Virginia and Vita; 'Orlando: A Biography'

This is my first attempt at analysing and discussing a piece of literature outside of the confines of an essay (aside, I suppose, from the copious notes I made on Macbeth earlier this year). The copy of Orlando that I was reading was actually part of a collection I received for my birthday, which is the Wordsworth Classics hardback edition (published 2007), containing eight different pieces by Woolf. As such, my page number references are totally all over the place and I have developed an even more crooked back as a result of carrying one thousand pages of hardback book with me everywhere I go.

 

I have really enjoyed Orlando, even if at times it became a quite difficult read. I liked it, I think, because it’s so very different from the things I usually read. I’m a pretty dedicated to Realist literature, so this was bound to be an interesting, if slightly irritating, read.

  

Orlando was conceived by Woolf as a ‘writer’s holiday’ of sorts; an escape from more demanding work. It was published on October 11^th 1928, was Woolf’s sixth major novel and was a huge success. It was based upon the life of Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West, whose son, Nigel Nicolson, described the novel as, “the longest and most charming love-letter in literature”. Orlando is not overtly homosexual but the protagonist’s change from male to female certainly suggests a love that crosses all gender barriers. This was my first experience of Woolf’s work and I haven’t been disappointed; while the plot at times felt like trying to follow the paths of every spark in a bursting firework, the language is rich and ultimately a journey by itself. It is language with which Orlando himself is concerned; its difficulties, inadequacies but also its power.

 

Of course, the bizarre nature of the plot (Orlando ages only 36 years in a lifetime spanning three centuries) is to be expected in a Modernist piece of literature. According to one of my literary bibles, Studying the Novel by Jeremy Hawthorn, 'modernists question the ‘dogma of realism’ and search for alternatives to the well-made plot, the rounded and lifelike characters and the known world wholly accessible to reasoned and rational enquiry'. Indeed, there is nothing rational about the life of Orlando! Modernism typically focuses on the inner-self and the internal states and processes of the characters’ consciousness. Perhaps, then, this is the reason why at times I was utterly lost in this novel, confused about what was happening, where the action was taking place and even in which century it was taking place! For somebody who has for so long been committed to Realist texts, this has been a very strange, but ultimately rewarding, reading experience.

 

Despite Orlando being the product of the love between two women, I have found in my (admittedly limited) experience that there is a vacuum where the great lesbian literature ought to be found. Of course, we now have Sarah Waters, a hugely gifted researcher before we even begin to admire her books, and also I suppose Jeanette Winterson, although she’s not exactly my cup of tea. There are plenty more, I’m sure. However, I am not speaking about today; I mean if you examine the entire literary cannon. I could mention Sappho (and avoid the obvious joke that "it’s all Greek to me – HA!"). Then there’s Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness. But ultimately, there seems to be a void in works throughout history that deal openly with ‘Sapphic love’. Perhaps I am wrong? If anybody can think of any others, feel free to point them out to me!

 

But back to The Well of Loneliness, and this is where it starts to fit together somewhat. Many people are of the opinion that Orlando is, as Vita Sackville-West’s son expressed, a beautiful love letter from one woman to another. I was interested to discover that while Woolf's work is not at all overtly homosexual in content, Radclyffe Hall's really is. I do actually have The Well of Loneliness on my shelf but have yet to read it. Anyway, in my research conducted around my reading of Orlando, I discovered that just under a month after Orlando was first published, The Well of Loneliness was the subject of an obscenity trial (I must admit, I’m quite curious to read it now!). Many people were reluctant to testify in its defence; however both Virginia Woolf and E.M Forster were among those who stepped forward to act as witnesses, although they were not actually allowed by the court in the end. On the topic of those who did not agree to testify for the defence, Woolf is quoted as saying, “they generally put it down to the weak heart of a father, or a cousin who is about to have twins”. I found it interesting to see this scathing comment from a woman who never truly expressed her love for Vita Sackville-West through her writing. 

 

Sackville-West’s son, in describing his mother, said, “she fought for the right to love, men and women, rejecting the conventions that marriage demands exclusive love, and that women should love only men, and men only women. For this she was willing to give up everything… How could she regret that the knowledge of it should now reach the ears of a new generation, one infinitely more compassionate than her own”. Perhaps, then, it is a shame that Woolf never properly addressed her passionate love for Sackville-West in her writing. However, in Orlando, Woolf does make a comment on monogamy; ‘Orlando could only suppose that some new discovery had been made about the [human] race; that they were somehow stuck together, couple after couple, but who had made it, and when, she could not guess.’ – p. 517. 

 

Orlando’s switch from male to female opens up many interesting points. I found it very interesting that upon waking from yet another of his strange extended naps, he finds himself to now have the body of a woman. Orlando reacts cooly and, in fact, seems not to really pay much attention, or change her behaviour very much at all. It is only later, when confronted with society, and seeing the different way in which she is now treated, that her behaviour and feelings of self change. This is quite clear here: ‘It is a strange fact, but a true one, that up to this moment she had scarcely given her sex a thought… it was not until she felt the coil of skirts about her legs and the Captain offered, with the greatest politeness, to have an awning spread for her on deck, that she realised with a start the penalties and privileges of her position.'

 

Throughout the novel frustration and fascination with the inadequacies of language are expressed. Within the first few pages, Orlando discovers that, 'green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.' – p.404 I absolutely love this idea; that there are some things simply too complex or divine for words. Woolf does a good job nonetheless. Later, Orlando again finds that, 'Ransack the language as he might, words failed him. He wanted another landscape, another language.' – p.422 When Orlando begins writing, he struggles again with language, '… he now undertook to win immortality against the English language. Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them…' – p. 437. 

Woolf herself was a dire perfectionist, totally incapable of taking criticism (aren’t we all!). I found it interesting, from a socio-biographical viewpoint, to see Orlando suffering so immensely. In contrast with the earlier observation that words fail one when attempting to describe nature, Orlando later wonders, 'Why not simply say what one means and leave it? So he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue… looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods.' – p.446. The language here is truly luscious, and we see this contradiction in the uses and applications of language.

I did perhaps go off on a bit of a tangent here, but I began to wonder about the very nature of questioning language itself; the tool with which we analyse and identify the things around us, and, ultimately, define our very selves. To question the ways in which we do these things is a brave thing, I think, and likely to make one start to feel a bit mad.

 

This quotation is magical, 'But if sleep it was, of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from asking, are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures – trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life forever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harshness off and gilds them, even the ugliest and basest, with a lustre, an incandescence? Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to tikme lest it render us asunder? Are we so made thay we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?' – p. 431 These Great Sleeps that Orlando experiences are totally fascinating; I’d love to have a go at analysing them through different critical lenses. But I haven’t really had the time, so for now I’ll just have to allow that quote to float around my mind.

 

I have been entirely converted to Virginia Woolf’s writing, if not completely convinced of the merits of Modernism as a movement. It is only unfortunate that it has taken me twenty years to discover her. In a literary sense, Woolf defines her gender, if not her generation. There was so much more I wanted to mention (Woolf’s reasons for writing a ‘biography’, Orlando’s poem etc) but this will just have to do.; I hope I haven’t bored anybody too much!

 

Even though I didn’t quite feel her love for Vita Sackville-West in Orlando (perhaps only through my own immaturity), I would just like to end this post with something I discovered during my research. It is general knowledge that during her lifetime Virginia Woolf suffered from severe periods of depression. On March 28^th 1941, Woolf committed suicide  by filling her coat pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse. A portion of the River Ouse ran through the town in which I lived for some years as a teenager and the image of Virginia Woolf calmly walking into the water has haunted me for years (that, along with Javier doing the same thing in Les Misérables). I don’t think that the following really needs much further comment, so here is the letter she left for her husband Leonard, with whom she did not have a sexual relationship but whose soul was clearly very deeply entwined with her own.

 

'Dearest, I feel certain that I am going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and I can’t concentrate. So I am doing what seems the best thing to do. You have given me the greatest possible happiness. You have been in every way all that anyone could be. I don’t think two people could have been happier ‘til this terrible disease came. I can’t fight any longer. I know that I am spoiling your life, that without me you could work. And you will I know. You see I can’t even write this properly. I can’t read. What I want to say is I owe all the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that – everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me it would have been you. Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness. I can’t go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been. – V'