Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own & Orlando - Book Report/Review Example

The Project Virginia Woolf, "A Room of One's Own" & "Orlando" The great novelist Virginia Woolf was able to characterize persons of the opposite sex as convincingly as those of his own. In her book A Room of One's Own, published the year after Orlando, Virginia Woolf classified authors according to the androgyneity. The mention of intellect indicates directly enough that this theory is not alien to the general "metaphysic" of Virginia Woolf's art. Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Ramsay, if they are to overleap the boundaries of their own individual selves, must arrive at an understanding of men as well as of women sex cannot raise a barrier to cleave the basic likeness that they find. In A Room of One's Own, where Mrs. Woolf discusses the androgynous quality of the human mind, she states quite clearly: "Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated." Of course Orlando has been given innumerable interpretations. It has been called "a study in multiple personality, and a protest against the too narrow labeling of anybody"; "a dynamic fantasia on the history of England's spirit"; Orlando is a fantasy and an allegory only on the surface; as an expression of its thought, the technique is functional and not mere virtuoso caprice. Virginia Woolf's concept of androgyneity is not that there is really no difference between men and women. Only by intuitive perception can men and women be the same; to be a woman, then, is in this sense to be as different as possible from a manto know by intuition and intellect instead of by intellect alone. The great novelist Virginia Woolf was able to characterize persons of the opposite sex as convincingly as those of his own. In her book A Room of One's Own, published the year after Orlando, Virginia Woolf classified authors according to the androgyneity. Noting that "neither Mr. Galsworthy nor Mr. Kipling has a spark of the woman in him. They lack suggestive power," she went on to say that Milton, Ben Jonson, Wordsworth, and even Tolstoi are too much male; that Shelley is sexless; but that Shakespeare, Keats, Sterne, Cowper, Lamb, and Coleridge are androgynous. "Proust," she added, "was wholly androgynous, if not perhaps a little too much of a woman. But that failing is too rare for one to complain of it, since without some mixture of the kind the intellect seems to predominate and the other faculties of the mind harden and become barren." The mention of intellect indicates directly enough that this theory is not alien to the general "metaphysic" of Virginia Woolf's art. Mrs. Dalloway, Mrs. Ramsay, if they are to overleap the boundaries of their own individual selves, must arrive at an understanding of men as well as of women sex cannot raise a barrier to cleave the basic likeness that they find. The germs of this theory, as it appears in The Voyage Out, have already been noticed. Night and Day also contains hints of it: Katharine is twice compared to Rosalind, and Katharine and Cassandra "represented very well the manly and the womanly sides of the feminine nature." In A Room of One's Own, where Mrs. Woolf discusses the androgynous quality of the human mind, she states quite clearly: "Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the act of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated." The idea of creative tension is merely touched upon, however; never in Mrs. Woolf is it as fully developed as in Eliot. There is another, more important difference between Eliot's ideas and those of Virginia Woolf. Eliot believes that life has a divine pattern and an ultimate meaning, which one discovers upon union with the still point. The pattern is evolving, rather than final: "the pattern is new in every moment." And the individual has his choice: simply to be moved in the movement, like a hollow man acted upon but not acting; to cut himself off and attempt to create an isolated pattern, which will end in spiritual destruction; or to move with and in "the dance," creating a pattern within the pattern. The only pattern Mrs. Woolf acknowledges is that of the general flux and flow of life itself, the "eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall and rise again," which Bernard proclaims. Beyond that, for Mrs. Woolf, there is no divine pattern, no ultimate meaning; beyond that, whatever pattern or meaning life seems to have is that which one arbitrarily imposes in defiance of life's fluidity and chaos; and this pattern which the individual creates must, like Lily's vision, be perpetually remade. On the other hand Orlando is a fantasy that moves in time from about 1586 to October 11, 1928; its action takes place in England and the Near East. The hero-heroine Orlando grows, during 342 years, from an Elizabethan boy of sixteen to a twentieth-century woman of thirty-six. As a boy, Orlando catches the fancy of Queen Elizabeth I and is made her treasurer and steward; but he is exiled from court for failing to marry the Lady Margaret O'Brien O'Dare O'Reilley Tyrconnel (alias Euphrosyne), who had compared unfavourably with the beautiful but faithless Princess Marousha Stanislovska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch (alias Sasha). To escape the lust of Archduchess Harriet Griselda of Finster-Aarhorn and Scandop-Boom. In the Romanian territory, Orlando becomes Ambassador to Turkey, where he negotiates between Charles II and the Turks; as a reward for his invaluable services, he is given a dukedom. Awaking one morning after a trance of over a week, Orlando finds himself become a woman. Obviously unable to continue as ambassador, she joins a gypsy tribe; but since her love of nature is considered most unconventional in that community, she returns to England aboard the Enamoured Lady, an English merchant ship, and settles down at her huge ancestral estate. Orlando's return sets in motion a series of law suits that, in true English fashion, take more than a hundred years to settle, and as results of which she is pronounced indisputably a woman and her three sons by the Spanish dancer Rosina Pepita are declared illegitimate. The Archduchess Harriet who now reveals himself as really the Archduke Harry continues to annoy Orlando; by cheating at Fly Loo and dropping a toad inside his shirt, Orlando manages to rid herself of him, and goes to London -- to Blackfriars -- for the purpose of finding life and a lover. There she has a series of adventures that include joining the fashionable salons, meeting Pope and Addison, falling in love for a time with another woman, and changing her sex (clothes) often in order to heighten her enjoyment of life and to widen her experience. With the advent of the Victorian period, however, Orlando hurriedly changes from eighteenth to nineteenth-century clothes and becomes "a real woman at last." She marries Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire, who leaves immediately after the ceremony to continue his career of sailing around Cape Horn. Orlando gives birth to her first child (a boy) and wins the Burdett Coutts Memorial Prize for her poem "The Oak Tree," which she had begun in 1586. Otherwise aside from the fact that her house has 365 bedrooms Orlando is just like any other twentieth-century woman. Of course Orlando has been given innumerable interpretations. It has been called "a study in multiple personality, and a protest against the too narrow labeling of anybody"; "a dynamic fantasia on the history of England's spirit" "une histoire raccourcie de la littrature anglaise"; "a learned parable of literary criticism" "a fantastic meditation on a portrait of Victoria Sackville-West." Ruth Gruber, calling it a satire on criticism, adds that it "seems as much the history of Virginia Woolf's own literary growth as that of Miss Sackville-West or of England. Virginia Woolf appears to trace her poetic development from that of a romantic child to a woman seeking the realities modulated by her sex." All these statements about Orlando can be called true. None of them, however, is true for the book as a whole: none of them can be or should be used in the attempt to "interpret" each scene or sentence on a single level. It is true, for example, that Orlando's clothes usually correspond to the poetic style of each period, so that at the beginning of the Victorian period she realizes that a person can no longer "still say what one liked and wear knee-breeches or skirts as the fancy took one," and so hurries home to escape embarrassment and "wrapped herself as well as she could in a damask quilt which she snatched from her bed" until she can procure suitable clothes. But it would be a subjective view indeed that attempted to "interpret" Orlando's son upon the same level. If "nothing was simply one thing" in To the Lighthouse, the same is true in Orlando. Orlando herself thinks that "nothing is any longer one thing," that "everything was partly something else." These are thoughts of the twentieth-century Orlando. In the past a thing was simply one thing, so that the "old" Orlando was a relatively simple person; the "new," the modern Orlando, however, is composed of many selves that form a complex whole. It is in terms of this Orlando -- of the time at which Virginia Woolf wrote the book -- that meaning must be understood. Therefore it follows that Orlando cannot be explained as an imaginative biography of Victoria Sackville-West or of English poetry or of the English spirit, but that these partial meanings are ways to the book's total meaning rather than ends in themselves. If Orlando were a consistent parable or allegory upon any one of these levels, if it were explicable according to some one fixed symbol, it would be false to the whole concept that determined it. Orlando is a fantasy and an allegory only on the surface; as an expression of its thought, the technique is functional and not mere virtuoso caprice. Orlando is just as serious as To the Lighthouse, but, by further creative modulation of her perspective, Virginia Woolf was able to accomplish her serious meaning through a humorous form, and so to comment upon it in a new way to explore new possibilities of its implications. Like Jacob's Room, Orlando has two narrators; but here the device is used purely for its ironic value; there is never any doubt that the prim and coy man who is writing Orlando's biography is himself a comment upon himself a comment made by the central intelligence who, through most of the novel, backs away from the biographer so that he becomes part of the total perspective. Throughout, this biographer insists that he is writing a biography and not a novel. As soon as Orlando begins to think, the biographer begins to apologize: "These are not matters upon which a biographer can profitably enlarge"; "life, the . . . authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with . . . thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder." Just as he is ashamed of thought and imagination, he is very proud when he can describe action or muster facts; thus he is careful to quote from diaries and letters, and to give his readers most detail about what is least important: he does not mention even the year of Orlando's birth, but he is careful to note that Nick Greene visited Orlando "punctually at seven o'clock on Monday, April the twenty-first," or that it was June 16th, 1712, when Orlando said, " 'What the devil is the matter with me' " He is often ashamed of Orlando's exploits; "Let other pens," he alludes to Jane Austen, "speak of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can." This biographer is responsible for the pedantic footnotes; parts of the fussy, scholarly preface, with its ridiculous statements; the hopelessly incomplete index, with such entries as "Abbey, Westminster," "Frost, the Great," and "Keynes, Mrs. J. M.." Of these, the preface is perhaps most successful, combining as it does factual and ironic truth; of the sixty-odd persons whom the author thanks here, some merit thanks and others anything but thanks. This device of the author's is the first example of Virginia Woolf's extended use of comic irony. Irony is in all the novels, but it has usually serious overtones and only at times a suggestion of humour; here the comic value of the irony makes it seem to be all the more truthful and effective in its criticism. Clearly, that criticism is not only of clock time but of knowledge dependent upon clock time. The biographer is, as Mr. Ramsay was not, ludicrous in his valiant attempts to arrive at truth by using facts -- and facts only. Just as "when the shrivelled skin of the ordinary is stuffed out with meaning it satisfies the senses amazingly," so when fact is played upon by imagination it satisfies the intellect. The chronological order of Orlando the procedure from period to period of English history in perfect logical order -- is completely nullified by the last fifteen pages, in which the action proper of the novel may be said to begin and in which the past is recapitulated temporally rather than spatially, so that the past becomes present, the present past, and, as Virginia Woolf had noted in her diary, "the actual event practically does not exist." Driving home along the Old Kent Road, on October II, 1928, Orlando is at once all that he-she has been during more than three hundred years. Bergson said: "Is my own person, at a given moment, one or manifold If I declare it one, inner voices arise and protest -- those of the sensations, feelings, ideas, among which my individuality is distributed. But, if I make it distinctly manifold, my consciousness rebels quite as strongly; it affirms that my sensations, my feelings, my thoughts are abstractions which I effect on myself, and that each of my states implies all the others." The actual state, the present event, is made actual and present only by being fixed intellectually in space; on the other hand, "intuition is mind itself, and, in a certain sense, life itself: the intellect has been cut out of it by a process resembling that which has generated matter. Thus is revealed the unity of the spiritual life. We recognize it only when we place ourselves in intuition in order to go from intuition to the intellect, for from the intellect we shall never pass to intuition." The first five chapters of Orlando are what the intellect perceives; in the last chapter there is the intuitive perception of Orlando in which all that has been spatially ranged by the intellect is temporally unified by the intuition. Since the intuition does not halt or fix the actual event, but instead perceives its pure-time duration, the actual event "practically does not exist." There is no past, no present, no future, but only pure duration itself, one and undivided. This is the truth, the wild goose that the biographer has been chasing and that suddenly appears on the last page of the novel. There are (at a venture) seventy-six different times all ticking in the mind at once, how many different people are there not Heaven help us all having lodgment at one time or another in the human spirit Some say two thousand and fifty-two. 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. Choosing, then, only those selves we have found room for, Orlando may now have called on the boy who cut the nigger's head down; the boy who strung it up again; the boy who sat on the hill; the boy who saw the poet. But Orlando wants the "true self," "as happens when . . . the conscious self, which is the uppermost, and has the power to desire, wishes to be nothing but one self." There follows a monologue that comes as close to being "stream of consciousness" as anything Virginia Woolf ever wrote, but it is interrupted constantly by comment from the author. It is only when Orlando stops sorting her selves -- she is in despair, as Bernard will be in The Waves, because she can make words and phrases but never catch the thing itself -- when she stops separating and specializing the different parts of her personality, that she finds the Orlando for whom she has been searching. "She was now darkened, stilled, and become, with the addition of this Orlando, what is called, rightly or wrongly, a single self, a real self. And she fell silent. For it is probable that when people talk aloud the selves are conscious of disseverment, and are trying to communicate, but when communication is established they fall silent." The real Orlando, then, is simply the communication of all these different and diverse Orlandos. When that communication has been accomplished, it is "as if her mind had become a fluid that flowed round things and enclosed them completely." Now, when the clock strikes the hour, Orlando can withstand its shock better than she could in London earlier in the day, "for she was now one and entire, and presented, it may be, a larger surface to the shock of time." Gradually the striking of the clock comes to have less and less alarm for her, because she remains "a real self"; and it is in spite of clock time -- at the very moment indeed when the strokes of midnight are sounding -- that she finally finds the wild goose. This awareness of Orlando is the reason for all that has gone before it; one by one the selves have been perceived spatially; one self is at last perceived intuitively. In this sense, Orlando occupies only the one day in 1928, and from it are projected back into space the three hundred years of its first five chapters; just as all these different times are one time, so all Orlando's different selves are one self. On the other hand, just as the one self is actually a way of seeing innumerable selves a communication of the selves so the moment at which Orlando's awareness becomes complete and one is actually a communication of innumerable other moments again, the actual event does not exist. As in the novels preceding it, in Orlando unity is the essence of diversity itself; but in Orlando there is, as Delattre has noted, not only duration and memory but also intellect and irony. It is from the ironical presentation of clock time that the novel proceeds to its affirmation of duration and memory; before its theme can be fully revealed, however, that intuitive perception must in turn be intellectualized. This is of course quite in accord with Bergson's statement: "Intuition and intellect represent two opposite directions of the work of consciousness: intuition goes in the very direction of life, intellect goes in the inverse direction, and thus finds itself naturally in accordance with the movement of matter. A complete and perfect humanity would be that in which these two forms of conscious activity should attain their full development." Although Orlando has been compared to As You Like It and even to Orlando Furioso, very little if anything seems to have been gained by such comparisons. At least one of the many stylistic echoes in this novel is probably of more than casual significance. It is well known that appropriate imitations of the great English prose stylists occur throughout the book; yet imitations of Laurence Sterne can be found, not only in chapter iv, which deals with the eighteenth century, but also in every other chapter. The Sternesque touches are used by Virginia Woolf to underline the meaning of the total novel as well as to capture the flavour of the eighteenth century. With some important differences, Sterne and Virginia Woolf were remarkably alike in philosophical perspective; it is not surprising, then, that when she employed comic irony to show the illogicality of logic, Virginia Woolf should avail herself of Sterne's methods. Mr. Ramsay of To the Lighthouse, if Virginia Woolf had conceived him as a comic figure, might easily have become another Walter Shandy. In Orlando the action of pages 159 - 169 takes "days," but it occurred, the reader is told, in "three and a half seconds"; elsewhere, it is winter and summer in the same scene. Like Sterne, Virginia Woolf distrusted factual knowledge, and used facts only as stepping-off places for imaginative perception of reality. In Orlando, a fantasy exploiting the comic values of irony, Virginia Woolf was able, not only to use Sterne's techniques for her purposes, but also to extend the meaning of her own book by reminding the reader of Sterne's. Orlando, dealing as it does with the art and attitudes of four centuries in England, is a treasure house for anyone interested in Virginia Woolf's opinions. There can be seen, for example, her admiration of the Elizabethan age and contempt for the Victorian; her concern for the position of women; 30 her theory that English literature, at some time during the seventeenth century, changed from "masculine" to "feminine," as well as her ideas about literature in general; her dislike of doctors, of lecturers, of popular society, and of professors, especially American professors. These, interesting though they are, have no primary significance for her art; but there are in Orlando certain statements about concepts vitally important in determining not only this novel but those that preceded and followed it as well. So it is that when Orlando is alone, "the seconds began to round and fill until it seemed as if they would never fall. They filled themselves, moreover, with the strangest variety of objects." This recalls Proust's famous assertion: "Une heure n'est pas qu'une heure, c'est un vase rempli de parfums, de sons, de projets et de climats. Ce que nous appelons la ralit est un certain rapport entre ces sensations et ces souvenirs qui nous entourent simultanment." 33 Orlando finds that every thing is more than itself. "Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge it from its place in his mind, he found thus encumbered with matter like the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragonflies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women." If he thinks of friendship or of truth, "his whole past, which seemed to him of extreme length and variety, rushed into the falling second, swelled it a dozen times its natural size, coloured it a thousand tints, and filled it with all the odds and ends in the universe." It is precisely this recovery of time past that the novel is to accomplish, and for which such passages as this prepare the reader. In Proustian fashion, it is the "fat, furred woman" whom the twentiethcentury Orlando notices in the department store, and who reminds her of Sasha, who will give the first impetus to that complete recovery of the past and recognition of reality that constitutes the novel's catastrophe. In just the same way, Marcel of la Recherche du temps perdu experiences a series of vague and elusive remembrances that puzzle him, but the true meaning and value of which he does not understand until his final perception of reality. This network of concepts, although expressed with new materials and technique in Orlando, is of course essentially the same as it was in the preceding novels. But Virginia Woolf's concept of androgyneity is first given adequate expression in Orlando. Virginia Woolf's concept of androgyneity is not that there is really no difference between men and women. Only by intuitive perception can men and women be the same; to be a woman, then, is in this sense to be as different as possible from a manto know by intuition and intellect instead of by intellect alone. The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's dress and of a woman's sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual . . . something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. For here again, we come to a dilemma. 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. References Woolf Virgina, A Room of One's Own. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929. Woolf Virgina Orlando. A Biography. New York: Penguin Books, Inc., 1946. Read More