Like Vita Sackville-West – and like Virginia Woolf herself – Orlando seems to have been born into a central and privileged position in society. At the same time, like both Woolf and Vita, he/she is always a kind of outsider, and even, from a conventional point of view, mad (furioso), like his/her literary ancestor, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso.25 By rank a nobleman, he has ‘a liking for low company, especially for that of lettered people’, and even when he is more or less adopted by the great Queen Elizabeth, he has little enthusiasm for the doings of the court. During the timeless time of the Great Frost, when London seems to hang suspended on the ice of an eternal moment, he falls in love with the androgynous Sasha, a Russian Princess for whom he ‘want[s] another landscape and another tongue’, a place and a language outside the public English history that is forming all around him. When Sasha sails away in the flood of time that suddenly breaks up the ice, Orlando retreats to his country estate to become a writer, but even in the world of letters he is still an outsider. Gulled and galled by the literary impresario Nick Greene, he is haunted but mystified by the enigmatic face of Shakespeare and feels that no battle in which his ancestors fought was ‘half so arduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against the English language’ (p. 57).
Again, as the English ambassador to Constantinople and, then, the ex-ambassadress living al fresco among a band of gypsies, Orlando never quite fits in. In the first case, he alarms the English by making a disreputable marriage to one ‘Rosina Pepita’, and in the second, she disturbs the gypsies by writing poems, admiring sunsets and longing for her English manor house. Finally, when she returns to England, the lady Orlando is always slightly out of step with the march of time around her. In the eighteenth century, she dresses as a man so that she can visit – and hear the tales told by – the communities of fallen women who walk the London pavements. In the nineteenth century, she marries a sea captain and produces ‘lachrymose blot[s]’ (p. 167) of poetry, but her husband is an eccentric explorer, not a Victorian patriarch, and her writing of sentimental verse is ‘much against her natural temperament’. In the twentieth century, she finally wins a prize for her poem ‘The Oak Tree’ but wires her husband a sardonically encoded comment on the meaning of literary achievement: ‘ “Rattigan Glumphoboo”, which summed it up precisely’ (p. 196). Always on the margins of history, she nevertheless glimpses Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Charles II, Nell Gwyn, Alexander Pope, the Carlyles and even, in the book’s first draft, one ‘Volumnia Fox’ – a pseudonym for none other than Virginia Woolf.26 But her glance passes over these luminaries with the luminous indifference of, say, a lighthouse beam. Within sight of shore, she is always offshore, at sea in the wilder waters of history.
Nevertheless, as Woolf depicts him/her, Orlando is history, if only because the light of her mind is the lamp that lights up time for Woolf’s readers, and her stately mansion, with its allegorically resonant 365 bedrooms and 52 staircases, is the house whose endurance-through-change is the metaphor that Woolf gives us for human duration. Whether offshore or on the edge of time, Orlando’s supposedly marginal perspective, a perspective both Stephen and Strachey might have excluded or ignored, becomes the central point of view from which we must view the world as we try to come to terms with the terms of history. In fact, as Woolf ranges over them – obliquely envisioning them, slyly appropriating them, subversively revising them – the terms of history become Orlando’s terms, and finally even history itself becomes Orlando’s story, the tale of a body now male, now female, which embodies that thread of alternative truth Woolf was to call, in A Room of One’s Own, ‘the common life which is the real life’ as opposed to ‘the little separate lives… we live as individuals’.27
Thus, the psychosexual development of this parentless creature (for Woolf never really introduces Orlando’s parents into her ‘biography’) constitutes a novel narrative indeed, for it is generalized, parodied and ultimately transcended in the course of Orlando’s fantastic intersections with history. Simultaneously redefining and questioning conventional periodization, the so-called Elizabethan period recapitulates Orlando’s childhood and pre-adolescence, with a timeless pre-Oedipal frost and an Oedipal flood exaggerating and mocking the meaning of ‘growing up’. Similarly, the seventeenth century, with its sex change, offers Orlando a new kind of adolescence, comically marking a moment of sexual transformation and self-realization, while the eighteenth century represents her ostensible (that is, what should be her) ‘young ladyhood’. Again, the nineteenth century reproduces her bemused confrontation with the exigencies of patriarchally defined female maturity (wedlock, maternity); and the twentieth century, with its adumbration of an apocalyptic ‘new world’, reflects a mature ‘moment of being’, a liberating encounter with ‘the Captain self, the Key self, which amalgamates and controls them all’ (p. 214).
In this uncanny conflation of the personal and the political, both the processions of ‘King following King’ that make up official history and the permutations of ‘the lives of the obscure’ that constitute the ‘other history’ appear, to use a phrase of Wallace Stevens’s ‘more truly and more strange’. And specifically, the history Woolf herself had always defined as ‘masculine’ here becomes ‘feminine’, too – becomes, indeed, what the writer had heretofore implicitly defined as a contradiction in terms: a public history of the private woman – as Orlando, returning at last from Turkey to reclaim her English inheritance, becomes England’s figurative land-lady: the Lady Or-land-o, Ur-land-o, Her-land-o.
That Orlando did begin as, and at base really is, a fantasy biography/family history of a particular woman Virginia Woolf loved is certainly also relevant here, not just because the novelist wanted to flatter and immortalize her friend, not just because that friend was the wife of the theorist of biography Harold Nicolson, but also because her commonly used nickname, Vita, means ‘life’, so that the Vita Nuova Woolf devised for her fancifully suggests the New Life that is the Life of the New Woman. Therefore, just as many of the illustrations scattered throughout the book are pictures of Vita herself or of her Sackville ancestors, many details of the plot reflect significant details of Vita’s actual biography: her early impassioned affair with Violet Trefusis (who here becomes the Russian Sasha because Vita called her ‘Lushka’); her Spanish grandmother (here, as in real life, ‘Rosina Pepita’); her courtship by the foolish aristocrat Lord Lascelles (here the Duke/Duchess of Scand-op-Boom); her travels in the East (here the Turkish episode): her transvestism (here the eighteenth-century escapades); her winning of the Hawthornden Prize for ‘The Land’ (here the winning of the ‘Burdett Coutts Prize’ for ‘The Oak Tree’); her legal fight for her ancestral property (here, as in real life, her Great Law Suit); her marriage to the supportive bisexual Harold Nicolson (here called Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine); and so forth.28
Equally important, Woolf’s fantastic transformations of these details function to empower Vita. Thus this fictional Vita Nuova grants her not just the one ‘life and a lover’ she asks for as Orlando but many lives and many lovers. Thus, too, because Vita had grown up feeling like a boy – even, during the height of her affair with Violet Trefusis, posing as a wounded soldier named ‘Julian’ – and haunted by anxiety about her ‘dual’ sexuality, Woolf assures her that, yes, if she felt like a boy she was a boy. In fact, as if responding to the hope Vita expressed in her (then unpublished) autobiography that ‘as centuries go on… the sexes [will] become more nearly merged on account of their increasing resemblances’,29 Woolf suggests in her simultaneous revision of history and sexuality that centuries have indeed gone on and the sexes have merged, or were never wholly separated – for ‘Different though the sexes are, they intermix’ (p. 132). Thus, finally, where Vita was ultimately barred from inheriting Knole, the Sackville estate, because of her sex, Woolf grants her perpetual possession of this house so that at last the dispossessed man/woman has not one but 365 rooms of her own – a figure whose symbolic cast, even if based on the extravagant re
ality of Knole, implies that he/she has inherited not just a place in time but time itself.30
As a ‘theory of biography’, then, Orlando is also both a comment on history and a meditation on time. To begin with, in her role as a sort of metabiographer – a writer who both deploys and criticizes the form in which she is working – Woolf wittily parodies the intrusive and often absurd speculations of the scholar who presumes to know the ‘truth’ about the ‘life’ and ‘self’ of his subject. Each of us, she argues, as she endows Orlando with a host of costumes and careers, has many ‘lives’ and many ‘selves’. Nor can they ever, in their multiplicity, be properly understood by the voyeuristic researcher. In relegating some of the major turning points of Orlando’s history (for instance, her sex change, some of her romances, the birth of her son, and even her completion of ‘The Oak Tree’) to offstage scenes, Woolf simultaneously mocks the feigned puritanism of biographers who shudder at scandals even while they recount them and emphasizes the singularity, opacity and privacy – indeed, the unknowability (at least to others) – of major personal ‘events’.
Just as importantly, in resisting the usual definitions of a ‘lifetime’ (threescore and ten), Woolf points out that an individual’s own perception of duration, as well as her or his sense of the varieties of her/his emotional and intellectual experience, may be far more dramatic than we ordinarily suppose. From adolescence to adulthood, one may undergo personal metamorphoses as radical as the public changes associated with the transformation of the fertile and unruly ‘Elizabethan period’ into the tidily rational ‘eighteenth century’ or the stickily sentimental ‘Victorian period’. And one may feel, as ‘time passes’, that the gulf between one’s adolescence and one’s adulthood is so vast that it ought to be measured not in what we call ‘years’ but in what we term ‘centuries’.
Conversely, by arbitrarily associating traditionally defined historical ‘periods’ with the life of a single individual, Woolf proposes that our definitions of historical moments – the ‘Elizabethan’, the ‘Romantic’, the ‘Victorian’, the ‘modern’ – may be equally arbitrary. If Orlando, as a kind of paradigmatic spirit of English letters, is still persistently him/herself, single yet multiple, various yet the same throughout these apparent metamorphoses of English society, perhaps historical ‘changes’ themselves are not as easily explicable or describable as we have been taught. Certainly the hilarious rhetoric that Woolf adopts (as her role of biographer/historian heralds each new ‘age’) deflates the pretensions of writers who imply that the complexities of the past can be interpreted through simplistic labels and categories.31
The funniest and best-known passage of such rhetoric is probably the one in which, while Orlando gazes at the ‘serene and orderly’ prospect of eighteenth-century London, remembering the ‘tortuous Elizabethan highways’, her parodic biographer suddenly describes a ‘turbulent welter of cloud’ gathering over the city at the stroke of midnight and proclaims that now ‘All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun’ (p. 156). To be sure, Woolf is succinctly and metaphorically summarizing here the difference between the ‘spirit’ of one ‘age’ and the ‘spirit’ of another, but the abruptness and absurdity of the change she depicts puts the very idea of historical ‘transition’ in question. How and why the ‘hypothetical orderliness’ of the eighteenth century gave way to the supposed ‘cloudiness’ of the nineteenth are more difficult questions than most chroniclers are willing to concede.
Finally, Woolf shows, time itself – the material with which both biographers and historians must inevitably grapple – is far more mysterious than the average scholar would like to admit. Is time what we experience or is it what we are told we experience? Do we, in other words, live primarily by personal internal clocks or are we really governed by an abstract, culturally imposed chronology? These are questions Woolf had already addressed in a number of works. In Mrs. Dalloway, for instance, public, official time is represented by ‘Big Ben… with his majesty laying down the law, so solemn, so just’, while what we might call private, experiential time is symbolized by ‘the other clock, the clock which always struck two minutes after Big Ben’ and which ‘came shuffling in with its lap full of odds and ends… all sorts of little things… flooding and lapping and dancing in on the wake of that solemn stroke’.32 And as we have seen, in To the Lighthouse the culturally constructed time by which history is usually measured – the chronicler’s time of births, deaths and wars – is so engulfed by a sort of undifferentiated ‘natural’ time that major events are related in parenthetical statements while the passage of ten years appears merely to occupy a single night.
As a meditation on comparable questions about temporality, however, Orlando is a good deal more radical than either of these precursor texts. Obviously, the elasticity of the medium through which the book’s protagonist moves is metaphysically crucial: on the one hand, half of Orlando’s life/time expands to include five centuries of English social and cultural history; on the other hand, five centuries of English history shrink, as it were, to half the span of this magical being’s life/time. But in addition, Woolf intermittently comments not just on the arbitrariness of the ‘ages’ into which historical time has been organized by assorted historians, but also on the arbitrariness of temporal units themselves. At one point, for example, her narrator ridicules the calendar, which, as she dryly observes, has no meaning in and of itself unless a human significance is imported into it:
It was now November. After November, comes December. Then January, February, March, and April. After April comes May. June, July, August follow. Next is September. Then October, and so, behold, here we are back at November again, with a whole year accomplished.
This method of writing biography, though it has its merits, is a little bare, perhaps… (p. 184)
At another point, though, Woolf celebrates the centrality that the calendar – and the clock – can assume when their abstract signification coincides with the fullness of human experience. Achieving a sort of Joycean epiphany in the twentieth century, Orlando notices that
the immensely long tunnel in which she seemed to have been travelling for hundreds of years widened; the light poured in; her thoughts became mysteriously tightened… she could hear every whisper and crackle in the room so that the clock ticking on the mantelpiece beat like a hammer. And so for some seconds the light went on becoming brighter and brighter, and she saw everything more and more clearly and the clock ticked louder and louder until there was a terrific explosion right in her ear. Orlando leapt as if she had been violently struck on the head. Ten times she was struck. In fact it was ten o’clock in the morning. It was the eleventh of October. It was 1928. It was the present moment.
No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart, and turned pale. 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 and the future on another. (p. 206)
Hyperbolical though it is, this passage summarizes the radiant intensity of the temporal experience – the ‘moment of being’, to use Woolf’s own phrase – that this writer continually sought to capture in her complex role as revisionary biographer/historian/novelist and that, in Orlando, she triumphantly bestowed upon Vita Sackville-West.
By the time Woolf finished Orlando, she had started to have doubts about this novel which had begun with such compelling exuberance as a ‘writer’s holiday’. ‘It may fall between stools, be too long for a joke, & too frivolous for a serious book,’ she worried on 22 March 1928, and a month later she dismissed the work as ‘a freak’.33 To her surprise, though, her first ‘reviewer’ – Leonard Woolf, to whom she regularly submitted all her manuscripts for comment as soon as she felt they had been properly completed – took the book ‘more seriously than [she] had expected’. He ‘Thinks it in some ways better than The Lighthouse’, she noted in h
er diary on 31 May – ‘about more interesting things, & with more attachment to life, & larger… He says it is very original.’34
Nor was Leonard Woolf eccentric among the novel’s early readers, for in his wife’s own words, ‘The reception [of Orlando] surpassed expectations’,35 in newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic. Writing for the New York Herald Tribune, the feminist novelist and essayist Rebecca West defined the work as ‘a poetic masterpiece of the first rank’,36 an encomium which left Woolf feeling ‘a little sheepish and silly’, while other, equally enthusiastic critics praised Woolf’s ‘swift and sparkling prose’, her ‘delicious’ fantasy, her ‘exquisite’ poetry, and her ‘wit that plays like summer lightning’. ‘Never, perhaps, has Mrs Woolf written with more verve: certainly she has never imagined more boldly,’ pronounced The Times Literary Supplement. And though pre-publication orders for the book had been disheartening because, as Woolf explained to herself in her diary, ‘No one wants biography’37 – not even, evidently, mock biography – post-publication sales were the strongest Woolf had ever had. ‘L. has just been in to consult about a 3rd edition of Orlando,’ she noted in December 1928, adding that ‘we have sold over 6,000 copies; & sales are still amazingly brisk –150 today for instance; most days between 50 & 60; always to my surprise.’ In fact, the success of Woolf’s literary ‘escapade’ marked a turning point in her professional career. At last, she was able to decide, ‘my room is secure. For the first time since I married… I have been spending money.’38