‘Love, the poet has said, is woman’s whole existence’: Orlando as an intertextual space for women, writing and literature.

Orlando acts a text that is a literary space where women and writing as a profession can be discussed. For Woolf, this text and the temporal space it occupies, has closest compositional genesis with her work A Room of One’s Own. Although much of her other work, including her short stories permeate around both texts. Orlando is a text which is also referential in its historical and contemporary literatures. Woolf utilises this to discuss ideas of gender, expectation and profession. This post considers these concerns, exploring Orlando as prism rather than a one dimensional shape.

Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own, establishes the fictional concept of Shakespeare’s sister Judith. Judith’s own creative and critical output is ignored in Elizabethan culture and Woolf determines this predisposition down to her sex and gender. At the beginning of Orlando, the figure of the Elizabethan Orlando is able to achieve literary success in sonnets and plays, because he can, simply by his sex and gender being identified as male. By historicising this dichotomy as a space where this creative and critical output can achieve success simply by the nature of one’s gender, Woolf is using this as a demonstration of the problems women face in terms of their own professional identity. As the figure of Orlando transcends historical periods and gender, the unfinished nature of the work The Oak Tree is constantly interrupted by the difficulties he/she faces by this gender shift. It is only when the novel reaches its conclusion in contemporary 1928, that Orlando feels able to write uninterrupted.

However, this freedom of purpose is not as simple as this. Orlando is still a woman who has the financial and social means to establish her aim of finishing her work. And, the assumption that this attempt is a fleeting and non-serious concern for women still has potent political and social currency in 1928. Towards the end of the novel it is reflected ‘Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and woman in the prime of her life, she will soon give over the pretence of writing and begin to think of a gamekeeper (as long as she thinks of a man, no one objects to a woman thinking’ (p.133). Whilst this is an indirect reference to D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it is a further permeation of what the text means in terms of women and writing. Placed at the end of the novel, it is a stoppage where Orlando and her profession can be examined and linked back to the beginning of the novel – and these same problems about gender, and professional purpose can be considered.

‘For masterpieces are not single and solitary births, they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common.’

A Room of One’s Own, p.68.

The literary inheritance that Orlando as text uses and what it seeks to provide to literature is an interesting space too. Woolf, who further establishes this later in AROO, as provided in the quote above makes use of this ‘thinking in common’ to achiever her own subtle aims. The use of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as previously mentioned, also acts as a contextual reference. The novel had recently been banned for its moral and sexual divergence from accepted norms, and Woolf is making sutble use of this and the societal contradictions it offers in the roles of women. Earlier in the novel, the parodic reversal the roles Jane and Rochester in Jane Eyre is used when Orlando meets her husband for the first time, when Orlando is found laying upon the moorland. Whilst this is seen as parodic, it acts as another illustration of what the text is seeking to achieve in terms of role reversal and gendered contradiction.  

Whilst the full potential and establishment of women and writing is never fully realised in Orlando, the text makes bold and innovative statements about the problems that surround that debate, one which Woolf would further strengthen and articulate throughout her literary and critical career. The text is an open space, and this has allowed it to interact and influence other texts in terms of gender construction and identity. Woolf ends the novel with ‘And the twelfth stroke of midnight sounded; the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty-Eight.’ (p.162).  This lasting statement, finishes the novel with an optimistic look towards a future, whilst acknowledging the difficulties of the past and present. Its persistence is all the more prevalent, 1928, being the year of Universal suffrage for women. 

Ieuan Rees is an MA student at Cardiff University. He specialises in Twentieth-Century studies.