A review by millennial_dandy
Orlando by Virginia Woolf

5.0

"Having asked them all and grown no wiser [...] back we must go and say straight out to the reader who waits a-tiptoe to hear what life is -- alas, we do not know." (p.215-216)

Walt Whitman may have first given us the line 'I contain multitudes,' but Virginia Woolf gave us a novel about it.

It's easy to read 'Orlando' as a critique of gender roles, as a queer novel about a trans woman of incredible longevity. And it is, and in this role it is fabulous. The way Woolf tracks Orlando's transformation from man to woman both physically and mentally is nothing short of stellar. She has quick one-liners that would make any feminist titter ("'Life! A Lover!' not 'Life! A Husband!'" p.192) as well as a deeper analysis and critique of gender. Indeed, many of her ideas align with those of gender abolitionists of our day:

"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." (p.147-148). But then she goes and complicates it again.

When Orlando first transitions (for lack of a better term), she at first 'remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.' (p.107) However, forty pages later, she says: 'What was said a short time ago about there being no change in Orlando the man and Orlando the woman, was ceasing to be altogether true." (p.147)

To what does she attribute this process? Gender roles, naturally. As a woman, Orlando is treated differently than as a man; she has to cover her ankles, she is pursued relentlessly by a man who won't take no as an answer and feels she must beat him back, not with a sword as she would have previously, but with trickery. The expectations of her also change. In a memorable moment soon after her transition, she experiences something she finds deeply moving and notes: "Do what she would to restrain them, the tears came to her eyes, until, remembering that it is becoming of a woman to weep, she let them flow." (p.129)

Though men and women may not actually be from Venus and Mars respectively, the social pressures and expectations imposed upon us all based on our assigned gender at birth inevitably work on and shape us all, even against our inner natures. To combat this, Orlando, now gendered as female, sneaks out in men's clothing to escape the pressures of womanhood only to rediscover that manhood has its restraints too (though, in fairness, those restraints have much subtler influences than those on women).

Orlando spent the first thirty years of his life as a man, something not insignificant in terms of her sense of self, but, the narrator laments, the spirit of the age 'took her and broke her' (p.192) and after a point, she largely gives in to living the life expected of a conventional woman. She marries, she gives birth to a son, and she pines for her husband (off on a dangerous maritime adventure).

But 'Orlando' is not merely a critique on gender in sheep's clothing -- it's also a investigation into why we read, and, ultimately, why we write, and whether writing can truly capture the human spirit.
"he was a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature [...] it was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality so that Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift [...] had only to open a book for the whole vast accumulation [of wealth] to turn to mist [...] But worse was to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the inkpot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing." (p.53)


One of the major plot points (of the few concrete plotlines there are) is Orlando's struggle to complete a poem, 'The Oak Tree', meant to be an ode to a real oak tree on his property. It takes three-hundred years and many starts and stops and crossings out and starting over, but she does eventually finish and publish the poem (in a cruel bit of irony, the publisher is the same guy who lambasted her earlier attempts at the poem, but applauds it upon its completion hundreds of years later). Though completing the poem and having it published are two of her deepest desires, once it is published and goes through seven successive reprints, she finds the success hollow and ends up going to bury the first edition under the oak tree that inspired it in the first place.

Thus, Woolf spends much of the 'run-time' of the novel arguing against trying to create a time capsule of life in the form of poetry or prose. Yet, based on the dense and oftentimes very beautiful writing, though she seems to suggest that trying to capture life in writing is futile, she leaves us with a beautiful piece of writing that must necessarily capture something of her soul within it.

Is this, then, more a critique of literary analysis than of fiction? For she says: "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." (p.164) Does she then suggest that literature only dies when we try to freeze it in place rather that let it wash over us? To reason with it rather than feel it? Is this her argument in favor of death of the author?

But how can it be when she openly admits the entire project was inspired by and written for her friend and lover Vita Sackville-West?

How frustrating. Virginia: I demand you come right out and tell me the meaning of all this!

That being said, and analysis aside, 'Orlando' can at times be very funny, and Woolf obviously gave herself time within the writing process to let her wit flit across the page. One of my favorite exchanges in the entire book takes place when Orlando meets her husband for the first time:

"Madam," the man cried, leaping to the ground. "You're hurt!"
"I'm dead, sir!" she replied
A few minutes later, they became engaged. (p.197)


Orlando as a character is incredibly capricious (a trait she retains whether a man or a woman) which leads to some of the most entertaining scenes of her turning on a dime from wanting to suck the marrow out of life to musing: "I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it; life -- and behold, death is better" (p.196) while lying on the ground on a moor.

I can well understand a person not enjoying the reading experience of 'Orlando'; Woolf's sentences are incredibly dense at times, and it's easy to lose the thread of what it is you're reading while getting through some of her purpler stretches of description. Not everyone is going to like that, though it is necessary to her exploration of capturing life in words.

It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it was most certainly mine, and rather than getting bogged down, I became increasingly invested and enjoyed the book more and more as it went on so that by the end almost every passage would have been underlined and highlighted and tabbed within an inch of its life had this not been a library copy (though the long descriptive passages would have been spared such a close reading as God, or in this case, Virginia Woolf intended).

I finished it mere moments ago, but it already warrants a re-read. I am officially no longer afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Fabulous, fabulous read for Pride Month.
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