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Full title – Orlando: A Biography.
Woolfs father, Leslie Stephen, was until the early 1890s principal editor of the Dictнonary of National Biography, the great commemorative work of the Victorian period. Note her diary entry (1928, shortly after publication of Orlando):
Fathers birthday. He would have been 1928-1832 / 96 96, yes, today & could have been 96, like other people one has known; but mercifully was not. His life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books; – inconceivable.
Feels fathers influence would have stifled her creativity; not alone –
Gilbert and Gubar, in their monumental and influential work, The Madwoman in the Attic, write about the anxiety of influence – ie problem that all women writers have of establishing their independence of the male literary tradition (return to this subject later). But Woolfs is deliberate and personal reaction against her immediate male predecessor: because her book apparently belongs to the DNB genre of biography / historical picture / memoirs. These terms all appear in Woolfs first conception of the book:
One of these days, though, 1 shall sketch here, like a grand historical picture, the outlines of all my friends. [] It might be a way of writing the memoirs of ones own times during peoples [sic] lifetimes. It might be a most amusing book, The question is how to do it. Vita [Sackville-West] should be Orlando, a young nobleman. There should be Lytton [Strachey], & it should be truthful; but fantastic. Roger [Fry]. Duncan [Grant]. Clive [Bell]. Adrian [Stephen].
Only Vita Sackville-West does actually feature in the book as Orlando.
But the novel has the same commemorative function as the DNB.
DNB articles are written to a formula, with a narrative structure of birth, marriage and death + summary of the subjects major achievements.
And projects dominated by the concept of the great man or (more rarely) the great woman.
So Orlando has trappings of Victorian biography: a preface, dates, photographs, and an index.
But simultaneously de-stabilises the conventions of Victorian biography. (Remember, she says her book will be fantastic.)
– its a parody of clichйs of biography, and of historical portraits, especially the idea that there is an identifiable spirit of the age: the narrator demands, Whats an “age”, indeed? What are “we”? (p.196). [see pp253-55 for the biographer and his subject?]
Orlando is not only a “great man”, the stuff of Victorian biography: he is also a woman, and biographical conventions shift in an unstable manner around her. Orlandos rite of passage is neither birth, marriage, nor even death, but a fantastic and ridiculous experience of transsexualism. (Suzanne Raitt, Vita & Virginia: The Work and Friendship of V. Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf, 1993):
– the only noteworthy achievement of this great man- over the four hundred years of the tale – is to turn into a woman
– & its the ridiculous quality of Orlandos experience that most undermines the pompous tradition of Victorian biography.
– anyone who knew Woolf also knew that the book commemorated a lesbian love affair, a situation unthinkable to her respectable Victorian parents.
So Orlando uses the conventions of biography to question the very terms of biography itself.
– Some critics deconstruct its title as or/and /o to suggest that the novel always resists any definite single answer
– thats part of its challenge to the confidence of (male) unequivocal judgement.
Particularly evident in the novels treatment of gender.
In his lecture on Femininity (1933), Freud writes: When you first meet a human being, the first distinction you make is “male or female?” and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty.
– Orlando challenges this unhesitating certainty from the very opening sentence: HE – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it -(p.l3). The denial of doubt here actually introduces doubt: the he – the gendered pronoun which would normally classify an individual as male– is not allowed to stand unqualified.
– Is the problem of knowing Orlandos sex to do with fashion, the disguise of clothing?
– Or is it that clothes can create gender, can make the man or the woman?
-Orlando isnt really aware of being a woman until she dresses as one:
clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the worlds view of us [. . .] So, having now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain change was visible in Orlando []. If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of Orlando as a woman we shall see that though both are undoubtedly one and the same person, there are certain changes. The man has his hand free to seize his sword, the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. (p. 132).
Woolf not the first to develop a philosophy of clothes:
– Thomas Carlyle – Sartor Resartus (1833) — meaning dresser redressed.
– Shakespeares heroines, of course, demonstrate so-called manly qualities by dressing as men; showing courage or rationality.
– But these changes are temporary, in no way undermine their fitness to be good wives.
– Woolf gives cross-dressing a much more radical, gender inflection.
– see Shoshana Felman:
If it is clothes alone, i.e. a cultural sign, an institution, which