Orlando

Orlando has a strong connection with nature across the centuries. They find the solitude they experience in nature inspiring. Animals, especially dogs, are Orlando’s constant companions. When Orlando experiences a strong negative emotion, the weather reflects it. Sasha’s betrayal is accompanied by a torrential downpour. The arrival of the Victorian era features clouds rolling over England. In contrast, nature can also reflect a joyful experience. The novel’s final scene represents her idyllic life. She brings Shel into her natural world. Feathers rain down, symbolizing her attainment of inspiration.

The color green features prominently throughout the novel. Its connection to nature helps the reader anticipate whether the color foreshadows a positive or challenging experience. His difficulty in describing green in his poetry during the Elizabethan area reveals Orlando’s immaturity and misunderstanding of nature. Orlando first sees Sasha in “greenish-coloured fur” (28). In his youthful naivety, he compares Sasha to green things “like an emerald; like the sun on a green hill which is yet clouded—like nothing he had seen or known in England” (34). Yet she is not these things; she is only like them. Orlando’s overly romanticized understanding of love that he has cultivated from reading poetry prevents him from seeing her true nature. The same is true for Nicholas Greene, whose name includes the color. Orlando hopes that Greene will be a mentor that helps him achieve greatness, but Greene does not understand the nature of poetry.

When Orlando needs his first moment of solitude, he goes to the oak tree. This location symbolizes a moment of self-reflection, inspired by nature. Queen Elizabeth also refers to Orlando as “the oak tree on which she leant her degradation” (20). This comparison suggests Orlando’s connection to nature and his constancy across time. Her return to the tree in the 20th century allows both Orlando and the reader to see a physical representation of Orlando’s growth over the course of the novel.

Orlando names his poem “The Oak Tree,” further drawing the connection between Orlando’s identity, the tree, and the poem. Over the course of the novel, the poem is revised and rewritten constantly, reflecting the character’s evolution. The poem can be carried with Orlando, while the tree cannot. The poem has changed from a thin, melodramatic work to a published, award-winning text. Orlando connects her identity to the text when finding the poem causes her to reflect on how she has changed from a “gloomy” boy “in love with death” to an “amorous and florid” woman to something “sprightly and satirical” (173). Orlando conflates herself with her work, describing her evolution in the different forms she uses, including prose, drama, and poetry. Both Orlando and the work remain “fundamentally the same” (173). Her desire to “plant” the poem at the base of the oak tree symbolizes Orlando returning her work to her inspiration: nature.