time, addressing concepts such as ‘what is called, rightly or wrongly, a single self, a real self’ in terms of gender roles while also cracking through the illusions of social constructs to let the fluidity of life flow free. A marvelous read from an extraordinary writer.
5/5
‘By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis the waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life.’