Orlando

Novel by Virginia Woolf, first published in 1928. One protagonist, two sexes, 400 years, a poem and a house. Very funny.

Also available as an arthouse movie under the same title, starring Tilda Swinton and Billy Zane. Less funny.

Novel by Virginia Woolf, first published in 1928. The subtitle "Biography" Orlando has makes it different from her other novels which is that she attempts to represent a real person. Orlando is a fictional character who lives over 300 hundred years from Queen Elizabeth's reign to through to King Edward's reign in 1928. Orlando begins his adventures as a nobleman who writes plays and poems every day. Throughout the novel he falls in love with many young women. Once he gets tired of this lifestyle, he heads back to the court and tries flirting with wealthy and pretty women. After some heartbreaking events and disappointments, he once after 7 days of trance wakes up as a woman. She quickly gets used to her female body. "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." Experiencing being a woman, she thinks about both genders. She can not decide whether she has liked being a man or being a woman. As a great fan of poetry, she spends lots of time with Dryden and Pope. However, she gets tired of them, too. She begins spending time with prostitutes which she finds very entertaining. Suddenly, it is Victorian times and Orlando meets Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire, who upon her falling and twisting her ankle rescues her. Not long after, they marry. The novel ends with Orlando thinking about all her adventures and people who contributed in her present being and how everything is connected to each other.

Orlando, being one of the so called "high" modernism of the early twentieth century, has lots of modernist features. Of all the modernist aspects, the time element is the most striking. Woolf expresses her "modern fourth-dimensional concept" when she depicts Orlando in the beginning of the book as a boy of 16 in the Elizabthean times and as a 36 year old matron in 1928. This unstable span of time makes the novel challenging to read for the reader. The androgyny and the overlap of gender shows how this hermaphroditic intermix is indeed mobile, rather than static. Woolf reflects this change only as a biological change which does not affect the identity of the character. Woolf allows her reader with her experiments to examine how the modernist authors deal with the nature of time and consciousness.

Literature

Brown, Richard D, and Suman Gupta. Aestheticism & Modernism: Debating Twentieth-Century Literature 1900-1960. London: Routledge, 2005. Print.

Kaivola, Karen. “Revisiting Woolf's Representations of Androgyny: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Nation”. Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 18. (1999): 235–261. Web. Jstor. 22 Jan. 2015.

Lee, Hermione. The Novels of Virginia Woolf. London: Methuen & Co, 1977. Print.

https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/06/08/reviews/woolf-orlando.html