Orlando (3 page)

Despite the pain explored in
The Well of Loneliness
and the pleasure represented in
Orlando,
the two works have in common an assumption about gender, fostered by the theories of such
sexologists as Carpenter and Ellis, which radically contradicts Sigmund Freud’s famous assertion that ‘Anatomy is destiny’. Hall sees it as Stephen Gordon’s doom that her sexual destiny has been, as it were, detached from her anatomy, while Woolf defines Orlando’s ability to choose her own sexual destiny as a triumph over anatomy. But both at least implicitly protest against the notion that social or erotic gender roles are inevitably determined by biological sexuality. Thus, although Woolf thought
The Well of Loneliness
merely a ‘meritorious dull book’,
¹⁷
she offered to testify on its behalf when the work was seized and confiscated by government censors. Her defence of Hall’s project must have been impelled as much by a sense of kinship with the rejection of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ as it was by a commitment to freedom of speech.

Nor was Woolf alone among Bloomsbury intellectuals in her desire to disentangle anatomy from destiny. Quentin Bell notes that just before she was inspired by her romance with the Sapphic Vita Sackville-West to begin producing her own fantastic portrait of the artist as what we now call a transsexual, she had become fascinated by sex change at a social event where gender fluidity was virtually thematic:

… early in September [1927], Maynard and Lydia Keynes gave a party at Tilton. Jack… Sheppard enacted the part of an Italian
prima donna,
words and music being supplied by a gramophone. Someone had brought a newspaper cutting with them; it reproduced the photograph of a pretty young woman who had become a man, and this for the rest of the evening became Virginia’s main topic of conversation.
¹⁸

When Woolf decided, therefore, that the ‘writer’s holiday’ devoted to her friend Vita’s life as ‘Orlando, a young nobleman’ should be simultaneously ‘truthful’ and ‘fantastic’, she was quite accurately articulating a particular vision of gender as well as of history. For if it was ‘fantastic’ to conceive of Vita living for 300 years, from the age of Elizabeth to the ‘present day’, it was, in Woolf’s opinion, perfectly ‘truthful’ to imagine Vita changing her sex as easily and casually as she might change her clothes.

*

If Woolf’s romantic fascination with Vita and with Vita’s Sapphism was one of the major forces that compelled her to write
Orlando
with unprecedented speed and exhilaration, her long-standing interest in history and biography was another crucially influential factor. Her father, Leslie Stephen, had become the first editor of the prestigious
Dictionary of National Biography
in the year she was born, so she had been preoccupied with the personal but often ‘official’ genre of biography and its relationship to ‘official’ public historiography from early in her career. She was largely educated at home, moreover, and according to Quentin Bell, the studies her father prescribed for her in her adolescence had included most of the historical and biographical classics produced in the nineteenth century, among them Macaulay’s
History of England,
Carlyle’s
French Revolution,
Thomas Arnold’s
History of Rome,
Gibbon’s multi-volumed
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
and Froude’s
Life of Carlyle.
That most of these books centred on the lives and works of men, almost entirely omitting any discussion of the experiences and achievements of women, must have soon become irritating to a young proponent of women’s rights who was eventually to produce two of our century’s major feminist treatises –
A Room of One’s Own
(1929) and
Three Guineas
(1938).

Perhaps, therefore, as a gesture of rebellion against both paternal and patriarchal authority, some of Virginia Stephen’s first writings took shape as biographies and histories which drew upon the form in which her father and his associates worked, while not so subtly satirizing the Lives of Great Men that were the subjects of his dictionary, and which his friend Thomas Carlyle had, in
Heroes and Hero Worship,
proclaimed the substance of history itself. ‘Friendships Gallery’ and ‘Reminiscences’, her affectionate tributes to Violet Dickinson and Vanessa Bell, were in fact preceded by an attempted ‘History of Women’ (written in 1897 when she was just fifteen and unfortunately now lost) and later by a fanciful meditation on the past entitled ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ (1906), in which a woman historian named Rosamund Merridew discovers a set of documents purporting to
record the life and times of one Joan Martyn, a fifteenth-century diarist who is also a sort of prototype of the mythical ‘Judith Shakespeare’ whose tragic and monitory tale Woolf was to invent in
A Room of One’s Own.

As Woolf matured, these early efforts to revise and reimagine a past that had always been depicted as primarily masculine branched out into three major biographical/historical projects that consistently concerned her both as a fiction-writer and as an essayist. First, she frequently attempted to rewrite official history so as to provide what the French feminist theorist Héléne Cixous has named ‘the other history’ – the history not of ‘Great Men’ but of women and of, in Woolf’s own phrase, ‘the obscure’, the history that falls into the interstices between the chronicles of princes and kings so that, when told, it ‘breaks the sequence’ of recorded time. Second, she frequently sought to excavate and inspect
family
history – to investigate, that is, the chronicles of the person and the personal, the family romances, which stand behind both the Carlylean ‘Lives of Great Men’ and the Woolfian ‘Lives of the Obscure’. Third, in such crucial texts as
A Room of One’s Own
and
Three Guineas,
she produced meditations on education which simultaneously recounted her rejection of the ‘old’ history, her dream of a ‘new’ history, and her desire for a reengendered education – literally (from the Latin
educere
) a ‘leading into’ – in the new.

Woolf was not, of course, alone in her disaffection with traditional history. As early as 1818, her favourite novelist, Jane Austen, had created in
Northanger Abbey
a naive young heroine named Catherine Morland who voiced a discontent that would have been congenial to the youthful Virginia Stephen. History, Catherine complained, ‘tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome.’
¹⁹
In seeking to remedy this problem, moreover, Woolf’s own work significantly parallels (or in a few cases almost uncannily foreshadows) the research done by a range of real women historians in the early
twentieth century, some of whose writings – for instance, Eileen Power’s
Medieval People
(1924) – she would later read, but some of whose scholarship – for example, Mary Beard’s
Woman as a Force in History
(1946) – she would not live to know.

When the Bloomsbury novelist first began to address the ‘tiresomeness’ of conventional male-dominated history, such feminist projects were virtually non-existent, even in her circle of radical intellectuals. Indeed, as late as 1921, the American historian Arthur Schlesinger had observed that

If the silence of historians is taken to mean anything, it would appear that one half of our population have been negligible factors in our country’s history. Before accepting the truth of this assumption, the facts of our history need to be raked over from a new point of view. It should not be forgotten… that all of our great historians have been men and were likely therefore to be influenced by a sex interpretation of history all the more potent because unconscious.
²⁰

Though she may never have encountered Schlesinger’s statement, Woolf was to echo it shortly after completing
Orlando
: in
A Room of One’s Own
she remarked acerbically that ‘It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians’ [views of women] first, and the poets’ afterwards – a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet.’ To remedy the situation, she suggested that the students of Newnham and Girton ‘should re-write history’, for, she noted ironically, ‘it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided’.
²¹

Although she produced a number of essays on women’s past and on female literary traditions that attempted just such re-writings, Woolf’s most sustained attempts at historical revision paradoxically took the form of novels. In her view, as she explained in the ‘novel-essay’
The Pargiters,
which was the germ of her late novel-history
The Years
(1937), ‘it would be far easier to write history [than fiction but] that method of telling the truth seems to me so elementary, and so clumsy, that I prefer, where truth is
important, to write fiction.’
²²
And this was a preference to which, from the start of her writing career, she had consistently clung.

Thus, as a history of the transformed and transforming self which criticizes standard histories and biographies at the same time that it proposes the possibility of an alternative life,
Orlando
is not an unprecedented work in Woolf’s canon. In
The Voyage Out,
the arrogant St John Hirst finds it impossible to imagine that Rachel Vinrace has ‘reached the age of twenty-four without reading Gibbon’. In
Jacob’s Room
(1922), the form of biography encloses an absent subject – a mysterious young man ‘over whom’ we ‘hang vibrating’. In
To the Lighthouse,
when ‘Time Passes’, major public events are related only parenthetically while an unidentified narrator describes the assaults of nature on the Ramsays’ summer house, and then focuses on the restorative labours of two obscure cleaning women. Throughout these books (and others) Woolf persistently explored the mystifying relationship between the ineffable essence of human reality and the deceptive, usually patriarchal, substance of written records. By the time she came to compose her ‘love letter’ to Vita Sackville-West, therefore, she was ready not only for what she called ‘an escapade’ but also for the creation of what Leon Edel has seen as ‘a fully-fledged theory of biography’, formulated, now, not only in reaction to her father’s ideas but perhaps also in response to the theories of such modernist contemporaries as Lytton Strachey, the flamboyant debunker of
Eminent Victorians,
and Harold Nicolson, the author of a treatise on biography that was to be published in 1928 by her own Hogarth Press.
²³

In Edel’s view, it was in fact Strachey himself who helped spark Woolf’s desire to write a novel in the form of a parodic biography. Commenting on
Mrs. Dalloway,
Strachey proposed to Woolf that perhaps she should write a book with a ‘wilder and more fantastic’ structure than anything she had heretofore attempted, a ‘framework that admits of anything, like
Tristram Shandy’.
²⁴
But the nature of the history that Woolf did ‘take’ as both structure and subject was far more subversive than anything Strachey had in mind. For while, in such volumes as
Eminent
Victorians
and
Queen Victoria,
Strachey did ridicule the pomposities of the late nineteenth century, he still preserved the contours of traditional history and biography. Setting himself against the patriotic proprieties of the Victorian establishment, he almost always acquiesced in the subtler pieties of the masculinist Cambridge to which he himself remained loyal. Woolf, however, produced a new kind of record – an exuberant account of a life which, though apparently lived on the edge of patriarchal history, nevertheless appropriates and transforms that history.

Just as Woolf’s paradoxical decision that
Orlando
should be ‘truthful but fantastic’ accurately summarizes her vision of the gender transformation at the heart of the book, the phrase also offers an appropriate description of the narrative/historical enterprise she undertook as she embarked on this ‘writer’s holiday’. For the Lord/Lady Orlando is a nobleperson whom we first encounter as a young man in the sixteenth century, follow through the courts of Elizabeth I and Charles II to an ambassadorship in Turkey where
he
becomes a
she,
meet again living the life of a literary lady aristocrat in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, and finally see when she has become a prize-winning author in ‘the present moment’ of aeroplanes and motor-cars. Certainly, in the free-flying sweep and scope with which it wings over the gravities of history, this life goes beyond even the fantastic, Shandyan parameters Strachey prescribed. Yet at the same time, it is, as Woolf insisted, ‘truthful’ – truthful because it is true to Woolf’s ongoing effort to reimagine history, and truthful because it is true to her developing vision of the secret psychological realities that shape even the most liberated woman’s life.

Like Vita Sackville-West – and like Virginia Woolf herself – Orlando seems to have been born into a central and privileged position in society. At the same time, like both Woolf and Vita, he/she is always a kind of outsider, and even, from a conventional point of view, mad (
furioso
), like his/her literary ancestor, Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso.
²⁵
By rank a nobleman, he has ‘a liking for low company, especially for that of lettered people’, and even when
he is more or less adopted by the great Queen Elizabeth, he has little enthusiasm for the doings of the court. During the timeless time of the Great Frost, when London seems to hang suspended on the ice of an eternal moment, he falls in love with the androgynous Sasha, a Russian Princess for whom he ‘want[s] another landscape and another tongue’, a place and a language outside the public English history that is forming all around him. When Sasha sails away in the flood of time that suddenly breaks up the ice, Orlando retreats to his country estate to become a writer, but even in the world of letters he is still an outsider. Gulled and galled by the literary impresario Nick Greene, he is haunted but mystified by the enigmatic face of Shakespeare and feels that no battle in which his ancestors fought was ‘half so arduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against the English language’ (p. 57).