Image by Roger Fry, via Wikimedia Commons.
by Sofia Vanegas
Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is a study in biographical truths. The novel seeks to chronicle its central character’s life over 300 years of inexplicable, fantastic, yet apparently real events. This is far from the traditional subject of biography, a genre perceived as purely factual. The biographer, who narrates, continually grapples with the difficulty of distilling a subject defined by fluidity and fiction into an objective representation. The novel doubles as a recounting of the life of Woolf’s lover Vita Sackville-West. On these levels, Orlando questions biographical conventions by fictionalizing the subject and focusing primarily on their subjectivity. This focus on internal reality challenges the desire for a factual, linear biography. Woolf uses this fiction to interrogate the locus of truth, and through this, asks: how does one accurately represent history? Beyond the typical understanding of it as a series of events, how can one capture the essence of an individual? Of a historical period? She presents two avenues for historiography in the biographer’s fact-based perspective and Orlando’s artistic one. Although the novel favours a subjective interpretation, the conclusion is that real truth – the essence of a concept, a person, or a time in history – cannot be represented. Rather, truth is an ever-changing experience; there are many truths, all equally true, and as times change, so does the truth. Woolf argues here that truth cannot be captured, just as time cannot be paused. Thus, she reasons that the most ‘accurate’ vehicle for truth is a medium that approximates subjectivity, such as art. Through Orlando, Woolf argues that truth is a subjective experience; by exploring factual, fictional, and contextual understandings of truth, Woolf affirms the subjectivity of the past, reveals the necessity of a medium that prioritizes this subjectivity over factual accuracy, and ultimately concludes that any ‘real’ truth is impossible to represent.
Through the figure of the biographer, Woolf examines fact as the commonly accepted, yet ultimately insufficient, representation of truth. To the biographer, biography is “highly restricted,”[1] “told delicately,”[2] and yet “plod[s], without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth.”[3] This description – delicate, restricted, yet honest – illustrates his belief in a singular, recordable truth. His philosophy of biography is simple. To record the history of a life, one examines its external actions and connects them to provable results, creating a timeline of facts. The index of the book supports this perspective. Largely atypical for a novel, its inclusion gives Orlando an air of non-fiction. The entry for “Orlando” seems to chronicle every single plot event, from boyhood to womanhood. For the biographer, this timeline would ideally serve as a replacement for the text itself, as a factual and detailed account of Orlando’s life. However, in comparing the two, an element is lost between the text and the index. This discrepancy is most evident in the sparse entries following Orlando’s legal declaration of womanhood: “engagement […] marriage […] birth of her first son.”[4] In looking at these pages (169-221) of the novel, the reader quickly discovers moments that go unmentioned: Orlando contends with her newly understood gender role,[5] accepts the multiplicity of the self,[6] and struggles with the legacy of her poem “The Oak Tree.”[7] The index neglects all this. Even in moments included in the index, Woolf uses stream-of-consciousness to convey experience, rather than facts. For example, while giving birth, Orlando speaks of kingfishers, barrel-organs, and a “sleep, sleep, so deep that all shapes are ground to dust of infinite softness,”[8] only mentioning the child himself after pages of poeticisms. Despite the implications of the index, Orlando consists largely of abstract thought and feeling. The biographer’s perspective of a singular, comprehensible truth is then called into question, for if there was no truth besides factual cause-and-effect, why is there such a notable gap between the story and its timeline? As Thomas S.W. Lewis notes, this difference demonstrates “that external facts cannot serve as a substitute for knowledge of the inner life.”[9] Although the biographer creates the appearance of an objective history, he ignores the importance of subjectivity, presenting it as less important than fact because it cannot be proven on a timeline. As the biographer is primarily concerned with objectivity, he relies on the outer life as the singular truth. Woolf shows this approach to be telling incomplete stories, characterizing the internal and subjective as truths in and of themselves.
Orlando’s inner life has a strong presence in the novel, despite the biographer’s dismissal of it. He outright states that “life […] is the only fit subject for a novelist or biographer; life […] has nothing whatsoever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder.”[10] For him, life is defined by measurable action. It is action, after all, that typically makes a person worthy of biographical preservation. Orlando, however, is a subject that lives primarily internally, “thinking […] sitting in a chair, day in, day out.”[11] By the biographer’s definition of life, they may as well not be living at all. Without external action, the biographer is stuck with “that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests” [12]– a subjective, inner life that cannot be recorded accurately. This tension between inner and outer is the driving force of Woolf’s biography. James Harker’s essay “Misperceiving Virginia Woolf” (2011) explores this tendency. As opposed to the strict line that the biographer draws between ‘life’ and ‘thought’, Harker posits that “the thoughts of [Woolf’s] character[s] and the apparently ‘inward’ focus of [her] stor[ies] are inseparable from [the] body and its actions.”[13] There is an interplay between the inner and the outer; rather than one being elevated above the other in terms of biographical importance, they work in tandem to define a person’s ‘truth.’ The ‘active’ life does not exist in a vacuum, after all. When Orlando chooses to affect the world around them, their action is motivated by some internal impulse. The inextricable nature of the two lives is textually represented by Woolf’s prose. Within the novel’s framing, Woolf’s style is attributed to the biographer, so, despite his disregard, he still attempts to capture the internal life. He breaks his own rules,[14] going past objectivity and looking into that which “it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore.”[15] His hypocritical rejection of biographical conventions reveals the impossibility of attempts to isolate external actions from their internal counterparts. Orlando’s entire truth cannot be captured through a traditional biography, as it is limited to ‘externals’ and therefore loses the nuance of the inner world.
The character of Orlando provides an alternative by understanding truth through fiction. Much like the biographer, Orlando struggles with the process of translating life into words. However, where the biographer sees writing as the sole arbiter of history, Orlando sees it as limiting – insufficient but still necessary to try to grasp truth. This is most explicit in the following passage:
[Orlando] tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help
reverencing. “The sky is blue,” he said, “the grass is green.” Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. “Upon my word,” he said […] “I don’t see that one’s more true than another. Both are utterly false.”[16]
Just as his biographer does, Orlando interprets reality through words. However, by “simply say[ing] what one means and leav[ing] it”[17] – stating facts – Orlando finds the world flattened. On the other hand, speaking in metaphor creates a distance between the object and its description. The resulting image, while detailed, is fundamentally inaccurate. The veils of a thousand Madonnas clearly have nothing to do with the sky, but Orlando asks: does the word “blue” fare any better? While metaphor is a departure from literal reality, it shifts the focus to the experience of the thing, rather than the thing itself. This vivid imagery disregards reality and thus makes room for an inner experience. By prioritizing subjectivity, metaphor manages to be more accurate than fact in relaying the experience of the world. Lewis summarizes this notion: “Only […] an active imagination can bring forth an image of the truth.”[18] Note the use of the word “image” – imaginative extrapolation is still unable to represent the ‘essence’ of an object. As such, Woolf implies that the experience itself is the truth, and only by approximating experience (such as with metaphor) can one get close to accurately capturing reality. Woolf supports this by omitting verbalizations of “true wit, true wisdom, true profundity.”[19] During one of Orlando’s ventures in society, a Mr. Pope arrives to contribute:
[T]he little gentleman said,
He said next,
He said finally,.[20]
Woolf chooses to leave a blank space in place of Pope’s words, implying a limitation of the written word in denoting the truth of experience. His words could not be replicated and maintain their quality of truth. These “great blank[s]” imply what is later stated explicitly: “the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.”[21] While Woolf is still a proponent of metaphor as a tool for accuracy, the novel concludes that one can only gesture to the truth, not name it directly.
Orlando’s biographical form mirrors this since Woolf applies the idea of metaphor as approximate accuracy to writing her ‘metaphorical biography’ for Vita Sackville-West. Published in 1928, the novel could be considered Woolf’s first attempt at biographical writing, followed by Roger Fry in 1940. In “Revolutionizing Biography: Orlando, Roger Fry, and the Tradition”, author Elizabeth Cooley considers Orlando the more successful biography, despite being fictional. Following Sir Sidney Lee’s definition outlined in Principles of Biography, Cooley argues that “[Woolf] succeeded by dressing her biographical portrait in the vestiges of fiction.”[22] It can capture some ineffable quality – what Lee terms the “truthful transmission of personality”[23] – that straightforward fact cannot. This idea bears a remarkable similarity to Orlando’s examination of metaphor. Woolf’s approach with Orlando focuses less on the literal details of Sackville-West’s life and thus frees the text to convey Woolf’s experience of her. Its lack of specificity, which displaces Sackville-West’s personality, family history, and lifestyle onto Orlando as a fictional vessel, allows for greater representation of her ‘truth’ as an individual. Victoria L. Smith calls this a “self-reflexive split between […] subject and representation.”[24] Woolf parallels metaphorical distance through this “self-reflexive” biographical form, creating distance between the description of the individual and the individual themselves. In doing so, she can call attention to the inner experience, just as metaphor does with subjectivity. One could argue that this choice makes the final product more accurate, despite its fictional construction. After all, even a traditional biography is heavily constructed – Orlando only foregrounds the fiction of biographical representation. By abandoning the pretense of literal accuracy and embracing the subjective, one could call fiction an ‘accurate’ representation of biographical truth.
However, Orlando’s conception of truth as a subjective experience still disturbs the idea that any representation could be accurate. This fundamentally troubles the concept of biographical and historical truth. To remedy this, Woolf suggests historical truth as being that “which ha[s] no lustre taken from [its] setting, yet [is] positively of amazing beauty within it.”[25] In other words, truth exists in context, within its historical moment. For instance, when discussing Mr. Pope’s words, the attached footnote reads, “These sayings are too well known to require repetition.”[26] The implication here is that “true wit […] wisdom, [and] profundity” have diffused throughout the cultural consciousness. Woolf further illustrates this idea:
To give a truthful account of London society at that or indeed at any other time, is beyond the powers of the biographer or the historian. Only those who have little need of the truth and no respect for it—the poets and the novelists—can be trusted to do it, for this is one of the cases where truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma – a mirage.[27]
On a literal level, this may be read as her critique of London society as vapid, illusory, and deceitful. However, taken with her conception of illusions as “the most valuable and necessary of all things,”[28] this “mirage” is understood as cultural context. The experience of this contextual moment is the truth that Orlando seeks. In this quote, the value Woolf describes in art is its ability to capture context (“miasma”), and therefore, capture the fleeting truth of a moment in time. Art, in expressing an experience, is the best tool to capture what Orlando calls the “spirit of the age.”[29] Elena Gualtieri’s essay, “The Impossible Art: Virginia Woolf on Modern Biography” addresses a similar notion, characterizing Woolf’s perspective on life as “a condition of being enveloped, surrounded, and absorbed into an element that cannot be described or defined.”[30] Given this ineffable quality, the only way to understand the “spirit of the age” is to be immersed in it. This is not physically possible when studying ages gone by. In response, Woolf suggests that poems and novels are symptomatic of the context in which they were written. They are distillations of cultural practices and perspectives, acting as windows into time. Orlando’s poem “The Oak Tree” is a prime example, as it is rewritten many times over the centuries. In the process, “[Orlando] […] change[s] his style amazingly.”[31] Woolf ascribes this shift to societal changes “ha[ving] [their] effect upon the style, it cannot be doubted.”[32] Since Orlando edits the poem throughout different historical contexts, he adds pieces of different ages. As such, it becomes an accumulation of history, containing the “spirit” of the time it was written and edited in. It is the past made tangible.[33] For Woolf, art is a historical record – able to preserve the essence of a period, if not its factual events.
Woolf continues this exploration with the character Nick Greene, an immortal poet and literary critic. Twice, he repeats a critique of the ‘present’ almost word-for-word, at vastly different points in time: “[this] is an age marked by precious conceits and wild experiments – none of which [the past ages] would have tolerated for an instant.”[34] Woolf uses this parallel to show how one’s context distorts one’s perspective, and therefore changes one’s experience of truth. Greene’s idea of what should be aspired to radically changes, as the Elizabethans he disparages on page 53 become the ideal that the Victorians fail to embody. He “yield[s] completely and submissively to the spirit of the age,”[35] embracing the “miasma” of the age and affirming completely different positions with the same ‘objective’ confidence. This shift demonstrates the inescapability of the cultural moment, and how ‘truths’ are rooted to it. Therefore, truths can change, and can still be true within that framework. If Woolf defines ‘truth’ as subjective experience, both of Greene’s statements are ‘true,’ and because they exist entirely within their contexts, that ‘truth’ appears immutable. Truth, as the experience of a certain moment, is entirely mutable, and maintains the appearance of truth by virtue of being immersed in that moment. In an 1893 essay that long precedes Woolf’s novel, Victoria Welby explores the idea of projecting truth, stating, “We take […] words [and] phrases, […] we make [them] mean precisely what we ourselves mean. And be it noted that it is always what we mean now.”[36] Orlando plays with this concept not with words and phrases, but with history. Greene projects his current truth backward and forwards, making eternity of the current context. That moment is thus understood as the ‘truth.’ Through Greene, Woolf illustrates this transformation of truth over time, as he replaces apparently absolute statements with completely different, yet equally true ones. His truth changes with his historical moment, and even though this shift occurs, the truth of a specific moment remains true. Lewis puts it best:
[N]o history can ever be definitive or final, for, as [Woolf] acknowledges […] each of us views the past through a distinctly different set of lenses, and from a particular angle of vision; there will always be gaps in a historical narrative which must be filled by an active imagination.[37]
No historical truth can ever be objective, as history is constructed through subjective means, by subjective individuals. It therefore stands to reason that truth, constructed and interpreted subjectively, needs to be understood through subjective means. Nick Greene’s character illustrates the subjectivity of truth, as well as its constant transformation. Art, as a fundamentally subjective medium, is needed to make a record of this truth. Art made within the context – like “The Oak Tree” – can absorb the “miasma” in which truth exists and then express it in a way that fact and out-of-context fiction cannot. Ultimately, Woolf uses Greene to affirm this idea that truth only exists within context. The immutable truth of history is revealed to be an illusion, as it exists within the “spirit of the age,” and in one’s subjective experience with it. Only by disregarding the idea of singular truth can one realize its multiplicity.
Orlando re-examines conventional vehicles for truth. In its exploration of fact and fiction, Woolf asserts that a fully ‘accurate’ historiography does not exist. In comparing the biographer’s factual perspective with Orlando’s, whose existence is antithetical to traditional biography, Woolf reveals that truth can best be approximated through subjectivity. As such, poetry and novels are instead explored as ways to accurately understand truth. Still, by continuously building tension between reality and its expression, Woolf implies that the truth is not something that can be said outright. By putting a truth into words, like Orlando with their endless attempts to name the colour of the sky, one renders it inaccurate. Woolf is only able to represent a truth by metaphor, as evidenced by the novel itself as a metaphorical biography and historiography. Even so, Woolf asserts that the metaphorical approach cannot be fully accurate. The essence of truth, which the biographer and Orlando search for in facts and poetry respectively, exists in context. Truth is rooted in its moment. As this context changes, so does the idea of truth, and subjective interpretations become necessary for interpreting the past. Woolf argues that the closest one can get to capturing this truth is through art created in that moment. They operate on the same principle as metaphor: by disregarding literal reality, it can represent the experience thereof and thus preserve the “spirit of the age.” Through Orlando, Woolf concludes that ‘truth’ cannot be found in fact and only approximated through metaphor. Ultimately, truth is found in the experience of the moment.
Endnotes
[1] Virginia Woolf, Orlando (London: Penguin Random House, 2020), 59.
[2] Woolf, Orlando, 196.
[3] Woolf, Orlando, 37.
[4] Woolf, Orlando, 224.
[5] Woolf, Orlando, 172.
[6] Woolf, Orlando, 207.
[7] Woolf, Orlando, 210.
[8] Woolf, Orlando, 198.
[9] Thomas S.W. Lewis, “Virginia Woolf’s Sense of the Past,” Salmagundi 68/69 (1985): 198.
[10] Woolf, Orlando, 179.
[11] Woolf, Orlando, 179.
[12] Woolf, Orlando, 3.
[13] James Harker, “Misperceiving Virginia Woolf,” Journal of Modern Literature 34, no. 2 (2011): 7.
[14] Elizabeth Cooley, “Revolutionizing Biography: Orlando, Roger Fry, and the Tradition,” South Atlantic Review 55, no. 2 (1990): 77.
[15] Woolf, Orlando, 3.
[16] Woolf, Orlando, 61–62.
[17] Woolf, Orlando, 61.
[18] Lewis, “Sense of the Past,” 199.
[19] Woolf, Orlando, 133.
[20] Woolf, Orlando, 133.
[21] Woolf, Orlando, 168.
[22] Cooley, “Revolutionizing Biography,” 72.
[23] Cooley, “Revolutionizing Biography,” 72.
[24] Victoria L. Smith, “Ransacking the Language: Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” Journal of Modern Literature 29, no. 4 (2006): 60.
[25] Woolf, Orlando, 169.
[26] Woolf, Orlando, 133.
[27] Woolf, Orlando, 126.
[28] Woolf, Orlando, 131.
[29] Woolf, Orlando, 161.
[30] Elena Gualtieri, “The Impossible Art: Virginia Woolf on Modern Biography,” The Cambridge Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2000): 354.
[31] Woolf, Orlando, 69.
[32] Woolf, Orlando, 69.
[33] Lewis, “Sense of the Past,” 193.
[34] Woolf, Orlando, 187.
[35] Woolf, Orlando, 161.
[36] Victoria Welby, “Meaning and Metaphor,” The Monist 4 (1893): 512.
[37] Lewis, “Sense of the Past,” 198.
Works Cited
Cooley, Elizabeth. “Revolutionizing Biography: Orlando, Roger Fry, and the Tradition.” South Atlantic Review 55, no. 2 (1990): 71–83.
Gualtieri, Elena. “The Impossible Art: Virginia Woolf on Modern Biography.” The Cambridge Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2000): 349–61.
Harker, James. “Misperceiving Virginia Woolf.” Journal of Modern Literature 34, no. 2 (2011): 1–21.
Lewis, Thomas S.W. “Virginia Woolf’s Sense of the Past.” Salmagundi 68/69 (1985): 186–205.
Smith, Victoria L. “Ransacking the Language: Finding the Missing Goods in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.” Journal of Modern Literature 29, no. 4 (2006): 57–75.
Welby, Victoria. “Meaning and Metaphor.” The Monist 4 (1893): 510–25.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. London: Penguin Random House, 2020.