She was reminded of old Greene getting upon a platform the other day comparing her with Milton (save for his blindness) and handing her a cheque for two hundred guineas. She had thought then, of the oak tree here on its hill, and what has that got to do with this, she had wondered? What has praise and fame to do with poetry? What has seven editions (the book had already gone into no less) got to do with the value of it? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself — a voice answering a voice.
I don’t know where I got the idea that Orlando was Virginia Woolf’s least accessible novel because, although it does serve as an important critique of gender, art and whose stories are worth telling, it’s couched in an amusing plot that romps through four centuries of British social and literary history. Even if upon its release this wasn’t immediately recognised as a love letter to Woolf’s paramour Vita Sackville-West, with the constant subversion of and commentary on gender norms, it’s incredible to me that this became Woolf’s most popular novel to date and no one seemed to see it for the radical piece of writing it was (I went looking for a contemporaneous review, and this one from October 21, 1928 in The New York Times interpreted it as “an application to writing of the Einstein theory of relativity”; how I wish I really knew how the average reader responded to this in the day!) As for my own response: I found Orlando to be both a mind-bending narrative and a wry work of feminist writing; it’s timely and timeless and I’m delighted to have finally gotten around to it.
He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.
Orlando is subtitled “A Biography”, and a bit of digging reveals that Woolf described this in her diary as: “A biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando. Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other.” Further digging explains that this was undertaken not only as a sardonic response to Woolf’s father’s work as the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography (with few exceptions, the stories of manly men), but also as an exploration of Vita Sackville-West’s great heartache: the loss of her ancestral manor home, Knole, which she was blocked from inheriting due to her sex. And so: as Orlando opens above, we meet the titular character — “he, for there could be no doubt of his sex” — as a sixteen year old living in a town-sized manor; a wannabe poet and acquaintance of Queen Elizabeth. Over the next four hundred years, Orlando will receive a Dukedom and an Ambassadorship; travel to Constantinople and back again; fall in love with both men and women; and turn into a woman himself, ending the novel in 1928 as a thirty-six year old wife and mother. The character’s seemingly impossible age and gender are never explained or much commented upon — this isn’t magic, it just is.
The following (long) passage rather nicely demonstrates Woolf’s wry voice here as Orlando is first smitten with the Russian Princess, Sasha, while out skating with his fiancee on the frozen Thames during the Great Frost of 1683:
He beheld, coming from the pavilion of the Muscovite Embassy, a figure, which, whether boy's or woman's, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex, filled him with the highest curiosity. The person, whatever the name or sex, was about middle height, very slenderly fashioned, and dressed entirely in oyster-coloured velvet, trimmed with some unfamiliar greenish-coloured fur. But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person. Images, metaphors of the most extreme and extravagant twined and twisted in his mind. He called her a melon, a pineapple, an olive tree, an emerald, and a fox in the snow all in the space of three seconds; he did not know whether he had heard her, tasted her, seen her, or all three together. (For though we must pause not a moment in the narrative we may here hastily note that all his images at this time were simple in the extreme to match his senses and were mostly taken from things he had liked the taste of as a boy. But if his senses were simple they were at the same time extremely strong. To pause therefore and seek the reasons of things is out of the question.)...A melon, an emerald, a fox in the snow — so he raved, so he stared. When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be — no woman could skate with such speed and vigour — swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation that the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question. But the skater came closer. Legs, hands, carriage, were a boy's, but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea. Finally, coming to a stop and sweeping a curtsey with the utmost grace to the King, who was shuffling past on the arm of some Lord-in-waiting, the unknown skater came to a standstill. She was not a handsbreadth off. She was a woman. Orlando stared; trembled; turned hot; turned cold; longed to hurl himself through the summer air; to crush acorns beneath his feet; to toss his arm with the beech trees and the oaks. As it was, he drew his lips up over his small white teeth; opened them perhaps half an inch as if to bite; shut them as if he had bitten. The Lady Euphrosyne hung upon his arm.
Orlando will eventually lose Sasha — and the Lady Euphrosyne — and after escaping the amorous clutches of the Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scand-op-Boom in the Roumanian territory (who will, in time, be revealed as the Archduke Harry), Orlando makes his way to Turkey, and eventually awakens (after a long sleep) as a woman. By way of explanation:
We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman — there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same. His memory — but in future we must, for convention's sake, say 'her' for 'his,' and 'she' for 'he' — her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change of sex is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since.
And isn’t that a powerful lesson for how one should react to such a change? While others might want to debate what is or isn’t “against nature”, all one needs to understand is that Orlando was a man, and is now a woman. As for Orlando herself: She’s perfectly sanguine about the change, and while at first she assumes that she’ll still be attracted to other women out of habit, she eventually learns to enjoy the attraction she holds for men. She will also need to deal with a lawsuit, upon her return to England, which wants to disinherit her from her ancestral home and income because of her gender; and she will learn that there are societal differences in how male and female writers are regarded.
Another timely, if hundred year old, observation:
Looked at from the gipsy point of view, a Duke, Orlando understood, was nothing but a profiteer or robber who snatched land and money from people who rated these things of little worth, and could think of nothing better to do than to build three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms when one was enough, and none was even better than one. She could not deny that her ancestors had accumulated field after field; house after house; honour after honour; yet had none of them been saints or heroes, or great benefactors of the human race. Nor could she counter the argument (Rustum was too much of a gentleman to press it, but she understood) that any man who did now what her ancestors had done three or four hundred years ago would be denounced — and by her own family most loudly — as a vulgar upstart, an adventurer, a nouveau riche.
Throughout the years, Orlando rubs shoulders with: William Shakespeare; Addison, Dryden, Pope and Swift; British monarchs from Elizabeth to Edward; and always, she is attempting to distil literary truth into a single poem — “The Oak Tree”; a feat which will take four hundred years and diverse experiences across time, space, and gender. This radical act of “a voice answering a voice” — as an achievement independent of class or age or gender — seems to be the heart of Woolf’s thesis, and Orlando both advocates for its necessity to the human experience and demonstrates how to answer the call. I loved this; I can’t believe this is nearly a hundred years old and so much more accessible than I had thought.
