Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography

TABLE OF
CONTENTS
NOTE TO THE READER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
CONTEXTS
“THE LONGEST AND MOST CHARMING LOVE LETTER IN LITERATURE”:
ORLANDO AS A ROMAN À CLEF
A LOVE AFFAIR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
“VITA FREE AND EASY, ALWAYS GIVING ME GREAT PLEASURE TO WATCH.”
(D3 146) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
ORLANDO: “AN ESCAPADE”, “A WRITERS HOLIDAY”
AN OVERVIEW OF WOOLF’S CAREER AND OEUVRE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29
A MODERNIST “ART OF BIOGRAPHY” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
ORLANDO AS “A NEW HISTORY OF ENGLAND”?
A FEW HISTORICAL AND LITERARY LANDMARKS
CHAPTER I: FROM THE REIGN OF QUEEN ELIZABETH TO JAMES I:
THE “RENAISSANCE SPIRIT” (O 173) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
The end of the Elizabethan reign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
King James I and the Great Frost of the early seventeenth century . 50
CHAPTER II: ORLANDO RETIRES FROM COURT
(THE “RESTORATION SPIRIT” O 173) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
CHAPTER III: “ORLANDO AS AMBASSADOR” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
CHAPTER IV: ORLANDO’S RETURN TO ENGLAND AS A WOMAN:
“THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPIRIT” (O 176) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
CHAPTER V: “THE SPIRIT OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
WAS ANTIPATHETIC TO HER IN THE EXTREME” (O 176) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
CHAPTER VI: FROM THE LATE VICTORIAN ERA
TO THE “PRESENT MOMENT” (O 213) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68

ANALYSIS
MAN, WOMAN, GENDER AND SEXUAL DIFFERENCE IN ORLANDO
ORLANDO: SEXUAL DIFFERENCE OR GENDER IDENTITY? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
A new approach to the question of sexual difference
in the early days of the twentieth century . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Orlando across genders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
The comedy of sexual difference . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84
ORLANDO’S BODY: CLOTHES, PERFORMANCE
OR A NEW KIND OF TRANS-VESTITE? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Clothes as a form of disguise? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90
Clothing as performance, and perhaps performativity . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Nakedness and fragmentation
as ways of questioning fixed identity roles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
ORLANDO’S METAMORPHOSIS: A POETICS OF TRANSFORMATION . . . . . . 101
Non fixity as the new real . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
In celebration of hybridity and androgyny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
ORLANDO AND THE BODY OF A WOMAN:
FEMINISM AND THE POLITICS OF SEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108
“[T]IME HAS PASSED OVER ME” (O 217):
TIME AND TEMPORALITY IN ORLANDO
WOOLF THE ICONOCLAST: TURNING HISTORY INTO FICTION,
AND FICTION INTO HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
DEALING WITH COLONIAL HISTORY IN ORLANDO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
“[T]HE FLESH & BLOOD OF THESE SHADOWS”:
REVIVING THE FOSSILS OF HISTORY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130
CLOCKWORK TIME AND “THE SPIRIT OF THE AGE”:
EXPERIENCING THE PRESENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
RESISTING THE END: THE NARRATIVE TEMPORALITY OF ORLANDO . . . . 145

THE FABRICATION AND “VACILLATION” (O 133) OF SPACE IN ORLANDO
ORLANDO’S ZIG-ZAG MOVEMENTS AND THE MODERNIST PLOT . . . . . . . 156
Orlando’s voyages out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 156
Orlando’s body and the definition of space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160
Orlando’s escapades: trespassing as the affirmation of liberty . . . 162
ORLANDO’S “MENTAL LANDSCAPE” AND THE LANDSCAPES OF ORLANDO . 165
“By the hazard of fancy”: Orlando’s solipsistic creation of space . 165
An ever-shifting landscape as the site of temporal change . . . . . . 169
The fragmentation of places and the mosaic of space . . . . . . . . . . 172
BETWEEN “GRANITE AND RAINBOW”:
THE ARTIFICIAL RE-CREATION OF PLACES IN ORLANDO . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176
Domes and bubbles: Constantinople as the floating city . . . . . . . . 177
The ice city of the Frost Fair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
An ambivalent “love letter” to London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184
THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY: ORLANDO’S PLACES TO WRITE . . . . . . . . 185
A dual paradigm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Blurring the lines: the house as
“a town ringing with men at work” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Houses and places to write . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
The countryside and Orlando’s love of nature:
Englishness revisited . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190
A literary London, a writerly London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 192
GENERIC HYBRIDITY: REJUVENATING THE WRITING OF LIFE
UNDOING GENRES: DESTABILISING GENERIC HIERARCHY . . . . . . . . . . . 197
The Canon: “Purity” discarded . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
Poets as critics and critics as poets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206
Playing with genres . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
NOTIONS OF HYBRIDITY AND IMPURITY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Literary subversions: making use of pastiche and satire . . . . . . . . 217
Marketplace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
BIOGRAPHY AND LIFE-WRITING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
Mock biography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225
Life and writing: the vitality of a new literary form . . . . . . . . . . . 230

THE LIFE OF ORLANDO:
HOW THE BOOK CONTINUES TO INSPIRE OTHER WORKS
THE BODY AND THE MIND IN ARTS OF PERFORMANCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
The body as manifestation of the mind . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237
The body unveiled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239
ORLANDO AS A FILM ICON FOR TRANS- AND HOMOSEXUAL RIGHTS . . . . 241
Orlando, ma biographie politique . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
Orlando by Sally Potter (1992):
a trans-gender stance against 1990s homophobia . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244
FURTHER CONNECTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
“IT WAS TIME TO MAKE AN END.” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .251
TOOLBOX
GLOSSARY
LITERARY TERMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
HISTORICAL REFERENCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259
GENERAL VOCABULARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
Virginia Woolf’s works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263
Other primary sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
SECONDARY SOURCES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265

Nicolas Pierre Boileau, agrégé d'anglais, est professeur de littérature de langue anglaise à l'Université d'Aix-Marseille. Spécialiste du modernisme et des échos de l'écriture woolfienne dans la littérature des XXe et XXIe siècles, il travaille sur le genre et les sexualités, ainsi que dans le domaine des humanités médicales.
Juliana Lopoukhine, agrégée d'anglais, est maîtresse de conférences en littérature britannique à Sorbonne Université. Elle est spécialiste du modernisme ainsi que des littératures postcoloniales et diasporiques. Ses travaux de recherche sont dédiés aux liens entre esthétique et politique en littérature, notamment chez Virginia Woolf ou Jean Rhys.

“This is a book, I think I have said before, which I write after tea.
[…] & am launched somewhat furtively but with all the more passion
upon Orlando: A Biography” (D3 161), Woolf writes on October 22nd,
1927, before confessing that she is “in the thick of the greatest rapture
known to [her]” (D3 161). The mode of such a declaration, it must be
said, is hardly consistent with Woolf’s reputation in France, where she
has often been associated with the writing of grief and mourning, as well
as with the exploration of subjectivity and the representation of
the human mind. Perhaps it is the resounding success of To the
Lighthouse (1927), which was awarded the 1928 Prix Fémina, that
had a long-lasting imprint on the reception of her work: together with
Mrs Dalloway (1925) and The Waves (1931), the novels that made
Virginia Woolf’s name in France engage with a number of themes linked
to death, war, and formalistic experimentations, notably as she is
associated with a specific narrative tool called stream of consciousness*.
Students are often keen to observe this form of representation of the
mind’s processes, defined by free association and free indirect speech,
as emblematic of Modernism*. Although it is undebatable that Woolf is
a canonical writer on both sides of the Channel, as the publication of her
oeuvre in the prestigious collection “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade” in 2012
testifies, one may say that her reception in France continues to label her
as a writer who engages with subjectivity and the expression of
nostalgia, and whose writing is steeped in the Modernist crisis. She is
hailed for her capacity to create characters that are ghostly presences,
as shown by the loosely connected monologues that form part of The
Waves, a novel considered as the acme of her novelistic experimentations.
With the gradual publication of her unabridged journals in
five volumes, Woolf became more than a fiction writer and was revealed
as a complex, often moody woman, with deep-rooted anxiety partly
stemming from her frustration at having been advised against having
children, or perhaps the complex romantic relationships she was
involved in, or her literary ambitions and the strain that the publication
process inflicted upon her. All of this has consecrated her as the mad
artist, afflicted with depression–an image that her suicide in 1941,

fictionalised in the popular novel by Michael Cunningham and the
subsequent film adaptation by Stephen Daldry, The Hours, only
confirmed.
Despite such deep-rooted characterisation, Virginia Woolf is
undoubtedly considered a classic author of English literature in France if
one considers that five of her novels have already appeared on the
syllabus of the agrégation externe. Unsurprisingly, Mrs Dalloway was
the first novel on the syllabus in 1947, followed by To the Lighthouse in
1955, The Years in 1985 and The Waves in 1996. Yet this provides only
a partial vision of Virginia Woolf’s multi-faceted work: in fact, Woolf
scholars in France and abroad will no doubt rejoice that, this year,
it is Orlando that has been selected. Needless to say, its comedic mood
has been the very reason why Orlando has been shunned by French intellectuals
and critics in France and abroad for a long time: the novel is at
odds with the general tone* that Woolf is associated with. The novel
does not fit in with the classic understanding of her Modernist works,
and it shows Woolf as a writer of comedy and farce–Woolf herself
relished in “the pure delight of this farce” (A Writer’s Diary 115,
October 22nd, 1927)–offering instead a novel that is impossible to
classify, and defies all norms and conventions. In addition, there is a
whiff of scandal attached to the novel which not only depicts the change
of sex* of the main character but also what was then considered to be
indecent practices and relationships with which the narrator plays.
The autobiographical dimension of the text, addressed to her then lover
Vita Sackville-West when both women were married, has also
contributed to undervaluing the text. Orlando belongs in another
category of writing that Woolf herself is seen disparaging on many
occasions in her private correspondence and diary, but which constitutes
a fair portion of her work: French scholars like Christine Reynier,
Florian Reviron-Piégay or Chantal Delourme, but also British scholars
like Rachel Bowlby, Hermione Lee or Jane Goldman, have long worked
on this other facet of Woolf’s work, taking non-serious texts (such as her
essays, short-stories and this novel) very seriously. Re-reading Orlando
today is an invitation to rediscover works such as Between the Acts,
Flush, or Woolf’s many essays, and shift the narrative of Woolf’s life and
work away from the obsession with internal monologue, bereavement,
madness and sadness. Woolf could be as scathing as she was melancholy,
as mundane and worldly as she was interested in the intellect and
politics.