So you waited in the darkness. Suddenly he was struck in the face by a blow, light but heavy, on the side of the cheek. He was so full of anticipation that he gasped and put his hand on his sword. The blow was repeated a dozen times on the forehead and cheek. The dry frost had lasted so long that it took him a minute to realize that it was raindrops falling; the hits were the hits of the rain. At first they fell slowly, deliberately, one by one. But soon the six drops became sixty; then six hundred; then they threw themselves together in a constant stream of water. It was as if the hard, consolidated sky poured out in one profuse fountain. Within five minutes Orlando was soaked to the bone. (59-60)Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay In stark contrast to the widely accepted meaning of her other novels, such as Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, Virginia Woolf's Orlando has been met with mostly "critical ambivalence," to the point that seemingly exhaustive studies of the they ignore his anthology. Readers tend to dismiss it as little more than a six-chapter love letter, an extended series of inside jokes between Woolf and her lover, Vita Sackville-West, and while the point is moot, Woolf may have limited her ambition for Orlando to this type of tacit communication. However, an author's intention should not deter his critics from impartial analysis. If presumptuous writers can create irrelevant novels, then certainly a gifted author and thinker like Woolf could unconsciously produce a cerebral tome. Indeed, the prevailing wit in Orlando should not distract us from its fundamentally serious meditation on the misperception of reality, nor prevent the book from taking its rightful place within Woolf's impressive body of work and the wider canon of 20th century literature. seeing something deeper in Orlando tends to focus on his biting satire of the biographical genre and historical writing in general. Of course, Woolf is clearly making fun of the tendency to break long stretches of history into eras and eras, bounded occasionally by legitimately life-affecting events, but more often by arbitrary points such as the ends of centuries or the reigns of monarchs. Readers may find it easier to understand writing if they receive it in chunks, but the problem arises when those artificial subdivisions of time begin to affect how we perceive our ancestors and ourselves. Within literary circles, for example, writers are grouped into various isms: Woolf is traditionally considered a modernist, along with Joyce, Eliot, Faulkner, and others, but these designations can never be entirely accurate simply because no writer has a single ism. style, a vision of the world that he draws on without deviating. We compartmentalize them to facilitate discussion, but too often we let the discussion be influenced by the highly arbitrary way in which we have done so. In Orlando, Woolf demonstrates this common need most clearly through the biographer-narrator, who constantly expresses the desire to package his story in an orderly fashion, as well as the futility of attempting to organize a fundamentally chaotic existence like Orlando's, as that of anyone else. In response to Orlando's long sleep, during which the Turks rebelled, and his sex change, the biographer laments: "The darkness descends, and I really wish it were deeper! We would, we would almost have it in our hearts to exclaim, that were so deep that we could see nothing through its opacity! If we could here take the pen andwrite Finis to our work!" (133). Throughout the text, and particularly in the early chapters, before Orlando's consciousness begins to take control of the story in preparation for his epiphany in chapter six, the biographer seems desperately at search for impartial support for his narrative; he goes back to highlighting only some examples, "historians" (33, 149), "biologists and psychologists" (139), even the reader's interpretation of what he described (75). these words represent a system of categorization, in this case focusing on the designation of people as credible or not. Yet Orlando goes beyond academia to examine how all of Western civilization perceives the world , but rather encompasses space, identity, gender, and many other areas that we endlessly divide and subdivide. Indeed, as we will see, the very words I am using to express these thoughts – language itself – are understood discrete units to represent something that does not exist outside the interconnected continuum of existence. Even the word "interconnected" does not quite mean the correct concept, as it requires two distinct entities to be connected. Clearly, the tools at our disposal to understand the world are and have always been woefully inadequate. Orlando's story is that of anyone, everyone, incapable of experiencing reality in its truest form.I. Compartmentalization During his time as ambassador to Turkey, Orlando reveals his acceptance of the conventional organization of space, the arbitrary transformation of continents into nations and of nations into discrete units of property. His very position indicates his position between two entities, primarily committed to strengthening the rule of his own government. The conscious act of connection, however, only intensifies the perceived separation between the two nations, for surely that which requires deliberate connection must lie far apart. Throughout his sojourn in the East, he remained constantly aware of the differences between that kingdom and his native England, observing that "nothing . . . could be less like the counties of Surrey and Kent or the cities of London and Tunbridge Wells" ( 121). While this dissimilarity is indisputable, Orlando's references to the names of specific tracts of English land suggest that he identifies a distinction in the very essence of the two regions, a disparity so fundamental that "Kent" could never bear a resemblance to "Constantinople." . rather than a simple variation in the customs and architecture of otherwise similar populations. Far from the orderly division of England into individual pieces of land, he sees the undeveloped Turkish countryside as a “wild panorama,” a vast range of undivided space in all directions (122). At this point in the novel, such a lack of organization produces wonder, but no happiness for Orlando. Indeed, when she flees with the gypsies after the revolution (political and sexual), Orlando discovers that, despite her initial adoption of their cultural practices, she is not suited to nomadic life. Even the gypsies realize this incompatibility, especially regarding his conception of space: Seen from the gypsy point of view, a duke... was nothing more than a profiteer or a thief who snatched lands and money from people they considered these valuable things. it was worth little, and he could think of nothing better to do than to build three hundred and sixty-five bedrooms when one was enough, and none was even better than one. (148)Orlando remains unable to forge a true bond with the gypsy company, imprisoned in isolation by his desire to facilitate ownershipand privacy, as well as simplifying an incomprehensibly messy world, fracturing it into a myriad of disconnected units. Even though her body is located next to Rustum's in a physical sense, the place she is in appears very different to her than to him. Over time --- centuries, as we will see ---- Orlando will come to understand the gypsy's belief that "all the earth is ours," but for now he remains unable to recognize the overall unity of her compartmentalized reality (148) The relationship of man with nature is the cause of further contention between Orlando and the gypsies, and we can understand this conflict also in light of their distinct ways of organizing the world. As Rustum and his band move nimbly through the world, with respect but without reverence for the natural world, Orlando is repeatedly fascinated by the wondrous sights: "They began to suspect that she had beliefs different from theirs, and the men and women elders believed it probable that she had fallen into the clutches of the most vile and cruel of all Gods, which is Nature." Woolf's term for this attraction, "the English disease," initially seems to suggest that those accustomed to the developed world become fascinated by a rural setting, "where Nature was much larger and more powerful" (143). By his own admission, however, this disparity in progress does not cause "illness" but rather only intensifies the symptoms of a pre-existing condition. The true origin lies in the English system of categorization of the world. Orlando and his compatriots erect a wall between themselves (civilization) and nature that does not exist for the gypsies, which produces a sense of amazement that can only be felt for something separate, something else. Indeed, even the language of the gypsies reflects their refusal to separate things into arbitrary classes; instead of "nice", they use something like "good to eat"---not exactly "tasty", which would contain a subjective value judgment, but simply "edible". Thus, while Orlando admires the Turkish landscape, residing there permanently would destabilize his conception of self and other. Orlando's house also evokes a second type of compartmentalization at work throughout the novel: that of time. As an obvious nod to the central position of time in the novel, Woolf describes the house as having 365 bedrooms and 52 staircases, linking it inextricably with the year. Although this method of dividing the calendar into days and weeks derives from a natural phenomenon, the 365 rotations of the Earth in each orbit around the sun, the obsession with counting such small intervals belongs to Western civilization. For those who live directly from the land, such as gypsies, the seasons would be enough. Even more significantly, however, Orlando recognizes the various “ages” through which he lives as distinct entities, just as the biographer does throughout the novel and most prominently at the end of chapter four: “All was darkness; doubt; everything was confusion." . The eighteenth century was over; the nineteenth century had begun" (226). As I mentioned earlier, this kind of rigid temporal division serves Woolf's parody well, calling to mind the "true" biographies that she undermines in Orlando, books that reflect the Western worldview that Orlando struggles to overcome. Until his final recognition (or reconnaissance), Orlando falls prey to the conventional compartmentalization of time, and therefore of his identity: «He retraced, as if it were an avenue of large buildings, the progress of his own ego along his own past» (175 ). Rather than a continuous flow of personal experiences, she remembers her life in pieces, apparently in the same way the biographer presents it to us. Later, immediately before listing the various components of Orlando, Woolfhe writes, "She had a great variety of selves to appeal to, far more than we were able to find space for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely represents six or seven people." themselves, while one person may well have thousands" (309). The following exhaustive list sheds light on Orlando's conception of who she has been and who she currently is, since this passage comes from the end of the novel and the beginning of her revelation. As we will see, she eventually comes to understand that these selves do not exist in her memory as representing distinct eras of her life, but rather in her current consciousness, having co-existed within her throughout all of her experiences2E For now, however , this personality inventory testifies to her prior perception of a temporally categorized existence. While Woolf mocks literary critics as she does biographers and historians, Orlando conceives of her writing career as a series of independent stylistic states. She had been a dark boy, in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid; and then she had been lively and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes drama. Yet despite all these changes, it had remained, he reflected, fundamentally the same. (237)The joke is clear, a condensation of the history of British literature, and I do not intend to sacrifice this reading in favor of my own. To be sure, Orlando works perfectly as a parody of the last four centuries of England, but this represents only a superficial aspect of the novel. Hidden in the modern chronicle of literary history lies the modernist concern with the tension between perception and reality, with the fundamental imperfection in the communication of experience. The caricature apparently refers only to academic types, who make a living by classifying the world in various ways, but the implications are much deeper. Woolf subtly suggests that Orlando, an amalgam of both sexes and centuries of human existence, shares the same impulse toward misconception, toward interpretive creation of our illusory reality. As Orlando reflects on the phases of his literary development, however, he notices a strange fact: despite everything, the fundamental aspects of his personality have persisted: "the same meditative and brooding attitude, the same love for animals and nature, the same passion for the countryside and the seasons" (237). He seems to be on the verge of an awakening here, as the essential identity of things he had thought were separate comes to the fore, but he soon succumbs to a faulty explanation of his feeling of stasis. The narrating biographer offers the following clarification: Orlando had naturally inclined herself to the Elizabethan spirit, to the spirit of the Restoration, to the spirit of the eighteenth century, and consequently had barely noticed the transition from one era to another. But the spirit of the nineteenth century was extremely antipathetic to her, and so it took her and broke her, and she was as conscious of her defeat at its hands as she had ever been before. (244)Yet we observe no fundamental change in Orlando's constitution as the 19th century began; the presence of a unified self against the spirit of an age therefore implies that she has retained that ability, untapped as it has been, throughout her life. Indeed, the novel depicts her struggle to choose between many different identities, none of which she is "disliked", and reaches her resolution only when she comes to recognize the futility of that decision. At this point in the novel, however, that epilogue remains a chapter to come, and Orlando ignores his previous awareness of stability across time intervals in favor of erratainterpretation of his biographer. The 19th-century spirit mentioned in the previous paragraph, the marriage convention, provides a clear introduction to the third spectrum that Orlando compartmentalizes for much of the novel: gender. Unlike his conceptions of space and time, which become less compartmentalized as the novel progresses, Orlando's initially unaltered reaction to his sex change demonstrates an acceptance of an amalgamated identity that fades before its ultimate restoration. At first he simply does not pay attention to the new body and maintains his own behavior patterns. The narrator even hints at the epiphany to come, using third-person plural pronouns to describe the transformed Orlando before bowing "for the sake of convention" and adopting the masculine singular version (138). Indeed, the theme of gender does not arise again until her voyage back to England, when she spends much of the voyage at sea comparing her current femininity to her previous state. After a period of confusion---"she seemed to waver; she was a man; she was a woman" (158)---she comes to proudly submit to her new gender: "Praise God that I am a woman!" (160). Much of his contemplation at this stage centers on the culturally defined role of man. feminine, as she struggles to fit into a new compartment, previously seen only from the outside. Her first days as a woman in England begin the transformation, and soon after, despite her biographer's ambiguous descriptions of her gender, Woolf's voice screams above her narrator, perhaps --- Orlando comes to take on women: "His modesty regarding his writing, his vanity regarding his person, his fears for his safety all seem to suggest that what was said in a short time ago that there was no change in Orlando the man and Orlando the woman, ceased to be entirely true" (187). He has begun to perceive the world in a different way, from a new perspective that he believes requires these feelings. Despite its apparent metamorphosis, however, Orlando maintains some characteristics that indicate a continuing gender unity within it, although it continually ignores it in favor of compartmentalization. Not least is her sexual orientation: "Although she herself was a woman, she was still a woman who loved; and if the awareness of being of the same sex had any effect, it was to accelerate and deepen those feelings." that she had as a man" (161). Orlando thinks of Sasha even now, and when she later falls in love with Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, it is partly because he reminds her so much of a woman. Likewise, he wonders where she is “positive that you are not a man,” reinforcing our position that Orlando remained fundamentally the same (258) Despite the mounting evidence, however, and despite the masculine characteristics of his behavior --- “He could drink with the best and popular games of chance. She rode well and led six horses at a gallop over London Bridge" (189) --- -refuses to accept her multifaceted sexuality. Instead, she thinks to herself about her engagement to Shelmerdine: "I am a woman,...a real woman, finally" (253). Neither the destabilization of gender boundaries nor her romantic happiness can distract her from the need to compartmentalize her universe into well-defined categories, even when those categories are so clearly collapsing around her. Perhaps the best example of Orlando's refusal to recognize his evident ambiguity comes after his first interaction with the group of prostitutes. In that world in male clothes, those of his youth, he continues the disguise even in contextsmore formal. Yet despite the narrator's assertion that the dress makes her look, feel, and speak like a man, while rediscovering the social norm of masculinity, Orlando actually remains entirely aware of the gender she "should" be. In Nell's room, on the verge of consummating her lesbian impulses, she gives in: "Orlando could bear it no longer. In the strangest torment of anger, mirth, and pity she threw off all disguise and admitted that she was a woman" (217). Over time, however, as she finds comfort in the male dress, she learns to accept her attraction for other women, exploring it with the help of her costume: "For the probity of the trousers she exchanged the seductiveness of the petticoats and enjoyed the 'love of both sexes equally' (221). In any case, just as she later realizes that her engagement to an effeminate man strengthened her femininity, here too Orlando believes she has only strengthened her compartmentalized identity by appeasing secretly her other aspects. The reader must be savvy enough to distrust her, to recognize the intrinsic masculine quality that she harbors but refuses to outwardly acknowledge.II. Futility Throughout her centuries of life, the central activity that dominates Orlando's life is the creation of literature, be it poetry, prose or drama. Woolf repeatedly hints at the transcendent nature of writing, as Orlando seems to use it in an attempt to overcome simplistic compartmentalization and achieve a harmonious interrelationship with the world. After Orlando's transformation, for example, she retains her essence, her distinctive understanding and experience, partly because of her initial act as a woman: "First of all, she carefully examined the cards on the table; she took those that seemed written in poetry, and hid them in his bosom" (139-40). The unity in time discussed above depends on the constancy of Orlando's behavior, and certainly writing represents a significant activity that he repeatedly enjoys during the "stages" of her life. Later, one morning immediately after her return to England, she begins to write again, thinking back to the sensation she felt the previous night of being "confounded as usual by the multitude of things that require an explanation and leave their message behind no hint of their meaning." on the mind" (176). Lost in a labyrinth of "things" - in this case, particularly her dueling perceptions of England and Turkey, discrete units that form a subdivided interpretation of the world - she puts pen to paper in a futile attempt to resolve the clashes between sections of his memory and consciousness. Woolf compares this apparent breakdown of cognitive boundaries to a love affair between Orlando's self and his reality. At the end of the novel, as he contemplates abandoning "The Oak" forever, he thinks to himself: "What could have been more secret, more slow and more like the relationship between lovers, than the stammering answer he had given to all these questions? " years to the old humming song of the woods?" (325). In this context, the transformation of the phrase "Life and a lover" (185) into "Life, a lover" (186) takes on a deeper meaning, indicating a unconscious recognition that life is her lover, that she seeks not two things but a stronger connection with one of them: a coalescence of desire that foreshadows her imminent epiphany. Orlando's discovery of her eventual fiancé does not happen, it cannot happen until she understands her synergistic relationship with the figurative lover. Indeed, that first meeting with Shelmerdine occurs a few pages after she declares, “I am nature's bride” (248). she is confident that she can commit to a man regarding her literary pursuits: “If one still desired, more thananything else in the world, writing poetry, would marriage have been? He had his doubts" (264). Keeping Orlando's ambiguous gender in mind, even the physical aspect of writing becomes romantic, resembling the sexual consummation of courtship: "he dipped his pen in ink and wrote" (185). At Similarly, Woolf links the poem with religion, further accentuating its transcendent quality. As Orlando sails back up the Thames towards London, for example, he glimpses a "vast cathedral rising among a tangle of white spiers", which the biographer tells us "it suggests the forehead of a poet" (164). The connection, however, goes beyond this sort of metaphorical similarity, in the minds of the Turkish shepherds: they had met an English gentleman on the top of the mountain and had heard him praying to his God. It was thought to be Orlando himself, and his prayer was, no doubt, a poem recited aloud, for it was known that he still carried with him, in the bosom of his cloak, a highly carved manuscript, and the servants, listening at the door; , they heard the ambassador singing something in a strange sing-song voice when he was alone. (124)This replacement of Christian practice with poetry occurs in the novel; the question of what God replaces for Orlando is answered later, when the gypsies fear that he has deified nature. Both interpretations of Orlando's relationship with the world—whether we call them lovers or God and believer—emphasize her attempts to transcend the boundaries between herself and her surroundings, between the compartments of her perceived reality, through writing. Upon his return to England, Orlando recognizes his own heresy as he leafs through his old prayer book: "'I am losing some illusions,' he said, closing Queen Mary's book, 'perhaps to gain others'" (174). The second admission, that of his potential new illusions, foreshadows the final failure of writing to synthesize the world. Indeed, language itself is a system of categorizing the world, translating a continuum of experience into discrete units: words, sentences, chapters, and so on. As he explores nature with the gypsies, rather than simply experiencing the overwhelming views, he uses metaphor to compare "the hills to the ramparts... the flowers to be enameled and the grass to worn Turkish carpets. The trees were withered witches and the sheep they were gray boulders. Everything, in fact, was something else" (143). The traditional understanding of metaphor, of course, would suggest that this kind of linguistic feat serves to bring together concepts and objects in our perception, but metaphor relies on a perpetual awareness of the fundamental difference between things. We believe this is not the case, and so we are intrigued when a writer points out the similarities between the two, but they still remain essentially compartmentalized, as they are simply by virtue of their designations as “this” and “that.” ' The gypsies recognize him: «Here is someone who does not do something for the sake of doing it, nor seeks to see; here is someone who believes neither in sheepskins nor in baskets; but he sees… something else” (146). ). What she sees, of course, is akin to an entry in a library card catalog, something that allows her to file away the sheepskin and the basket in the appropriate compartment within her interpretation of the world. As already then, when he complained about the incompatibility between "green in nature" and "green in literature", here too Orlando falls prey to the inevitable detachment between words and referents of the real world. The biographer also describes the limits of language to describe the world as it is: "The most ordinary expressions do, for no expression does; therefore the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which he can'tbe written" (253). Indeed, if the highest purpose of poetry is to create a true interpretation of reality, then it should be created not through writing but through direct sensory experience. Therefore, in the example presented earlier, in which Orlando writes in an attempt to resolve the internal conflict between divergent perceptions, his self-undermining effort paradoxically relies on a system of associating discrete signifiers with real-world referents to unite the various meanings within his; consciousness. Likewise, when the new woman Orlando's first act is to recover "The Oak Tree," it serves to perpetuate her old interpretations of the world as I have suggested, but that interpretation is fraught with compartmentalization he act of writing tends to separate Orlando from her current reality in a very literal sense, as she flees from the outside world into the confines of her own thought: "When the party was at its height and her guests were at their revels, she was inclined to retreat alone in his private room" (112). Even temporally, writing can never capture the experience of the present moment, but at most (and imperfectly) the moment that has just passed, already divided into the appropriate compartments of the poet's memory. It is no wonder, then, that after reflection Orlando decides that "the letter S is the serpent in the poet's Eden" and that "the present participle is the Devil himself" (173). Both the letter S and the suffix ing transform non-committal infinitive verbs into their present tense forms, a linguistic paradox of the first order.III. EpiphanyAt several points in the novel, Orlando states that she feels somewhat disillusioned, as if her eyes have been opened to the imperfection of her perception. Although she normally remains misguided, these moments foreshadow her eventual epiphany, as she becomes increasingly aware of her misinterpretation of the world. The first occurs when Orlando is still a man, a boy to be honest, after Nick Greene betrays him with a ferocious pamphlet. Orlando childishly denounces all human society: There were only two things left in which he now trusted: dogs and nature; a greyhound and a rose bush. The world, in all its variety, life in all its complexity, had been reduced to this. Dogs and a bush were everything. Then, feeling free from a vast mountain of illusions, and consequently very naked, he called his dogs and walked across the park. (97)This passage represents the last stone in the wall between civilization and nature that will cause Orlando so many problems with the gypsies. However, the "illusion" of human loyalty that he perceives originates from the misdeed of one man, and thus the categorization of the natural world as good and society as evil is overly simplistic. Although his previous naivety was also a kind of illusion, Orlando now creates an alternative fantasy, based on the unfounded assumption of a disconnected world. The biographer later offers a contradictory justification for this behavior: "Illusions are the most precious and necessary of all things... but since it is known that illusions are destroyed by conflict with reality, therefore no true happiness, no true ingenuity, no real depth is tolerated where illusion prevails” (199-200). This absurd notion that the “most precious of all things” prevents one from achieving “true happiness” infects Orlando for much of the novel, while succumbs to a series of misperceptions. More correct disillusionment takes place in chapter four, when the woman Orlando walks along a long London street accompanied by Alexander Pope. Illuminated by lamps placed two hundred meters away, the long passage alternates long periods of darkness to