Richard’s Life Blog

Richard Harrison Memphis writes…

Woolf’s Orlando is the memoir of one Orlando, who is a young nobleman, who is blessed with a life that lasts for many centuries, who changes genders, becoming a woman. I think the trans-iness of the novel is a response to the sexist politics of the early 20th Century, when women did not have rights. The magic of Orlando is that the main character switches genders. 

Woolf wrote this book in 1928, and their novel is aware of colonialism’s atrocities. Especially, the words “the filing of letters and forging of links and chains, binding the Empire together,” in the following quote: 

“our cigarette smoke, we see blaze up and salute the splendid fulfillment of our desires for a hat, for a boat, for a rat in a ditch; as once one saw blazing–such silly hops and skips the mind takes when it slops like this all over the saucer and the barrel-organ plays–saw blazing a fire in a field against minarets near Constantinople. Hail! natural desire! Hail! happiness! divine happiness! and pleasure of all sorts, flowers and win, though one fades and the other intoxicates; and half-crown tickets out of London on Sundays, and singing in a dark chapel hymns about death, and anything, anything that interrupts and confound the tapping of typewriters and filing of letters and forging of links and chains, binding the Empire together” (294).

Here, empire is links and chains, tools of bondage for citizens of commonwealth countries. Orlando is published approximately a century after abolition. Still, according to We Have To Talk About The British Empire podcast, a lot of violence was occurring at that time, all records of it being destroyed, as a rule of British intelligence. All documentation would be burned when the Brits left a colony, like in India, or in its African colonies.

However, this novel is little about colonialism and much about the fountain of youth. Nick Greene and Orlando both have unprecedentedly long lives. When Nick Greene rereads Orlando’s poem she keeps in her breast, he finally awards her poem an award for quality writing. Orlando had, centuries earlier, shown Nick Greene the poem, to which he responded by saying how bad her poetry was. It hurt Orlando to hear her poetry criticized, because she returned to the memory of that dismissal of her poetry again and again. So, the decision of Nick Greene’s to say the poem good after all, what is that about? Is this a reminder to never give two seconds of self-consciousness when someone says,”your writing is no good?” 

To me, this means that being able to conjure a real version of something from a long time ago is a marker of a good poem. The poem became good because it was amazing to Nick Greene that someone could write in the tongue of centuries before. To me, this is an order to write down an accurate vision of the present time and place where I live, put it away for ages, and bring it back to light later to show that things were like that at one point.

Woolf speaks to this point when she says, “when anybody says ‘How future ages will envy me’ it is safe to say that they are extremely uneasy at the present moment” (213). This modern life IS an uneasy experience for many of us. No doubt women living in a sexist society felt the challenge. Is Orlando a message in a bottle to readers of another time?