Orlando: A Revolutionary Masterpiece
Analysis on “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf
It’s difficult to classify a novel like ‘Orlando’ (1928): is it a biography or a satire of biographies made in the Victorian age? is it historical fiction? just another work from the modernist era? what about a feminist novel? a masterpiece that defies gender roles and mocks the changing yet strictly imposed stereotypes in different periods? a book that dares to plunge into the mystifying waters of gender and identity to decipher its complex nature? a novel advanced for its time? or a love letter to Vita Sackville-West, Woolf’s lover for ten years?
Under such pressure to define it let’s conclude that it’s “all of the above”.
Silly me! I almost forgot to write the plot. Here we follow the adventures of Orlando’s life throughout centuries. Starting as a young nobleman member of the Elizabethan court and ending as a woman of the 20th century highly renowned for her poetry. Between these two extremes, we witness the ups and downs of Orlando — heartbroken due to a Russian princess, ambassador of Constantinople, suddenly a woman, giving in to the spirit of the Victorian era, — while the exquisite prose of the author achieves to immerse us into the stream of consciousness of our unconventional protagonist to illustrate the way in which the human mind and thoughts operate, breaking the boundaries of reality and letting the imagination run wild.
A Love Letter
Alright, as mentioned before, Vita Sackville-West inspired the novel — that’s easy to notice given the title of the original manuscript “Vita from Virginia”.
Both women were married to respectable upper-middle-class men of financial means: Virginia to Leonard Woolf, writer and publisher, and Vita to Harold Nicholson, a diplomat. On the bright side, Virginia and Vita had open marriages which allowed them to conduct other relationships — behind the public eye as expected.
Since the time they met in 1922, they grew closer together and their relationship would be the base of Orlando, the gender-switching, fervid protagonist. For instance, Orlando’s Elizabethan house is clearly Vita’s childhood home, the magnificent Knole House in Kent — its magnitude, paintings across the hallway, and the long genealogy are just some points that show the resemblance. Also Vita, as a woman, was unable to inherit Knole House due to being a woman. In parallel, Orlando becomes a woman and yet eventually regains her ancestral residence. It was Woolf’s attempt to, in a way, reclaim Vita’s childhood home. As Vita’s son Nigel Nicholson said, the novel was “the longest and most charming love letter in literature”.
Predominant Themes
Now, about the book, the key topics are the following:
Gender inequalities
Are men and women really that different? if so, why? what makes them so different from one another that the rules of the game we call life played in the arena known as society are clearly one-sided? When Orlando returns to England, he begins to live with the consequences of her sex change.
Starting with the way men treat her during her voyage and the new clothes to keep a “feminine” appearance to how all her properties and noble position are suddenly subject to lawsuits once she arrives in her homeland for being now a woman, Orlando finds herself (before himself) in a journey of awareness to the obligations and expectations women have to follow, in a society created and run by men, for men. In conclusion, the differences are not much as biological as they are societal.
“what fools they make of us — what fools we are!‟
Essential Identity
Despite being based on Vita, Orlando feels like an artifact from and for the future, a character who refuses to be bound by conventions and . . . does not present much internal change. Of course, he had first been a melancholic man and then a passionate one and finally a fierce woman but centuries have gone by, and, fundamentally, she remains the same. Orlando still has “the same brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same passion for the country and the seasons.”
In this line of reasoning, it can be said that one’s essential identity remains uniquely one’s own, untouched, and uninfluenced, by external factors.
“The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.”
Perception of time
Time is change. The passage of time tells us that things change and will keep changing and, usually, can’t be changed back. Orlando doesn’t live according to the steady, chronological rhythm of biological time. The novel shows the subjective perception of our understanding of time. The simple, linear movement from one moment in time to the next is not how time really works at the psychological or subjective level.
“Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that.”
Society & Class
In the novel, we get to see through Orlando’s experience how someone responds to different social pressures of different societies across centuries. This is particularly important in the 1800s during the Victorian era when marriage and monogamy were the spirits of the century.
We see the norms society puts forward depending on gender — how to act, what to wear, who to marry — and the shallowness of social life when Orlando starts to attend gatherings held by high-class women and intellectuals, realizing that, besides their appearances, they are ordinary people.
While dismantling the illusion of London society, Orlando decides not to surrender to its demands but instead negotiates with them to continue being who she is: free-spirited.
Final Thoughts
Witty, emotional, and non-conformist are the adjectives that first come to mind when someone asks me about this novel that doesn’t keep anything unlooked from the financial, educational, and cultural inequalities women face — as Orlando acquires a privileged dual perspective because of his gender-switching — to the essential identity each person has that goes beyond clothing or physical features.
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