ASSIGNMENT
Paper No : 106, The 20th Century Literature : 1900 to WW1
Topic : Orlando - A Biography by Virginia Woolf’s
Name : Sangita Kantariya
Roll No : 19
Enrollment No : 4069206420210015
Semester : MA- 02
Year : 2022- 23
Submitted By : S.B.Gardi,
Department of English, MKBU
Orlando - A Biography : Virginia Woolf
Brief Introduction about Author
Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) is recognised as one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century. she was also a prolific writer of essays, diaries, letters and biographies. Both in style and subject matter, Woolf’s work captures the fast-changing world in which she was working, from transformations in gender roles, sexuality and class to technologies such as cars, airplanes and cinema. Influenced by seminal writers and artists of the period such as Marcel Proust, Igor Stravinsky and the Post-Impressionists, Woolf’s work explores the key motifs of modernism, including the subconscious, time, perception, the city and the impact of war. Her ‘stream of consciousness’ technique enabled her to portray the interior lives of her characters and to depict the montage-like imprint of memory.
While she is best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), Woolf also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of power. A fine stylist, she experimented with several forms of biographical writing, composed painterly short fictions, and sent to her friends and family a lifetime of brilliant letters.
Bloomsbury Group
Virginia and Vanessa moved from Kensington to Bloomsbury in 1904 after the death of their father, the celebrated writer and critic, Sir Leslie Stephen.The Bloomsbury Group are often better known for their unconventional personalities and lifestyles than for their art. What was it about them that outraged people at the time and still fascinates people today?
They came from wealthy backgrounds, which had given them social advantages and self-confidence. But they were linked by a spirit of rebellion against what they saw as the unnecessary conventions, restraints and double standards of their parents’ generation. They wanted freedom to develop their own ideas and lifestyles. They were politically liberal. They also had liberal ideas about sex, which meant there were often complicated relationships and affairs between the various members of the Bloomsbury circle.
Virginia Woolf’s Writing Style
Virginia Woolf was one of the first writers of the modernist period to write with the stylistic features of Interior Monologue and Stream of Consciousness. Because of her connection in helping to develop and refine these styles, readers and literary critics a like can pull these styles from most of her works throughout her life as a writer.
Interior Monologue
Woolf commonly employs the techniques of interior monologue to distinguish between the public exterior and the private interior. Her use of this technique takes the reader from the expected view of outside the main character into their mind. She allows the reader to witness the innermost thoughts of her characters and to pull the story and character development from them. This style differs from any that had been seen before because all other writers focus their stories on the growth of characters from interpersonal interaction and external motivation. Woolf specifically wrote in the style of Indirect Interior Monologue, which means that she never let the characters thoughts flow without specific organisation and control.
Stream of Consciousness
As one of the pioneers of this literary technique, Woolf can be seen as one of the best examples of Stream of Consciousness writing. Stream of Consciousness is seen as a subset of the Interior Monologue, as it is seen from inside the characters mind, but it builds on the main premise. This style of writing is most known for it's flow of thoughts and images that do not seem to have any particular coherence to them). Stream of Consciousness works like the human thought process, the words and images move in a way that mimics this process and allows the writer to manipulate not only the conscious thought of their readers, but also the unconscious thought. This style of writing focuses more on the emotional and psychological processes within the character than the interaction with the physical world or with other characters.
Orlando - A Biography
Orlando, Virginia Woolf's sixth major novel, is a fantastic historical biography, which spans almost 400 years in the lifetime of its protagonist. The novel was conceived as a "writer's holiday" from more structured and demanding novels. Woolf allowed neither time nor gender to constrain her writing. The protagonist, Orlando, ages only thirty-six years and changes gender from man to woman. This pseudo-biography satirizes more traditional Victorian biographies that emphasize facts and truth in their subjects' lives. Although Orlando may have been intended to be a satire or a holiday, it touches on important issues of gender, self-knowledge, and truth with Virginia Woolf's signature poetic style.
Woolf’s writing style in Orlando
Woolf tells the story of Orlando in the third person and from Orlando's perspective. Occasionally Woolf will talk to the reader directly as the author. Woolf does this to draw the reader away from the narrative and show how much the writer knows about her subject. As a result, when reading about Orlando's life, it is difficult for the reader not to draw comparisons with the author's own personality. Woolf is writing about a person finding her voice as an author and a women but in what she presents as a man's world. In that way, Virginia Woolf uses Orlando to directly communicate her own thoughts about writing and life. In particular, she articulates that men and women are both and share attributes. She suggests to be truly happy you have to find the right .
Theme of Orlando
Writing and Literature
Virginia Woolf was an important artistic contributor to the modernist movement of the 20th century, which sought to break from traditional forms of artistic expression. Modernists like Woolf believed that traditional forms of writing—be it poetry, prose, and even biography—were a poor fit for their new and changing world. The early 20th century saw sweeping changes politically, socially, and economically—and since the world was changing, modernists figured, so should art. Woolf’s Orlando is one such attempt to critique antiquated literary traditions and produce more innovative work. Woolf’s form is highly experimental, and she does not conform to any one single genre or category. While declaring itself a biography (narrated from the perspective of a fictional biographer), Orlando is also a biting critique of literature and writing. The subject, Orlando, is a poet, and the biographer repeatedly interrupts the novel to comment on their own writing. Throughout Orlando’s unbelievable life, in which he changes gender after a curiously long sleep and lives over 400 years, Orlando encounters several past literary “giants,” including William Shakespeare and Jonathan Swift. Woolf makes countless references to other literary works, and while she generally respects and pays homage to the past, she pokes fun at both herself and other writers. Through Woolf’s meta commentary and her satirical depiction of writing and literature in Orlando, she effectively argues that there is a pressing need for new forms of literary expression.
Woolf also pokes fun at Nicholas Greene, a famous writer and critic, who is stubbornly resistant to change and whose opinions hypocritically change with the times, in order to critique those who oppose contemporary literature in favor of glorifying more traditional forms. When Orlando first meets Greene during the 16th century, Greene slams his fist on the table and proclaims, “the art of poetry is dead in England.” Greene does not appreciate the new forms practiced by contemporary Elizabethan writers like Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe and prefers those from the classical age, which reflects a resistance to change and a reverence for traditional forms. Orlando again meets Greene during the 19th century. “Ah! My dear lady,” Greene says to Orlando, “the great days of literature are over. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson—those were the giants. Dryden, Pope, Addison—those were the heroes.” Of course, these are the very same poets Greene criticized so harshly during their own time, which again reflects an overall resistance to new literary forms and a reliance on the old, but it also suggests that literary criticism is hypocritical and essentially meaningless.
This resistance to new literary forms is also seen in Greene’s criticism of Orlando’s own work. When Greene reads Orlando’s original play, The Death of Hercules, during the 16th century, he is exceedingly harsh and claims the play is “wordy and bombastic in the extreme.” However, when Greene later reads Orlando’s poem, “The Oak Tree,” during the 19th century, Greene insists it must be published. “The Oak Tree” reminds him of poets like Addison, and, Greene says, “thankfully,” it has “no trace” of “the modern spirit.” Greene is accepting of Orlando’s work only when it harkens to the form and “spirit” of past writers, not when it is original and experimental.
Orlando is deeply affected by Greene’s poor review of his play, and he slips into an overwhelming depression that lasts for decades. Orlando finally snaps out of his despair when he decides to reject Greene’s opinions. “Good, bad, or indifferent,” Orlando says, “I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself.” Later, as a woman in Victorian England, Orlando is happy that Greene approves of her poem, but his approval has much less influence on her. She questions why critics make writers feel that they “must always, always write like somebody else,” and this appears to be Woolf’s overarching point. After all, Orlando is nothing like the biographies—or novels, for that matter—that came before it, and it is through this “wordy and bombastic” book that Woolf suggests literature and writing, particularly the writing of biographies, is in need of reimagining for a new and changing age.
Subjectivity, Truth, and Biography
In Orlando, Virginia Woolf implies that biographies of the past have failed to effectively capture a subject because they rely too heavily on what is perceived as objective fact. The book’s subject, Orlando, is a fictional character based upon Woolf’s real-life friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Orlando’s unbelievable life spans some 400 years. Orlando is also a history of English literature, and it was written specifically with Woolf’s elite circle of friends (each of them writers and artists), known as the Bloomsbury Group, in mind. Woolf has an incredible connection to Orlando—personally, culturally, and artistically—which serves to underscore her opinion that remaining completely objective when writing a biography is impossible. Furthermore, Woolf suggests that collecting and recording facts, such as is done in the writing of biographies, is difficult because to do so relies (at least in part) on another person’s memories, which are highly fragmented and specific to each individual. Thus, with the surreal biography, Orlando, narrated by a fictional biographer, Woolf at once argues the unreliability of memory, while claiming simultaneously that time and truth are ultimately subjective. A biography should, instead, capture the overall essence of its subject rather than attempt to make a strict account of specific events.
Woolf repeatedly draws attention to time’s subjectivity in Orlando, which, she asserts, makes the biographer’s job difficult. The narrator notes that Time (with a capital “T”) makes “animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality,” but it “has no such simple effect upon the mind.” An hour, the narrator says, “may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length”; or, “an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.” The perception of time, then, is decidedly individual and circumstantial, not universal. Traditional biographies rely on a universal understanding of time, but the passing of time in Orlando is nearly imperceptible and would appear absent all together if not for the narrator’s mention of it. “Time passes” specifically as Orlando perceives it, not based on the clock. The narrator claims “the task of estimating the length of human life (of the animals’ we presume not to speak) is beyond our capacity.” Furthermore, “it would be no exaggeration to say” that Orlando can go “out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man of fifty-five at least.” Time, especially that of years, is incredibly subjective in Orlando. Individual moments have far more influence on Orlando than decades or even centuries, and as such, the novel often belabors a single minute but glosses over a hundred years. The narrator contends that “the true length of a person’s life […] is always a matter of some dispute. Indeed, it is a difficult business—this time keeping.” By the end of the biography, Orlando has lived over 400 years; however, Woolf does not mean to imply that people are capable of such longevity. Her point, on the contrary, is that Orlando is ultimately a mixture of everyone and everything that has come before her, such as her ancestors and the literature of the past. To adequately capture Orlando’s life, Woolf therefore argues, it is necessary to capture all that Orlando considers her life to be.
Woolf also interrogates truth in Orlando, which she does by way of Orlando’s search for truth through various means. However, Orlando ultimately learns that truth, like time, isn’t so concrete. Orlando chiefly looks for truth in poetry but is “despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is,” and falls “into a deep dejection.” Truth, it seems, can’t be found. Like time, Truth in Orlando is not universal, and it is not something that can be pointed to and written down, such as in a traditional biography or historical account. Truth is elusive and frequently changes, much like Woolf’s unconventional writing style. Orlando’s search for truth continues in the drawing room of Lady R., where the brightest and most famous writers and minds of the age gather. Lady R.’s intellectual gatherings have the reputation of hosting “genius,” and Orlando hopes to discover truth and “profundities.” But nothing profound is ever said and Orlando leaves bored. Truth, in this case, is an “illusion,” and at times “does not exist” at all. As such, factual truth is sparse in Orlando, and Woolf instead relies on Orlando’s personal truth, which, she argues, more adequately captures the essence of Orlando’s life. The most prominent, and perhaps most puzzling, moment of truth within Orlando is the point in which Orlando first wakes having transformed from a man into a woman. “THE TRUTH!” the narrator declares in capital letters. “Truth! Truth! Truth!” the narrator repeats. “[Orlando] is a woman.” Many in the novel set out to prove that Orlando was a woman all along, or that she is indeed not a woman now, but the fact remains that Orlando had been a man and is now a woman. Actual truth, Woolf implies, is often unbelievable and not accepted across the board.
Gender and Society
In one of the more surprising moments of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, Orlando wakes after an inexplicable coma-like sleep of seven days to find himself transformed into a woman. Orlando is the fictional representation of Woolf’s own friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Orlando’s seemingly easy transition from male to female reflects Woolf and, presumably, Sackville-West’s, own understanding of gender. Both Woolf and Sackville-West were members of the Bloomsbury Group, an elite group of writers and artists who questioned and openly resisted traditional assumptions of gender and sexuality. Orlando—or Vita, for all intents and purposes—possesses both male and female qualities and has affairs with both men and women, completely disrupting popular gender stereotypes along the way. People are perceived differently in Orlando, and, Woolf implies, in broader society as well, based on what gender they are; however, many of the characters in the novel are androgynous and their receptions change with their assumed genders. Through this rather fluid depiction of gender in Orlando, Woolf implies that the dichotomous male-versus-female understanding of gender is merely a social construction, and that no one person is wholly one gender or the other.
Identity and Transformation
Orlando, the protagonist and title character of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, undergoes profound personal and physical changes in the novel, and he lives in a world that likewise drastically transforms. When the narrator first introduces Orlando, he is a young boy of 16 in Elizabeth I’s court, sometime around the mid-1670s. By the end of the novel, however, Orlando is a 36-year-old woman who gets out of her car on “the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight.” Orlando lives through incredible changes of time and place, and even mysteriously changes gender. “What the future might bring,” the narrator declares, “Heaven only knew. Change was incessant, and change perhaps would never cease.” Despite the changes in both Orlando and the world, however, the person Orlando is deep down remains consistent. He begins the novel as a poet who deeply loves nature and women, and that is exactly who Orlando is at the close of the novel as well. In this vein, Woolf effectively argues that regardless of social changes and personal transformations, who one is—that is to say, one’s identity—remains the same.
Thank you
No comments:
Post a Comment