Orlando (5 page)

No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart, and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side and the future on another. (p. 206)

Hyperbolical though it is, this passage summarizes the radiant intensity of the temporal experience – the ‘moment of being’, to use Woolf’s own phrase – that this writer continually sought to capture in her complex role as revisionary biographer/historian/novelist and that, in
Orlando,
she triumphantly bestowed upon Vita Sackville-West.

By the time Woolf finished
Orlando,
she had started to have doubts about this novel which had begun with such compelling exuberance as a ‘writer’s holiday’. ‘It may fall between stools, be too long for a joke, & too frivolous for a serious book,’ she worried on 22 March 1928, and a month later she dismissed the work as ‘a freak’.
³³
To her surprise, though, her first ‘reviewer’ – Leonard Woolf, to whom she regularly submitted all her manuscripts for comment as soon as she felt they had been properly completed – took the book ‘more seriously than [she] had expected’. He ‘Thinks it in some ways better than The Lighthouse’, she noted in her diary on 31 May – ‘about more interesting things, & with more attachment to life, & larger… He says it is very original.’
³⁴

Nor was Leonard Woolf eccentric among the novel’s early readers, for in his wife’s own words, ‘The reception [of
Orlando
] surpassed expectations’,
³⁵
in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. Writing for the
New York Herald Tribune,
the feminist novelist and essayist Rebecca West defined the work as ‘a poetic masterpiece of the first rank’,
³⁶
an encomium which left Woolf feeling ‘a little sheepish and silly’, while other, equally enthusiastic critics praised Woolf’s ‘swift and sparkling prose’, her ‘delicious’ fantasy, her ‘exquisite’ poetry, and her ‘wit that
plays like summer lightning’. ‘Never, perhaps, has Mrs Woolf written with more verve: certainly she has never imagined more boldly,’ pronounced
The Times Literary Supplement.
And though pre-publication orders for the book had been disheartening because, as Woolf explained to herself in her diary, ‘No one wants biography’
³⁷
– not even, evidently, mock biography – post-publication sales were the strongest Woolf had ever had. ‘L. has just been in to consult about a 3rd edition of Orlando,’ she noted in December 1928, adding that ‘we have sold over 6,000 copies; & sales are still amazingly brisk –150 today for instance; most days between 50 & 60; always to my surprise.’ In fact, the success of Woolf’s literary ‘escapade’ marked a turning point in her professional career. At last, she was able to decide, ‘my room is secure. For the first time since I married… I have been spending money.’
³⁸

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

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).