77 pages • 2 hours read
Virginia WoolfOrlando
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1928A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The Construction and Performance of Gender
Woolf uses the fluid depiction of gender to imply that a binary understanding of gender is not based in scientific fact; rather, it is a social construction. The change in sex does not affect Orlando's core character; they still are passionate about poetry, nature, and love. Over time, Orlando becomes more mature, but they remain fundamentally the same person. Woolf considers the impact of social gender expectations on a person. For men, she considers the expectations for adventure, fame, and social power. For women, she considers the expectations regarding marriage, children, and domestic work. Women “must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled” (115), even if that is not their natural state. Orlando’s transformation highlights how these expectations are artificially constructed. Orlando is frustrated with how long it takes a woman to get ready: hairdressing “alone will take an hour;” “looking in the looking-glass, another hour;” then “staying and lacing;” “washing and powdering;” and putting on their dresses (116). Woolf implies that these expectations are ridiculous and unneeded.
These expectations are also culturally dependent. When Orlando lives with the Romani people, her gender does not play a large role in her daily life. Her clothing is unisex, and she does not feel that her actions are much changed. Yet when Orlando leaves to return to England, she feels she must dress herself in women’s clothes. On the journey, she immediately feels the effects of England’s gender expectations. Orlando’s feminine clothing causes her to become “more modest, as women are, of her brains, and a little more vain, as women are,” (138) as what she wears informs expectations of how she is to perform. Across genders, Orlando’s legs are their “chiefest beauties” (115). While women may compliment his legs while he is man, only when she is dressed as a woman do they cause a sailor to “start so violently that he missed his footing” (116). Orlando’s legs have not changed, but the reaction changes. Harry’s shifting performance of gender and his differing treatment of Orlando based on their gender also reflect the cultural construction of gender. As Harriet, he acts subordinate and dresses Orlando in their armor. Yet as Harry, he fashions himself as a suitable husband and patronizes her intelligence. Orlando has remained essentially the same, but their changed gender results in different treatment.
Woolf also uses Orlando’s shifting gender to consider the performance of sexuality. When he first sees Sasha, her ambiguous dress intrigues him. When he believes that she is likely a boy, he is only curious. But when he recognizes that she is a woman, he falls instantly in love, trembling and turning hot and cold. Orlando is influenced by social expectations around heterosexuality. Only when he discovers that their relationship would meet social norms does he act on it. Orlando’s meeting with Nell also reveals the performativity of sexuality. When Nell assumes that Orlando is a man, she treats it as a sexual transaction. When Orlando reveals herself to be a woman, Nell relaxes and shares her story with her. Clothing dictates the characters’ interactions and sexual encounters.
The Nonlinear Passage of Time
The passage of time in the novel is not the traditionally linear timeline of a biography. Despite the fact that the subject is still alive, the biographer looks back on Orlando’s life as if it were a completely finished event in the past. Throughout the novel, there are multiple anachronisms, like Orlando’s reference to a Keats poem despite him not having been born yet, and her desire to meet Dryden even though he died a decade earlier. These moments suggest that memory of time is imperfect.
Time’s role in growth and maturation is complex. Specifics of time are almost irrelevant, as exact dates are sparsely given throughout the text. Orlando only ages 20 years over the course of the novel’s 350 years. Woolf uses Greene’s lack of change over the same amount of time to make it clear that the passage of time does not equate to growth and maturation. Yet time influences the characters, as Orlando’s struggles to fit in with the Victorian age reflect. The striking of the clock is often used to indicate an impending revelation and transformation.
The ending of the novel features the compression of time. As the clock strikes, Orlando is transported to different moments in her memory, informed by her physical location. The book ends right at the moment of the novel’s publication. By ending the novel in the present moment, Woolf puts the reader in the position of Orlando, as neither Orlando or the reader are protected by the past on one side and the future on the other. The reader is left wondering “what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment?” (219). Like Orlando, the reader is left to pursue life, love, and poetry on their own.
The Connection between Subjectivity and Truth
The magical and subjective qualities of the novel initially appear at odds with the book’s claim to be a biography. While the biographer claims only to be reporting facts, the magical physical transformation is far from a realistic event. At the moment of Orlando’s transformation, the trumpeters blow once, declaring “THE TRUTH!” (102). This declaration prompts her to wake, suggesting that this magical transformation has revealed a truth. Yet the biographer makes it clear that this is only the truth of the moment, as it is equally true that Orlando was a man before then. Woolf argues that a person’s essence can only be captured by using imagination and creativity. In the biography’s pursuit of objective truth, Orlando’s multitudes of selves cannot be fully described. The biographer is left “[c]hoosing then, only those selves we have found room for” in the narrative “since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand” (226). Thus, an objective truth is impossible to attain.
The biographer’s reliance on objective truth, Woolf argues, is a failure. Collecting and recording facts relies on memory, which Woolf shows as imperfect and subjective. The biographer edits his information, as they often allude to changes that they are making. When describing the ledgers for Orlando’s renovation expenses, he omits the cost and includes only a small section of the entire “ninety-nine pages” (180) that catalog the process. The biographer further indicates the constructed nature of the biography when they interject after Orlando’s transformation to clarify a change in pronouns. When they state, “His memory,” the biographer immediately injects “but in the future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his,’ and ‘she’ for ‘he,’” before continuing with “her memory then’ (103). While that omission can be explained as necessary in the writing process, the biographer makes more subjective edits. After Orlando swears for the first time as a woman, the biographer states that “we must omit that word; it was disrespectful in the extreme and passing strange on a lady’s lips” (115). By editing, omitting, and interjecting, the biographer reveals that objective truth is impossible. Instead, one should seek to live as Orlando does. Orlando’s search for truth throughout the novel reflects Woolf’s understanding of truth. Orlando finds truth in their poetry, an openly subjective art form.
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