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Orlando
Book Review by Leila Alam
"I'm sick to death of this particular self. I want another."
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Virginia Woolf’s Orlando is no ordinary book. It is perhaps the weirdest and most imaginative piece of fiction I have read in months. It chronicles the life of the eponymous protagonist Orlando, who changes sex from male to female and lives for over 400 years. As soon as you begin reading, you are caught in a labyrinth of stories. Although Orlando never dies, in every period and in every century, his skin changes and he is reborn; having donned multiple contrasting personalities before reaching the present. Orlando is sometimes a man, sometimes a woman, a gypsy, a poet, an aristocrat, an ambassador, a recluse—he is always fluid, the only constant possessed by his character being change itself.
The book opens while Orlando is still young—a teenage nobleman in the court of Queen Elizabeth. We follow him as he communes with nature and writes prolifically. He has lovers of both/ambiguous sexes, and adventures with Russians, Turks, and gypsies.
At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Constantinople, awakes to find that he is now a woman. The sex change gives Woolf a perfect opportunity to critique the nuances of gender roles within society during the 18th, 19th and 20th century.
"He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets peeled Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess — he was a woman."
Woolf does not explain the sex change, it is treated as an entirely natural altercation. The three sisters Chastity, Purity and Modesty oversee Orlando during the beautiful transformation and Orlando awakes to find his body completely different. The nonchalance with which this subject is touched upon reveals that for Orlando, gender and sex is only a detail in his/her personhood— no more important than height or weight. I want to acknowledge here in my humble review how brilliant Woolf was for writing so bravely on a subject that still, in 2022, is such a taboo to our society.
“Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness.”
The reflections made by Orlando right after becoming a woman are undeniably my favourite part of the book. Her comparisons between the genders and her efforts in relearning how to act and think have a subtle but delightful touch of sarcasm to them. Orlando must readjust her behaviour not only because of her changed sex but also because of shifting societal norms that change completely every half century.
“His form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace… Orlando had become a woman… But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatsoever to alter their identity. Throughout the story, the main focus seems to lie on the contrast of the sexes.
Woolf subtly exposes these differences and speaks of a "gender neutrality" affirming that there is a male and female side in every human being irrespective of sex, and varying in degree. When Orlando wakes up as a woman, she feels no difference or any awkwardness; but, it is only when she finally must confront society as a woman, that she feels the change most acutely.
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Thus Woolf hints that the inward self of man and woman are more or less similar, and it is the society's rules of conduct that make them different and categorise them into different genders. The novel also mocks “compulsory heterosexuality” and challenges homophobia in an age decades before common society would come to accept same-sex love and nearly a century before the law would. Rather than making explicit statements about censorship like so many famous authors have done, Woolf chooses instead to tease and taunt the censor on the topic with her literary magic wand. Consider this seemingly simple, infinitely evocative passage:
“As all Orlando’s loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man.”
It would be misleading if I were to conclude this review without mentioning Woolf’s inspiration for this literary masterpiece, for it is useless to tell the story of "Orlando", without telling the story of another. Woolf did not write this book for her readers; she wrote it for Vita. Vita Sackville-West was a writer, gardener, and fellow member of the London group of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Set. She and Woolf were lovers for over ten years. It was this relationship which inspired Orlando, a novel which Sackville-West's son, Nigel Nicolson, later described as 'the longest and most charming love letter in literature.' The entire novel is a fictionalised history of Vita Sackville-West, of an imagined past life she lived under the guise of Orlando several centuries before she met Woolf. When viewed under this lense, you can spot countless homages to Vita. My case and point:
“For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.”
I had such a fun time reading Orlando. The word "fun" was something I never imagined attributing to a work of Virginia Woolf. But certainly, Orlando is the most entertaining work of hers. It is also a book I will never stop singing praises of, it's not often that one finds books written a hundred years ago that manage to discuss such radical feminist and transgender themes. For me, the main message of Orlando is this: be true to yourself, regardless of externally defined labels. This applies as much to the genre-defying book itself, as to Orlando the person. Labels can be useful, but they should only ever be descriptive, not prescriptive.