FAQ: Orlando

Key Critical Issues

Updated October 16, 2000
Created July 31, 1998

What are some key critical issues for studying Orlando?

Connection to Vita Sackville-West

Lawrence studies Woolf's correspondence with Vita while Vita was travelling in the Orient in 1926 and 1927, linking it to a theme of travel and female desire in Orlando.  Baldanza traces the historical parallels to Vita through reference to Vita’s Knole and the Sackvilles, which Woolf exaggerates at will.  The facts of her life and her family’s ancestry shape this biography.  In all of these she mixes Vita with her ancestors, including such of Vita’s traits as love of animals and nature, desire for solitude, her long periods of melancholy in which she would go to bed for days or weeks. Some historical links:

     1) the 16th century Thomas Sackville (co-author of Gorboduc, 1st English tragedy) to whom Eliz. I gave Knole (he was her cousin)

     2) the passage in which Orlando decides to furnish Knole (109) includes lists of items bought that resemble the many lists in Vita’s book about Knole 

     3) Orlando’s sexual adventures resemble various Sackvilles (including Vita).  Also Vita is androgynous looking and her affair with Violet Trefusis is the basis of the Sasha episode; during that affair. Vita sometimes dressed as a man.

    4) Some of the Sackvilles had been ambassadors, and Vita had just returned from Persia,  where Harold had been on the diplomatic staff. Woolf had herself been to Constantinople.

    5) Vita’s literary aspirations, and winning a prize for a poem called "The Land."

     6) Vita’s family scandal: her grandfather, Lord Sackville, had five illegitimate children by a Spanish gypsy who already had a husband. His sons were not allowed to inherit Knole, but his daughter (Vita’s mother) married the heir (his brother’s son). In 1910, the illegitimate heirs brought a widely publicized lawsuit contesting the ownership of Knole. (That lawsuit ultimately impoverished the Sackville estate and led to the sale of Knole to the National Trust in 1947.)

1. the name-dropping Preface acknowledging too many people
2. the illustrations (see key to illustrations)
3. the index (e.g., Lopokova, Madame; cross-referenced to Keynes, Mrs. M.L., leading to an analogy about how fast Orlando could change her skirt: "as if Madame Lopokova were using her highest art" 315).
4. the narrative voice—often pretentious and long-winded (compare this use of point of view to free indirect discourse in earlier novels; here she is impersonating a biographer and, as usual, concealing her own presence as author)
5. the reliance on supposed letters, diary entries, etc., to piece together the facts.
6. At the same time as using all these accoutrements of scholarship, she makes no attempt to explain why Orlando lives 400 years or how she changed into a woman. The only place where the narrator becomes coy and evasive is in introducing the fact that Orlando has a child (imitating 19th century manners).

Trautmann notes Woolf’s appreciative remarks about another biographer, written at the same time as Orlando: "he has devised a method of writing about people and about himself as though they were at once real and imaginary" (qtd. 86, from "The New Biography"; the biographer is Harold Nicolson).

1. Orlando "brilliantly embodies the seemingly contradictory political and aesthetic theories of A Room of One’s Own in a vision of the comic sublime" (Kari Elise Lokke qtd. in Hussey 205).
2. Orlando traces the history of literature and women writers much like Room (Lee 518).
3. Orlando is strongly linked to Room in the themes of gender and writing (Thompson).
4. Where To the Lighthouse "expose[s] her deep feelings" about her parents while seeking not to directly identify them, Orlando is "a blatant account of an intimate friend which is extremely self-concealing" (Lee 516).
5. Trautmann also suggests that Woolf’s making a work of art from her beloved friend Vita was akin to Lily Briscoe creating her friend Mrs. Ramsay in a painting (Lily: "Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one?") and that after writing Orlando, she "had an even more profound understanding of friendships" which she uses in The Waves, wherein "Bernard and his friends reflect images of each other" (84). Bernard’s relationship to Percival (opposites) is like Virginia’s to Vita.

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      1) Orlando demonstrates Woolf’s resistance to the genre of the novel (Thompson).

      2) Orlando is in fact an "anti-novel" (Wilson ).

1. "revisits the history and development of English literature from the Renaissance to 1928 in the spirit of feminist parody in order to free it—and by extension its author—from the burden of this largely masculine tradition" (Daniel Fogel qtd. in Hussey 204).
2. the character Orlando celebrates Vita’s androgynous qualities (Trautmann 86) and also combines the Shakespearean characters of the young lovers Orlando and Rosalind in As You Like It. Both Orlandos are young aristocrats cut off from their father’s fortune (Floris Delattre cited in Trautmann 86)
3. "Androgyny in Orlando is not a resolution of oppositions, but the throwing of both sexes into a metonymic confusion of genders" (Minow-Pinkney 122 qtd in Hussey 205).
4. Orlando is "a mad, surrealistic Bildungsroman or perhaps, one could argue, a female novel of initiation. Orlando seeks identity and fulfillment first through the guidance of corrupt male literary advisers, next through an exotic romance set in a frozen carnival, and, finally, through public service in foreign lands. Each experience increases his alienation and confusion until, suddenly, Orlando awakes from a dream . . ., female. Thereafter gender becomes amorphous and time irrelevant. . . . Indeed, throughout Orlando, clothes, not genitals or personality, symbolize gender change" (Smith-Rosenberg 288).
5. Orlando is a coded text that plays with censorship issues; "Woolf complies with the letter of the law while outrageously demolishing the spirit of the law" (Hankins 184). Writers who wanted to deal with lesbian themes at the time could do so openly and face a trial (like Radclyffe Hall), change the sex of one of the lovers (as Vita did in Challenge), or suppress the novel entirely. Woolf mocks the censor (in the person of the Ladies of Purity, Chastity, and Modesty), puts the sex change openly in the novel, and also suppresses some lesbian elements (as can be seen in drafts), while maintaining some openly, as when, after the sex change, the narrator writes "though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved" (160).
6. Orlando's first 100 years are a prologue to birth of female subjectivity; the "sex change" is orientalized (must take place outside of England because "English soil is inimical to the emerging female subjectivity and sexuality" (Lawrence 255).
7. There are two coded fantasies here: Vita's, to be androgynous, immortal, and owner of Knole; and Virginia's, to act on lesbian desire, as she did in her affair with Vita (Moore).
8. Androgyny is a "refusal to choose" (Caughie 486), not a unification of identity; "not a freedom from the tyranny of sex . . . so much as a freedom from the tyranny of reference" (489). Caughie relates this to the 18^th century ideas about whether thought and form should be separated (Samuel Johnson) or are inseparable (Pope), both of which are essentialist positions. Caughie argues that Woolf's position is anti-essentialist: "what matters is not the nature of the sign, the transsexual, but its position and function within a particular discursive situation" (488).  Woolf's androgyne does not transcend gender so much as she plays with it, breaking down conventional oppositions and converting it into a matter of dynamic role-playing.  For Woolf, "androgyny in Orlando is not so much a psychosexual category as a rhetorical strategy" (491).

    

Hussey and others trace the original conception for Orlando to a diary entry for "The Jessamy Brides" (Diary, March 14, 1927), based on the Ladies of Llangollen, a famous pair of 18th century English aristocratic women who eloped with each other to Wales.

1. the line where Orlando has pointed to her huge home saying "This is where I live," and Sasha asks "All by yourself?"
2. Elizabeth I’s huge retinue and the elaborate clothing that all the royalty and aristocrats wear

Works Cited

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