Image from Public Domain Archive.
by Amy Sheardown
The human experience is a cause for questions waiting, craving, and dreading to be asked. Who was I? Who am I? Am I enough? Am I enough for them? Could I be in love? Can I do this? Will I sustain myself? When the world looks back in time for questions and answers to life’s mysteries, will my story have faded away like a rainbow, only to return in remembrance when the conditions are correct, or will it have remained as solid as granite, ever-present in the earth? Virginia Woolf’s Orlando takes us on a whirlwind journey across hundreds of years, multiple rulers, a handful of countries, countless fashions, innumerable social conventions, and two sexes. Despite the almost four centuries Orlando spans, its titular character’s presence remained as it was: incandescent and effervescent and opaque and transparent and impermeable and fluid all at the same time, a life made of “rainbow and granite” (Woolf, 47). Whether Orlando’s rainbow was out in full display for all eyes to see or hidden from view, the colours of their existence always remained: “violets, oranges, reds, and blues” (166) creating a swirling mosaic of “strength, grace, romance, folly, poetry, [and] youth” (17). A striking arc above their life and times, Orlando’s rainbow glistened with every element, figment, and experience of who they were, but just as a range of colours will eventually mix and whirl into brownish grey, Orlando’s rainbow of life evidentially melded into sharp granite fragments that set them and their legacy in stone. Orlando, and Orlando, was powerful and beautiful, an intersectional storm of identity, intellect, love, and class swirled together in an abalone tinted amalgamation of answers to the painfully inevitable questions of the human experience.
* “We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements” (83).
Orlando’s sex and pronouns change throughout the course of Woolf’s text, however, for
the sake of simplicity and understanding “there will be no “ ‘her’ for ‘his,’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’ ” (83) in the body text; Orlando will be referred to with they/them pronouns. Quotes, however, scholarly and primarily, will retain their original pronoun structure.
The reflective question: Who was I? A mirror. An image of ourselves reflected in glass right in front of our eyes, a sort of prismatic miracle. Mirrors, however, tend to warp and stretch and shift our true reflections, leaving us lost to how we appear to others and ourselves. For someone like Orlando, who “had a great variety of selves to call upon” (179), looking at their supposed reflection would theoretically increase internal quarrels and confusion, but Orlando was unique. Woolf’s novel begins in the Elizabethan era, where Orlando’s reflection of life as a young boy within the English Court was royally flush with privilege and opportunity; “he was young, he was rich, he was handsome. No one could have been received with greater acclamation than he was” (21). Kathryn Miles essay “Searching for ‘The New Biography’ in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando” argues that Woolf’s “vivid description[s] of the title character’s exploits and actions” (Miles, 213) were all intentionally boyish, cavalier, and reflected an image of a boy trying to be a man. From romping sexual escapades with ladies and innkeeper’s daughters alike to “slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters” (Woolf, 11) to lamenting about trees to being an awkward and clumsy dancer, Orlando was an odd reflection of masculinity. They both grasped at boyhood in their princely reign over women and the power they wielded on their estate, and yet rejected the expectations and examples of stoic, unfeeling, and cruel manhood as they aged. Orlando evolved throughout time, both to new centuries, new countries, and to a new self, but they were at ease with themselves. They knew who they had been and who they were becoming, as a young boy, a nobleman, an ambassador to Turkey, and even after a spontaneous seven day trance, the mystical unconscious appearance of the Ladies “Chastity, Purity, and Modesty” (83), and the resulting dramatic change when they awoke:
We have no choice left but confess — he was a woman. […] The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. […] It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since. (83–84)
The reflective question stuck like a thorn in Orlando’s side, but as Christy L. Burns posed in “Re-Dressing Feminist Identities: Tensions between Essential and Constructed Selves in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando”, “how much of the self, Woolf asks, is unchangeably and essentially our own?
How solid a space does one have for resistance to social demands for conformity?” (Burns, 346). How much of Orlando’s young self was their own, and how much of it was simply a path towards their future? Was Orlando’s transformation a manifestation of their rainbow breaking through the cumulus skies? Or was it a sign they were ready for the identity question?
The identity question: Who am I? The struggle to answer the identity question, to know oneself, one’s “true self” (Woolf, 179) was a mountain Orlando undoubtedly spent centuries climbing, but they did not struggle to find their footing as many others do. They were confident, unfamiliar to the Sisyphean selfhood scramble of grasping for a seemingly close conclusion and then tumbling all the way back down to the start in a desperate chase after a fallen identity. Orlando was comfortable with themselves, and also able to recognize when a new self may be needed. Presenting as a woman broke the self-switching circuit in unforeseen ways, but womanhood also shone a perfect sunbeam into their rainbow, lighting up the sky “with violet shades instead of yellow sunlight” (90). The eventual joys of femininity were initially overshadowed by the expectations to be tame, meek, submissive. Orlando’s hands, previously “free to seize [their] sword” (111), were now preoccupied with keeping “the satins from slipping from [their] shoulders” (111). They were no longer the uncontested heir to their estate. They could no longer simply be; sailors fell from their posts at the mere sight of a glimpse of their ankle, appearances in London society were expected, “a proposal of marriage from some great nobleman” (129) was a near daily occurrence. As Miles aptly said, “Orlando loses her voice and her identity. As the weight of Victorian goodness presses upon her, the Orlando that we have come to know is diminished” (Miles, 216). The social pressures heaved upon women, the expectation to dress, talk, think, and seem like a delicate pansy were unfamiliar and strange to Orlando, and “she was horrified to perceive how low an opinion she was forming of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong” (Woolf, 93). Aline Sanfelici said in “One Name, Several (Wo)Men: Cultural Categories of Identity in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography” that Orlando’s change in sex was an intentional display of “the way genders were seen at the time and how they rely on a history of beliefs and conventions arbitrarily dictated by society” (Sanfelici, 14). Interestingly, Orlando adjusted to their new presentation naturally, and a violet hue shone effortlessly into their world:
Which is the greater ecstasy? The man’s or the woman’s? And are they not perhaps the same? No, she thought, this is the most delicious (thanking the Captain but refusing), to refuse, and see him frown. Well, she would, if he wished it, have the very thinnest, smallest shiver [sic] in the world. This was the most delicious of all, to yield and see him smile. (Woolf, 92)
As Orlando fell further into femininity and the expectations of modesty and compliance that came with it, “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” (110). The change was there, but it was a change towards knowing and feeling and becoming completely themselves. Orlando’s identity, an undeniable answer to the identity question, was strong and opaque: a deep purple streak across an orange sky, a solid stone set deep in the earth. Orlando knew who they were, but for them to prove their worth, they needed to answer the call of the intellectual question, one that has long-plagued “author and artist” (188) alike.
The intellectual question: Am I enough? Orlando spent all of their life thinking, reading, writing, agonizing, and asking themselves the intellectual question. For Orlando, to write was to live and to live was to create something mimetic; a legacy, a stain, a granite pillar buried deep in the earth, a rainbow that brings life and light and joy and colour to the world. In “She will be a poet […] in another hundred years’ time’: Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as a quest for incandescence”, Christopher Piazzola said “writing offers Orlando a source of communication with the world, a relationship beyond the borders of the self. […] Nature and the writer speak the same language, allowing them to establish communion” (Piazzola, 5). Like a communion, writing became a holy rite of passage for Orlando. Like a communion, writing was a way to prove “that he himself belonged to the sacred race rather than to the noble” (Woolf, 51), and to become part of something greater and above themselves:
He vowed that he would be the first poet of his race and bring immortal lustre upon his name. He said (reciting the names and exploits of his ancestors) that Sir Boris had fought and killed the Paynim; […] Sir Jordan, the Frenchman; and Sir Herbert, the Spaniard. But of all that killing and campaigning, that drinking and love-making, that spending and hunting and riding and eating, what remained? A skull; a finger. Whereas, he said, turning to the page of Sir Thomas Browne […] this man and his words were immortal. (49–50) As writing became more than a distant object on Orlando’ orange horizon, the need to compose something of meaning and value, to leave behind, intensified dramatically. They lived to write and wrote to live, “would give every penny [they had] to write one little book and become famous” (46), and struggled for centuries to create a sonnet of substance. They went through periods of inspiration where words flowed like glacial melt after the first orange-hued spring day, their rainbow brighter than ever, and periods of immense frustration where they “wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile” (50), their rainbow evaporated and sky entirely absent of sun, words “frozen [and] immovable” (22). Orlando walked a tight rope of intellectual confidence and doubt where they darted between seeing themselves as “the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world” (50). It was a dangerous, unsteady tight rope to walk, and it created a path that led them to the unfamiliar land of asking the validation question.
The validation question: Am I enough for them? Orlando’s world was shaped by literature, by who was writing, and how that writing made them feel: both superior and inferior. Orlando’s high status itself was an invitation to elite social circles, but the feeling as though “all these groups of people lie under an enchantment” (117) never left their sky. Orlando, who saw, felt, wrote, expressed, and thought deeply, was continuously disappointed by the disengagement of their company from anything of true meaning. Orlando’s status also enabled them to keep a cast of writers under their wing and roof, first and foremost one “Mr Nicolas Greene” (51):
He talked incessantly about himself, yet was such good company. […] Then he was so witty; then he was so irreverent; […] thought oranges grew underground and turnips on trees; preferred any townscape to any landscape; all this and much more amazed Orlando, who had never met anybody of his kind before. (55)
Greene’s presence was both contemptuous and welcomed, like a torrential rainstorm that will eventually give way into a rainbow. Piazzola notes that “while Orlando adapts to new ages, Greene consistently harbors resentment toward the changing present. The rigidity of his views on literature portray a truly ‘fixed’ self” (12). Piazzola likens Greene to a metaphor, a “personification of literature as an elderly gentleman in a grey suit” (14). However, Orlando was not elderly, manly, or fond of wearing grey, and yet they were still a writer; but still felt the need to prove it. Being enough as a man and being enough as a woman are two entirely separate walls to climb. What was expected of women was growing and looming in Orlando’s life; as Burns writes, the Victorian “spirit of the age” (Woolf, 137) corralled women into marriage boxes, and “one result of this conflict, in Orlando’s experience of the Victorian era, is that she can no longer write” (Burns, 353). We see that the progression of time, and all the pressures that came with it, was also the decline of Orlando’s poetry. Shortly after Orlando’s transformation, they were desperate to write, to capture moments and magic on their journey with the gipsies with “ink [made] from berries and wine” (Woolf, 87). When they left Turkey and embarked back to England, the magic faded and misted away; “for example, it may have been observed that Orlando hid her manuscripts […] 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” (110). Writing was Orlando’s time to feel the orange glow of an actor’s spotlight, and it was terrifying to be so exposed to others. Rather than writing, being enough for others came to Orlando by engaging with disengaged company, and the flow of thought was sequestered to a slow, painful drip. To overcome the wall of womanhood in their writing, Orlando needed to answer the validation question by rejecting it. They needed to “write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person” (141), and accept they would not be enough for everyone, but they needed to find the one who was enough for them: enter, the romantic question.
The romantic question: Could I be in love? Romance is a central part of Orlando’s story, for better or worse. Proposals became a commonality and promiscuity became a commodity, and the romantic question was only wholeheartedly asked for one: “a melon, an emerald, a fox in the snow […] the Princess Marousha Stanilovska Natasha Iliana Romanovitch (24)”. “Sasha […] for short” (28) engulfed Orlando’s heart and head in red flames, burning their “cheeks scarlet” (18) in the process. Before Sasha, “love had meant to [Orlando] nothing but sawdust and cinders (25), unlit and uninteresting. With Sasha, Orlando found a partner, a muse, a future, a love separate from the growing ennui in the Court. With Sasha, the world came alive: the sunsets were like painted red streaks across the sky, “the ice turned to wine in [their] veins” (25). And with Sasha, “the flower bloomed and faded. The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went” (18). When the Russian Princess disappeared on “the ship of the Muscovite embassy” (39), heading north in the vast expanse of the sea, the flame that burned within Orlando’s heart was extinguished by a simple splash of saltwater. The memory as Sasha continued to fester and smoke in Orlando’s life, and as Burns argues, Sasha became one of many extended metaphors in Woolf’s novel:
Memory is, in fact, as fickle a seamstress as Sasha was a mistress and both are tied metaphorically to “fabrication” by Woolf: memory being a “thread” and sash — the root of Sasha’s name — meaning in Arabic the turban of cloth one wraps around the head (Burns, 349).
It seemed as though Sasha had wrapped Orlando with inflammable fabric, but the desire for “a life and a lover” (112), a rainbow with red in it, was persistent. Their wick took centuries to relight, but it did, in fact, finally catch. Orlando met their match in “Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire” (145), “Mar” (149) for short. For Orlando, who had spent so long in solitude, Mar was a pillar, a strength, a granite rock “which he could attach his floating heart to” (14). Piazzola noted that “Orlando and Shelmerdine not only have an uncanny understanding of one another, but they also recognize each other as quasi-androgynous beings” (Piazzola, 7). Mar was not powerful, nor titled, nor especially manly, but they saw Orlando’s rainbow in a way others, who focused on their presentation, peculiarities, poetry, and power, were passively colourblind to. Orlando and Mar, both unconventional people, formed an unconventional relationship with intuit knowledge and a polychromatic blend of respect for each other. With Mar, there was no need to ask the romantic question; its affirmative answer was set in stone from the moment their paths crossed. Together, Orlando and Mar lit billions of candles in the “misty fields” (Woolf, 189), twin flames of red fire keeping each other alight in sickness and in health, for richer and for poorer, through question and through answer.
The reality question: Can I do this? It was one thing to have a life, another to know who you are, another to be enough, another to be validated, and another to have a lover, but in order keep their rainbow vibrant and granite strong, Orlando needed to ask themselves the reality question, which in turn, involved asking the other questions again. Can I do this? Can we do this? Can I be enough for them? Orlando’s manuscript, The Oak Tree, was a 400 year passion project that Orlando kept chipping away at, and once it was finished, the book “wanted to be read. It must be read” (159). The book was published with positive reception, earning Orlando “seven editions. A prize. Photographs in the evening papers” (180). And Orlando did not seem to care. Piazzola argues that Orlando’s eventual success came from a mindset shift, away from others and towards the self and the surroundings, as they learned “to identify poetry as a natural process […] rather than as an endeavor motivated by personal ambitions or grudges” (Piazzola, 17). The “Glawr” (Woolf, 54), or glory, Greene salivated on was not to Orlando’s taste, and the decided rejection of the ambitions for personal fame and wealth was Orlando’s movement towards answering the reality question. They did not want to be known by face or wealth or lawsuit or scandal, they wanted to be known by writing. As the ages went on, turning “brown and blue, rose and purple” (100) in the sun, Orlando also knew the answer to the reality question. They could do it, they would do it; they learned to “neither fight her age, nor submit to it; she was of it, yet remained herself. Now, therefore, she could write, and write she did. She wrote. She wrote. She wrote” (154–155). Orlando was capable of their own glory on their own time. Their success, however, was undoubtedly a result of the carefree answer to the question of “comfort and satisfaction with the class he lives in” (Sanfelici, 7): a class of writers, lovers, intellectuals, whose “fathers had been noble since they had been at all” (Woolf, 11).
The class question: Will I sustain myself? The overwhelming majority of the world faces the class question with understandable fear. It is a necessary question to ask, and for those not made of “blue blood” (19), often a miserable answer to accept. Orlando, however, was part of the small minority that did not fear the class question. The economic issues that simmered and boiled for the rest of the world barely spat at Orlando. They were able to literally look down upon the poor, unfortunate souls beneath them from the hilltops, overrun with nature’s trellis as an escape route, flushed with wealth and privilege that sparkled like a “sapphire” (27), a lighthouse in the darkness, its beacon of wealth keeping Orlando safe from the otherwise rocky shores of poverty:
It looked a town rather than a house […] built, Orlando thought, by workmen whose names are unknown. […] [It was furnished] with rosewood chairs and cedar-wood cabinets, with silver basins, china bowls, and Persian carpets, [in] every one of the three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms which the house contained. (63–64)
The estate was a cushion “of the softest swansdown” (66) to fall back upon, one that proved useful after a slew of lawsuits questioning their right of inheritance were launched that “would, of course, take time and money to dispose of” (100). The lawsuits, which would send an ordinary person into fight or flight, were a mere annoyance for Orlando to handle, their “steel-blue feather[s]” (190) flitting through life almost unmarred. The lawsuits were ruled in Orlando’s favour, but not without expense: “the cost […] had been prodigious […] though [they were] infinitely noble again, [they were] also excessively poor” (148). Despite the shortage of funds, Orlando does not seem to change their life in any way. Their dwindled fortune did not matter, their high-class status remained. They could still turn to “senseless singsong” (165) and have the world “brought to a favourable opinion of [their] sanity by noticing the pearl necklace which [they] wore” (165). Sanfelici argued that Orlando’s disinterest in class significance is a lack of class consciousness, and that “Orlando can move within classes keeping the privilege of returning any time” (Sanfelici, 10). Orlando moved between classes their whole life, from drinking with peasants in Elizabeth’s England to roaming with gipsies across Turkey, but it is important to note that “not everybody has such privilege” (11) They still had the privilege of a home of their own. The sky was still blue, the grass was still green, the “the mixture of brown earth and blue blood” (19) still coursed through their veins. Orlando’s rainbow still showed its true colours, and the answer to the class question was as hard as rock.
The final question: Will I fade away? Orlando’s answer to the final question was a resounding rejection. They refused to fade away. The times changed, the years flew by, the book was written, the lover was found, the home was saved, and “yet through all these changes [they] had remained […] fundamentally the same” (137). Orlando continues to stand as a symbol of identity, queerness, artistry, and meaning for readers now and into the future. The great “canopy of the sky” (126) will forever hold Orlando’s inner colours. “The heart in the middle of the earth” (145) will forever produce and protect Orlando’s inner strength. Like a stained glass panel, Orlando’s life cast a shadow of brilliant colours, of “violets, oranges, reds, and blues” (166) over the pillars of granite that shaped their existence, and over the questions asked to oneself, the “problems which have puzzled the wisest of men, such as What is love? What friendship? What truth?” (59). Woolf masterfully crafted Orlando’s rainbow with effervescent, incandescent, remarkable, and unique impermeability; each time Orlando lost vibrance, their colours seemingly never returning, the sentence continued, the paragraph flowed, the page turned, the rainbow “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” (59), and the granite remained.
WORKS CITED
Burns, Christy L. “Re-Dressing Feminist Identities: Tensions between Essential and Constructed Selves in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 40, no. 3, 1994, pp. 342–64. JSTOR, doi.org/10.2307/441560
Piazzola, Christopher. “She Will Be a Poet[…]in Another Hundred Years’ Time”: Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando” as a Quest for Incandescence. 1999, University of Montana. ProQuest, www.proquest.com/docview/1115317510/abstract/10ED672042A4614PQ/1
Sanfelici, Aline. “One Name, Several (Wo)Men: Cultural Categories Of Identity In Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography.” Epiphany, vol. 2, no. 2, Nov. 2009, doi.org/10.21533/ epiphany.v2i2.8.