Orlando

This chapter’s opening disclaimer about lost documents reveals the book’s true interest in the personal over the political. Because of the lost documents, the biographer is unable to give facts and describe any of Orlando’s actions as an ambassador in any substantial way. Instead, this chapter focuses on Orlando’s transformation and her time with the Romani people.

The political revolution happening outside the main narrative reflects the internal conflict Orlando is experiencing. His poetic and noble English nature is at odds with his desire for a simple life like that of the Romani. The biographer ascribes this conflict to the hereditary influence of his peasant grandmother. Initially, this change of setting seems to suit his nature. His “English root and fibre, should yet exult to the depths of his heart in this wild panorama” (89). Although Orlando is unsatisfied with his political duties, he does them well and his new home seems to be a better fit than his life back in England.

The biographer struggles with the magical nature of Orlando’s transformation. They attempt to approach this transformation as a factual event outlined in historical documentation. The veracity and quality of their sources are inconsistent. When describing the night of Orlando’s transformation, the biographer draws from many different sources. He cites “the diary of John Fenner Brigge,[...] an English naval officer, who was among the guests'' (93), a letter from “Miss Penelope Hartopp, daughter of the General of that name” (94), and the “Gazette of the time” (96). These sources, while providing insight into the party itself, are only tangentially related to Orlando and his transformation. The biographer depends on sifting through the gossip in these documents to find facts. In addition, Brigge’s diary is “full of burns and holes” and some lines are “quite illegible (93), which makes his document incomplete at best. The sources get even more tenuous when drawing from eyewitness testimony in the Gazette, despite the differing representations of what the supposed witnesses saw. When the biographer describes the transformation itself, their sources are unclear and unspecified.

Orlando is given a “golden circlet of strawberry leaves” (97) to wear to make his new title of Duke. Strawberries are one of the types of plants where plants can be only male, only female, or hermaphroditic. This gender distinction foreshadows Orlando’s impending gender transformation. In addition, this title, earned for successfully completing his ambassador duties, reflects his acceptance into English noble society and his duty to conform. This ceremony begins as “the clock struck twelve” (96) and, as “the cornet settled on Orlando’s brows” (97), a riotous “uproar” (97) breaks out with the Turkish people revolting against the sultan. The striking clock accompanies not only the political transformation but precedes Orlando’s physical transformation.

Florida State English professor Celia R. Caputi Daileader argues that the juxtaposition of the Turkish popular revolt with Orlando’s transformation is a commentary on British imperialism. The 17th century was an inflection point in global politics, with the British empire ascending as the Ottoman Empire declined. Yet compared to the homogeneity of London in the 1600s, Constantinople was a vibrant melting pot of Middle Easterners, Greeks, Slavs, Jews, Africans, and Western Europeans. Thus, it is a place of shifting identities—an apt location for Orlando’s transformation. What’s more, the war of empires between the Ottoman Empire and Western and Central Europe would directly lead to World War I, itself a devastating inflection point that changed everything—including literature, through Modernists like Woolf. (Daileader, Celia R. Caputi. “Othello’s Sister: Racial Hermaphroditism and Appropriation in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.” Studies in the Novel, Vol. 45(1), Spring 2013.)

Again, Orlando is in a sleep-like trance for seven days, suggesting that both trances result in equally substantial transformations. The first transformation radically altered his memory and left his body unaffected, while the second radically altered his body and left his memory unaffected.

The trumpeting of truth is imperative to Woolf’s argument about the merging of fact and imagination. Her description of this magical event as the actual truth reflects her belief that pursuing objective fact is less desirable and revealing than imaginative language.

Orlando’s nakedness during her transformation also underscores its truthfulness, as clothes are capable of disguising a person’s gender. Yet even the physical transformation is ambiguous, as her “form combined in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace” (102). The physical transformation is also contrasted with the constancy of her personality and memory, which does not change. While the physical change of sex “altered their future, [it] did nothing whatever to alter their identity” (102). (Tellingly, Woolf uses they/them pronouns during Orlando’s transformation). When she does choose clothes, she selects “Turkish coats and trousers which can be worn indifferently by either sex” (103). Orlando still refuses to conform to one set of gender expectations.

During Orlando’s time with the Romani, Woolf depends on many stereotypes to inform her writing. Their wisdom is presented as primitively simplistic and at odds with Orlando’s inherently English nature. While Rustum is present as a sort of “noble savage” trope popular among British writers, the other men of the group are murderous and barbaric. Woolf does complicate this understanding of the Romani by having the Romani apply these stereotypes back onto the English themselves. For example, they accept Orlando because she could have been a baby “snatched” (105) and stolen by the English. For Woolf, Orlando’s positioning as both of and separate from these two groups is the key. Orlando cannot conform to the standards or expectations of either group. Woolf’s attitude toward the Romani is also informed by her real-life dismissal of Sackville-West’s exoticizing fascination with the Romani.

When reflecting in solitude after realizing how the Romani perceive her, Orlando has a vision of England. The vision is filled with much natural imagery, including “a green hollow” (111), “oak trees” (11), and various animals like thrushes and deer. All three of these features hold great meaning to Orlando. When the scene builds to a snowy pastoral scene before changing again to the grassy countryside, Orlando is so overwhelmed that “she burst into a passion of tears” (112). This reaction reflects her connection to nature and the English land, prompting her return to England.