British Novel (Second Year) (1)

101 “Bergsonism to offer a more comprehensive explanation of the literary and philosophical implication of the new novel than the symbolism. Durational flux which constitutes the essence of the technique, is obviously more Bergsonian than symbolistic in character, and the former in its wider scope seems to embrace the basic principles of the latter.” A popular theory, put forward by many critics, present the Stream of consciousness method as an inevitable sequel to the disintegration of values in the first quarter of this century, and an effort to compensate by greater experimentation for the spiritual vacuum prevailing everywhere. The new novel, therefore, is a manifestation, says H.J. Muller, of “the blurring of objective reality and dissolution of certainties in all fields of thoughts.” The new novel is described as withdrawal from external phenomena in the flickering half-shades of the author’s private world. However, a detailed analysis of the work of Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf will show that the new prose fiction does not imply a “withdrawal” from objective reality but constitutes, on the contrary, a deliberate effort to render literary medium a new realization of experience as a process of dynamic renewal. Robert Humphrey stresses psychological aspects of the technique by defining it “as a type of fiction in which the basic emphasis is placed on exploration of the pre-speech levels of consciousness for the purposes, primarily of revealing the psychic being of the characters.” E. Bowling subscribes to the same view by describing it “a direct question of the mind - not merely of the language area but of the whole consciousness.” According to this view the Stream of Consciousness Novel deals with the pre-speech area and incoherence in human consciousness with the view to analyze human nature. It deals with the whatness and the howness of the mental and the spiritual experiences because the chamber of consciousness is the chamber of experience. However, Dr. S.K. Kumar does not give much importance to the psychological aspect in the Stream of Consciousness Novel, “The interest of all Stream of Consciousness novelists in the contemporary psycho-analystical theories cannot be over-estimated; the danger lies only in exaggerating this relationship and reading their novels as mere Liberation of suppressions. To label Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage as document of ‘the Daphenean furtiveness of a woman’s mind’, would be as inaccurate as to treat Ulysses as text-book of psychology and psychiatry. Nor again, would the work of Virginia Woolf yield any significant results if analysed in terms of psycho-analysis, since the Stream of Consciousness novelists are essentially concerned with presenting individual personality and experience in terms of artistic sensibility.” Portrayal of Characters The great advantage and consequently the best justification of stream of consciousness novel depends on its powers for portraying character more graphically, accurately and realistically. Novelists who use of consciousness theory hold that character portrayal is beyond the reach of a traditionalist. Regarding the novels of Bennett, Wells, Galsworthy, Virginia Woolf remarks, “They have given us a house in hope that we may be able to deduce the human beings who live there.” Stream of Consciousness novelists argue that character is a process not a static state, and men’s reaction to their environment can be presented only through Stream of Consciousness technique. This is the method which shows the character changing or developing, so that while the initial portrait is valid with reference to the situation presented at the beginning of the novel it ceases to be valid by the CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

102 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II time the novel is concluded. “It provides”, says David Daitches in his book ‘The Novel and the Modern World’, “a method of presenting character outside time and place; in the double sense that, first it separates the presentation of consciousness from the chronological sequence of events, and, secondly, it enables the quality of given state of mind to be investigated so completely, by means of pursuing to their end the remote mental associations and suggestions, that we do not need to wait for time to make the potential actual before we can see the whole.” Hidden Recesses of Mind The Stream of Consciousness novelists take us to the hidden recesses of ever-changing consciousness of their characters and reveal to us what is happening inside their characters’ minds. This knowledge of what is happening in the mind of the character cuts down the old barriers between the reader and the novelist’s characters. We plunge into the characters’ presepeech level of consciousness and see what is happening there. “With Joyce and Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf”, says Waltger Allen, “we as readers, are as it were at the cutting edge of the characters’ mind, we share the continuous presence of their consciousness. There is, obviously an immense gain in intimacy and immediacy. We know Bloom and Dorothy Richardson’s Miriam in a way we know no characters in fiction before him.” Plot is Sacrificed The Stream of Consciousness novelists are also innovators in the sense that they do not care a fig for a well-knit and compact plot of the few Edwardians - H.G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and John Galsworthy, They got themselves rid of the mechanism of a compact story. Edwin Muir misses the point when he unnecessarily criticizes Joyce’s Ulysses for being “formless in itself”, and having “arbitrary construction” and “clumsy structure”. To some extent the lack of plot is compensated by Joyce’s adherence to the unities of time and place. Even if the Stream of Consciousness novels are formless in structure and without pattern they are because life very seldom falls into a pattern and shapes itself into a story. Life is chaotic, incomplete and confusing. Why should life become so well- knit, trimmed, logical and ordered then in a novel? So, in order to keep the novel closer to reality, illusionary objective pattern and the work of the novels are disposed of for catching flux in the character’s mind. Virginia Woolf makes a spirited defence of the lack of pattern in her novels, in her essay The Modern Novel in the Common Reader: “If a writer were a free man and not a slave, if he could, write what he chose, not what he must, if he could base his work upon his own feeling and not upon convention, there would be no plot, no comedy, no tragedy, no love interest or catastrophe in the accepted sense, and perhaps not a single button sewn on as the Bond Street tailors would have it. Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelop surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?” Innovation of New Technique The Stream of Consciousness novelists are innovators of a new technique because of their response towards space and time, and their attitude towards this complex problem of time has been CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

103 shaped by the inquiries of various philosophers and theoretical psychologists - Herman Minkowsky (1864-1909), Henri Bergson (1859-1941), Albert Einstein (1897-1955) and Samuel Alexander (1859- 1938). The concept of ‘Relativity’ propounded in the field of Physics (1905-1916) put forward that many factors of experience like the three dimensional Space and Time as separate entity, and the time interval between events, are not absolute, but relative to the way of looking at them. Reality can no longer be considered as the experience of physical actions, unconnected with the impressions produced by these actions in the consciousness. The ‘universe’ itself is not the material aspect alone, but with the element of Time added to it - the changes and motions. Philosophers have assumed that the basic aspect of reality is shape. Time - for Samuel Alexander, it is the ‘matrix’ or ‘the stuff of things’ from which aspects of reality like matter, life, mind and Deity have emerged, and for Henri Bergson, it is duration (“duree”) of which Consciousness, matter, time, and evolution are aspects. These philosophical inquiries produced a new outlook among the ‘Bloomsbury novelists’. The most unique of the Bloomsbury Group – Virginia Woolf – pointed out that the external events may be spread over a long period of time, but they leave impressions which may be recalled over a very short duration. Mind should practice this very duration because in it time past impinges on time present and both link to time future, without being categorized as past, present and future. A man’s awareness of reality is, in fact, the state of his mind and this in turn is the myriad of impressions during a particular time. Marcel Proust has also pointed out in his great work Remembrance of Things Past, “We live over our past years not in their continuous sequence, but in a memory that fastens upon the coolness or some-parched heat of some solitary place enclosed, immovable, arrested, lost, remote from all others. Conclusion Stream of consciousness is a narrative technique in non-dramatic fiction intended to render the flow of myriads of impressions. These impressions can be visual, auditory, physical, associative and subliminal. These impinge on the consciousness of an individual and form part of his awareness along with the trend of the rational thoughts. The term was used by the psychologist William James in “The Principles of Psychology” (1890). Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and other twentieth century writers used this fictional technique. To represent the full richness, speed and subtlety of the mind at work the writer incorporates snatches of incoherent thought, ungrammatical constructions and free association of ideas, images and words at the pre-speech level. It enjoyed its heyday from 1915 to 1941 but its influence did not end. That is why the major novelists of today should attempt to used wed the stream of consciousness technique to a befitting conception of structure. 6.5 FEMINIST CRITIQUES Virginia Woolf wrote a large extent on the problem of women’s access to the learned professions, such as academia, the church, the law, and medicine. It was a problem that was exacerbated by women’s exclusion from Oxford and Cambridge. Woolf herself never attended any university, and she resented the fact that her brothers and male friends had had an opportunity that was denied to her. Even in the domain of literature, Woolf found, women in literary families like her own were CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

104 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II expected to write memoirs of their fathers or to edit their correspondence. Woolf indeed wrote a memoir of her father, Leslie Stephen, after his death, but she later wrote that if he had not died when she was relatively young (22), she never would have become a writer. Women’s Equality Woolf also concerned herself with the problem of women’s equality with men in marriage, and she brilliantly evoked the inequality of her parents’ marriage in her novel To the Lighthouse (1927). Woolf based the Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay on her parents. Vanessa Bell forthwith decoded the novel, discovering that Mrs. Ramsay was based on their mother, Julia Duckworth Stephen. Vanessa felt that it was “almost painful to have her so raised from the dead.” Woolf’s mother was always anxious to fulfill the Victorian ideal that Woolf later described, in a figure borrowed from a pious Victorian poem, as that of the “Angel in the House.” Woolf spoke of her partly successful endeavours to kill off the “Angel in the House,” and to describe the possibilities for freedom of women independently of her mother’s sense of the proprieties. The disparity Woolf saw in her parents’ marriage made her sure that “the man she married would be as worthy of her as she of him. They were to be equal partners.” Despite various marriage proposals throughout her young adulthood, including offers by Lytton Strachey and Sydney Waterlow, Virginia only hesitated with Leonard Woolf, a cadet in the Ceylon Civil Service. Virginia wavered, partly due to her fear of marriage and the emotional and sexual involvement the partnership needs. She wrote to Leonard: “As I told you brutally the other day, I feel no physical attraction in you. There are moments—when you kissed me the other day was one—when I feel no more than a rock. And yet your caring for me as you do almost overwhelms me. It is so real, and so strange.” Virginia eventually accepted him, and at age 30, she married Leonard Woolf in August 1912. For two or three years, they shared a bed, and for several more a bedroom. However, with Virginia’s not keeping good mental condition, they followed medical advice and did not have children. Related to the unequal status of marriage was the sexual double standard that treated lack of chastity in a woman as a serious social offense. Woolf herself was almost sure the victim of some kind of sexual abuse at the hands of one of her half-brothers, as narrated in her memoir ”Moments of Being”. More broadly, she was highly aware of the ways that men had an approach and knowledge of sex, whereas women of the middle and upper classes were expected to remain unaware of it. She often perplexed about the possibility of a literature that would treat sexuality and especially the sexual life of women candidly, but her own works discuss sex rather indirectly. If much of Woolf’s feminist writing concerns the problem of equality of access to goods that have traditionally been monopolized by men, her literary criticism prefigures two other concerns of later feminism. The reclaiming of a female tradition of writing and the deconstruction of gender difference. In ”A Room of One’s Own (1929)”, Woolf finds the fate of Shakespeare’s equally brilliant sister Judith (in fact, his sister’s name was Joan). Notable have access to the all-male stage of Elizabethan England, or to obtain any formal education, Judith would have been compelled to marry and abandon her literary gifts. If she had chosen to flee from home, would have been driven to prostitution. Woolf analyses the rise of women writers, emphasizing in particular Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot, but alluding too to Sappho, one of the first lyric poets. There was the question of whether women’s writing is specifically feminine, she realises that the great female CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

105 authors “wrote as women write, not as men write.” She, therefore, raises the possibility of a specifically feminine style. However at the same time she lays stress (citing the authority of Coleridge) that the greatest writers, among whom she includes Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Marcel Proust, are androgynous, able to see the world equally from a man’s and a woman’s point of view. 6.6 WAR AND ITS IMPACTS The theme of how to make sense of the changes wrought in English society by the war, specifically from the perspective of a woman who had not seen battle, became pivotal and significant to Woolf’s work. In her short story “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” (1922), Woolf has her society hostess, Clarissa Dalloway, finds that since the war, “there are moments when it seems utterly futile…— simply one doesn’t believe, thought Clarissa, any more in God.” Although her first novel, ”The Voyage Out (1915)” had tentatively embraced modernist techniques, her second, ”Night and Day (1919)”, followed many Victorian conventions. The young modernist writer Katherine Mansfield thought that ”Night and Day” had “a lie in the soul” because it could not refer to the war or recognize what it had meant for fiction. Mansfield, who had written a number of significant early modernist stories, died at the age of 34 in 1923, and Woolf, who had published some of her work at the Hogarth Press, often measured herself against this friend and rival. Mansfield’s criticism of ”Night and Day” as “Jane Austen up-to-date” pinched Woolf, who, in three of her major modernist novels of the 1920s, challenged with the problem of how to portray the gap in historical experience presented by the war. The war is a central theme in her three major modernist novels of the 1920s: Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs. Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927). Over the period of the decade, these novels pave the experience of incorporating immense and incomprehensible experience of the war into a vision of recent history. She went ahead with her journalistic endeavours and published all of novels, providing her the editorial freedom to do as she wished as a woman writer, free from the criticism of a male editor. J.H. Willis explains that Woolf “could experiment boldly, remaking the form and herself each time she shaped a new fiction, responsible only to herself as writer-editor-publisher…She was, [Woolf] added triumphantly, ‘the only woman in England free to write what I like.’The press, beyond doubt, had given Virginia a room of her own.” Female Relations Woolf’s writing of emancipation parallels her relationships with women, who gave her warm cordial relations and literary stimulus. In her girlhood, there was Violet Dickinson; in her thirties, Katherine Mansfield; and in her fifties, there was Ethel Smyth. But none of these women emotionally encouraged Virginia as did Vita Sackville-West. They met in 1922, and it developed into the closest relationship that Virginia would ever have outside her family. Virginia and Vita were more different than alike; but their differences in social class, sexual orientation, and politics, were all a part of the scenario. Vita was an outsider to Bloomsbury and disapproved of their literary gatherings. Though the two had different intellectual backgrounds, Virginia found Vita remarkable with her charming and aristocratic conduct. Virginia felt that Vita was “a real woman. Then there is some voluptuousness CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

106 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II about her; the grapes are ripe; and not reflective. In brain and insight she is not highly organised. But then she is aware of this, and so lavishes on me the maternal protection which, for some reason, is what “I have always wished from everyone.” Though Vita and Virginia shared close relations, they both avoided categorizing their relationship as lesbian. Vita discarded the lesbian political identity and even Woolf’s feminism. Instead, Vita was well-known in her social life as a “Sapphist.” Virginia, on the other hand, did not express herself as a Sapphist. She avoided all categories, especially those that classed her in a group defined by sexual demeanour. Relationship with Vita Virginia Woolf’s relationship with Vita ultimately shaped the fictional biography ”Orlando”, a narrative that spans from 1500 to the contemporary day. It follows the protagonist Orlando who is based on “Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another.” For Virginia, Vita’s physical outlook embodied both the masculine and the feminine, and she wrote to Vita that Orlando is “all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind.” Though Virginia and Vita’s love affair only lasted for about three years, Woolf wrote ”Orlando” as an “elaborate love-letter, rendering Vita androgynous and immortal, transforming her story into a myth.” Indeed, Woolf’s ideal of the androgynous mind is extended in ”Orlando” to an androgynous body. When it was published in October 1928, ”Orlando” soon became a bestseller and the novel’s success made Woolf one of the famous contemporary writers. In the same month, Woolf gave the two lectures at Cambridge, later published as ”A Room of One’s Own (1929)”, and actively took part in the legal battles that censored Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, ”The Well of Loneliness”. Despite this concentrated period of reflection on gender and sexual identities, Woolf would wait until 1938 to publish ”Three Guineas”, a text that expands her feminist critique on the patriarchy and militarism. 6.7 BLOOMSBURY GROUP The Bloomsbury Group slowly dispersed, beginning with the death of Lytton Strachey in 1932 and the suicide of his long-time partner Dora Carrington shortly thereafter. Virginia realized the loss of Lytton acutely in her life and her writing; years later she still thought as she wrote, ‘Oh but he won’t read this!” Roger Fry’s death in 1934 also affected Woolf, to such a level that she would later write his biography (1940). As her friends died, she felt her own life begin to wither away. In January 1941, Woolf became intensely depressed, partly due to the stress of completing her novel ”Between the Acts”. She distrusted her publisher’s praise of the novel; she felt it was “too slight and sketchy.” She instead thought to delay publication, deciding that it needed much revision. Yet during this time, Woolf began feeling that she had lost her artistic flavour; she felt if she could no longer write, she could no longer fully exist. It was “a conviction that her whole purpose in life had exhausted. What was the point in living if she was never again to understand the shape of the world around or, or be able to describe it?” Woolf frankly expressed her reasons for committing suicide in her last letter to her husband Leonard: “I feel certain that I am going mad again: I feel we cant go through another of those CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

107 terrible times. And I shant recover this time. I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate.” On March 18, she may have tried drown herself. Over a week later on March 28, Virginia wrote the third of her suicide letters, and walked the half-mile to the River Ouse, filled her pockets with stones, and walked into the water. Virginia’s body was found by some children, a short way down-stream, almost a month later on April 18. An inquest was held the next day and the verdict was “Suicide with the balance of her mind disturbed.” Her body was cremated on April 21 with only Leonard present, and her ashes were buried under a huge elm tree just outside the garden at Monk’s House. It inscribed the words of The Waves as her epitaph, “Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!” The last words Virginia Woolf wrote were “Will you destroy all my papers.” Written in the margin of her second suicide letter to Leonard, it is not certain what “papers” he was supposed to destroy— the typescript of her latest novel ”Between the Acts”; the first chapter of ”Anon”, a project on the history of English literature; or her huge bundle of diaries and letters. If Woolf wished for all of these papers to be destroyed, Leonard did not follow her instructions. He published her novel, compiled important diary entries into the volume ”The Writer’s Diary”, and carefully kept all of her manuscripts, diaries, letters, thereby preserving her legacy in the vaulhali of great authors of immense repute. 6.8 CONCLUSION Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, biographer and feminist. She was a prolific writer whose modernist style changed with each new novel. Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Woolf at the centre of English literary culture during Bloomsbury era. T.S. Eliot describes Virginia in his Obituary: “Without Virginia Woolf at the centre of it, it would have remained formless or marginal…….. with the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken.” She continued writing articles and novels throughout her life she wrote a lot on the problems of women and denial of education to them. She supported the cause of women’s equality. Leonard and Virginia in 1915 installed Hogarth Printing Press to establish a small publishing house. Leonard compiled her diaries into a volume called “The Writer’s Diary” after her death. It captured her voice and personality. Her influence has far outlasted here life. She is treated as a crucial architect of modernist literature. She was a key member of the Bloomsbury group. Her quotes are quite innovating and depict newness with realism for example: (1) “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” (2) “If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people” 6.9 SUMMARY OF THE UNIT Virginia Woolf was the daughter of a well known Victorian critic and scholar Leslie Stephen. Her mother was Julia Princep. She began writing professionally in 1900 but her father’s death in 1904 jolted her completely. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

108 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II She married Leonard Woolf in 1912 and founded the Hogarth Press in 1917. Her mental illness troubled her throughout her life. She published her first novel “The Voyage Out” in 1915 followed by “Day and Night” in 1919. “Mrs. Dalloway” was published in 1925 which was followed by “To the Light House.” “The Years” was published in 1937. Her novel “Orlando” takes us to the Elizabethan days and expands time to include almost eternity. She changed the conventional conception of the novel and adopted the method of stream of consciousness technique and interior monologue. But her work is free from the vices and taints of her fellow worker. Her range of characters is small. She, however, reformed the novel. She based most of her novels on real-life prototypes. She brought out a printing press called Hogarth Press, named after Hogarth House in London suburbs. They bought a cottage called “Monk’s House” in 1919. She wrote short functions in 1921 which were complied in “Monday” or “Tuesday”. Her “Jacob’s Room” is an anti-war novel. Characteristics of Virginia Wool’s Novels Virginia Woolf had an urge to discard the orthodox linear narrative of the Edwardians. She followed the Stream of Consciousness technique and interior monologue in her novels. She presented the inner reality of life in her novels. Most of her novels do not reveal any story. She focuses her attention of on the rendering of inner reality. However, she does not reject the outer reality. She shows a rare artistic integrity in her novels. Her best novels which reflect this technique include “Mrs. Dalloway”, “To The Lighthouse”, “The Waves” and “Between the Acts”. Virginia Woolf’s novels contain lyricisna. She achieves it by musicalisation of English novel. “To the Lighthouse” shows her lyricism it its best. She reveals the spring of action in a Stream of Consciousness technique Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsay are the immortal characters in the realm of English Literature. She had her own vision of life and she adhered to it throughout her life. She presents the woman’s point of view in her novels and relies more on intuition than reason. Her range of characters is limited. But she knew the art of Stream of Consciousness with selection and ordering of material. She was a modern and late Victorian. She experimented with many types of biographical writing. Lee explains that “she was a sane woman who had an illness” — a manic-depressive illness. Stream of Consciousness Technique: Here the novelist tries to discover a pattern in an apparently confused pattern of impressions, CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

109 memories and obsessive images. This technique is useful in breaking down the distinction between subject and object and suggests states of mind. This technique also provoked controversy. However Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf exercised this technique where the fiction does not imply a “withdrawl” from objective reality but leads to realization of experience as a process of dynamic renewal. Stream of consciousness novelists are innovators and do not care for a well-knit plot. Feminist Critiques: Virginia Woolf wrote much on the problems of women like their access to education and equality with men in marriage. She tried to describe the possibilities for freedom of women independently. She called the unequal status of marriage as the double standard. She was highly aware of the fact that women of the middle and upper classes were ignorant of the knowledge of sex. She considers Shakespare, Jane Austen and Marcel Proust as great writers. She was considerate about the influence of war. Her relationship with Vita paved the way for fiction “Orlando” whose narrative spans from 1500 to the contemporary day. “Orlando” was published in 1928 and was a roaring success. She was disturbed by the death of Lytton Strachey of Bloomsbury Group and thereafter, the loss of Lytton. Virginia Woolf also committed suicide. She frankly expressed her reasons for committing suicide in her last letter to her husband Lenard. 6.10 Keywords/Abbreviations 1. Mysterious: occult, inscrutable. 2. Androgynous: bisexual, hermaphrodite 3. Interior monologue: expressing inner thoughts of a character. 4. Rhythemical: In rhythem 5. Delirium: dementia, insanity 6. Malevolent: perfidious, deceitful 6.11 LEARNINGACTIVITY 1. Discuss the “Stream of Consciousness” technique. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

110 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II 2. What do you know about Bloomsbury Group? Why did Virginia suffer a setback? 6.12 UNIT END QUESTIONS (DESCRIPTIVE, SHORT AND MCQS) (A) Descriptive Type Questions 1. How far is it correct to say about Virginia Woolf when she states that for Modernist Writers “the point of interest lies in the dark places of psychology” Discuss with context to Virginia Woolf’s when she discarded the conventional style? 2. Discuss Virginia Woolf’s concern for women. What does she think about them? Elaborate. 3. Evaluate the life and works of Virginia Woolf. 4. What is Virginia Woolf’s place in the history of English literature? Discuss. 5. What did Woolf learn in her life about writing fiction and how did she revolutionaries the style of writing? Discuss her use of interior monologue and stream of consciousness technique. (B) Short Answer Type Questions 1. Write a note on Hogarth Press. Ans. Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf Started their printing press called Hogarth Press. It was a kind of publishing arm of the Bloomsbury group. They published a lot of articles of the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud’s works in England. 2. What was the purpose of writing essay “Modern Novels”? Ans. Virginia Woolf’s essay “Modern Novels” (1919) was revised in 1925 and named as “Modern Fiction”. It attacked the “materialists” who wrote about superficial rather than spiritual or luminous experiences. 3. How did Virginia Woolf manage her achievement of the Stream of Consciousness Technique? Ans. It was her greatest achievement that there is a balance in her novels which breathe the Stream of Consciousness technique. She was conscious of the fact that art need a selection and ordering of material. She wonderfully succeeded in imposing form and order on the chaos inherent in the novel of subjectivity or the Stream of Consciousness novel. She was the innovator of interior monologue in her novels. 4. What did she say about women in the essay “A Room of One’s Own”? Ans. “A Room of One’s Own” was published in 1929. This essay was based on two lectures addressed by the author in 1928 at Newnham College and Girton College, the first two colleges for women at Cambridge. Woolf addressed the status of women and women artists in particular. In this famous essay Virginia Woolf asserts that a women must have money and a room of her own if she is to write. 5. Introduce yourself to the novel “Orlando” by Virginia Woolf. Ans. “Orlando” was published in 1928. It is a biographical novel that pays homage to the family of Woof’s friend Vita Sackville West from the time of her ancestor. Thomas Sackville (1536- CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

111 1608) to the family’s country estate at Knole. The manuscript of the book, a present from Woolf to Sackville-West is housed at Knole. The novel’ is an affectionate portrait of Sackville West. 6. What is the Chief quality of her novels as compared to Joyce and Faulkner? Ans. She has fluid perception in her novels and the world she present. Joyce and Faulkner separate one character’s interior monologues from another’s, Woolf’s narratives move between inner and outer and between characters with clear demarcations. Moreover, she avoids the self- absorption of many of her contemporaries and implies a cruel society without the explicit details, some of his contemporaries found obligatory. Her non-linear forms impart aesthetic resolution. (C) Multiple Choice Questions and Answers 1. Virginia Woolf was the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen. She had an Odd Nickname as a young child. What was it? (a) Lioness (b) Goose (c) Wolf (d) Goat 2. What was the name of the river in which Virginia Woolf ultimately drowned herself? (a) Ouse (b) Seine (c) Wye (d) Orwell 3. What was the title of the first novel which Virginia Wrote? (a) To the Lighthouse (b) The Waves (c) Mrs. Dalloway (d) The Voyage Out 4. Virginia Woolf had a Close association with one of the literary and intellectual groups of her time. Which was it? (a) The Pre-Raphaelite Group (b) The London Literary Circle (c) The Bloomsbury Group (d) The Writers Forum 5. Virginia Woolf was born in London in: (a) 1882 (b) 1883 (c) 1884 (d) 1885 6. Hogarth Press set up by the Woolf’s did not publish which of these authors? (a) T.S. Eliot (b) Sigmund Freud (c) Charles Darwin (d) Dostoevsky Answer: 1. (d), 2. (a), 3. (d), 4. (c), 5. (a), 6. (c) 6.13 REFERENCES 1. Bergonzi Bernard, Reading the Thirties: Texts and Contexts, Pittsburth: Pittsburgh University Press, 1978. 2. Johnson M. George, Dynamic Psychology in Modern British Fiction, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. 3. www.pdfdrive.com>virginia.woolf 4. www.researhgate.net>publication CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

112 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II UNIT - VII VIRGINIA WOOLF : ORLANDO STRUCTURE 7.0 Learning Objectives 7.1 Summary and Critical Comments of the Novel 7.2 Different Sex Same Person 7.3 Orlando’s Movement within Classes 7.4 Categories of Identity in the Novel 7.5 Is Novel “Orlando” a Story of a Single Person? 7.6 Themes in the Novel “Orlando” 7.7 Character Sketch of Orlando 7.8 Character Sketch of Sasha 7.9 Summary of the Unit 7.10 Key Words/Abbreviations 7.11 Learning Activity 7.12 Unit End Questions (Descriptive and MCQS) 7.13 References 7.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After studying this unit, the students and readers will be able to write: The summary and critical comments of the novel. They will know about the Stream of Consciousness Novel. They will be able to write the various themes of the novel. 7.1 SUMMARYAND CRITICAL COMMENTS OF THE NOVEL Chapter One : Summary The First Chapter begins by presenting Orlando’s Physical appearance. Physical Appearance: Orlando, a young man of sixteen, imagines himself slicing the head of CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

113 the Moor, in the tradition of his father and grandfather before him. Now he is young to ride with the men in France and Africa, but he determines to have adventures like them someday. His family is noble, and has been noble for as long as they have existed. The narrator describes Orlando’s appearance. He has red cheeks, exquisite white teeth, an arrow-like nose, and dark hair fitted close to the head. He is handsome. Orlando is a poet, and he composes drama, tragedy, description, and sentiments fluently. He goes out into nature to be alone. As he climbs a hill, he looks out over the spires of London and the huge properties of his father, his uncle, and his aunt. He lies down on the ground, imagining himself a part of nature. He gets up hear a trumpet sound from his house in the valley: Queen Elizabeth I has come to visit them. Orlando dashes home to change clothes and make himself dandy for the Queen. She immediately takes a liking to Orlando; to her, he represents innocence and simplicity. While he sleeps that night, she gives a great monastic house as a gift to Orlando’s father. Two years later, the Queen calls on Orlando to her court. She finds him the great image of a noble gentleman. She takes a ring from her finger, gives it to him, and names him her treasure and steward. From then on, Orlando has everything that he likes to possess. He travels everywhere with the Queen. As the winter grows cold, the Queen turns one day to see Orlando kissing a young girl. She is overcome with rage and breaks her mirror with a sword. But the narrator tells us that we must not blame Orlando for this act. The era and the morals are different from our own. Orlando finds he also has a liking for “low company”. He begins to hide his clothes and look for adventures at inns and pubs. One night, the Earl of Cumberland finds him intertwined with a young woman named Sukey. He vows repentance for all of his sins. But Orlando soon grows tired of these “low” decorum’s and ways of life. Now that his Queen has died, he returns to court, this time the Court to King James I, and he is received with much acclamation. Three Court Ladies He considers three Court ladies for marriage: Clorinda, Favilla, and Euphrosyne. Clorinda is a fine mannered and gentle, but she tries to reform Orlando of his sins and this sickens him. Favilla is graceful and much praised, but after Orlando witnesses her brutal whipping of a spaniel, he decides she is not fit for him. Euphrosyne has a deeply rooted family tree, much like Orlando, and he concedes that she would make the fine wife of a nobleman. Their relationship goes so far that lawyers were busy making arrangements for the connection of their two fortunes. It is at this point that the Great Frost comes. The Great Frost is too much in Britain and many people are dying from the cold. At Court, the King turns the Frost into a sort of Carnival, directing that the river, which is solidly frozen over, should be turned into a type of pleasure ground. One night at this Carnival, Orlando sees a seductive figure that takes his breath away. He is not sure whether the person is male or female. As it comes closer to him, he finds that she is the Muscovite princess, Sasha. At dinner, he soon becomes acquainted with her, as they are the only two people who speak French. He falls in love with her and is never far from her side, much to Euphrosyne’s chagrin. They make love on the ice, but are not cold. Sasha and Orlando Sasha and Orlando skate down the river to where the Russian ship is frozen in mid-stream. Sasha climbs aboard to reclaim some of the clothes she has left on the ship. A young Russian crew CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

114 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II member offers to help her find them. Orlando waits on deck for them to return, but when they take a long time, he goes down to look for them. He finds them in an embrace, Sasha upon the sailor’s knee. He becomes irate, but Sasha denies that anything indecent has happened. He reluctantly believes her and apologizes for jumping to decisions but secretly he holds doubts about Sasha’s sincerity. Night falls, and Sasha and Orlando go back to the town. He whispers a French phrase into her ear, which is their signal to run away together. At midnight they are to meet and board their flight. Orlando waits for her in the rain, but Sasha never arrives. He takes off on his horse along the river to the sea. There, as the sun rises, he sees that the frozen river has started to melt, and all the people who were on the frozen city are now stranded on icebergs. There chaos as the people trapped on the icebergs look to their doom. Orlando looks to the big ships and sees that the Russian ship is freely moving out to sea. He understands that Sasha is on it. In his rage, he yells insults at her as the ship moves further away. Critical Comments From the very first chapter, the characters in “Orlando” are described as strangely androgynous. Orlando is beautiful. His red cheeks are covered with “peach down”, lips drawn back to show teeth “of an exquisite and almond whiteness, an “arrowy nose”, dark hair, and “eyes drenched like violets.” His handsome body is punctuated by his “well-set shoulders” and “shapely legs.” Although the narrator states that Orlando is a boy, his description is surprisingly feminine. The narrator shows that his appearance crosses gender boundaries. Similarly, Princess Sasha’s gender is questionable at first glance. She is of “middle height”, “very slenderly fashioned” in a tunic and trousers that disguise her sex. Orlando assumes that she must be a boy because she skates with such speed and easily. The presence of androgynous characters foreshadows the gender changes that will occur later in the novel. Such descriptions imply that gender is of little importance to beauty or attraction. This theme reemerges throughout the novel. The narrator is a vocal presence in the novel. Claiming to be a “biographer”, the narrator reveals her good fortune at having such a worthy subject: “Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one!’ It is clear that the narrator will not be at all objective in her history of Orlando’s life. Frankly, the narrator writes in exactly the opposite way that she claims to be writing. Though she states that she never need “invoke the help of a novelist or poet,” she writes in an extraordinarily poetic manner, describing Orlando’s eyes as being “drenched like violets.” The narrator frequently breaks the flow of the story to express things from her point of view. When Orlando cheats on Queen Elizabeth with a young girl, the narrator implores the reader to consider the context of his actions: “It was Orlando’s fault perhaps; yet after all, are we to blame him? The age was the Elizabethan; their morals were not ours…” The narrator is dismissive of Orlando’s actions, excusing him because of such conditions of the time. In the novel, she purposely intervenes to shape the reader’s opinion of her subject. Thus, Woolf uses the narrator to challenge the truth of biography. Chapter Two : Summary The narrator begins this chapter with an interlude on the difficulty of writing on what is “dark, mysterious, and undocumented”, She however reaffirms her duty to “state the facts” and let the CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

115 reader think what he or she will. In the summer following the drastic winter after the Great Frost, Orlando is exiled from Court and is in immense disgrace with the powerful nobles. One June morning, he is unable to wake at his usual time, and remains, as if in a trance for seven days. When he finally awakes, he is different. He has forgotten much of his past life. He chooses to live in aloofness for months, allowing no visitors but his servants. His servants hold him in high regard and curse the Russian princess for bringing their master to this state. Orlando spends his time among the crypts of his ancestors, meditating on death, and moving in a somber depression. His love of literature keeps him alive, as he reads constantly during this period. Orlando tries to write as well, but “happily” because he is of a robust constitution, the disease does not destroy him as it destroys so many other unsuccessful writers. Orlando is smitten with writing, and by the time he turns twenty-five, he has composed over forty-seven plays, romances, histories, and poems, mostly involving “some mythological personage at a crisis in his career.” But now, as he dips his pen in the ink, he pauses, and the narrator comments that “it is these pauses that are our undoing.” He thinks of the fat, shabby man he saw years ago at his house when the Queen came to dine, and he is amazed who the man was. He guesses the man was a poet. Orlando stands and vows to be the first poet of his race, and to bring immortal luster to his name. Overcome with the prospect of being a writer, Orlando decides to suspend his solitude. He asks his friend, who has connections to writers, to deliver a letter to Nick Greene, a very well- known author of the time. Orlando’s feels delighted as, Greene decides to visit him. In Orlando’s huge house, which has welcomed the richest and the most noble, Mr. Greene looks small and awkward. He is short, stooped, and lacks the air of nobility. Orlando is at a loss for how to place him. They go to dinner and try to discuss the family relations that may bring them nearer together on the social scale. Greene goes on and on about his infirmities, and mentions that poetry is very tough to publish. Though this is the period where Shakespeare, Marlowe, Donne, and Jonson are writing or have recently written, Greene maintains that the great age of literature is past in England. So many poets write for materialism. Orlando leaves all hope of discussing his own writing with Greene, but he is pleased by the drunken, amorous anecdotes of all his literary heroes. Though he holds some pity and contempt for all Greene’s rude mannerisms and language, Orlando thinks his conversation is an improvement over the boring discussions of the nobility, Ironically, Greene feels smothered by the peace of Orlando’s estate, and thinks that he will never write again if he does not escape such repose. Greene leaves and Orlando promises to pay his pension. When Greene gets back to his busy household, he writes a satire about a lonely nobleman. He is clearly modeled on Orlando. It is published and when Orlando reads it, he vows he is done with men. He sends for dogs to keep him company. Orlando decides he is should be up with love, women and even literature. He burns almost all of his written works. He decides to let nature, his dogs, and reflective questions about life take up all his time. In this way, he passes many years until he is thirty years old. Though he is healthy, he has been consumed by the “lethargy of thought”, which forces him to reflect upon life rather than act. Finally, after admitting that he has been deeply hurt by Nick Greene, he vows to write only for himself, not for any critic. He decides to write about his home, and he thinks that his ancestors have been noble to allow themselves to die in obscurity. Orlando feels that his ancestors have done well CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

116 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II by improving their family estate, so he decides to follow their lead and refurnish his home. Once all 365 bedrooms are refurnished, all fifty-two staircases are redone, and the whole house is shining, Orlando invites his neighbours to stay with him and seek their good opinion. He laboriously works to add to his poem “The Oak Tree” and his writing is now much polished, less ornate. One day, Orlando sees a very tall woman riding by his window. He goes to investigate and finds she is a Romanian archduchess named Harriet, a cousin of the Queen’s. He invites her into his home and is suddenly overcome with passion for her. But he is repulsed that this feeling is lust rather than love. Orlando does not know what to do, so he asks King Charles II to send him as an Ambassador to Constantinople. He determines that he must leave the country. Critical Comments Woolf in this novel satirizes the genre of biography. She believes that biographies are much concerned with extraneous details, and have a limited sphere of reality. Chapter Two opens with the biographer confessing her difficulty in writing of this part of Orlando’s life, which is “dark, mysterious, and undocumented.” She claims that the first duty of the biographer is to “plod in the indelible footprints of truth” without looking right or left. She realizes that she must “state the facts as far as they are known” and let the reader make of them what he will. These words, by our biographer/ narrator are Woolf’s way at poking fun at Victorian biographers (like her father) who think they are recounting the factual truth. Tone of the Novel The tone of the novel is light-hearted satirical. Throughout, Woolf includes allusions mocking at other authors, her contemporaries, and even her own work. In Chapter Two, the narrator suggests the simple statement “Time passed” might help one more surfily to reach the conclusion that in a period of many years, nothing whatsoever changed. This is an allusion to Woolf’s previous work, To the Lighthouse, in which she includes a chapter simply mentioning that “time passed”. Such frequent allusions to her own work and to the work of contemporary authors suggests that Woolf was writing with the audience of her friends in mind. Vita Sackville-West and the rest of the Bloomsbury group, a circle of intellectual, well-educated people, would have been the most likely to find humour in the novel’s comic allusions. Although many of the jokes make Orlando most appropriate for Bloomsbury readers, the interesting themes and entertaining story allowed the novel to be accessible to a wider audience. Difficulty of Finding Fulfillment: The novel explores the difficulty of finding fulfillment. In the period of Orlando’s life covered in Chapter Two, the protagonist turns from love to literature in an effort to find fulfillment. Orlando lives through four centuries and many adventures, but always he is searching for “life, and a lover.” Writing becomes his outlet for both his frustrations and his reflections. It is through art that he reveals his love of nature, his worries and his essence. Woolf here describes the writing process, which involves the rigours of reading, crossing out, editing, adding, and reading again thousands of times. The narrator describes Orlando as being affected by the “disease” of reading. After putting so much of himself into his writing, Orlando is heartbroken that he is laughed at by a critic. Much like Woolf herself, Orlando is horribly fearful of criticism. Yet Orlando perseveres in his writing. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

117 Chapter Three : Summary The narrator comments on the misfortune that so many documents regarding this important part of Orlando’s life are destroyed. Orlando plays a significant role in the negotiations between King Charles II and the Turks. While he is out of the country during the Glorious revolution of 1688, many of the records are destroyed. Orlando finds Turkey much different from the manor houses he has known in England, but he enjoys Constantinople’s wild and its exotic quality. He spends his mornings adding bows and flourishes to important letters of state, and his afternoons visiting other dignitaries with much pomp and ceremony. Yet this life tires Orlando, and he would sometimes take the opportunity to go out to the mountains and read his poetry. Though he has a magnetic nature that draws people to him, Orlando finds no close friends in Constantinople. But he carries out his of ambassador so nicely that King Charles gives him a dukedom, raising him to the highest office of the peerage. When the officer who carries his official patent of nobility arrives, Orlando arranges a magnificent party. Thousands of people of every nationality are there to see the sight. The rumor has been that a miracle is to be performed there. The party is a sight to see. There are fireworks and many English people dressed in their most elegant dresses. The narrator pieces the story together, she tells us, from fragments of reports of Lieutenant Brigge who watches the scene from a tree, and from the letters of Miss Penelope Hartopp. The letter reveals that half t he women at the party are dying of love for Orlando. Just as Orlando kneels down to place the golden circlet of strawberry leaves upon his brow, a disturbance ensues. An uproar arises as natives rush through the door. Luckily, British soldiers are there to silence the disturbance. Later that night once all the guests are gone, a washer woman sees Orlando the Duke go out onto his balcony, let down a rope and pull a peasant woman up to his room. Then they embrace each other. The next morning, Orlando’s servants find him alone in his room, asleep, with all of his clothes and papers in sixes and seven around him. They try to wake him up unsuccessfully. When his secretaries look through the papers on his desk, they find a marriage license to Rosina Pepita, a dancer. On the seventh day of Orlando’s trance an insurrection occurs. The Turks rise against the sultan and set fire to the town. They try to imprison or kill all the foreigners, but finding Orlando lying still in a trance, they think him dead and steal his robes. As Orlando lies in the trance, three figures enter: Lady of Purity, Lady of Chastity, and Lady of Modesty. They dance around Orlando’s body and try to claim him, but trumpets sound. The figures are not delightful that no one wants them any longer. They decide that this is a place for Truth and not for them, so they leave. The trumpeters blast one note at Orlando, “the Truth” and he awakes. He stands upright, naked, and is now a woman. Orlando is now a charming woman, with the strength of a man and the beauty of a woman. Orlando is not at all upset by this change. The narrator tells us that except for his gender, Orlando is in every respect “precisely what he had been.” She remembers everything from her past, and the change has come about without any trouble. The narrator confirms that up until age thirty, Orlando was a man, and now and ever after, she is a woman. Orlando Leaves Constantinople CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

118 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II Orlando dresses, and calmly leaves Constantinople on a donkey with a gypsy. She rides to the mountains and allies herself with a gypsy tribe. The gypsies look upon her as one of their own members. She had been in contact with them before the revolution and was now happy to join them at their camp. Her dark complexion and hair help her blend well with them. Though they accept her, the elders of the tribe find that she often spends long periods of time starting into space. They believe the English disease, a love of Nature, has been incorporated into her. The old man of the tribe is angered because Orlando loves Nature so much and does not believe what he believes. She spends long periods of time writing blank verse poetry on her manuscript of “The Oak Tree” and she becomes less adept at her writings. Orlando begins to notice large differences between the gypsies and herself. When she tells them of the magnificent house in which she was born and of her ancestral property that is 500 years old, she senses their unease. Rustum, the oldest man of the tribe, takes her aside and tells her not to be ashamed of her background. Orlando realizes then that 500 years of lineage is nothing to these people whose ancestors helped build the pyramids. They dislike the person who claims land and builds grand houses because land and buildings are not important to them. They don’t need any bedrooms to be happy. Orlando is Upset Orlando is upset that she and the gypsies have such different values: she treasures the sunset, they a flock of goats; she sees the value in multiple bedrooms, but they cannot. One day as she lies beneath a fig tree in the heat, Nature plays a trick on her, and she watches a hollow deep in a rock. Inside the hollow, she can see visions of England, and she sees her great house and great lawns swallowed up. She bursts into tears, runs to the gypsies and tells them she must return to England the very next day. It is good that she acts this way because the young men of the tribe have been plotting her murder. They were happy to send her back to England, and with one of her pearls, she pays her way home and bids them farewell. Critical Comments The narrative structure of “Orlando” values the personal over the political. While the main nucleus of the novel remains the story of the protagonist, we are always aware of the historical background of the events. Though the narrative defies a consistent chronological structure, it is possible to piece together the succession of Kings and Queens so as to roughly determine when events take place. During the Glorious Revolution of 1688, for example, when William of Orange usurps the throne from King James II, Orlando is in a gypsy camp far away in Turkey. Such a conflation of actual historical events with the story of a fantastic, fictional life, changes the nature of the biography. It evidences the interconnectedness of all events while allowing the personal, internal story to take precedence over “facts”. Thus, Orlando’s biography, much of it an internal monologue, exists alongside a framework of other, more ‘definite’ and more masculine history. Orlando’s Gender Change The description of Orlando’s gender change is both poetic and sudden. The three ladies of Chastity, Purity, and Modesty attempt to control Orlando while he is in a trance, but the trumpeters of Truth frighten them away, waking Orlando from his deep sleep. When Orlando awakes, he is a CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

119 woman. This passage may at first appear confusing, but the Ladies and the trumpeters are merely the narrator’s means to describe the process of Orlando’s change. Modesty, Purity and Chastity work to cover Orlando, to prevent his new, true self from being shown to the world. But the strong duty to tell the Truth means that the narrator must show to the reader what truly happened to Orlando. Though it seems neither modest, nor chaste for Orlando to reveal his himself to the world as a woman, he does so nonetheless. This scene is a metaphor for the act of expressing one’s true self to the world. There are those, the narrator writes, who wish to hide the truth in darkness. Orlando as a novel, brings Truth to light, depicting the tenuous line which separates male from female, suggesting that the qualities of both may even be combined into one being. We learn that Orlando’s character hardly undergoes any change, except for the appearance of his body. Indeed, to Orlando, the change is so meagre that she hardly notices it. She looks herself up and down in a long mirror, and walks calmly to her bath. Gender is not nearly so important to Orlando as the other qualities that make up a person. This idea is soon apparent in the gypsy passage which follows the gender change. In the gypsy camp, Orlando reveals her deep love and reverence for nature, which is in stark contrast to the gypsies who treat nature as a harmful adversary. The difference between Orlando and the gypsies is likewise highlighted when Orlando talks of her enormous house with 365 bedrooms. Old Rustum takes Orlando aside and tells her that she should not be confused for having so much of what she does not need. The gypsies do not share Orlando’s strong English values of property and nature. Chapter Four : Summary Orlando buys herself English women’s clothes and gets aboard the ship to take her home to England. She reflects upon her new gender and the penalties and privileges it holds for her. She thinks how she can no longer swim now that she wears so many petticoats and she questions whether she feels good or bad about requiring manly protection. She feels a tingle when Captain Nicholas Benedict Bartolus offers to cut her meat for her. She questions whether the man’s or woman’s sexual delight is greater, whether it is better to pursue or flee. She decides it is most delicious to yield and see the Captain smile. But Orlando is unhappy at the time and energy it will take her to make herself presentable as obedient, chaste and appareled as a woman each day. As a person who has been both sexes, she concludes by censuring both sexes equally; women for their limited role and power in society, men for the way they prance about like lords. The ship anchors off the coast of Italy and Orlando agrees to accompany the Captain onshore. When she returns the next morning, she speaks more like a woman than a man, and it is obvious that her romantic interlude with the Captain has made her more feminine. She enjoys in being a woman, happy to take on the blights of poverty and ignorance so as to be free of the manly pursuits of power, happy that she may spend her time on contemplation and love. She finds that even though she is now a woman, she is still in love with women. She realizes she can understand Sasha better than ever before. But Orlando remains conflicted; she does not want her new gender to require her to hold her tongue and “fetter her limbs”. The ship makes its way to England and Orlando stands in wonder at the sights of St. Paul and the Tower of London, which she has not seen for such a good time. London is much different now in the late seventeenth century than she remembered it more than a century ago. There are shops, paved streets, and many people walking about, talking, and shopping. At a coffee shop, she thinks CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

120 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II she sees Mr. Dryden and Mr. Pope stopped for a drink. She returns to her home to find servants awaiting her and to find that several lawsuits have been brought against her. The chief charges are that one she is dead, and can thus own no property, two she is a woman, with much the same consequences as being dead, and three that she was an English Duke, whose three sons by Rosina Pepita claimed her property. Orlando does not think much of the charges at the moment, and once at home, she takes to reflecting on her religion (poetry) and her history. Orlando looks out her window and sees the Archduchess Harriet, the woman whose seductions led her to run away from the country. She laughs at Harriet’s appearance, thinking she resembles a “monstrous hare.” She invites Harriet in, thinking women annoying, and when she turns around, Harriet has turned into a tall man appareled all in a black. The “Archduke Harry” asks Orlando to forgive him for the way he has deceived her. He explains that he has always been a man, and he simply dressed as a woman because he was so in love with Orlando when he was a man. Now he asks Orlando to marry him and travel with him to his castle in Romania. Orlando does not retort him an answer, but Harry is persistent, returning day after day, though the two can find nothing to talk about. They take to playing a game in which they each bet money as to where a fly will land. Orlando grows so upset with Harry that she cheats in the game, hoping he will catch her. After the twentieth time, Harry finally catches her cheating and is appalled. Orlando, who is relatively new at being a woman, drops a small toad down his shirt. This flares up Harry and he drives away. Orlando is relieved she does not have to marry him. Orlando’s Desires Orlando does not really care about her title or fortune. All she desires is “life and a lover”. She takes off for London in her coach. Here, the narrator takes a moment to point out that Orlando is changing because of her sex. She is a little more modest about her writing, more vain in her appearance. Her outlook on the world undergoes because of the clothes she wears, because of something intrinsic to the gender. When Orlando arrives in London, it is not long before she finds a lover. She goes out for a walk on the mall one morning, when all of a sudden she finds herself surrounded by a mob of people who know her from reports of the lawsuits. She is distressed as the mob closes in, when suddenly the Archduke Harry arrives to flee her away. He has forgiven her for the frog incident, and has even made a jewel in the shape of a frog to give to her. Orlando is slightly confused that she cannot even go for a walk without Harry asking for her hand in marriage. She returns home to find the cards of many great ladies who intend to make her acquaintance. She is thrust into London society. Amidst all the balls and engagements that she is invited to in London, Orlando gets delighted and excited. But as she grows accustomed to these engagements, she becomes sad. She has found many lovers but no life. She thinks society unfulfilling. The next morning she responds to an invitation from a great lady, the Countess of R—. Orlando wants to be among the society of Addison, Dryden, and Pope, the great writers of the time, and she believes they will be at this party. Lady R. is known to have exclusive parties to which only the very best minds are invited, and where everything that is said is witty. Orlando goes, stays there for three hours, and comes back delighted. Although these people, like everyone else, seem to talk about nothing whatsoever, they are all under the illusion that these are the wittiest. One evening, Mr. Pope the famous poet comes to join their circle. He says three or four truly witty things in a row and destroys everyone’s illusion. They go away in a sad CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

121 mood. Orlando invites Pope to drive home with her. During the ride, she sways between venerating such a great poet and scolding herself for being so foolish to think that anyone deserves name and fame. She takes to spending time with ‘men of genius’ and she finds that they are much like everyone else. The secrets of writers’ souls are written upon their works. They are not so mysterious as people think. She grows tired of spending time with poets, who, she finds, have great minds but often lack the other virtues. Orlando realizes that these men do not really respect her for her acumen and magnanimity. Orlando puts on her old men’s clothes of her youth and walks outside. She goes into London where she finds a beautiful woman sitting on a bench. The woman, a prostitute named Nell, thinks Orlando a man and takes her to one rented room. Orlando pities the girl and reveals herself to be a woman. Nell laughs loudly and confides that she is glad because she is not in the mood for men tonight anyway. This begins Orlando’s interactions with the prostitute women. One by one, Nell and her friends sit around the punch bowl telling Orlando their life stories which are very interesting. Orlando takes to switching genders, and dons male or female clothes depending upon which is more befitting for the moment. She finds that living in two genders is doubly fulfilling. She uses her male persona to eavesdrop on interesting conversations in coffee houses, like those of Dr. Johnson and Mr. Boswell. At the end of this chapter, she looks out over London and views a great cloud moving over it. “The Eighteenth Century was over; the Nineteenth Century had begun.” Critical Comments This chapter finds out the concept of mismatching. Orlando finds she can bear neither the boring society of Archduke Harry nor the frustratingly witty company of famous poets like Mr. Pope. Feeling hindered by her petticoats, her new gender, and the subsequent loss of all legal property-holding abilities, Orlando travels from poets to prostitutes looking for a group to support her. Yet in this century, she is not in a position to find her complement. Chapter Four is perhaps the most comical section of the novel. Orlando has always held writers on a pedestal and when she gets the opportunity to see some of the fine poets of the day, she is delighted. But the reality of what she finds falls far short of her expectations. In Lady R——‘s meeting of important and interesting people, it is important to refrain from saying something too witty, lest everyone else feel quite dull. The one man with an ego large enough to say something witty (Mr. Pope) is ironically small, misshapen, and ugly. The carriage scene, in which Orlando reverse Pope’s noble brow, only to find it is a bump in the cushion above his head, epitomizes Woolf’s comic irony. The ‘truth’ Orlando finds is far from what she expects from reading history and poetry. By making fun of those star-struck people in love with the image of intellectuals and well-known writers, Woolf produces great satiric comedy. Chapter Five : Summary The nineteenth century begins with a cloud hanging over all over London. None of the colors are as bright and dampness seeps into every home. The dampness comes within, as men feel a chill in their hearts, and love and warmth are “swaddled in fine phrases”. The sexes grow farther apart. Ivy and gardens are becoming overgrown. The narrator describes the suffocation of immense growth. Orlando looks out the window of her carriage and sees a monument of assorted rubbish CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

122 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II held up by the figure of a woman half-clothed and of a man fully-dressed. The monument is in the park where the figure of Queen Victoria now stands. She goes to her home in the country and feels biting cold there. The walls have grown so much with ivy that very little sunlight is passing through the windows. Her housekeeper tells her that Queen Victoria is wearing a crinoline, which means she is trying to hide the fact that she is pregnant. The narrator comments that all women in this period must, out of modesty, try to hide their condition until it becomes quite late. Orlando thinks about how she must soon go out to buy her own crinoline and she blushes. She takes the manuscript of “The Oak Tree” out of her bosom which she began in 1586, almost 300 years ago. She sees on how the poem changes with her maturation, sometimes gloomy, sometimes romantic, sometimes satirical, but she sees that beneath her changes, she has always been the same person. Orlando tries to write more of her poem and she finds that her hand is controlled from something external. Her hand moves and poetry flows from her pen without her giving it any thought. Orlando is frightened and feels a tingling in the finger on which she wears Queen Elizabeth’s ring. She looks around and sees that everyone seems to be wearing wedding rings. People everywhere seem not to be moved by passion, but are always linked together in bands of gold. This situation seems unnatural and repugnant to Orlando. Yet she is unable to compose poetry. She is thirty-two years old now, and she feels that this century is not right for her; it is ‘antipathetic’ to her nature. Nevertheless, she decides she must “yield to the spirit of the age” and take a husband. Orlando’s Search for Marriage Orlando wonders whom she can marry. The Archduke Harry has long since married someone else and all her old friends are gone. She feels that everyone is married except herself, and she longs for someone to lean upon. She goes for a walk alone and gets nervous. She finds a feather, puts it in her hat, and starts following a trail of feathers. Soon, she grows more content. She follows the feathers to a lake and falls and twists her ankle, but she is happy. She whispers, “I have found my mate. It is the moor. I am nature’s bride.” She lies down on the ground and thinks she is dying. Soon she hears a horse moving toward her. The man on the horse is Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire. He asks her if she is all right, and a few minutes later they become engaged to be married. The narrator notes that the two know everything of importance about each other within two minutes. Shel takes her to have breakfast and she learns that he is a seaman and adventure who sails around Cape Horn. When Orlando exclaims that she loves him, they have wonderous realization at the same time. Shel realizes Orladno is a man, and Orlando realizes Shel is a woman. Yet Orlando thanks Shel earnestly, saying she has never felt more like a real woman. Shel and Orlando remain together for a few days as a message comes from the Queen. The letter says that all of Orlando’s lawsuits have been settled: the Turkish marriage is annulled, the children pronounced illegitimate, and Orlando’s sex is declared to be female beyond a doubt. She is now in full claim of all of her titles and property again. But the lawsuits were so expensive that Orlando is actually quite poor. The town is excited when they hear the news that Orlando’s suits are in her favour and she once again receives many invitations from important English lords and ladies. Instead, Orlando chooses to spend her time alone with Shel. Shel cannot believe that Orlando is a woman because she is “as tolerant and free-spoken as a CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

123 man” and Orlando cannot believe that Shel is a man because “he is as strange and subtle as a woman.” They get along well together, understanding each other well. She loves hearing of his stories of Cape Horn. One day in the forest, leaves start to drop and Orlando feels a chill. Shel realizes that the wind has changed direction and it is time for him to sail again. Shel and Orlando run to the house, and a servant quickly marries them in a quick ceremony. They cannot hear over the wind, and the words just as well may be “jaws of death” as “honor and obey”. Shel mounts a horse and rides away to his ship. Orlando goes inside, a ring on her finger. Critical Comments A lot of “Orlando” deals with a protagonist who feels the need to conform to the image and morals of those who surround him. Nowhere is this process more difficult for Orlando than in the nineteenth century. The imagery that the narrator uses to describe this period mirrors the emotions and frustrations of her subject. She writes that a dark cloud hangs over all London: ivy and vegetation is everywhere overgrown and no sunlight can get in. Children and vegetables are found in abundance, and in everyone there is a chill. They are cold both inside and out. Such imagery reveals the suffocation that Orlando feels from the oppressive “spirit of the age”. Here Woolf alludes to the Victorian period, known for industrial abundance and strict, moral patterns of behaviour. Orlando looks around and sees that everyone is married. People seem to have been born by couples. She feels a literal tingling in her left finger, which would carry a wedding ring. Orlando knows that to successfully exist in this age, she must find a husband. Chapter Five would have been especially meaningful for the Bloomsbury Group, as many of its members opposed Victorian morality. They resented being told the correct way to act and the most moral way to live one’s life. Such rules were suffocating to them. For Orlando, who is now a woman, the nineteenth century, with all its limitations on female activity is the most tough. She cannot run as well in her layers of skirts and petticoats. She is mocked for walking unaccompanied in public. In short, to exist as any sort of public figure, she needed a husband. The feminist in Orlando (and in Woolf) rejects such dependence on men. Orlando decides that nature will be her husband. Parody of Gothic Romances Woolf parodies gothic romances in the passages with Orlando and Shelmerdine. The scene in which Orlando runs across the land, calling herself the bride of the “moor”, clearly pokes fun at Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, which romanticizes the wild nature of the landscape. It is comic that Shel sweeps Orlando off her feet and that within two minutes the pair know everything there is to know about one another. Woolf seems skeptical that any love like this could ever be real. It is more likely that such a ‘love’ is the result of an age with glorifies and demands it. However, the relationship with Shel is the closest that Orlando comes to finding love. They are so attracted to each other because they see the best qualities of their gender in the other. Shel is “strange and subtle as a woman”, while Orlando is “tolerant and free-spoken as a man”. Despite the dictates of their age, they do not conform to such obviously divided gender roles. They are complex individuals, and though their behaviour may be influenced by the Victorian spirit, their selves reveal the complexities that belie clearly marked rules. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

124 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II Chapter Six : Summary Orlando glances at the ring on her finger and feels amazed whether the age would approve of her wedding. She thinks of how much she wants to write poetry, and she comes to know that a great writer must strike a balance with the spirit of her age. Orlando need not submit to the age, she finds that she can remain herself and continue to write. The biographer now takes a moment to react on the boring nature of her subject, Orlando, who does nothing but think and love. Such happenings do not satisfy the pen of the biographer for there is nothing to write about if these two subjects comprise Orlando’s whole existence. The narrator turns to describe nature outside the window. At this, Orlando rises from her chair and declares that her manuscript, “The Oak Tree” is finished. Orlando journeys to London in search of someone who will read her manuscript in a loud voice. She comes across her old acquaintance, Sir Nicholas Greene, who is now the most influential critic of the Victorian age. They take lunch together, and Nick Greene, now a knight, tells her how the great Elizabethan age of English literature is over. He says that while Shakespeare, Marlowe, Dryden, and Pope were the best, authors now only write for materialism. It is clear that Greene himself has grown quite wealthy from literature. Orlando is hesitant to show him her manuscript but it pops out of her dress and Greene asks to take a look at it. He appreciates her work highly, and tells her she should publish it immediately. He promises to get it good reviews. After lunch, Orlando goes to a bookshop, buys some things to read, and settles down in Hyde Park. Here, with her attention divided between the sky and her reading, she queries the relationship between life and literature. She falls under the illusion that a toy boat bobbing in the water is her husband’s ship sinking, and she goes to telegram him at once. Orlando Studies Victorian Literature Orlando travels to her house in Mayfair and reads all she can of Victorian literature. She concludes that literature has changed substantially since the Elizabethan period, and that with so many critics it must have become very dry. Then, she looks out the window and the narrator, with poetic language writes of the scene outside. When the action returns to Orlando she has given birth to a son. The century now changes and King Edward succeeds Queen Victoria on the throne (1901); everything seems to have squeezed and the clouds are pulled back. Orlando reflects on how different this age is from the last one; everyone seems happier, but which a sense of distraction and desperation. Suddenly a light becomes very bright around Orlando and she hears an explosion in her right ear. She is struck ten times on the head. it is ten o’clock in the morning on the eleventh of October, 1928. Orlando is afraid to be living in the present, unprotected by the future or the past. She jumps in her motor car to go to the store and is wonder-struck by all the new things around. Elevators can whisk her through the air, men are flying, and she can hear voices from America. At the store, she orders sheets for a double bed, to replace the royal bed sheets at her home. Then, she smells a familiar scent, turns around, and is shocked to see Sasha entering the store. Sasha has grown fat since Orlando has seen her last. Orlando finds that Sasha is not really there, but that the scent of someone lighting a candle made her think of Sasha. Orlando comes to the realization that time has CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

125 passed over her; she is now approaching middle age. Orlando sees that everything is connected to everything else; she picks up a handbag and it reminds her of an old woman frozen on the ice. She gets into her car to drive home and the clock once again strikes her eleven times. The present is once again upon her. Driving home, Orlando thinks about all the different selves which live within her. The young boy who met Queen Elizabeth, the Ambassador, the soldier, the gypsy, the Lady, the woman in love. She tries to call on these selves, because each one is a part and parcel of her. She bends her head and ponders deeply; she is now stilled and “with the addition of this Orlando” she is now a single self, a real self. Once at home, she gets something to eat and wanders about the house. She and the house have been together nearly 400 years, and she knows its moods, its weariness, and its ease. She hears that its heart still beats, however far and withdrawn. The house does not belong entirely to her anymore, but to history. There are no more hoards of servants running down the hall or beer being spilled on the floor; Orlando sighs. As Orlando looks down her great hall, down through time and all of the things that happened in this hall, she is shuddered by an explosion. The clock strikes four, and Orlando sits composed but frightened. The present makes everything look distinct to her, and she is afraid that danger may come with each passing second. She goes outside to her gardens. The sight of her gardener’s thumb without a fingernail shocks her from thought to reality. She climbs up a path to her oak tree, which she has not seen since 1588. There, she intends to bury her bound book of poetry (which is now in its seventh edition) beneath the tree as a tribute to what the land has given her. But her dedication seems silly now, as she remembers how Greene compared her to Milton and handed her a large check. As she looks out over land that was once hers, she remembers Rustum, the old gypsy, asking her what the importance of her antiquity could be compared with nature. She knows her husband’s ship has sailed around the tip of Cape Horn and is coming home to her at last. She yells “ecstasy!” and “Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!” Now that the wind is calm and relaxed, she knows he will return to her. The house is prepared, just as it was over 400 years ago, for the coming of the dead queen (Elizabeth). Nothing has been changed, Orlando says. It is night, and the first stroke of midnight sounds. She hears an airplane above, and she bares her breasts to the moon, waiting for Shelmerdine. Shelmerdine, now a fine sea captain, leaps to the ground. As he does this, a wild bird springs up and Orlando exclaims, “It is the goose...the wild goose!” The twelfth stroke of midnight sounds on Thursday, October 11, 1928. Critical Comments The reemergence of Nick Greene comes as a comic function as this novel draws to a serious ending. More than two centuries later, Greene is exactly the same as he has always been. He is the product of Woolf’s attempt to poke fun at know-it-all Victorian literary critics who decide what is worthy literature and what is not. When Orlando goes up to her old oak tree to bury her bound poem beneath it, she comes to know the difference between being famous and being a poet. She sees that they have nothing to do with each other. Poetry is “a voice answering a voice.” It has nothing to do with fame, or even with the actual oak tree; it is her personal victory, regardless of what the critics may say. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

126 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II In the final chapter, which recounts Orlando’s experiences in the twentieth century, Woolf follows a stream-of-consciousness style. Slowly, everything grows more internalized as Orlando realizes that reality and age are subjective. The external is no more real than the internal, and therefore is no more worthy of time and description. Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness writing mirrors the thoughts of Orlando, her protagonist. Thus, the scenes which happen at the very end of the novel, where Orlando goes up to her tree, looks out over her home, welcomes back a dead queen, and heralds the return of her husband, may be a product of her imagination. But the reader is left with the message that imagination is just as essential to life as ‘fact.’ It is only upon maturity that Orlando is able to become conscious of this fact. Time, too, is a subjective quality. In this novel, where one day can be described in thirty pages, but entire decades are brushed over in a moment. Time seems an unreliable measure of experience. Orlando is finally able to recognize at the end of the novel that she is not defined by the moment in which she lives. Though the present time beats her over the head as she crouches in fear, her discomfort emanates form the fact that she has not yet discovered what she is in the present. And what Orlando finds is that she is a composite of many selves, many experiences, and many times. She cannot exist in isolation; just like scents and memories (which remind her of experiences past), she sees the interconnectedness of everything. It is a fallacy that things or people may exist in individual realities. Orlando exists in a continuum. When the clock strikes twelve, Orlando finally reaches maturity and understands the unity of her life. Conclusion Orlando character in the novel “Orlando” possesses a multidimensional personality due to his lifespan of four centuries and having undergone a sex change from male to female. Virginia Woolf’s deliberate disassociation of time in the novel supports the shift from male to female. Orlando as a character does not need any society or friends as he feels contented with himself. He is a noble and rich man and accepted for his accomplishments. But he lacks the fame through his poetry. The novel as such is equally divided in the first three chapters. Orlando is a man and at the end of chapter three, he transforms into a woman and lives as one till the end. The interest of the novel gains speed in the second half of the novel. The transformation of Orlando seems to unfold a character which illustrates the changes of the noble British society from the Restoration to Virginia Woolf’s contemporary England. Orlando’s thought both as male and female is masculine, open-minded and tolerant being sensitive to nature and people’s feelings. Male Orlando is a functional misanthrope; achieving fame through poetry is his only ambition. He seeks love not with the conviction that Orlando as a female does Female Orlando cannot live outside the society. It is both her restriction and her freedom. Orlando’s soul and inspiration is freed from any limitations to writing poetry after her transformation to a woman, after becoming a wife. Her soul having lived in man’s and a Woman’s body is a whole that inspires him Orlando has no need for society and friends. He is content being himself on his own even within a crowd of people. He is a nobleman, possesses richness is accepted for his accomplishments as an ambassador but he lacks something. He has not been granted fame through his poetry. As a man, he could avoid whomsoever he wanted; as a woman she has to resort to roundabout measures and insults to get rid of the Archduke and his declaration for love. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

127 7.2 DIFFERENT SEX SAME PERSON Introduction: Woolf has attempted to find truth through an examination through her friend Vita Sackville West. Woolf believed as she indicated numerous times in a “granite and rainbow approach” to biography that the reality of the self lay in understanding both of “solid facts and intangible personality’. In “Orlando” bearing the subtitle “A Biography”, we see her first and perhaps most liberated opportunity to test her belief, the change of sex and confusion of gender forces us to question the degree of federation between the duplicitous and often paradoxical manifestations of the self,… and more importantly to ask how the relation of such fantastical events facilitates our understanding. Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West were lovers. Does that mean they had sex? It probably does, because Vita liked sex and was a pursuer of women. She also loved a long and successful marriage to Harold Nicolson. He also had his affairs. Virginia and Leonard Woolf were largely compatible and undoubtedly affectionate. It seems unlikely from all that we know that she was interested in sex with Leonard, but sexless marriages were, and are, common enough. The thing about passion is that it is much more than a sexual encounter. And that is worth keeping in mind in the case of Woolf’s novel Orlando. What Vita and Virginia did or didn’t do in bed is much less important than the effect of Vita on Virginia’s imagination. Had the love affair not happened Orlando would never have been written. That would be a loss. As Woolf wrote in her diary: “A biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando. Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other.” Orlando is not the first piece of fiction about a sex change. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a playful and serious treatise on the shiftability of form – especially human form, as humans turn into trees or animals, or the gods embody themselves as human to pursue their love aspects. Shakespeare, the great playwright loved gender disguises – a girl who’s a boy who’s a boy who’s a girl – and of course as women were not allowed on the London stage in Shakespeare’s day, every female role was cross-gender. Derivation of Title : “Orlando” It is likely that the title of Woolf’s novel comes out of As You Like It, where the heroine Rosalind disguises herself as Ganymede, and in that guise teaches the man she loves – Orlando – how to love in return. Sackville-West liked to cross-dress, calling herself Julian. The freedom of male dress and male privilege is inverted in Woolf’s biography. Orlando as a woman finds how cumbersome are the clothes she must put on, and how restricted are her freedoms. Woolf’s Orlando begins his journey as a young man living at Knole, the magnificent house in Kent that Sackville-West could not inherit because she was female. The novel starts in an attic, as the young Orlando slices at the preserved head of a Moor. It also initiates with a famously disingenuous sentence: “He, for there could be no doubt about his sex … “ and then we spend the rest of the novel doubting exactly that. Is Orlando the first English language trans novel? It is, yet in the most playful way. Orlando manages his transition with grace and a ultimate truth. On seeing himself as a herself for the first CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

128 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II time in the mirror, she remarks: “Different sex. Same person.” That difference of sex, though, had legal and social implications. Many of the men Woolf knew, including her husband Leonard, and her sister Vanessa’s husband, Clive Bell, had been educated at Cambridge. Virginia and Vanessa had been home schooled. The usual method for upper class girls. Other girls were hardly got school education at all. When Woolf was writing Orlando, more than 8 million women aged 30 and over had won the vote in the 1918 Representation of the People Act. For men the age had been set at 21. In 1928, though, the year of its publication, all women over 21 finally won the vote on equal terms with men. But education for women posed a problem. Higher education especially so had much problem. Cambridge refused to confer degrees on women, and the two Cambridge colleges for women, Newnham and Girton, founded and funded by women, could offer coaching only but not degrees. Until 1948 the best a woman could expect was a degree in title only. Less than a fortnight after the publication of Orlando, Woolf went to Girton to deliver the second of her two lectures, entitled Women and Fiction. A week earlier she had been at Newnham. Woolf reworked her lectures into her great polemic A Room of One’s Own published in 1929. She included the details of two starkly contrasting experiences: a lavish lunch at King’s College with some of her men friends, followed by a threadbare dinner at Girton. She wrote in her diary: “Starved but valiant young women … Why should all the splendour, all the luxury of life be lavished on the Julians and the Francises and none on the (Elsie) Phares and the (Margaret) Thomases?” Woolf was preoccupied by the social and economic differences between the sexes – differences. She thought that there were gender biases masquerading as facts of life. “Orlando” had paved the way for this more serious and disturbing exploration. The protagonist spends hundreds of years trying to reclaim his own property and cash, legally sequestered after he wakes up as a woman. Woolf asks the reader to consider the following questions: why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? On poetry? What conditions are necessary for the creation of a work of art? She had already asked these questions in Orlando. Orlando is a poet – perhaps not a very sound one – but as a man even a mediocre writer is taken seriously. Even the best women struggle to be noticed. But we must keep writing, she told the young women at Cambridge, for in 100 years, and with a room of her own and money of her own, there will be no more gender-imposed limits to a woman’s capacity and her creative acumen. “Orlando” has sometimes been dismissed as a romp. It was far ahead of its time in terms of gender politics and gender progress. Consider it not only as the first trans novel in English but in the light of another 1928 publication: “The Well of Loneliness.” Radclyffe Hall, who liked to be known as John, was a rigid lesbian who believed that women who loved women were born in the wrong body. This attacked all lesbians to eternal suffering. Her novel was like a depressing version of “Orlando”. The writing style is strange – I’d say if you don’t believe me, see for yourself, but that would mean actually reading the thing. Following the sexologist Havelock Ellis, Hall calls lesbians “inverts”. Carol Ann Duffy told me that when she first read this she thought it meant lesbians had sex upside down. Woolf agreed to testify, in the interests of free speech and against censorship, but fretted at the thought of having to say The Well of Loneliness was a work of literature. She was right to fret; it isn’t. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

129 Woolf, because she can write, because she can charm, because she is funny, perhaps because she was in love, and her style flies along with such ease and grace, managed to smuggle past the censors and the guardians of propriety the most outrageous contraband. There was a hero who becomes a heroine, who loves women and men, who rails against the system. His experiences reflect those of a real-life woman who had numerous same-sex affairs and who went to the opera with slicked back hair wearing evening dress. The Well of Loneliness reinforces every depressing stereotype about gender and sexual desire. It was banned. Orlando reflected all the stereotypes – and became a bestseller. Orlando smashed up literary categories. Woolf called it a biography – in fact it is a novel. This was a direct hit at her dead father, Sir Leslie Stephen, the Victorian patriarch who had been the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, a dead white male heterosexual enterprise. Women hardly existed in the DNB. Woolf’s father was one of the senior figures wiping out women from history. And claiming truth. Now Woolf struck back. She started the postmodernist fashion for mixing up fact and fiction, history and invention. We’re used to it now. She’s our pioneer. When Woolf chases Orlando through continents of history and geographies of time, she is giving herself the freedom to discover the different ages of England, and the changing role of women. “Did you feel a sort of tug, tug, as if your neck was being broken on Saturday last at five minutes to one?” Woolf wrote to Sackville-West, as she finished the book on 20 March 1928. Woolf, of course, dedicated the book to her and sent her a copy on publication day, 11 October 1928. The love affair was nearly over by then. It had lasted three years, beginning at Christmas 1925, and Sackville-West had altered Woolf’s mind. The author had used every ounce of the affair to propel her own writing, and to alter how fiction could be written – and, in A Room of One’s Own, to discuss how women might soon alter the world with their writing. Not bad, for what she called “a little book.” Novel’s Inspiration Orlando was inspired by an actual relationship in Woolf’s life, with Vita-Sackville-West. Their relationship was inherently more complicated because both women were married although the boundaries of their respective marriages were not particularly restrictive. Sackville West was often conducting and nurturing various intimate relationships at any given time. Woolf was far more self- reflexive regarding her feelings and relationship with Sackville-West. Despite her existential examination of love, her relationship with Sackville-West contained deep-longing, constant devotion, intense jealousy and carnal craving, all of which are expressed far more overtly than similar sentiments in her writings. However, their ability to express the thoughts was somewhat thwarted by convention throughout the most intense segment of their relationship between 1924-1927, Sackville-West pursued other sexual conquests which resulted in Woolf’s endless jealousy. Prior to Sackville-West’s relationship with Woolf, Sackville was deeply involved with Violet Trefuis. “Orlando” novel in fact promotes the concept that gender and sexuality are not exclusively linked to sex, thus promoting a more androgynous reality. “Orlando” is written in the form of a mock biography and spans approximately 400 years in duration. However, the protagonist “Orlando” ages thirty six years over the course of the narrative. A particularly central moment in the taxi is midway through the novel when Orlando awakens to find that he is now a biological woman whose gender and identity has remained intact and unaltered though his biological sex has been completely changed. It is this CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

130 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II unrealistic and fantastical event which allows Virginia to create a fictional case study examining and essentially promoting androgyny. The poignant event relevant to explanation was Orlando’s initial observations regarding Princess Sasha. Aside from Orlando’s inability to immediately discern whether the person he is looking at is male or female, it is specifically important to note that his attraction is not limited by the boundaries of sex. He soon senses this person’s “extraordinary seductiveness” despite having no knowledge of the typical cultural markers i.e. sex that would denote an appropriate mate. Orlando remains bound by convention despite seductiveness. After experiencing the cultural interpretations of being a woman, Orlando became fully cognizant of the vastly variant opportunities between the sexes, all developed around the notion of sex and gender expectations. Although Orlando does not necessarily promote their implementation, she is slowly becoming indoctrined to their existence and learning how to deftly navigate within a society framed by strict expectations for each sex without causing a stir. Orlando as a Woman: Orlando spends more time living as a woman and begins internalizing the cultural expectations and perceptions of women and reflecting them in her own actions. “She was becoming a little more modest as women are, of her brains, and a little more vain as women are of her persons.” So there is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking. So having now worn skirts for a considerable time, a certain change was visible in “Orlando”. The redefining of interactions based upon people’s perception of Orlando as a woman and of Orlando’s gradual adoption of some stereotypical behaviours, and the qualities and strengths that she externally emphasises: “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, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result everyone has had experience.” Conclusion Orlando became fully cognizant of the vastly variant opportunities between the sexes, all developed around the notion of sex and gender expectations. Some of these changes she slowly assimilated into her life, examples being Orlando’s discovery of the oppressive notion of the fragility of the feminine mind yet at the same time experiencing the freedom to express emotions that she had been expected to repress as a man. “Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman, it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided.” These changes coupled with the stereotypical masculine gender traits that Orlando continued to feel and demonstrate, exemplify the omnipresent power of cultural ideas and the inherent limitations presented by such in a binary gender system. Orlando as a biological woman yet dressed as a man encounters a prostitute one night while walking. Their initial encounter was laden with stereotypical actions. After Orlando exposes herself as a woman, Nell, the prostitute responds with, “Well, my dear”, she said, when she had somewhat recovered, “I’m by no means sorry to hear it. For the plain Dunstable of the matter is that I’m not in the mood for the society of the other sex tonight.” This exemplies to the extent of the impact regarding sex and gender stereotypes. The cultural constraints imposed are so ingrained within CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

131 people’s psyche that they have lost the ability or desire to attempt sincere, purposeful interactions across sex and gender lines. They just accept that women are of an assigned personality and temperament as men. Orlando’s gender and self-identity had remained intact irrespective of sex. It is particularly significant that Orlando’s sex is described as “……. changing far more frequently…” which insinuates more conversions than the singular dramatic transformation midway through the book. These changes are metaphorical in nature. The assumption of any overarching generalities regarding gender and sex tend to be repressive notions that function more to thwart the growth of an individual rather than encourage autonomous growth according to intrinsic desires. That was the notion that Virginia Woolf began to explore. In discussing many selves present in any one person, the narrator identifies the most predominantly, examined manifestations of Orlando’s identity. 7.3 ORLANDO’S MOVEMENT WITHIN CLASSES Introduction: Orlando can move within classes keeping the privilege of returning any time. The character is portrayed as comfortable and satisfied with his positioning within a wealthy class, and at other times, he does not live his noble identity. He denies it, exchanging it for a new one. His desire at being a writer attached to his education and position as a noble woman, at a certain moment in the story, make the character face the fact that his or her noble position offers not only privileges but also hurdles and, of course, limitations to surpass. This is parenthetically observed by the omniscient narrator. The narrator’s comment about the effects of belonging to a certain class points to a reality faced by Orlando in the beginning of his life as the character lives for three centuries. Characterization of Orlando within class is convenient when he insists on writing the poem “The Oak Tree” and publishing it at the end of the novel. Orlando varies classes and blurs the limits of the classes where he/she is a participant but it carries a liberal standpoint. It means he takes part in different classes so that he finds room to write in one class when he/she needs to write. He finds room to publish the writing, moving to another class, when he needs the support to do so. Orlando has the privilege to shift within classes according to his/her own needs-and not everybody has such privilege. To show this, it should be noted that parts of “The Oak Tree” are written while the character lives among the gypsy community. But the poem is published when the character participates again in the noble class. In the following excerpt, the omniscient narrator reflects the character’s self-categorization by occupation, rather than by class: “eagerly recalling these and other instances of his unfitness for the life of society… proved that he himself belonged to the sacred race rather than to the noble-was by birth a writer, rather than an aristocrat-possessed him”. Here, there is the confusion of the issue of race. The narrator equates being noble with being an aristocrat, whereas being a writer is equated with belonging to a sacred race “by birth”. So, there is an intersection between class and race here, which causes a hesitation between received and constructed identitarian categories. Each of this is simultaneously set and rejected. After all, being a published writer seems to be related to class, as explored earlier, but in the excerpt just mentioned, it seems to be related to race. In Crenshaw’s sense, then, this intersectionality subtracts the radical issue of class within writing. It means that the writing profession is no longer marked by matters of social position. This slipperiness and deferral indicate that the novel politicizes identitarian categories used in Orlando’s characterization by the CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

132 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II omniscient narrator. These categories are destabilized and not fixed. In short, considering Orlando’s general characterization within class, the description of Orlando’s transit between richer and poorer classes reveals that such characterization is not stable, but this instability is made possible by the very class privilege Orlando is taken for granted to have transgressed or transcended. The protagonist in “Orlando” continues to defy preconceived gender expectations through his characteristic actions and reactions to other, often gender flouting characters. Midway through the novel, Virginia Woolf offers a more direct challenge to the notion that sex and gender are intrinsically linked and determined by biology by having Orlando emerge from a great sleep as a woman. Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando” emphasized economic independence for women. “Orlando” had a big polemic. The novel is a story of fantasy where Orlando is represented in four different periods of history. In the second part of the novel, he turns into Lady Orlando. Orlando feels comfortable being a man and being a woman. This fact reflects clearly the feminist vision of Virginia Woolf, her belief in sexual ambiguity. Conclusion Love is not the sole theme that dominates the novel. It is an in-depth exploration of what it means to be a man and a woman. The novel surpasses all natural boundaries, spanning across centuries and lifetimes, following Orlando as he metamorphoses from a young man into a fully realized woman of thirty four. In “Gender Trouble” Butler is of the view that “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congenial over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being. A political geneology of gender ontologies, if it is successful, will deconstruct the substantive appearance of gender into its constitutive acts and locate and account for those acts within the compulsory frames set by the various forces that police the social appearance of gender.” Virginia Woolf was self-reflexive regarding her feelings and relationship with Sackville-West. Sackville-West’s experiences while in drag seem to operate as both an example, using Judith Butler’s terms of performativity and performance. Her experience in drag can be classified as an act of performativity when it is considered that Sackville- West was operating comfortably within her won androgynous identity that pulled from both the stereotypical masculine gender and the traditional feminine gender. Her choice to dress in accordance with the masculine gender is completely in line with elements of her own personal identity “Orlando” promotes the fact and concept that gender and sexuality are not exclusively linked to sex. The event regarding Princess Sasha’s observation by Orlando is very poignant. His attraction is not limited by the boundaries of sex. The third chapter of the novel features the literary culmination of sex and gender ambiguity. Besides this, Lady of Purity, Lady of Chastily and Lady of Modesty converge upon Orlando’s sleeping body who are the three metaphorical sisters. Their realms acknowledge that they are welcome. Virginia Woolf focuses on the inaccurate assumption that gender and sex are intrinsically linked. 7.4 CATEGORIES OF IDENTITY IN “ORLANDO” Introduction: Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando: A Biography” becomes conscious of the opinions CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

133 she used to have before the transformation. These are modified and adapted by force to the current reality of her new gender role. When Orlando was younger and a man, he/she had varied hues of ideas towards the opposite sex, which would become her own contestations with the sexual transformation: “[s]he remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely appareled. ‘Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires,’ she reflected; ‘for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely appareled by nature” In other words, Orlando’s experiences in being a woman make her reflect about her previous misunderstanding of gender difference, as a man. This reflection leads Orlando to develop critical consciousness of her former (“masculine”) identity’s assumptions about the female gender. Orlando’s change shows the way genders are seen at the time and how they depend on a history of beliefs and conventions arbitrarily dictated by society. Argued by several scholars, gender roles are constructed culturally. Then, Orlando changes her opinion not only about women, as just quoted, but also about men: “[a]nd mincing out the words, she was horrified to perceive how low an opinion she was forming of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong”. So, Orlando lives as a man and a woman, and with the transformation he/she becomes much conscious of the arbitrary gendering of perspective and subject positions. Gender Perspective Though the shift in gender perspective does not seem as easy for Orlando to undergo as does the shift from male to female sex. The narrator suggests that the character learns, eventually, to adapt her behavior to what would be expected from a woman. This can be noticed in the following passage, when a man cries in front of Orlando: “[t]hat men cry as frequently and as unreasonably as women, Orlando knew from her own experience as a man; but she was beginning to be aware that women should be shocked when men display emotion in their presence, and so, shocked she was” The fact that Orlando notices that women “should be shocked” in this situation reveals once more that Orlando is conscious of genders being culturally constructed. It is not natural for women to be shocked in this situation, only they should be shocked for cultural reasons. However, at the same time that the narrator conveys the character’s apparent adaptability to her new condition. Orlando also questions this condition and criticizes the limitations of being a woman in Elizabethan noble society. Here, Orlando is disappointed with the cultural reduction of womanhood to such worthless roles as paying and receiving court, whereas she hopes more from her current condition. Gender and Class As Orlando is now a woman, and participates in a privileged class, there are limitations imposed CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

134 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II on her due to the roles assigned to women of the class she is occupying. So, she as a woman is discriminated within the class she is taking part into, not because of factors concerned with his ability or intelligence to be responsible for other roles in society. It is because solely of her gender. This intersection between gender and class reduces a group of people (women) in the dimension of roles in a certain class in society. This reading is crucial in order to show how different grounds of identity relate to each One Name, Several (Wo)Men. It is important to observe, that Orlando tries to adjust herself to womanly habits, but her behaviour and critiques of such habits cause her characterization to be ambiguous. This ambiguity indicates that Orlando’s characterization within gender identity is marked by fluidity. It means that there is non-fixity and indeterminacy of gender roles: “[i]f Orlando was a woman, how did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s love of power. She is excessively tender-hearted. She could not endure to see a donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. She could drink with the best and liked games of hazard... Whether, then, Orlando was most man or woman, it is difficult to say.” Orlando’s behaviour as a woman as described above confuses intelligible conceptions of womanhood, paradoxically developing a new identity, one that is not limited to cultural impositions of dualist thinking. In other words, Orlando is arguably introducing here new ways of being a woman. He is creating ways that up to this presentation were not legible to the culture in which the character is put up. Thus, textual analysis here proposes the challenge to fixed notions of sex and gender articulations and other identities, and treats identities as mutable signifiers. In fact, what takes place is Orlando’s presentation of a new possibility of identity, an identity until now not legible within cultural constructs. On account of the findings drawn from the characterizations of Orlando within nation, class, and gender, and the intersections, it is necessary to be critical of Orlando’s chances to experience various realities and never lose his/her privileges (such as the convenient possibility of returning to the previous nation and class anytime, a privilege of few). These added to the fact that he/she often leaves such experiences behind without engaging politically and struggling to change hierarchies and forms of discrimination. At the same time, though, it is necessary to celebrate Orlando’s awakening regarding gender. Orlando undergoes a significant change in gender perspective, and also gets constant questioning and critiquing of gender roles and artificial impositions to each gender. Conclusion “Orlando: A Biography” presents a transgressive text. It disturbs cultural constructs of gender and creates still “unintelligible” ways of behaving. For example, it is contradicted by a non- transgressive and normalizing subtext whenever the narrative suggests imperialism. Orlando’s emergence as a woman is not a troubling or problematic experience for her although those around CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

135 Orlando who were present in her life as a man seem to need time to fully accept and reconcile this transformation within their world view. There is explicit clarification that Orlando remained completely intact with her identity and gender after having switched biological sexes is highly significant. Her sense of self, identity, history and world-view remains unaltered in its entirety, although how the world reacts to her and the expectations placed upon her by society at large will alter vastly despite the fact that Orlando is intrinsically the same person as before, simply with an altered economy. 7.5 IS NOVEL “ORLANDO” A STORY OF SINGLE INDIVIDUAL? Introduction: Virginia Woolf saw herself as being much influenced by the Bloombury group of intellectuals where she could express her liberal ideology openly without prejudices and restrictions for being a woman “Orlando” established her at the height of her career as defender of social freedom for women. The character of Orlando is based on Vita-Sackville-West a famous member of the Bloomsbury group. Orlando does not accept the rules imposed to woman in that age. The story of Woolf’s gender-fluid and superhuman heroine is about much more than a single individual. As a work of political satire and feminist fantasy, “Orlando” laid the groundwork for today’s cultural landscape, in which the boundaries of both gender and literary genre are more clear and porous than ever. Through a protagonist who, over the course of several centuries, takes multiple lovers and writes lot of poetry in every possible manner, Woolf makes a joyful case for the transgression of all limits on desire, curiosity, and knowledge. But at the same time, Orlando constantly runs up against the limits of that freedom, revealing the persistent vise-grip of patriarchy even on a character blessed with the privileges of wealth, beauty, and close-to-eternal youth. Woolf invites us to imagine what it would feel like to escape, and yet, over and over again, reminds us that we are trapped. When we talk today about the tantalizing vigour of a gender-agnostic society, of a world in which masculine and feminine qualities are recognized for the performances that they are, or when we explore such possibilities in fiction and fantasy, we do so in “Orlando’s” shadow. During the week of the novel’s release, Woolf gave the first of two talks at Cambridge that became “A Room of One’s Own”, which was published in 1929. It is now considered as a classic of feminist polemic. Ahead of the release of that book, Woolf suspected it might be dismissed, along with “Orlando”, for having too much “charm” and “sprightliness.” She worried that her illustrious male friends would give it only “evasive, jocular” criticism, refusing to engage with its ideas. About “Orlando”, she wrote defensively, “I want fun. I want fantasy,” perhaps to preempt dismissive half-praise. Even the author seemed unwilling to acknowledge the political aspect in her playful skewering of gender roles, her creation of a protagonist who is bound by neither of the two forces that define us as human: sex and death. The novel express the same frustration, roaring to the surface again nearly a century on — the specific impossibility of living a full human life once society, in one form or another, has labeled you a woman. Woolf explores and clarifies the insidious enforcement of masculine power: through money, through status, through freedom of dress and movement, through the right to speak in public and be heard and believed. Woolf points out over and over again that what makes men as men is nothing but their power, and what makes women as women is their lack of it: financially, culturally, and physically. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

136 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II Orlando follows the same timeline of “A Room of One’s Own” from the 16th century to Woolf’s exact time and place, England in October 1928. When Orlando is not much more than a boy, he is presented to Queen Elizabeth; the elderly monarch takes a shine to him, and as a consequence, “Lands were given him, houses assigned him.” While Elizabeth’s infatuation with Orlando is feminine, her power is not. In a speech to rouse the troops against the invading Spanish Armada, the Virgin Queen famously declared, “I may have the body of a weak and female woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” Her favour endows Orlando, as a man, with property and power. Orlando at Court Orlando is presented at court and pursued by a number of potential wives; instead, he falls in love with a gender-ambiguous Russian princess named Sasha, who breaks his heart. He is appointed ambassador to Constantinople, raised to the status of duke, and then, after a days-long sleep, he awakens one morning as a woman. For a brief interlude after Orlando’s male-to-female transformation, Woolf raises the possibility of not being bound by sex at all, and tries speaking of Orlando with “they” pronouns, as a person containing both male and female selves: “The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity. Their faces remained, as their portraits prove, practically the same.” After these two sentences, however, the narrator- biographer bows to convention and begins to call Orlando “she.” But the glimpse of a nonbinary pronoun is tantalizing. It would take decades for the singular, gender-evasive “they” to take hold in the lexicon and for the culture to catch up to “Orlando’s” casual claim that “in every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place.” The Transition of Character The character’s transition is more gradual than the shift to the feminine pronoun suggests. At first, Orlando adopts unisex Turkish trousers, and it is not until she feels “the coil of skirts about her legs” and the changed attitudes of observing men that she starts to grasp the consequences of her new identity. Her once-secure grasp on her estates and her noble position are suddenly subject to lawsuits that drag on for hundreds of years. The female Orlando’s fortune is minimized to the strands of pearls and emeralds wrapped around her neck, portable and removable, instead of being connected, body and soul, to her land, where she used to lie and feel the roots of an oak tree like a “spine” beneath her. The rest of the novel is about the financial and emotional results consequences of being a woman in a society created and run by men, for men. Back in London, at the end of the 18th century, Orlando spends her time attempting to gather the wisdom of the great male wits of the age, Pope, Addison, and Swift, but her sex makes it impossible to speak freely with them. She can hardly get a word in, and is ignored and patronized when she does. Orlando in a state of frustration dons her old masculine clothing, takes to the streets, and picks up a prostitute, with whom she can finally have a frank conversation, woman to woman. Conclusion Orlando feels comfortable being a woman and also being a man. He is not a single person. She believes that both sexes could have some differences but the human essence was the same for both. Orlando decides to live her life freely adopting an open mind ideology. There is a comingling of both masculinity and femininity within his/her body and mind. On the whole the novel is not a novel of CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

137 single person’s involvement. He/She may be one but covers the whole canvas of the novel in a well- limit manner. It is a biography of not only one character but of nature and history of gender, identity and sexuality through time. 7.6 THEMES IN THE NOVEL “ORLANDO” Introduction: Every novel possesses themes which are sometimes inherent and sometimes very much expressive. “Orlando” is one of the novels by Virginia Woolf which traces themes which are not very easy to find out. There are themes of fulfillment, values, gender, language, fame, writing and poetry, time sense. Besides this, fact and imagination, gender differences, conforming to society are also some of the themes. Fulfillment is one of the themes of the novel. It is not possible to achieve it. Time and again, Orlando tries to find meaning in life and happiness by attempting to immerse himself in myriad shades of activities. He finds ample in pleasures of literature, women and good company But these are all ephemeral. As the initial thrill vanishes nothing is left behind but emptiness that is hard to fill than before. So the novel presents Orlando’s quest and passionate zeal for happiness and pleasures. Values: The novel projects in a fine manner the journey and process of maturity in Orlando. Orlando transforms from male to female, moves from country to country and possesses interests that change all the time. What remains is the same which mark his values. No matter the place where he finds himself, Orlando values the same things always. For him, poetry, wealth and feelings carry importance even though the society in which he lives considers such values as of no value. Orlando’s life is itself a performance. Gender: Virginia Woolf focuses on gender as the main theme of the novel. He does not have a fixed gender and shifts from male to female. Orlando notices how it is harder to be a female than to be a male because of the limitations imposed on females. But being a male is not perfect either because males, as Orlando describes them, are driven by the desire to climb the social ladder and are not able to openly show their emotions. The way the narrator describes the differences between two genders is a realistic one. She does not favour a gender to be detrimental to the other. The novel describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries meeting the key figures of English literary history. Victoria Smith argues that the novel is about the impossibility of representing the female experience in its entirety as the recurring theme of the novel “Orlando” is his inability to properly describe emotions people and even binal occurrences. Throughout the novel, Orlando cannot describe Sasha or nature, the biographer cannot write properly a description of Orlando and the love which he feels for Shelmerdine is referred to as indefinable. Language: Language is an important theme in the novel as it serves to distinguish between different cultures and social classes. The fact that Orlando speaks French Well, unlike the other young men of the English court, allows him to become romantically involved with Sasha. But they are still separated by the linguistic boundaries of communication that is not their mother tongue. When Sasha speaks to a man in Russian, it makes Orlando jealous and curious. The people are separated by foreign language. Upper and lower classes of people speak different dialects that serve to mark and separate them socially. Writing style is also influenced by this and Nicholas CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

138 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II Greene makes fun of Orlando’s high class language by calling his poetry as full of words and bombastic to the extreme. Name and Fame: During the novel Orlando thinks over the merits and demerits of fame and name. He has a passion to earn name and fame as a young boy. Through his writing, he is interested to achieve fame all over the world and then he decorates his huge mansion as a mark of dignity. But Sasha and Nicholas mock at him publicly and he turns inward. He states: “Bad, good or indifferent, I’ll write from this day forward to please myself.” So Orlando becomes famous. By that time, it does not seem to matter much to her and she reflects negatively. Orlando’s ideology of fame is also affected by the well-known people he comes across. As he returns to England as a woman, Orlando enters high class people which she finds titillating and full of boredom. When he attends parties, she thinks that everything is charming, witty and interesting. But as she comes back home afterwards, she finds that she cannot recollect anything. Even when Orlando takes home Alexander Pope, the great Victorian poet and author, she is intrigued and allured to him when the carriage is in the dark. But as the light approaches, she sees that he is as common and grotesque as any other person. She rebukes herself for getting entrapped in celebrity and vanity syndrome and breaks off her friendship with him when she comes to know about it. For all his genius writing, he does not truly respect women class. Poetry Compositions etc.: Composition of verse form is an intense passion for Orlando. When we see Orlando as a sixteen year boy, he is said to be a prolific writer who is fond of writing about nature though he finds it tough to compose about nature when he really tries to go deep into it. Orlando’s style of writing undergoes change all through his/her life. For example, the biographer notes that Orlando got better at writing witty, natural dialogue after remaining in the company of Pope, Addison and Swift. The biographer states: “She had been a gloomy boy, in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid; and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried drama. Yet all through these changes she had remained, she reflected fundamentally the inextricably tied to one’s personality and experiences. However, Nicholas Greene’s mocking tone had made Orlando ashamed and humiliated of his writings, she is eventually praised for his adeptness in writing and wins. However, Nicholas Greene seems to like “The Oak Tree” for its emulation of styles and past authors. His character serves to show that literary critics will always remember the writings of the past. Time: When “Orlando” was published, the most disruptive, anachronistic aspect of the novel would be the title character’s bending of gender and societal norms or may be Woolf’s critiques of high society and the literary world. However, a review of “Orlando in New York Times in October 1928 focuses on Woolf’s depiction of time. It states “Not that she has abandoned the stream of consciousness method which she used with such conspicuous success in her previous novels, but with it she has combined what, for lack of a better term, we might describe as an application to writing of the Einstein’s theory of relativity. In this new work, she is largely preoccupied with the “time” element in character and human relationships and with a statement of the exact complexion of that intangible moment, a combination of past and future, of objective reality and subjective consciousness, which we refer to as the present”. Virginia Woolf explores the concept of time in a quite purposeful way all through the novel. She tells us that some hours in Orlando’s life flash by while others contain decades, simply because of the events or intellectual work done within the CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

139 period of time. Orlando ages slowly, transforms into a woman at middle age and experiences a rebirth of sorts as a result, and continues to age even more slowly so that after over four hundred years, she remains a thriving healthy adult woman. Woolf’s choice to span such a vast period of English history allows the reader to liken not only the experiences of men and women in England but also the influence and impact of different ages on the freedom of women. Conclusion Virginia Woolf’s creation of character in the novel “Orlando” relies upon a certain amount of “wordplay” so as to maintain her nature. All his/her actions lead to the formation of certain themes. The novel as such presents the fairy tale of the character Orlando. Orlando’s role in the novel imparts several themes which are really important. Virginia Woolf imparts gender roles and androgyny according to her, has to do with breaking out of restricting gender roles and social norms. De Reversal of gender roles is central to the plot of create themes of universal value. The book’s subject and themes emanate from Orlando’s life and its performance. 7.7 CHARACTER SKETCHES OF ORLANDO’S Introduction: Orlando is the protagonist of the novel who is a wealthy nobleman. He was born during the reign of Elizabeth-I. He undergoes a mysterious change of sex at the age of about thirty and lives on for more than three hundred years into modern times without aging perceptibly. Orlando has values deeply rooted in his home and his long and noble ancestry which are based on Woolf’s real life-love interest Vita-Sackville West. Orlando is able to reflect upon the different positions and experiences of each gender. She/he is a reflective individual who has a passion both for life and for love and finds in poetry one of her greatest satisfactions. As a Young Boy As a teenage boy, the handsome Orlando serves as a page at the Elizabethan court and becomes “favourite” of the elderly queen. After her death he falls intensely in love with Sasha, an elusive and somewhat feral princess in the entourage of the Russian embassy. This episode, of love and ice skating against the background of the celebrated Frost Fair held on the frozen Thames River during the Great Frost of 1608, when “birds froze in mid air and fell like stones to the ground”, inspired some of Virginia Woolf’s mot bravura writing: “Great statesmen, in their beards and ruffs, dispatched affairs of state under the crimson awning of the Royal Pagoda … Frozen roses fell in showers when the Queen and her ladies walked abroad … Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn, overladen with apples. The old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips hinted the truth.” Orlando does not feel constrained by any time but the present which frightens her in its potential for danger. It is in the present that Orlando realizes herself to be composed of not one but many CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

140 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II selves. These selves and experiences combined with her love of nature allow Orlando to find composure and confidence as one individual. Orlando’s sex change midway through the novel plays an important part in his character development. While she/he starts as a young, wealthy nobleman who takes interest in dallying about the royal court with lovely noble women, Orlando ends the novel a deep reflective woman. The change is reflected in Orlando’s writing what was once overly ornate mythological drama turns into a beautiful mature epic poem. As Orlando ages and lives through many ages and realizes that she/ he is composed of hundreds of selves and experiences. All these selves and experiences combine the person he/she is at the present moment. She/he is a part of nature and thus not immortal. She/he realizes that this self will also abolish. Finally by maturing and by reaching middle age, Orlando finds that she/he has gained what she/he was looking for life and a lover. As a Poet Orlando engages energetically with life in the 18th and 19th centuries, holding court with great poets, notably Alexander Pope. Critic Nick Greene, apparently also timeless, reappears and promotes Orlando’s writing, promising to help her publish “The Oak Tree”. “The Oak Tree” a long poem started and abandoned in his youth. He meets and hospitably entertains an invidious poetaster, Nicholas Greene, who goes ahead to find fault with Orlando’s writing. Later Orlando feels betrayed on learning that he has been lampooned in one of Greene’s subsequent works. A period of contemplating love and life leads Orlando to praise the value of his ancestral stately home, which he proceeds to furnish lavishly. There he plays host to the populace. Ennui sets in and Orlando feels troubled by a persistent suitor, the tall and somewhat androgynous Archduchess Harriet, leading Orlando to look for a way to leave the country. He is appointed by King Charles II as ambassador to Constantinople. Orlando performs his duties well, until a night of civil unrest and murderous riots. He falls asleep for a period of days, and others cannot rouse him. Orlando gets up to find that he has metamorphosed into a woman - the same person, with the same personality and intellect, but in a woman’s body. Although the narrator of the novel professes to be disturbed and bewildered by Orlando’s change, the fictional Orlando complacently accepts the change. From here on, Orlando’s amorous inclinations change frequently, although she stays biologically female. Conclusion Orlando is a mysterious character due to central event of Orlando’s transformation from male to female. The difference of sex though had legal and social implications Virginia. Woolf was preoccupied by the social and economic differences between the sexes. These were the differences that were gender biases masquerading as facts of life. The titular character defies nature’s laws of sex and in doing so undergoes the freedom, privilege and even immortality of maleness juxtaposed to the constraints, misfortunes and relative absence of femaleness across four centuries. 7.8 CHARACTER SKETCH OF SASHA Introduction: Sasha is a Russian princess who comes to England in 1604. She fascinates the CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

141 youthful Orlando who falls in love and wants to marry Sasha. The Princess, a fickle creature, toys with the common sailors and finally deserts Orlando to return home to Russia. Qualities: Sasha is a character who first awakens in Orlando, a feeling of despair. Until the point that Sasha deserts him, Orlando has easily had everything he could have wanted. She was born in a noble family and chosen by the queen at an early age to achieve ample fortune and dignity Orlando is not in favour of all these. But Sasha is an exotic, mysterious princess and changes Orlando’s complacency about life. Like all the other characters, her significance in the novel vibrates by the impact she leaves on the Protagonist Orlando. It is important to note that Sasha awakens in Orlando an intense sexual instinct. Even before he knows her gender, he is drawn to her. She goes ahead vigorously and puts on androgynous clothes. Orlando is infatuated towards Sasha as an individual, altogether separate from what her gender is at the time. Sasha’s exotic nature is coupled by her foreign tongue and deceptive etiquettes. Orlando can never be sure exactly what she is thinking and he feels very vulnerable when she speaks to the sailor in Russian. As the novel progresses and Orlando, seeks maturity, Sasha is Orlando’s first real experience with love and female nature. Conclusion Sasha’s character is thought to be based on violet Trefusis, a lower of Vita’s from 1918-1920. She was an English socialite and author and remembered for her lengthy affair with the poet Vita Sackville-West. The episode of love and ice-skating of Sasha against the background of the celebrated Frost Fair held on the frozen Thame River during the Great Frost of 1608, when “birds froze in mid air and fell like stones to the ground” inspired some of Virginia Woolf’s bravura writing. The melting of the ice coincides with Sasha’s unfaithfulness and sudden departure for Russia. 7.9 SUMMARY OF UNIT The first chapter of the novel relates to physical appearance of Orlando who is presented as a young man of sixteen. He is a poet and composes drama, tragedy sentiments very quickly. He puts on good clothes to meet the queen. He has a liking for low company also. After Queen’s expiry, he goes to the Court of James 1. He meets three court ladies as Clorinda, Favilla, and Euphrosyne. There is an immense frost but the king turns it into a carnival. Sasha and Orlando skate down the river where the Russian ship is frozen. They go back to the town at night. Gender is of little importance to beauty or attraction. In chapter 2, The narrator reaffirms her duty to “state the facts”. Orlando is exiled from the court. His love of literature keeps him alive. He wrote a lot of literature as he turns twenty-five. He meets Nicholas Greene who thinks that great age in literature is past in England. He writes a satire modeled on Orlando. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

142 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II Orlando decides to let nature take up all his time. He does not write about any critic. Orlando invites his neighbours to 365 bedrooms mansion. Orlando sees Harriet, the Queen’s cousin who is attracted by her. He becomes an Ambassador to Constantinople. Virginia Woolf satirizes the genre of biography. The tone of the novel is light hearted. The novel explores the difficulty of finding fulfillment. In Chapter three, Orlando plays a dominant role in the negotiations between King Charles II and the Turks. Orlando arranges a party where thousands of people gather where women grow fascination for Orlando. Orlando goes under trance where an insurrection occurs. Three figures enter during trance called Lady of Purity, Lady of Chastity and Lady of Modesty. Orlando undergoes a sex change at the age of thirty. She now spends long times in composing verses. His gender change to female is both poetic and sudden. Chapter Four describes Orlando’s concept of delight in being a man or woman. Women have a limited role to play while men are free like birds. Now she Orlando loves to live in the company of women. Orlando again watches Archduchess Harriet. Harriet asks for Orlando to forgive her who in fact was a man. Orlando does not care about her title or fortune. What she desired is “life and a lover”. Orlando walks with old men’s clothes on her body and rooms in London. This chapter explores the concept of mismatching. This chapter is the most comical section of the novel. In Chapter Five, Orlando thinks about the manuscript of “The Oak Tree”. She is thirtytwo years old now and feels that this 19th century is not fit for her. Orlando now searches for marriage. She feels that everyone is married. She meets Shelmerdine Esquire but realizes that she is a woman. Shel cannot believe that Orlando is a woman. In this chapter, the novel deals with a protagonist who feels the need to conform to the image and morals of those who surround him. The relationship with Shel is the closest that Orlando comes to finding love. In Chapter Six, Orlando watches at the ring on her finger and feels whether the age would approve of her marriage. The narrator turns to describe nature. Orlando journeys to London in search of someone to read her manuscript. Greene has grown rich from literature but Orlando hesitates to show him her manuscript. Orlando travels to her house and studies all the Victorian literature. Now King Edward succeeds Queen Victoria (1901). Orlando is afraid to live in the present unprotected by the future or the past. Orlando thinks about all the selves which live within her. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

143 Orlando is shuddered by an explosion. The clock strikes four. The twelfth stroke of midnight sounds on October 11, 1928. The sixth chapter explores the poking fun of Greene. Virginia Woolf follows the stream of consciousness technique in the novel. Orlando is able to become aware at the end of the novel that she is not defined by the moment in which she lives. Orlando possesses a multidimensional personality in the novel. His soul and inspiration is freed from any limitations to writing poetry. Summary of “Different Sex : Same Person” “Orlando” novel is based on the love-affair of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West. Title of the novel is derived from “As You Like It” where heroine Rosalind disguises as Ganymede to teach the man Orlando. Virginia Woolf’s Journey begins as a young man living at knole. Orlando manages his transition from male to female. Orlando is a poet. Women who loved women were born in the wrong body. Orlando’s initial observations regarding Sasha were much poignant. Orlando remains bound to conventions despite seductiveness. Orlando spends more time living as a woman. Orlando became fully cognizant of the vastly variant opportunities between the sexes, all developed around the notion of sex and gender expectations. The narrator here identifies the most predominantly examined manifestations of Orlando’s identity. Summary of “Orlando’s Movement Within Classes” The character of Orlando is portrayed as comfortable and satisfied with his positioning within a wealthy class. The character of Orlando lives for three hundred centuries. Orlando has the privilege to shift within classes according to his/her own needs. The protagonist continues to defy preconceived gender expectations through his characteristic actions and reactions to other characters. The novel depicts economic independence for women. Orlando feels comfortable being a man and a woman. Orlando undergoes metamorphoses from a young man into a fully realized woman of thirty four. Sackville-West was operating comfortably within her own androgynous identity. Orlando’s attraction is not limited by the boundaries of sex. Summary of Categories of Identity in “Orlando” When Orlando was younger and a man, he/she had the ideas towards the opposite sex which would become her own contestations towards the opposite sex. After transformation, Orlando changes her opinion not only about women but also about men. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

144 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II The character learns to adapt herself to what would be expected from a woman. Orlando is conscious of genders being culturally constructed. Orlando as a woman participates in a privileged class. The intersection between gender and class reduces a group of people in the dimension of roles in society. Orlando tries to adjust herself to womanly habits. Orlando gets the chance to experience various realities. Orlando’s emergence as a woman is not troubling. Summary: Is “Orlando” a Story of Single Individual? The story of “Orlando” is much more than a single individual. The novelist explores and clarifies the insidious enforcement of masculine power through money, states, dress and movement. Orlando is pursued by a number of wives at the court and falls in love with Sasha. “In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place.” The transition of character is more gradual than the shift to the feminine pronoun suggests. The novel is also about the financial and emotional consequences of being a woman in society. Orlando feels comfortable being a man as well as a woman. Summary of “Themes in the Novel “Orlando” The novel Orlando has a number of themes like theme of fulfillment, theme of values, gender, language, name and fame, poetry and time sense etc. The novel presents Orlando’s quest for happiness and pleasure. The novel portrays the journey and process of maturity in Orlando. Which mark his values. Virginia Woolf focuses on gender as the main theme. Orlando feels it is harder to be a female than male. She does not favour a gender to be detrimental to the other. Language is an important theme that serves to distinguish between different cultures. Orlando wants to earn name and fame as a young boy. But Orlando’s fame is affected by the people who meet him. Composition for verse form is an intense passion of Orlando. Nicholas Greene’s mocking tones had made him ashamed and humiliated of his writings. Time is also one of the important themes of the novel Virginia Woolf explores the concept of time in a purposeful way. All the actions of Orlando lead to formation of themes. Summary of Orlando’s Character Orlando is the protagonist of the novel “Orlando”. Orlando serves as a page at the Elizabethan Court and becomes favourite of the Queen. The present time makes him think that he is composed of many selves. Orlando’s sex change plays an important role in the novel. Orlando realizes that he/she is composed of hundreds of selves and experiences. Orlando engages energetically with life in the 18th and 19th centuries holding court with CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

145 great poets. So Orlando is a mysterious character. Summary : Character of Sasha Sasha is a Russian Princess. She is a fickle creature and toys with the common sailors. She awakens in Orlando a feeling of despair that Sasha desert him. She is an exotic mysterious princess. She awakens sexual instinct in Orlando. Sasha’s character is thought to be based on violet Trefusis. 7.10 KEYWORDS/ABBREVIATIONS 1. Androgynous: bisexual, hermaphrodite 2. Contestations: juxtaposition, reactance 3. Intelligible: understandable, perspicuous 4. Insidious: unfair, deceitful, sneaky 5. Titillating: tickling, mild excitement 6. Skewering: fasten together with pin or skewer 7.11 LEARNINGACTIVITY 1. Discuss Virginia Woolf’s use of time in “Orlando”. What is its effect on the elements of story? 2. Discuss Orlando’s beliefs about fame in the novel. What is Orlando’s conclusion about fame? 3. What is the thematic role of clothing in “Orlando”? How does clothing interact with notions of gender in the story? Discuss. 7.12 UNIT END QUESTIONS (DESCRIPTIVE, SHORTS AND MCQS) (A) Descriptive Questions 1. Discuss various themes in the novel “Orlando”. 2. Discuss the character of Orlando in the novel “Orlando”. 3. How does the concept of time function in the novel? Discuss. CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

146 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II 4. Is “Orlando” a story of a single person? Discuss. (B) Short Questions-Answers 1. Why is the spirit of the nineteenth century so ‘antipathetic’ to Orlando? Ans. As Orlando reaches the nineteenth century, she is a woman and thus limited in her actions and freedom according to social standards of time. She finds that all property is held in court. It cannot legally belong to her. Orlando finds the spirit of Victorian morality suffocating and oppressive. In previous centuries, she had been happy to find lovers. But in the nineteenth century, the pressure to conform is heavy. She resents feeling as if her existence is not important. 2. What was the base of the novel for Virginia Woolf to write “Orlando”? Ans. Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando” is based on the love affair between Virginia and Vita Sackville- West. Vita liked sex and was a pursuer of women. She also enjoyed a successful marriage to Harold Nicolson. What Vita and Virginia did or did not do in bed is much less important than the effect of Vita on Virginia’s imagination. Had the love affair not happened “Orlando” would never have been written. Virginia wrote in her diary: “A biography beginning in the year 1500 and continuing to the present day, called Orlando Vita; only with a change about from one sex to the other.” 3. What are week-long trances of Orlando? Ans. Orlando’s trances parallel each other in their duration and physical manifestation. But these differ much in their effects. Orlando falls into the first trance when he retreats to his home after Sasha scorns him. He remains in the trance for exactly seven days, rising on the morning of the seventh day. The trance seems to have erased his memories of his time with Sasha. But his second trance has a physical effect when he wakes up as a woman. These trances underscore the importance of theme of time in the novel. 4. What are Orlando’s beliefs about fame? Ans. Orlando wants to be famous for his writing as a young man. But after being scorned by Sasha and Nicholas Greene, he turns inward with his writing. He decides that he would not write for fame, but rather personal fulfillment. Orlando’s views of fame are also affected by the famous people she meets. She cannot recollect anything of note after attending parties. Her final conclusion about fame is negative. 5. Virgina Woolf liked to write a fictional biography rather than simply a novel, why? Ans. By doing so, Virginia Woolf challenges the factuality as a whole, especially those that stray into fiction or do not try to give a complete picture of the subject. At many points, the biographer notes that little is known about Orlando’s life during a period because he/she spent most time alone or records were lost. The biographer acknowledges the fact that those particular parts of the story have been inserted with imagination of Orlando’s experiences which is humorously meta-fictional as the whole story is fictional. (C) Multiple Choice Questions and Answers 1. What type of book does the narrator say “Orlando” is? (a) An Autobiography (b) A Tragedy (c) A Mystery (d) A biography CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

147 2. What does Nick Greene tell Orlando that poets in the 19th century only work for (a) Fame (b) Love (c) Money (d) Food 3. What natural disaster overtakes Britain the season that Orlando meets Sasha? (a) The great frost (b) The great fire (c) The great volcano (d) The great earthquake 4. What is the title of the poem that Orlando continually works to write? (a) Hercules (b) The Oak Tree (c) The Pine Tree (d) Hermaphrodite 5. What does Orlando find shocking about Archduchess Harriet? (a) She is much more wealthy than Orlando guessed (b) She is quite athletic (c) She is really a man (d) She was a part of the gypsy tribe in Turkey 6. When the novel ends, what year is it? (a) 1588 (b) 1888 (c) 1928 (d) 1988 Answers: 1. (d), 2. (c), 3. (a), 4. (b), 5. (c), 6. (c) 7.13 REFERENCES 1. Woolf, Virginia. “Orlando: A Biography”, London: Penguin Books, 1993 (1928) 2. Butler, Judith. “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London Routledge, 1990 3. Apter T.E. : Virginia Woolf, Study of Her Novels. New York: New York University Press. 4. www. researchgate.net > publication One Name, Several Wo(men) Cultural Categories. 5. Orlando: A Biography : Wikipedia 6. www. sparknotes.com > lit > orlando CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

148 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II UNIT - VIII JOSEPH CONRAD : HEART OF DARKNESS STRUCTURE 8.0 Learning Objectives 8.1 Life and Works of Joseph Conrad 8.2 Summary of the Novel 8.3 Significance of the Title 8.4 Marlow’s Role and Character in the Novel 8.5 Character of Kurtz 8.6 Autobiographical Elements in the Novel 8.7 Themes in the Novel 8.8 Women Characters in the Novel 8.9 Conclusion 8.10 Summary of the Story 8.11 Keywords/Abbreviations 8.12 Learning Activities 8.13 Unit End Questions (Descriptive, Short and MCQs) 8.14 References 8.0 LEARNING OBJECTIVES After going through this unit the students will be able to: Know about the life and works of Joseph Conrad. Will be able to write the summary of the novel with comments. The roles and characters of Marlow and Kurtz. 8.1 LIFE AND WORKS OF JOSEPH CONRAD Introduction: Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad) was a novelist of Polish origin. Who born at Berdyczow in partitioned Poland on December 3, 1857. As the sailor-cum- fiction writer Conrad was born, the nation was vanished from the map of Europe. However, the CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

149 Poles were, and remain, a stout patriotic nation. Their sense of national identity being all the more strong for their lack of national autonomy; and when a nation is annexed by hostile powers; its preoccupation with interlinked problems of loyalty and treachery is intensified Family: Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was highly patriotic; and as a consequence of their conspirational activities, both Apollo and his wife Ewa were arrested, tried and sent into exile by the Russian authorities. Four-year old Conrad accompanied them on the sad journey to Vologda. So already, as a child, Conrad would have learned that to be loyal to one principle may cause treachery to another: service of nation may entail subversion of a state. Partly as a result of the privations of exile, Ewa died early of tuberculosis in 1865. Four years later Apollo, her grieving husband, joined her. Childhood: Conrad was orphan by the age of eleven heading the vast procession of mourners which followed his father’s Coffin through the streets of Krakow in a funeral that was simultaneously an immense patriotic demonstration. Already stamped on the boy’s imagination was an image of the lethal cost exacted from domestic, familial life by national political concerns; and already he knew personally the isolation which was to be rendered with such force in the novels of his mature years. Conrad was a junior member of the ruling class - the szlachta - that had ceased to rule; the class which, in Poland, got its power mainly from the ownership of agricultural land. Politically, Conrad’s subsequent novels could seem paradoxical in their combination of some aristocratic conservative elements like the keen sense of honour, of traditions, of noblesse oblige and some skeptically radical elements (the hostility to capitalism and to the commercial spirit). However, the paradox dwindles when we see how strongly it relates to the values of a traditional land-owning gentry, and particularly to a gentry which, in the modern world, is denied its former political powers. After the death of Apollo Korzeniowski, the role of Conrad’s guardian was eventually taken by Apollo’s brother-in-law, Tadeusz Bobrowski. Conrad’s career as a seaman and his after entry into the world of fiction-writing were supported by money provided by Tadeusz Bobrowski who, unlike Apollo, was a landowner, shrewdly practical, astutely prudent and lucidly circumspect. Yet he was also intensely patriotic, and repeatedly reminded the young Conrad of his heritage and responsibilities of a Polish nobleman. The economic basis of Conrad’s early career is thus revealed in a letter Bobrowski sent him in September 1886, when his errant nephew had qualified as a master in the merchant navy. It well shows the intermingling of the economic and the literary in Conrad’s background. “The money (on this occasion £ 30 requested by Conrad) will probably arrive about a week late for it will take at least that time for it to reach Odessa and then be posted on to London. I am now just telling you that it will arrive, proving my constant solicitude for you. I do not know how much longer I shall be able to manifest my remembrance in such a tangible form. For if Hamlet said ‘Something is rotten in the State of Denmark’, so it has been the case of some time in our agricultural affairs. The fall in the prices of grain (in spite of the bad harvest this year our local needs can always be met) and sugar affects the rent one can get for one’s land. The leaseholders are losing badly… (W)hatever the price of land may be I am not going to farm it myself, so I shall let it for whatever it will fatch…” Tadeusz Bobrowski’s heavy emphasis on the bleakness of the economic climate is partly intended to chasten a sometimes feckless and extravagant nephew; and the concluding remark about not CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)

150 British Poetry of 19th and 20th Century - II taking the matter as tragically as Hamlet tallies with Bobrowski’s concern to control the melancholic and depressive side of Conrad’s temperament. The ease with which the Shakespeare quotation came to the Uncle’s mind shows how culturally civilized was the milieu in which Conrad had grown up. The letter, as a whole, reminds that the direct or indirect income from land was what made Bobrowski powerful to sustain young Conrad’s peripatetic and sometimes erratic progress through the world. Bobrowski had also earmarked for Conrad half of his own inheritance from a relative, Mikoloj Bobrowski and made him an allowance of 2000 frances a year and put him in touch with a merchant named Delestang. In 1890, when Conrad visited him at Kazi microwka, Tadeusz presented his thirty-two-year old nephew with the long and meticulous balance-sheet which is now known as the Bobrowski document. It showed that “the making of a man out of Mr. Kornad” had cost £ 1745 during a period in which an English working man with a family would be fortunate to earn £ 50 a year. After Childhood: Conrad had left Poland in 1874 at the age of sixteen. He stayed first in Marseille, working intermittently as a pilot and undertaking voyages to the West Indies. He travelled to England and served on large variety of ships, from humble coasters to four-masted clippers, gaining experience, passing examinations and achieving qualifications. His wages at sea were inconsistent. These could be as low as one shilling per month (on the Skimmer of the Sea) or as high as £ 14 a month (on the Otago). Throughout that time his financial security was ensured by the remittances from his Uncle. That Conrad had this form of economic insurance partly accounts for his mobility in those years. He served for no longer than two years on any one ship. It also accounts, in part for his manner and learning: other seafarers referred to him as ‘The Russian Count’, for, when going ashore, he stood out from other captains by his aristocratic demeanours and led a life of dandy. When he eventually abandoned his maritime career for that of a professional writer, the risks were somewhat lessened - indeed, he was encouraged to take this step - by the knowledge that when his old and ailing uncle died, Conrad would inherit a substantial sum: in the event, £ 1600, which he received in the year of publication of his first novel, ‘Almayer’s Folly’. Financial Crisis: Conrad floundered in financial difficulties, struggling to meet deadlines and the redeem debts, until the commercial success of “Chance” in 1914 at last ensured his fame and name. There are many reasons why Conrad turned to a novelist’s career: the need to resolve intrinsic tensions and contradictions; the desire to memorialize the beauty and strangeness of the world through which he had yoyaged; and the sense of solidarity with his family’s cultural milieu and with the time-defying community of creative writers. In his lonely struggles as a writer, he sometimes compared himself with a tightrope performer. But during his maritime life and in the earliest part of his literary career, he was tightrope performer aided by financial safety-net which had been extended by Uncle Tadeusz and which had been woven by tenant-farmers of the Polish soil and by workers in the sugar-beet mills. It is correct to say that in “Nostromo” Conrad would offer a remarkable analysis of the relationship between idealistic aspirations and material interests, and would describe the irony that the complex apparatus of a modern state is sustained by the labours of illiterate peasants and sweaty mine-workers. From his father, Conrad inherited romantic nationalism, the melancholy of defeated aspirations, CU IDOL SELF LEARNING MATERIAL (SLM)