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Queer Classics
Virginia Woolf's "Orlando: A Biography"
by Ernie McLeod
Not far into Virginia Woolf's witty, gender-bending classic, Orlando, I came across a scene in which the time and day are given as “about six in the evening of the seventh of January.” Realizing it was the seventh of January, I glanced down at my watch: precisely six in the evening. Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? I am! I told my boyfriend if he saw me heading riverwards with rocks in my pockets, he'd know Virginia's ghost was hovering a tad too close.
Fortunately, the spookiness ended there, but in the past few years it does seem Woolf's ghost has been popping up everywhere. There have been film adaptations of Orlando (with Quentin Crisp as Queen Liz the First – how queer is that!) and Mrs. Dalloway, a play based on letters between Virginia and Vita Sackville-West (the woman who inspired Orlando), an acclaimed biography of Woolf by Hermione Lee, and two novels which pay homage to Woolf, one being Michael Cunningham's 1999 Pulitzer Prize winning (and queer-themed) The Hours. Add this to the heaps already written about Woolf and her milieu, and she rivals Jane Austen for posthumous overexposure.
As I noted in a previous Queer Classics, Orlando was published in 1928, the same year as Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. Though both books were milestone explorations of the meaning of gender, Orlando faced little of the venom or censorship that greeted Hall's work. (Woolf was among those who took the stand to defend The Well politically during the obscenity trial against it.) Unlike Hall's fierce – and notably humorless – polemic, Woolf's fictional fantasy was viewed, rightly, as a literary lark, its more subversive notions playfully wrapped in layers of linguistic levity, making it an easier pill for the reading public to swallow. They did; it was an immediate success.
Oddly enough, though Orlando is Woolf's queerest book, it's more straight-forward and accessible than some of her introspective, stream-of-consciousness styled novels. Conceived as a mock biography, Woolf realized that for the satire to work, the prose needed to be clear and relatively simple. Not that the result is simple: Spanning some 400 years, with a main character who abruptly changes sexes midway through, Orlando muses not only on the ambiguous nature of masculinity and femininity throughout time but on time itself, and art, and society, and love.
Elizabeth Bowen, in an afterword to one of the editions, described Orlando not as a novel but as a “novelist's holiday,” fantastic but psychologically sound.
Woolf's general biography is well-known. She was born in 1882, home-schooled as a child, likely sexually abused by a half-brother, greatly affected by her mother's death when she was in her teens, and then, later, by the deaths of her step-sister, father, and favorite brother. With her sister Vanessa she was at the center of an artistic circle (which had several gay members, including E.M. Forster) known as the Bloomsbury Group. In 1912 she married Leonard Woolf and in 1917 they formed Hogarth Press, which published writers such as T.S. Eliot and Katherine Mansfield along with Woolf's own works. She attempted suicide in 1913 and was plagued by depressions and debilitating headaches throughout her life until, in 1941 at age 59, distressed by world events, fearful of another breakdown and its effect on Leonard, she, famously, loaded up her pockets and walked into the River Ouse. (Woolf's drowning is very effectively imagined in The Hours.) The focus on her mental illnesses has sometimes obscured the brilliance of her life and of her writings. Of her writings, none is more buoyantly high-spirited than Orlando.
Introduced to Virginia in 1922, Vita Sackville-West, also a writer and also married, became Woolf's lover (or “possible lover,” or "romantic friend," depending on the information source). Whatever the exact nature of their relationship, Orlando was clearly based on Sackville-West, is dedicated to her, and included photographs of her dressed as Orlando. Nigel Nicolson, Sackville-West's son, described Orlando as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature,” and it's hard to disagree.
The book begins with Orlando as a sixteen year-old boy in the sixteenth century, slicing at the head of a Moor, and ends at the time the book was written with Orlando as a thirty-six year-old woman who's recently given birth and published the poetry manuscript she's been working on for centuries. As a man he has “a pair of the shapeliest legs that any Nobleman has ever stood upright upon.” When, in Constantinople, he stands naked and discovers he is now, in fact, a woman, the change is purely physical:
“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, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.”
Soon after the sudden switch, the text says: “But let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can.” A remark to be taken not quite in earnest, yet true to some extent. Woolf flits over the sexual implications of Orlando's plight, settling rather conventionally (or so it seems now) even as she skewers societal conventions. In other words, it's a queer book, but not as queer as it might have been. Other pleasures abound, however, hilariously clever descriptions of Victorian Age idiocies among them.
In A Room of One's Own Woolf writes: “It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly,” concluding that the ideal creative mind is an androgynous one. I couldn't agree more, and such a mind is on display throughout Woolf's great body of work, perhaps why, as Daphne Merkin says in her review of the Lee biography, “something about her writing has consistently threatened a certain kind of male reader.” Which can only be a good thing.
Ernie McLeod is a native Vermonter currently attempting a novel in Montreal. He can be reached by e-mail at mcleod@middlebury.edu
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