So he waited in the darkness. Suddenly he was hit in the face by a gentle but heavy blow to the side of his cheek. He was so impatient that he jumped and reached for his sword. The blow was repeated a dozen times on the forehead and cheek. The dry frost had lasted so long that it took him a minute to realize that it was raindrops falling; the blows were those of the rain. At first they fell slowly, deliberately, one by one. But soon the six drops became sixty; then six hundred; then they ran together in a constant stream of water. It was as if the hard, consolidated sky were pouring into a bountiful fountain. Within five minutes, Orlando was soaked to the skin. (59-60)Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on 'Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned'?Get an Original EssayIn contrast to the widely accepted importance of her other novels, such as Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Virginia Woolf's Orlando above all encountered a “critical ambivalence”, to the point that apparently exhaustive studies of his anthology were able to ignore it. Readers tend to think of it as nothing more than a love letter in six chapters, a long series of jokes between Woolf and her lover, Vita Sackville-West, and although the point is debatable, Woolf may well have limited his ambition for Orlando to this kind of tacit communication. However, an author's intention should not distract his critics from impartial analysis. If smug writers can create irrelevant novels, then a talented author and thinker like Woolf could certainly unwittingly produce a cerebral volume. Indeed, the spirit that prevails in Orlando should not distract us from his fundamentally serious meditation on the erroneous perception of reality, nor prevent the book from taking its rightful place within the impressive corpus of works of Woolf and the broader canon of 20th-century literature. If we see something deeper in Orlando, we tend to focus on his biting satire of the biographical genre and historical writing in general. Certainly, Woolf clearly mocks the tendency to divide long periods of history into epochs and epochs, demarcated sometimes by events that legitimately influence life, but more often by such arbitrary points as the end of the centuries or the reigns of monarchs. Readers may find it easier to understand scripture if they receive it in chunks, but the problem arises when these artificial subdivisions of time begin to influence the way we view our ancestors and ourselves. In literary circles, for example, writers are grouped into various isms --- Woolf is traditionally considered a modernist, along with Joyce, Eliot, Faulkner and others --- but these designations can never be all completely accurate simply because no writer has only one ism. style, a vision of the world in which he relies without deviation. We compartmentalize them to facilitate discussion, but too often we allow the discussion to be influenced by the very arbitrary way in which we have made it. In Orlando, Woolf very clearly demonstrates this common need through the biographer-narrator, who constantly expresses the desire to present his story cleanly, as well as the futility of the attempt to organize a fundamentally chaotic existence like that of Orlando, like that of from anyone. In response to Orlando's long sleep, during which the Turks revolt and his sex changes, the biographer laments: "The darkness descends, and if it were deeper! that we cannot see anything through its opacity! May wehere take up the pen and write Finish our work! » (133). Throughout the text, and particularly in the early chapters, before Orlando's own consciousness begins to take control of the story in preparation for his epiphany in chapter six, the biographer seems desperate for support impartial for his story; he relies on, to highlight a few examples, "historians" (33, 149), "biologists and psychologists" (139), even the reader's own interpretation of what he has described (75). These words also represent a system of categorization, in this case focused on designating people as credible or not. Yet Orlando goes beyond academia to examine how Western civilization as a whole perceives the world. Our compartmentalization is not limited to history, but rather encompasses space, identity, gender and many other areas that we constantly divide and subdivide. Indeed, as we will see, the very words I use to express these thoughts – language itself – are discrete units meant to represent something that does not exist outside of the interconnected continuum of existence. Even the word "interconnected" doesn't quite mean the correct concept, because it requires two separate entities to be linked. Clearly, the tools we have for understanding the world are and always have been woefully inadequate. Orlando's story is that of anyone, everyone, unable to experience reality in its truest form. CompartmentalizationDuring his tenure as ambassador to Turkey, Orlando revealed his acceptance of the conventional organization of space, of the arbitrary transformation of continents into nations and of nations into distinct property units. His position itself indicates his situation between two entities, primarily striving to strengthen the dominance of his own government. However, the conscious act of connection only intensifies the perceived separation between the two nations, for what requires deliberate connection must surely be very far apart. Throughout his time in the East, he remained constantly aware of the differences between that kingdom and his native England, observing that "nothing... could be less like the counties of Surrey and Kent or the cities of London and of Tunbridge Wells” (121). Although this dissimilarity is unquestionable, Orlando's references to the names of specific parcels of English territory suggest that he identifies a distinction in the very essence of the two regions, a disparity so fundamental that "Kent" could never sound like " Constantinople.” rather than a simple variation in the customs and architecture of otherwise similar populations. Far from an orderly partition of England into individual plots, he sees the undeveloped Turkish countryside as a “wild panorama,” a vast expanse of undivided space in all directions (122). At this point in the novel, such lack of organization produces wonder, but not happiness for Orlando. Indeed, when she flees with the gypsies after the revolution (political and sexual), Orlando finds that, despite her initial adoption of their cultural practices, she is not cut out for a nomadic life. The gypsies also realize this incompatibility, particularly with regard to their conception of space: Seen from the gypsy point of view, a duke... was nothing other than a profiteer or a thief who snatched land and money to people who judged these things as little worth nothing, and saw nothing better to do than to build three hundred and sixty-five rooms when only one was enough, and none was even worth more than 'a. (148)Orlando remains unable to forge a real connection with thecompany of gypsies, trapped in isolation by its desire to facilitate property and privacy, as well as to simplify an incomprehensibly disordered world, fracturing it into a myriad of disconnected units. Even though her body is physically located next to Rustum's, where she is feels very different to him than it does to him. Over time - centuries, as we will see - Orlando will come to understand the gypsy's belief that "the whole earth is ours", but for the moment she remains unable to recognize the global unity of her compartmentalized reality ( 148). Humanity's relationship with nature sparks further conflict between Orlando and the gypsies, and we can also understand this conflict in light of their different ways of organizing the world. As Rustum and his group travel the world smoothly, with respect but no reverence for the natural world, Orlando is repeatedly captivated by the awe-inspiring sights: "They began to suspect that she had other beliefs than theirs , and the older men and women I thought it probable that she had fallen into the clutches of the vilest and cruelest of all gods, which is nature. Woolf's term for this captivation, "the English disease," initially seems to suggest that those accustomed to the developed world are fascinated by a rural environment, "where nature was so much larger and more powerful" (143). However, by his own admission, this disparity in progress does not cause the "disease", but only intensifies the symptoms of a pre-existing illness. The real origin lies in the English system of categorizing the world. Orlando and his compatriots erect a wall between themselves (civilization) and nature that does not exist for the gypsies, which produces a feeling of respect that one can only feel for something separate, something else. In fact, even the language of the gypsies reflects their refusal to separate things into arbitrary classes; rather than "beautiful", they use something akin to "good to eat" --- not exactly "tasty", which would contain a subjective value judgment, but simply "edible". Thus, even if Orlando admires the Turkish landscape, to reside there permanently would be to destabilize his conception of self and others. Orlando's house also evokes a second type of compartmentalization at work throughout the novel: that of time. In an obvious nod to the centrality of time in the novel, Woolf describes the house as having 365 rooms and 52 staircases, connecting it inextricably to the year. Although this method of dividing the calendar into days and weeks derives from a natural phenomenon, the 365 rotations of the Earth in each orbit around the sun, the obsession with counting such small intervals belongs to Western civilization. For those who live directly from the land, like the gypsies, the seasons would be enough. More significantly, however, Orlando recognizes the different "epochs" through which she lives as distinct entities, just as the biographer does throughout the novel and most blatantly at the end of chapter four: "Everything was darkness; everything was doubt; everything was confusion. “The 18th century was over; the 19th century had begun” (226). As I mentioned earlier, this type of rigid temporal division serves Woolf's parody well, evoking the "real" biographies she mines in Orlando – books that reflect the Western worldview Orlando strives for to overcome. cognition), Orlando falls prey to the conventional compartmentalization of time, and therefore of her identity: "She reviewed, as if it were an avenue of tall buildings, the progress of her own self along his ownpast” (175). Rather than a continuous stream of personal experiences, she remembers her life in pieces, seemingly in the same way the biographer presents it to us. Later, just before listing the various components of Orlando, Woolf writes: "She had a great variety of self to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it only has six or seven selves, whereas a person can very well have several thousand” (309). The following exhaustive list highlights Orlando's conception of what she has been, as well as what she currently is, since this passage comes from the end of the novel and the beginning of its revelation. As we will see, she comes to understand that these selves do not exist in her memory as representatives of distinct eras of her life, but rather in her current consciousness, having coexisted within her throughout all of her experiences2E. For now, however, this inventory of personalities testifies to her long-held perception of a temporally categorized existence. Lines, while Woolf mocks literary critics as she does biographers and historians, Orlando conceives of her career as a writer as a series of independent stylistic states. She had been a dark boy, in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been in love and flowery; and then she had been lively and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried theater. Yet through all these changes, she had remained, she thought, fundamentally the same. (237) The joke is clear, a condensed history of British literature, and I have no intention of sacrificing this reading in favor of my own. Certainly, Orlando works perfectly as a parody of the last four centuries of England, but this represents only a superficial aspect of the novel. Hidden in the modern chronicle of literary history is the modernist preoccupation with the tension between perception and reality, with the fundamental imperfection in the communication of experience. The caricature apparently only concerns academics, who make their living by categorizing the world in various ways, but the implication runs much deeper. Woolf subtly suggests that Orlando, an amalgamation of the two genres and centuries of human existence, shares the same impulse toward misconceptions, toward the interpretive creation of our own illusory reality. However, as Orlando reflects on the stages of her literary development, she notices a strange fact: through it all, the fundamental aspects of her personality have persisted: "the same brooding, meditative temperament, the same love of animals and nature." nature, the same passion for the country and the seasons” (237). It seems here that she is on the verge of awakening, as the essential sameness of the things she considered separate comes to the fore, but she soon succumbs to a faulty explanation for her sense of stasis. The biographer narrator provides the following clarification: Orlando had naturally leaned towards the Elizabethan spirit, towards the spirit of the Restoration, towards the spirit of the 18th century, and was therefore barely aware of the change from one era to the next. the other. But the spirit of the 19th century was extremely unsympathetic to her, and so it took her and broke her, and she was conscious of her defeat at his hands as she had never been before. (244) Yet we observe no fundamental change in Orlando's constitution with the turn of the 19th century; the presence of a unified self against the spirit of an era therefore implies that she maintained this capacity, however untapped, throughout her life. Indeed, the novel depicts his struggle to chooseamong many different identities, none of which are "unsympathetic" to her, and only reaches resolution when she comes to recognize the futility of this decision. At this point in the novel, however, this denouement remains a chapter to come, and Orlando ignores his earlier awareness of stability across temporal intervals in favor of his biographer's misinterpretation. The 19th-century spirit cited in the previous paragraph, the convention of marriage, provides a neat introduction to the third spectrum that Orlando compartmentalizes for much of the novel: gender. Unlike his conceptions of space and time, which become less compartmentalized as the novel progresses, Orlando's initially unaffected reaction to his sex change demonstrates an acceptance of an amalgamated identity that collapses before his final restoration. At first, she simply doesn't pay any attention to the new body and maintains her own behaviors. The narrator even hints at the coming epiphany, using third-person plural pronouns to describe the transformed Orlando before bowing to "love of convention" and adopting the masculine singular version (138). . Indeed, the subject of gender only arises again upon her return to England, where she spends much of the sea voyage comparing her current femininity with her previous state. After a period of confusion --- "she seemed to waver; she was a man; she was a woman" (158) --- she comes to proudly submit to her new gender: "Praise God for I am a woman!" (160) Much of her contemplation in this phase focuses on the culturally defined role of the woman, as she struggles to fit into a new compartment, previously seen only from the outside. as a woman in England begins the transformation, and soon after, despite the biographer's ambiguous descriptions of her sex --- Woolf's voice shouting at her own narrator, perhaps --- Orlando comes to take on qualities feminine: "His modesty regarding his writing, his vanity regarding his person, his fears for his safety, everything seems to suggest that what was said shortly after" a few years ago, that there had no change between Orlando the man and Orlando the woman, ceased to be entirely true” (187). She began to perceive the world in a different way, from a new perspective that she believes requires these feelings. Despite its apparent metamorphosis, Orlando retains certain characteristics that indicate a continuing gender unity within it, even as it continually ignores it in favor of compartmentalization. Not the least of these is her sexual orientation: “Even though she was a woman herself, it was still a woman she loved; and if awareness of being of the same sex had any effect, it was to accelerate and deepen these feelings. "that she had had as a man" (161). Orlando still thinks of Sasha now, and when she later falls in love with Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, it is partly because he reminds her so much of a woman. Likewise, he wonders where she is “sure that you are not a man,” reinforcing our position that Orlando has remained fundamentally the same (258). However, despite the growing evidence and despite the masculine traits of her behavior --- "She knew how to drink with the best and loved games of chance. She rode well and drove six horses at a gallop across London Bridge" (189) - -she refuses to accept her own multifaceted sexuality. Instead, she says to herself during her engagement to Shelmerdine: “I am a woman,...a real woman, at last” (253). Nor the destabilization of bordersgender nor her romantic happiness can distract her from the need to compartmentalize her world into clearly defined categories, even when those categories are so clearly collapsing around her. Perhaps the best example of Orlando's refusal to acknowledge his obvious ambiguity comes after his first interaction with the group of prostitutes. Entering this world dressed as a man, that of her youth, she continues the masquerade even in more formal contexts. Yet despite the narrator's assertion that the outfit allows her to look, feel, and speak like a man, as she rediscovers the societal norm of masculinity, Orlando actually remains entirely aware of the gender she " should” be. In Nell's room, on the verge of consummating her lesbian urges, she gives in: “Orlando couldn't take it anymore. In the strangest torment of anger, mirth, and pity, she threw away all disguise and admitted herself as a woman” (217). But over time, as she finds comfort in the male costume, she learns to accept her attraction to other women and to explore it with the help of her costume: “Against the probity of the breeches, she exchanged the seduction of petticoats and enjoyed love. of both sexes equally” (221). In any case, just as she later perceives that her engagement to an effeminate man strengthened her femininity, Orlando here also believes that she only reinforced her compartmentalized identity by secretly appeasing her other aspects. The reader must be wise enough to distrust her, to recognize the inherent masculine quality that she nurtures but refuses to acknowledge outwardly.II. Futility Throughout his centuries of life, the central activity that dominated Orlando's life was literary creation, whether poetry, prose, or drama. Woolf repeatedly alludes to the transcendent nature of writing, as Orlando seems to use it in an attempt to move beyond simplistic compartmentalization and achieve a harmonious interrelation with the world. During Orlando's transformation, for example, she retains her distinctive essence, understanding, and experience, in part because of her initial act as a woman: “First she carefully examined the papers on the table; she took those that seemed to be written in poetry. , and secreted them in his bosom” (139-40). The unity in time mentioned above depends on the constancy of Orlando's behavior, and writing certainly represents an important activity that she repeatedly enjoys throughout the "stages" of her life. Later, one morning shortly after her return to England, she began to write again, reflecting on the previous night's feeling of being "disconcerted as usual by the multitude of things which call for explanation and imprint their message without leaving any trace as to their meaning. on the mind” (176). Lost in a maze of "things" - in this case, specifically her conflicting perceptions of England and Turkey, distinct units that form a subdivided interpretation of the world - - she takes up the pen in a futile attempt to resolve the problem. conflicts between sections of his memory and his consciousness. Woolf compares this apparent breakdown of cognitive boundaries to a love affair between Orlando's self and his reality. At the end of the novel, when she considers abandoning "The Oak Tree" forever, she says to herself: "What could be more secret, slower and like the relationships of lovers, than the stammering response she had made all these years to the old cooing song of the woods? » (325). In this context, the transformation of the phrase "Life and a lover" (185) into "Life, a lover" (186) takes on a deeper meaning, indicating a recognitionunconscious that life is her lover, that she is not looking for two things. but a stronger bond with one of them --- a coalescence of desire that foreshadows his next epiphany. Orlando's discovery of her prospective fiancé cannot occur until she understands her synergistic relationship with the figurative lover. Indeed, this first meeting with Shelmerdine takes place only a few pages after she declares: “I am the bride of nature” (248). After marriage, she is still not sure whether she can commit to a man over her literary activities: “If one still wanted, more than anything in the world, to write poetry, was it marriage? She had doubts” (264). Keeping Orlando's ambiguous gender in mind, even the physical aspect of the writing becomes romantic, resembling the sexual consummation of the court: "She dipped her quill in ink and wrote" (185). Similarly, Woolf associates poetry with religion, further emphasizing its character. transcendent quality. As Orlando returns to London on the Thames, for example, he sees a “vast cathedral rising among a cluster of white spiers,” which, according to the biographer, “evoked the brow of a poet” (164). The link, however, goes beyond this sort of metaphorical resemblance, in the minds of the Turkish shepherds: they had met an English lord at the top of the mountain and had heard him pray to his God. It was believed to be Orlando himself, and his prayer was undoubtedly a poem spoken aloud, for it was known that he still carried with him, within his cloak, a very orchestrated manuscript; and the servants, listening at the door, heard the ambassador singing something in a strange, lilting voice when he was alone. (124) This replacement of Christian practice by poetry recurs in the novel; the question of what supplants God for Orlando is answered later, when the bohemians fear that she has deified nature. Both interpretations of Orlando's relationship with the world - whether we call them lovers or God and believer - emphasize her attempts to overcome the boundaries between herself and her environment, between the compartments of her perceived reality, through writing. On her return to England, Orlando recognizes her own heresy while looking through her old prayer book: "'I am losing some illusions,' she said, closing Queen Mary's book, 'perhaps to acquire others.' » (174). The second admission, that of its new potential illusions, foreshadows the ultimate failure of writing to synthesize the world. Indeed, language itself is a system of categorizing the world, translating a continuum of experiences into discrete units: words, sentences, chapters, etc. As she explores nature with the bohemians, rather than simply experiencing stunning landscapes, she uses metaphor to compare "hills to ramparts...flowers to enamel and grass to worn Turkish rugs." The trees were withered witches and the sheep were gray rocks. Everything, in fact, was something else" (143). The traditional understanding of metaphor suggests, of course, that this type of linguistic enterprise serves to bring together concepts and objects in our perception, but metaphor relies on a perpetual awareness of the fundamental difference between things We think it's not like that, and so we're intrigued when a writer points out similarities between the two – but they nevertheless remain essentially compartmentalized, because they are simply by virtue of their nature. designations like "this" and "that". The bohemians recognize this: "Here is someone who does not do the thing for the pleasure of doing; here is someone who does not believe in it; sheepskin nor in the basket but;who sees... something else” (146). ). What she sees, of course, is akin to an entry in a library catalog, something that allows her to classify the sheepskin and the basket into the appropriate compartment of her interpretation of the world. As earlier, when he deplored the incompatibility between "green in nature" and "green in literature", Orlando here too falls prey to the inevitable detachment between words and the referents of the real world. The biographer also describes the limits of language to describe the world as it really is: “The most common expressions do it, since no expression does it; therefore the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written” (253). Indeed, if the higher purpose of poetry is to create a true interpretation of reality, then this should not be created through writing but through direct sensory experience. Thus, in the example presented above, where Orlando writes in an attempt to resolve an internal conflict between divergent perceptions, his attempt undermines itself; it paradoxically relies on a system of attachment of discrete signifiers to referents of the real world in order to merge the different signifieds within one's consciousness. Likewise, when the new woman Orlando's first act is to reclaim "The Oak Tree", this serves to perpetuate her old interpretations of the world, as I have suggested - but this interpretation is fraught with compartmentalization. Indeed, the act of writing tends to separate Orlando from her current reality in a very literal sense, as she escapes from the outside world to confine herself in her own thoughts: "When the party was at its peak and while his guests were at their celebrations, he tended to go alone to his private room” (112). Temporally, too, writing can never capture the experience of the present moment, but at best (and imperfectly) the moment that has just passed, which has already been subdivided into the appropriate compartments of the poet's memory. It is therefore not surprising that after reflection, Orlando decides that "the letter S is the serpent in the poet's Eden" and that "the present participle is the Devil himself" (173). The letter S and the suffix ing transform uncommitted infinitive verbs into their present tense forms, a linguistic paradox of the highest order.III. EpiphanyAt several points in the novel, Orlando claims to feel disillusioned in some way, as if his eyes had been opened to the imperfection of his perception. Although she remains generally misguided, these moments anticipate her eventual revelation, as she becomes increasingly aware of her misinterpretation of the world. The first occurs when Orlando is still a man, a boy in fact, after Nick Greene betrays him with a scathing pamphlet. Orlando childishly denounces all human society: “Only two things remained for him in which he now trusted: dogs and nature; a moose dog and a rosebush. The world, in all its diversity, life in all its complexity, had been reduced to this. Dogs and a bush made up all of this. Feeling thus abandoned by a vast mountain of illusion, and very naked as a result, he called his dogs and strode across the park. (97) This passage represents the last stone of the wall between civilization and nature which will cause so many problems in Orlando with the gypsies. Yet the "illusion" of human loyalty he perceives comes from the wrongdoing of a single man, and so the categorization of the natural world as good and society as evil is too simplistic. Although his previous naivety was also a kind of illusion, Orlando now creates an alternative fantasy, based on the erroneous assumption of a