Source of book: I own this
I may have read a Virginia Woolf short story way back in the day. Or not, because I really do not remember.
Whatever the case, I had not read any of her novels until this one.
I selected Orlando as my read for Pride Month, but it took a while due to other books I was working on as well as a pair of delightful backpacking trips I took with friends and family last month. Not complaining, but it did cut into my reading a bit.
You can read my list of books by LGBTQ+ authors here.
Virginia Woolf was an interesting character in the history of literature. She was one of the pioneers of the “stream of consciousness” technique of writing, along with Joyce and Proust and a few others. They all appear to have developed their own versions simultaneously, drawing on the same precursors stretching all the way back (arguably) to Tristram Shandy, which is probably the most “before its time” novel ever written.
Orlando doesn’t really have much stream of consciousness in it, though. It is written in the third person voice, although very much from Orlando’s perspective. That said, it has a dream-like quality throughout, and Orlando’s life is not exactly realistic or of our world as it exists.
The book is considered a feminist work (and I find it to be so) as well as a look at gender fluidity, gender essentialism, and perhaps even the experience of being transgender.
Virginia Woolf was a lesbian, although she was devoted to the man she married. The two of them probably intended the marriage to be a Lavender Marriage - a way to disguise the fact that both of them were homosexual.
Woolf had a series of affairs with women, but her longest and most serious partnership was with Vita Sackville-West, who was used as the model for Orlando in this book.
Before I get into that more, I do want to mention a musical connection. Earlier this year, I got to play a work by Ethel Smyth, a composer who was also a Suffragist activist, who spent time in prison for her efforts. I’ll reproduce the (unofficial) program notes I wrote for the occasion at the bottom of this post.
I did want to note that Smyth had a huge crush on Woolf, but the love was unrequited. At the time, Woolf described Smyth’s affections as "like being caught by a giant crab.” The two eventually became friends, however.
Vita Sackville-West was quite the character. Born wealthy, she had a freedom of action few women did in her day. She was likely bisexual, marrying and then divorcing, and having affairs with both men and women. She had an androgynous style, and acted in ways more culturally affiliated with males.
Virginia Woolf took incidents from Sackville-West’s life loosely to use in Orlando, as well as patterning the character after her.
The basic plot is this: Orlando, a wealthy young aristocrat in the age of Queen Elizabeth I, engages in a number of adventures and affairs as a young man, before ending up as an ambassador in Turkey. When the capitol is overrun in a war, he falls into a coma for a week, and awakens to find himself changed into a woman.
From then on, Orlando lives her life as a woman - she is still the same person, and has the same inherited wealth, personality, and intelligence, but people treat her differently.
After an episode of living with gypsies, she returns to England. From there, she has a fling with a poet, has a child by a seaman she marries briefly before he returns to sailing around the Cape (and it is implied, either perishes or is doomed to sail forever…at least until he reappears right at the end parachuting out of an airplane), and lives well into the early 20th Century still young and vital.
As I noted, everything has a weird, dreamlike quality. The world swirls around Orlando, yet he/she remains the same. History progresses, from horseback to Victorian taxies to motor vehicles. Politics change. Literature changes.
What stays the same, it seems, are the opinions of the critics, who always think the previous era was the golden one, and all the new works are trash. (This trope is really funny, actually - Woolf is spot-on with her characterization of the equally eternal critic as experienced by the eternal Orlando.)
Throughout the book, another constant is “The Oak Tree,” a poem that Orlando continues to write up until the last chapter, when it is finally published.
I’m not even sure how to hint at the psychological and sociological ground the book covers. It touches on male-female relationships through several centuries and in different cultures. It looks back at the male gaze. It philosophizes about gender roles, gender stereotypes, and sexism. It satirizes literary culture, from hack poets to critics to literary salon culture. It looks at cultural change and the response to it.
Most of all, though, it challenges the reader to consider gender as essentially fluid and irrelevant to character. For Orlando, their gender is the least important thing about them, and they switch at will between presenting as male and as female. It is the prejudice of those around them that makes others respond differently depending on presentation.
I hope that description gives at least an idea. As usual, I jotted down a few lines that I liked, in this case, some that are more random than specific to the plot.
For example, a way in which I resemble Orlando:
Perhaps there is a kinship among qualities; one draws another along with it; and the biographer should here call attention to the fact that this clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude. Having stumbled over a chest, Orlando naturally loved solitary places, vast views, and to feel himself for ever and ever and ever alone.
There is a weird passage near the beginning where Orlando is having an affair with a Russian princess, modeled loosely on one of Sackville-West’s early loves. At one point, he speculates that he has heard that “the women of Muscovy wear beards and the men are covered with fur from the waist down.” This is a rather amusing example of the “exotic” way that humans tend to imagine foreigners.
There is another bit which is weirdly philosophical that I want to quote.
Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?
And, there is the satire of writers. Apparently, Woolf didn’t think much of Sackville-West’s writing, as much as she admired her otherwise. But also, this is a great spoof of the way the rich have often eschewed learning.
A fine gentleman like that, they said, had no need of books. Let him leave books, they said, to the palsied or the dying. But worse was yet to come. For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. And while this is bad enough in a poor man, whose only property is a chair and table set beneath a leaky roof - for he has not much to lose, after all - the plight of a rich man, who has houses and cattle, maidservants, asses and linen, and yet writes books, is pitiable in the extreme.
Orlando accepts their change of sex without any drama, indeed, without even questioning it. The description is fascinating.
We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman - there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, thought it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits proved, practically the same. His memory - but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say “her” for “his, and “she” for “he” - her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle.
He, they, she. The transition proceeds. Unfortunately for Orlando, the transition to female is not without some significant costs. For example, he used to dally with women without consequence; now she must think of her sexual purity.
It was not caused, that is to say, simply and solely by the thought of her chastity and how she could preserve it. In normal circumstances a lovely young woman alone would have thought of nothing else; the whole edifice of female government is based on that foundation stone; chastity is their jewel, their centre piece, which they run mad to protect, and die when ravished of. But if one has been a man for thirty years or so, and an Ambassador into the bargain, if one has held a Queen in one’s arms and one or two other ladies, if report be true, of less exalted rank, if one has married a Rosina Pepita, and so on, one does not perhaps give such a very great start about that.
Soon after, in a related passage, Orlando nearly ends up causing the death of a sailor when she shows a [GASP!] bare ankle, distracting him.
“If the sight of my ankles means death to an honest fellow, who, no doubt, has a wife and family to support, I must, in all humanity, keep them covered,” Orlando thought. Yet her legs were among her chiefest beauties. And she fell to thinking what an odd pass we have come to when all a woman’s beauty has to be kept covered, lest a sailor may fall from a mast-head.
Yeah, this is all so silly. Yes, I wrote a series about this, inspired in significant part by my mother’s attempts to impose a detailed dress code on my wife. (Who was, at the time in her 30s and the mother of 5 children, not to mention a competent nurse and leader.) Woolf here pokes fun at the idea that men are so fragile that they literally die when they see female bodies.
There is another hilarious incident in the book. Orlando as a man first flees England because of the unwanted attention of a woman, the androgynous Archduchess Harriet. When Orlando returns to England as a woman, this person again reappears, this time as the male Archduke Harry. He is as slimy both times.
Orlando wishes he were a man again, so that he could just use his sword to ward off an unwanted man. Instead, she slips a toad down his shirt. Which is pretty great, actually.
In justice to her, it must be said that she would infinitely have preferred a rapier. Toads are clammy things to conceal about one’s person a whole morning. But if rapiers are forbidden, one must have recourse to toads. Moreover toads and laughter between them sometimes do what cold steel cannot. She laughed. The Archduke blushed. She laughed. The Archduke cursed. She laughed. The Archduke slammed the door.
I’ll end with another rapier-level bit of snark about society.
But Orlando was a woman - Lord Palmerston had proved it. And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman’s whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretense of writing and thinking and begin to think, at least of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk; and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window - all of which is, of course, the very stuff of live and the only possible subject for fiction.
Yeah, a woman can do whatever…as long as it is centered around a man. I am so done with that, as are a lot of women I know.
Orlando is definitely an unusual book, written in a distinct style. I do think perhaps I should explore some more Virginia Woolf.
***
Notes about Ethel Smyth:
I wrote the following for a concert I performed earlier this year. We played Smyth’s The Boatswain’s Mate Overture.
Who was Ethel Smyth? And what is a Boatswain’s Mate anyway? The answers to both of those questions are fascinating.
First, about Ethel Smyth. She was quite a multi-talented woman: an excellent pianist, a composer in multiple genres from symphonies to operas, a respected writer.
She was also an activist in the British Women’s Suffrage movement. In the 1910s, she participated in numerous protests, including one in which she, along with over 100 other women, were arrested and kept in jail for two months.
Her friend, the conductor (and feminist ally) Sir Thomas Beecham, went to visit her, he found the women marching around the prison quadrangle singing protest songs while Smyth conducted them with a toothbrush.
Smyth’s love life was every bit as colorful. She had a series of passionate affairs with women, both within the music world and the suffrage movement. The longest of these was with harpsichordist Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, whose life eventually was made into an opera, Violet, by Roger Scruton. Violet would eventually marry Gordon Woodhouse, and convince him to combine his name into a surname for both of them. It was an unconsummated marriage of convenience - he was likely gay as well.
Smyth never did marry, although she was engaged to Oscar Wilde’s brother Willie, but broke it off after a few weeks, likely realizing she would never be attracted to men.
In her 70s, she formed a rather violent crush on Virginia Woolf, who did not return her love. Woolf described the experience as "like being caught by a giant crab" - although the two eventually became friends.
Smyth’s involvement with the suffrage movement probably was influenced in part by the reception her music received. If she composed vigorous, rhythmic music, she was condemned for “lacking feminine charm.” When she composed more lyrical and introspective music, this was taken as proof that she was not as artistically capable as her male peers. Women just can’t win.
The Boatswain’s Mate was a short opera written by Smyth, and tells a comic story of the boatswain who tries to win the heart of the widow running the country inn. He convinces his mate to pretend to burgle the inn, so the boatswain can rush in and “save” the widow.
She has no interest in him, or in marriage, and, instead of playing the victim, she pretends to shoot the mate, to the boatswain’s horror. She sends him outside to dig a grave, but, overcome with remorse, he flags down and confesses to a passing policeman. Except that it turns out the “victim” is still very much alive, and all that has been lost is a bit of ego.
The overture draws from folk songs and f a prior Smyth composition, entitled March of the Women. It has a recurring march theme, interspersed with folk tunes, and nautical references. (Listen carefully for these.)
And, one might ask, “what is a boatswain?” The term “swain” goes back many centuries and can be found in various northern European languages. In fact, my own last name, Swanson, comes from the word. Someone in my ancestry was the “son of a swain.” The word can mean anything from a young man - that usage is in plenty of romantic era poetry - to its more technical use to describe a skilled laborer.
In nautical terms, a boatswain is the man in charge of the boat or ship. He supervises the workers who maintain the hull, decks, rigging, and sales. As such, he is one of the most important and knowledgeable persons on a ship. (Contrast the coxswain, who is in charge of steering the ship.)
The boatswain’s mate still exists as a position in the US Navy - and he is the one person on the ship who pretty much is expected to know everything. The jack of all trades - and master of all.
No comments:
Post a Comment