Virginia Woolf's Orlando is an experimental novel that explores and parodies many literary conventions. Written initially as a 'joke', it has come to be regarded as characteristic of 'high' modernism, in that it emerged in the late 1920s, when the modernist movement was considered to be in full maturity. Central to the project of inventing a modernist sensibility were concerns of the coming and the nature of this 'modernity', themes which Woolf self-consciously adopts as a subject for Orlando. So although the novel was conceived in a light-hearted vein, there is an underlying level of seriousness in Woolf's undertaking of it.
A fascination in how history is represented in literature forms a central part of Orlando. Woolf appears to have had an interest with the literary techniques and devices previous writers used to bring past epochs to life. In terms of form, Orlando takes the established genres of history and biography, and experiments with them on a grand scale. Woolf appears to have been profoundly dissatisfied with the methods that she had inherited from the Victorian and Edwardian writers employed in history and biography. This could be considered to indicate a greater discontent with the literary styles of the recent present in general in depicting the distant past. Woolf's intentions therefore are inextricably associated with the nature of time and consciousness, in a prose narrative.
In terms of genre, Orlando is very difficult to categorize. It was first conceived as a biography, and on initial acquaintance it would appear to be a biography, indicated mainly by the subtitle, however even some consideration of the title itself would call this into question. The name 'Orlando' itself sounds familiar, mainly on account of it featuring in several medieval poems and also as the name of the lover of the sexually ambiguous Rosalind in Shakespeare's As You Like It (1599-1600). The name is somewhat literary in its alluding to earlier works. Even the briefest of perusals would dispel any assumptions of Orlando being a biography, beginning with the implicit irony of the opening line: "HE - for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it" (1; p.13). There is generally no doubt as to the gender of a biographical subject therefore such a line is curiously redundant. Although the fact that Orlando changes sex halfw ay through the biography is also of note.
The character of Orlando is strongly identified with Vita Sackville-West, an aristocrat who was also a writer and Woolf's lover; she features in the photographic illustrations for the novel. Woolf had been eager to depict several of her friends as fictional characters in a story, a type of novel known as a roman-a-clef (literally, a story with a key). In the end however, only Vita remained as a potent influence on Orlando.
The narrative of Orlando spans almost four hundred years, beginning in the Elizabethan era and finishing in 1928, the year Woolf produced it. By incorporating Vita Sackville-West into its narrative structure, Woolf was essentially taking a figure from the present and applying them to the past. Orlando's loves broadly fictionalize many of Vita's real-life love affairs and her open marriage, however, perhaps more importantly; Orlando's house is modelled on Sackville-West's beloved family home, Knole, in Kent. The central setting of Woolf's novel is Orlando's house, a location which forms an essential part in the narrative. A key moment in the story is the lawsuit over Orlando's right to inherit her house, an event similar to Vita's own exclusion from inheriting Knole, due to the process of primogeniture.
The nature of Vita's presence in Orlando is also related to issues of class. Since the mid-eighteenth century, a type of biography and autobiography emerged which featured a middle-class writer effectively immortalizing themselves by entering into print - Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1781-8) is an example of this. Being of the aristocracy however, Vita wouldn't generally be regarded as being subject to the same biological/biographical time-clock as an author such as Rousseau; her class are generally regarded in terms of family lineage rather than a single person.
Woolf's dissatisfaction with the representation of 'the real' in Victorian biography is also echoed in her disdain for Edwardian realism, at least the kind of realist novels produced by authors such as Arnold Bennett. Her essay 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown' (1924) is generally read as an account of the move from Edwardian realism to 'high' modernism. She regarded the representational tools employed by Bennett and others as 'ugly', 'clumsy' and 'incongruous', overburdened with an obsessive interest in facts and details. She believed that Edwardian writers sacrificed the depiction of character in favour of imparting trivial information.
In its account of the preceding four hundred years, Orlando makes radical departures from the representational devices of Edwardian realists like Bennett. It isn't particularly interested in dates and facts, but instead sets out to establish Orlando within what could be termed the 'spirit of the age'. This raises all sorts of questions in regards to characterization; the most pressing being whether a character's consciousness is already preset or is determined by the period in which they live, a question particularly pertinent to a person who survives several historical epochs!
Woolf's portrayal of Orlando is largely derived from the literature of these times, turning history and biography into a pageant of literary fashions. For example, the Elizabethan era sees Orlando as dashing, enthusiastic and mildly androgynous. These attributes were supposed by modernists to pertain to Shakespearean drama. The Jacobean Orlando suffers from textbook melancholy while the Restoration Orlando becomes an ambassador within a narrative of Constantinople. Later in the text, Orlando will make his/her way through a series of narrative plots characteristic of each historical period. However when Orlando arrives at the present day (1928), Woolf depicts modern times as being more precarious and harder to inhabit than previous epochs, as there are no established narratives.
The concept of time clearly plays a significant role in Orlando as the nature of past, present and future are all addressed within the text. Virginia Woolf appears dissatisfied with her present and the prevailing modes of Victorian biography and Edwardian realism. Through an analysis of Orlando, the notion of the past is certainly questioned, an obvious point being that it covers an enormous area. Woolf seems to identify more with the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration eras than she does the Victorians. However, in the figures of Knole, and Vita Sackville-West, she also displays a fondness for the aristocracy. On the basis of these findings, it may be possible to conclude that certain opinions a writer may have about a specific subject contemporaneous to their time, might determine their views of some particular phenomena from the past.
Interested in reading more about Orlando? Then why not visit my website The Literary Index where you'll find links to many academic essays regarding Virginia Woolf Literary Criticism.
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