Orlando

“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.”

The opening line of the novel foreshadows Orlando’s transformation and the novel’s thematic interest in interrogating the concepts of sex and gender. Orlando engages in a traditionally masculine activity: violent warfare and physical domination. By insisting on Orlando’s masculinity, the biographer anticipates those explanations he describes in Chapter 3 that seek to give a realistic explanation for his transformation. The biographer attributes any confusion to the clothing, a topic returned to throughout the novel.

“He was describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and here he showed more audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre. Moreover, nature has tricks of her own.”

Nature and writing are often presented as oppositional forces. Nature is marked by its inability to be tamed and its organic composition, which contrasts with the structured and artificial nature of writing. When Orlando attempts to use language to describe nature, he finds it impossible, as language’s capabilities are limited. In addition, the color green is an important motif that recurs throughout the narrative. It symbolizes a connection with nature.

“[...] he forgot the frozen waters or night coming or the old woman or whatever it was, and would try to tell her--plunging and splashing among a thousand images which had gone as stale as the women who inspired them--what she was like. Snow, cream, marble, cherries, alabaster, golden wire? None of these. She was like a fox, or an olive tree; like the waves of the sea when you look down upon them from a height; like an emerald; like the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded--like nothing he had seen or known in England. Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, and another tongue.”

When Orlando tries to describe Sasha, he finds that the English language is insufficient. Both literal words and figurative language comparing her to natural objects fails to capture her full beauty. This echoes the limitations Orlando feels when writing poetry.

“Up to this point in telling the story of Orlando’s life, documents, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfil the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; enticed by flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads. [...] Our simple duty is to state the facts as far as they are known, and so let the reader make of them what he may.”

The narrator describes how their role as Orlando’s biographer is to truthfully outline the events of Orlando’s life. Their supposed objectivity is often questioned through Woolf’s stylistic choices and the fantastical story elements. The biographer’s use of documents also becomes a key element to the story, as key plot points are described from unreliable sources and some important documents are lost.

“Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher's face and the butcher a poet's; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated our task and added to our confusion by providing...a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us...[and] has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress and a capricious one at that.”

According to the biographer, nature is not ordered in a logical manner, suggesting that a person who feels confused about their identity should make a change. Connecting identity to clothing, the biographer suggests that a person’s memory impulsively sews together their many different personalities to create a patchwork person. The narrator’s reference to rainbow and granite also recalls Woolf’s essay “The New Biography,” where she argues that biographers should be less concerned with pursuing objective truth and instead focus on language and design. She connects granite with facts and rainbows with imagination.

“No, he concluded, the great age of literature is past; the great age of literature was the Greek; the Elizabethan was inferior in every respect to the Greek. In such ages men cherished a divine ambition which he might call La Gloire (he pronounced it as Glawr, so that Orlando did not at first catch his meaning). Now all young writers were in the pay of the booksellers and poured out any trash that would sell.”

Woolf uses the character Nicholas Greene to mock poets’ obsession with fame, poetic immortality, and good reviews. Greene always thinks that the age of great literature is past. Here, he criticizes Elizabethan writers like Shakespeare and Marlowe, whom he later holds up as the great writers of the past when Orlando meets him again. By emphasizing his mispronunciation of La Gloire, Woolf satirizes poets who claim to write not for money or good reviews, but rather for poetic immortality. While famous, Greene himself never becomes a poet of historical note and can only criticize the works of others.

“Two things alone remained to him in which he now put any trust: dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had shrunk to that. Dogs and a bush were the whole of it. [...] he flung himself under his favourite oak tree and felt that if he need never speak to another man or woman so long as he lived; if his dogs did not develop the faculty of speech; if he never met a poet or a Princess again, he might make out what years remained to him in tolerable content.”

Through all of time and the transformation, Orlando is portrayed as an animal lover. Dogs’ silent companionship appeals to Orlando, who often comments on how he prefers to be alone. Nature, while it changes seasonally, paradoxically offers Orlando stability. Trees, bushes, and animals always provide relief from the challenges of human life.

“It looked as if in the process of writing the poem would be completely unwritten.”

The biographer describes Orlando’s writing process after his disillusionment with Nicholas Greene. Orlando's efforts to write this poem reflect the fluidity and inconstancy of his identity. The constant revisions show how his life is always changing. Soon after this comment, Harriet arrives and prompts another reimagining of his identity.

“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. Her 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.”

The biographer is quick to insist that Orlando’s transformation is literal fact, and she is now a woman. The separation of sex and gender from identity is an important thematic point for Woolf, as this physical transformation occurs in some way twice more in the novel. The biographer’s outlining of pronoun usage underscores the importance of language in creating identity.

“They began to suspect that she had other beliefs than their own, and the older men and women thought it probable that she had fallen into the clutches of the vilest and cruellest among all the Gods, which is Nature. Nor were they far wrong. The English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her, and here, where Nature was so much larger and more powerful than in England, she fell into its hands as she had never done before.”

Orlando struggles to conform to society’s expectations, whether it be in England or in Turkey. Her love of nature solicits as strong of a negative reaction from the Romani people as her gender nonconformity might from Woolf’s original readers. Yet her love of nature is intrinsic, here ascribed to her inherent Englishness.

“And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each.”

Orlando’s gender fluidity is emphasized here, a fact that recurs in her actions and reactions for the whole book. Even after her physical transformation, her identity shifts between traits that are considered masculine and those considered feminine by the English society of her era. The ambiguity of her language reflects the ambiguity of her gender and allows Woolf to avoid backlash for misandry or misogyny.

“Yet still for all her travels and adventures and profound thinkings and turnings this way and that, she was only in process of fabrication. What the future might bring, Heaven only knew. Change was incessant, and change perhaps would never cease.”

As the book spans centuries, change is an important feature. Orlando undergoes a physical change, characters’ feelings and relationships shift, and England and its values evolve. Like the constant change in fashion described throughout, Orlando constantly redesigns and recreates herself.

“The change of clothes had, some philosophers will say, much to do with it. Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.” 

The biographer describes how clothing often creates gendered effects in the wearer. They notes that, while the physical transformation had little effect on Orlando’s personality, the women’s clothes she is wearing do seem to be have an effect. The skirts cause a change in her perspective, resulting in her being more skittish and wary of the world, as traditionally expected of women.

“Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and 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.”

The biographer describes the fluidity of gender with regard to Orlando’s shifting reactions to Harry’s advances. The disconnect between clothing and sex allows for the mixing of gender identities that both Orlando and Harry embody.

“In short, every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works, yet we require critics to explain the one and biographers to expound the other. That time hangs heavy on people’s hands is the only explanation of the monstrous growth.”

The biographer reacts to Pope’s poetry with this statement describing how critics artificially separate readers from poetry. The biographer’s opinion on critics and writers reflects Orlando’s final understanding of poetry. Yet the biographer also implicates themselves in this process, which the last sentence suggests is a waste of time.

“Orlando had inclined herself naturally to the Elizabethan spirit, to the Restoration spirit, to the spirit of the eighteenth century, and had in consequence scarcely been aware of the change from one age to the other. But the spirit of the nineteenth century was antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and broke her, and she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before. For it is probable that the human spirit has its place in time assigned to it; some are born of this age, some of that; and now that Orlando was grown a woman, a year or two past thirty indeed, the lines of her character were fixed, and to bend them the wrong way was intolerable.”

Orlando attributes her difficulty in adapting to the Victorian era and conforming to its ideals to each soul having a fitting time to thrive in. The passage of time, which previously had a negligible effect on her, has begun to wear on the now 32-year-old Orlando. Her older age has made her identity even more fixed as she matures.

“But love—as the male novelists define it—and who, after all, speak with greater authority?—has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one’s petticoat and—But we all know what love is.”

As Orlando reflects on love after her marriage to Shel, Woolf uses her thoughts to criticize male novelists’ definition of love. As a female novelist, Woolf is critical of both men’s exclusive ability to define love and the sexist expectations and limitations placed upon her as a writer.

“[...] here she dropped into a cipher language which they had invented between them so that a whole spiritual state of the utmost complexity might be conveyed in a word or two without the telegraph clerk being any the wise, and added the words ‘Rattigan Glumphoboo,’ which summed it up precisely.”

Orlando and Shel create their own language in which to communicate. This act reveals the limits of the English language and the complexity of love. The nonsensical and amusing phrase she uses contrasts with the troubled mental state she describes, even as the description fits her state of mind exactly.

“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, the future on another.”

The biographer considers the effect of time on individuals. The protection of the past and the potential of the future allow a person to continue living. As Orlando has caught up to the date of publication of the biography, she is free from Woolf and the biographer’s narratives, and she can create her own identity.

“For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand.”

In the climax of the novel, the biographer describes Orlando’s maturation as a person and the solidification of her personal identity. As the clock chimes, her various identities separate before coming back together. In describing this event, the biographer describes the biography form’s inability to fully and accurately describe a person.

“Trees, she said. (Here another self came in.) I love trees (she was passing a clump) growing there a thousand years. And barns (she passed a tumbledown barn at the edge of the road). And sheep dogs (here one came trotting across the road. She carefully avoided it). And the night. But people (here another self came in). People? (She repeated it as a question.) I don't know. Chattering, spiteful, always telling lies. (Here she turned into the High Street of her native town, which was crowded, for it was market day, with farmers, and shepherds, and old women with hens in baskets.) I like peasants. I understand crops.”

As Orlando’s different identities speak, her love of nature and animals remain constant. She also expresses her aversion to others and preference for solitude across identities. While her identity is fluid and adaptable, there is a core essence to Orlando’s personality across the multiple transformations.

“She now looked down into this pool or sea in which everything is reflected—and, indeed, some say that all our most violent passions, and art and religion are the reflections which we see in the dark hollow at the back of the head when the visible world is obscured for the time”

Orlando closes her eyes and compares her thoughts to looking into a pool. She describes human feelings, art, and religion as visible reflections of humanity’s interiority.

“The tree had grown bigger, sturdier, and more knotted since she had known it, somewhere about the year 1588, but it was still in the prime of life”

Seeing the oak tree for the first time in centuries, Orlando is struck by its maturity and potential for continued growth. Reflecting her own maturation, the tree has changed over the centuries. Like the tree, Orlando is in the prime of her life.

“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?”

Standing under the oak tree, Orlando reflects on the relationship between poetry and fame. Having experienced financial and critical success, Orlando describes the true value of poetry as a tool for communication and understanding.