Orlando: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

Orlando buys herself “a complete outfit of such clothes” as the women of the time and boards the Enamored Lady. Aboard the ship to England, she thinks for the first time about her sex. “Perhaps the Turkish trousers, which she had hitherto worn had done something to distract her thoughts,” the narrator writes. There were surprisingly little differences between the “gipsy” men and women, and with the heavy skirts wrapped around her legs, Orlando is suddenly aware of “the penalties and the privileges of her position.”

Orlando thinks of her “chastity” and how she must “preserve it.” Chastity is, after all, what “the whole edifice of female government is based” upon. It is a “foundation stone,” a woman’s “jewel” and “centre piece.” Women “run mad to protect it” and “die when ravished of it.” Orlando, however, was a man for 30 years—she “has held a Queen” and “married Rosina Pepita”—so she has not had “a very great start about that.” It takes Orlando the “entire length of the voyage to moralise out the meaning of her start, and so, at her own pace,” the biographer writes, “we will follow her.”

Orlando thinks her “skirts are plaguey things.” They are beautiful, no doubt, but what if she must jump overboard? She surely cannot swim in such a getup. “Therefore,” Orlando says, “I should have to trust to the protection of a blue-jacket. Do I object to that? Now do I?” she asks herself. As the captain offers Orlando a slice of meat at the dinner table, she knows the answer, and “a delicious tremor” runs through her.  “Which is the greater ecstasy,” Orlando wonders, “the man’s or the woman’s?” Perhaps they are the same, she thinks. “No,” she decides, “this is the most delicious (thanking the Captain but refusing) to refuse, and see him frown.” 

“For nothing,” Orlando says, “is more heavenly than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist.” She begins to think that she may jump overboard just to be saved, but then she remembers what she used to call women like that back when she was a young fellow “in the cockpit of the Marie Rose” and thinks better of it. “Lord! Lord!” Orlando cries, “must I begin to respect the opinion of the other sex, however monstrous I think it?” She decides that to wear a skirt means that she must be rescued. “I must!” she says.

From her time as a man, Orlando knows that women “must be obedient, chaste, scented and exquisitely appareled.” Yet, judging by her short time as a woman, Orlando knows that women are not any of these things naturally. Living as a woman involves “the most tedious discipline,” Orlando notes. Hairdressing alone takes an hour each morning, “looking in the looking-glass, another hour,” and then “there’s staying and lacing; there’s washing and powdering; there’s changing from silk to lace and from lace to paduasoy; and there’s being chaste year in year out.” 

As Orlando lists the tedium of womanhood in her mind, she tosses her “foot impatiently,” revealing “an inch or two of calf.” A nearby sailor catches a glimpse of Orlando’s leg and nearly trips face first onto the deck. She immediately decides to always keep her legs covered if the sight of them prompts such a spectacle. A shame, she thinks, to keep such beauty covered. “A pox on them!” Orlando cries of “the sacred responsibilities of womanhood.”

Orlando knows that once she returns to England, she will never again “crack a man over the head,” or call him a liar, or “draw [her] sword” on him. She will never again “wear a coronet,” and she won’t be able to “sit among [her] peers” or “lead an army.” All she will be able to do is “pour tea, and ask [her] lords how they like it.” “D’you take sugar?” Orlando says out loud as if in practice. “D’you take cream?” She is suddenly “horrified” of the “low opinion” she is beginning to form “of the other sex, the manly, to which it had once been her pride to belong.”

“Heavens!” Orlando cries, “what fool [men] make of us—what fools we are!” She feels as if she doesn’t belong to either sex, and she begins to “vacillate” between the two. Orlando is a man. Orlando is a woman. She knows “secrets” and “weaknesses” of both, but she is “not sure” which one she belongs to. “Ignorant and poor as we are compared with the other sex,” Orlando says as she yawns and falls asleep, “still—they fall from the mast-head—”

“Better is it,” Orlando decides when she wakes, “to be clothed with poverty and ignorance, which are the dark garments of the female sex” if by doing so “one can more fully enjoy the most exalted raptures known to the human spirit, which are,” she says, “contemplation, solitude, and love.” Suddenly, Orlando cries out: “Praise God that I’m a woman!” Then she stops. “Love,” she says once more. Orlando has always loved women, and now, though she is a woman, it is still women that she loves. She thinks of “what the poet says about truth and beauty” and begins to cry. “Permit me, Madam,” the captain interrupts, pointing to land in the distance. “The cliffs of England, Ma’am.” “Christ Jesus!” Orlando yells at the sight of her country.

Orlando thinks of Sasha as she approaches England. “So good-bye and adieu to you, Ladies of Spain,” she says sadly. Orlando thinks of the fabulous life she is sure to lead as a woman of high society, but she decides if it also means “conventionality,” “slavery” and “deceit,” she will not tolerate such a life. If she must “deny her love,” “fetter her limbs,” “purse her lips,” and “restrain her tongue,” then she will immediately return to the ship and set sail for the “gipsies.”

Orlando suddenly thinks of the shabby man she saw years earlier in the servants’ dining room, and her hand absentmindedly goes to her bosom, where she keeps her poem, “The Oak Tree,” “hidden safe.” Her mind wanders to “the great lines of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, [and] Milton.” The captain begins to point out important London architecture, such as St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London, and Westminster Abbey. She notes that London itself has changed as well. The dirty and comparatively smaller city she left has been transformed into a “broad and orderly” city of wealth and beauty. 

Near London Bridge, the streets are lined with people and coffee houses. Orlando wonders if these people are poets, and she asks the captain as much. Yes, he answers. It is not uncommon to see Mr. Addison, and there, he continues pointing at two men standing together, are Mr. Dryden and Mr. Pope. “Sad dogs,” the captain says, by which Orlando assumes he means that the men are “papists.” Orlando smiles. “Addison and Dryden and Pope,” she repeats to herself like “an incantation.”

Back in London, Orlando finds that she has become “a party to three major suits.” The “chief charges against her” are that she is technically dead, technically a woman (“which amounts to the same thing”), and the three sons she allegedly fathered during her marriage to Rosina Pepita have declared their father dead and claimed his property. All of Orlando’s estate have thus been “put in Chancery and her titles pronounced in abeyance” until the whole mess can be sorted out. At present, it is “uncertain whether she is dead or alive, man or woman, Duke or nonentity.” Orlando is given permission to reside at her country house, “in a state of incognito or incognita as the case might turn out to be.”

Upon her arrival at the country house, Orlando is met by Mrs. Grimsditch, Mr. Dupper, and an overly excited elk hound, which nearly knocks her to the ground. “Milord! Milady! Milord! Milady!” Mrs. Grimsditch cries as Orlando kisses her cheeks. Later that evening, Mrs. Grimsditch and Mr. Dupper sit visiting. “If my Lord is a Lady now,” Mrs. Grimsditch says, “I’ve never seen a lovelier one.”

Since Orlando’s return, the “bones of her ancestors” have “lost something of their sanctity.” Rustum el Sadi’s words have caused her to look at things differently. “I am growing up,” she thinks. “I am losing my illusions, perhaps to acquire new ones.” Yet, for all of Orlando’s “travels and adventures and profound thinkings and turnings this way and that,” her “process of fabrication” has only just begun. “Change is incessant,” the narrator writes, “What the future might bring, Heaven only knows.”

The next day, Orlando takes out “The Oak Tree” and begins to write. Suddenly, a shadow crosses the window, and Orlando “hastily” hides her poem. She looks out the window and immediately sees that the shadow is a “familiar” one, a “grotesque” one. It is the Archduchess Harriet Griselda, the very woman who had chased Orlando from London in the first place. “A plague on women,” Orlando says of the Archduchess. “It was to escape this Maypole that I left England, and now—”

Suddenly, in the place in which the Archduchess stood not a moment before is “a tall gentleman in black.” “La!” cries Orlando, “how you frighten me!” The Archduchess apologizes. “Gentle creature,” she says, “forgive me for the deceit I have practiced on you!” The Archduchess—or the Archduke, as it turns out—is a man and has always been one. He had fallen hopelessly in love with a portrait of Orlando and that is why he disguised himself as a woman and moved to London. The Archduke recently heard of Orlando’s transformation and came as fast as he could to confess his love for her. “If this is love,” Orlando says to herself,” there is something highly ridiculous about it.”

The Archduke falls to his knees and continues to confess his love for Orlando with “enormous” tears springing from his eyes. Orlando knows from her time as a man that “men cry as frequently and as unreasonably as women,” but she also knows that she is supposed to be “shocked” by the Archduke’s display of emotion, “and so, shocked she is,” the narrator writes. The Archduke continues to visit Orlando at her country home most days of the week. “I adore you,” he says to her frequently. Soon, Orlando is “at her wit’s end” with the Archduke and is worried that she will have to marry him when she suddenly remembers the game, Fly Loo.

Fly Loo is a game “at which great sums of money can be lost with very little expense of spirit.” Three lumps of sugar are placed on a table and bets are taken as to which lump a fly will land. Orlando is hoping that boredom will drive the Archduke away, but he is an avid gambler and immediately takes to the game. Running out of options and patience, Orlando begins to cheat, hoping her dishonesty will drive the Archduke away. She sticks a dead fly to a lump of sugar and “deftly substitutes” it for another as the Archduke stares at the ceiling. “Loo Loo!” Orlando cries, but he doesn’t notice her sleight of hand. Orlando continues to cheat, taking a small fortune from the Archduke, but he never notices her deceit.

One day, Orlando cheats “so grossly” that the Archduke is finally discovers her trick. He stands up from the table, turns “scarlet,” and begins to cry. He cares not about the money she has taken from him, he claims, but “to love a woman who cheats at play is impossible.” Orlando laughs and the Archduke “curses.” She laughs again and he “slams the door.”

“Heaven be praised!” Orlando cries. “I am alone.” She walks across the room to her writing table. “Life and a lover,” Orlando says out loud. She dips the quill into the ink and writes the same: “Life and a lover.” Reading the words, Orlando “blushes” and rises to go to her room. “Life and a lover,” she again says as she looks in the mirror. The pearls around her neck don’t exactly match her outfit, so she dresses in “taffeta” and fixes her makeup. “Now,” she says looking again in the mirror. “So dark, so bright, so hard, so soft, was she, so astonishingly seductive,” the narrator writes, that Orlando knows immediately that she is “loveliness incarnate.”

Orlando smiles the “involuntary smile” of women who know “their own beauty,” and again says, “Life, a lover.” She then turns “on her heel with extraordinary rapidity” and tears the pearls from her neck. She strips off her taffeta dress, stands “erect in her neat black silk knickerbockers of an ordinary nobleman,” and rings the servants’ bell. She has “urgent affairs” in London, she says, and within the hour she is off. 

The narrator pauses to draw the reader’s attention “to one or two remarks which have slipped in here and there” during the narrative. “For example,” the narrator says, “it may have been observed that Orlando hid her manuscript when interrupted,” and now, as Orlando drives to London, it may be clear that she “starts” and “suppresses a cry when the horses gallop faster than she likes.” Orlando has a new “modesty as to her writing” and “vanity of her person” that she did not possess before. Thus, the narrator writes, that there is no change in Orlando from man to woman is “ceasing to be altogether true.”  

According to the narrator, “the change of clothes” has “much to do with it.” Clothes “change our view of the world and the world’s view of us.” This was perhaps most apparent in the captain’s treatment of Orlando aboard the ship to England. He likely would have treated Orlando much different had she still worn long pants. “Thus,” the narrator says, “there is much to support the view that it is the clothes that wear us and not we them.”

Now, the difference in Orlando can “be found even in her face,” and not because she looks physically different. Indeed, Orlando looks much the same as she did as a man, but “there are certain changes.” A man’s hand is “free to seize his sword,” whereas a woman “must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders.” A man “looks the world full in the face,” but a woman “takes a sidelong glance at it.” If men and women both wore “the same clothes,” the narrator suspects, “it is possible that their outlook might be the same too.”

To further complicate matters, the narrator notes, “the difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity.” Clothes, then, “are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath.” In fact, “it was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex.” According to the narrator, while the sexes are very different, “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 it is above.”

It is “this mixture in her of man and woman” that gives Orlando’s “conduct an unexpected turn,” the narrator claims. It is curious that Orlando can dress in 10 minutes flat, and her clothes are at times “random” and “rather shabby.” Still, she “has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s love of power.” She is “tender-hearted” and “detests household matters.” Orlando prefers to work outside and knows more about crops than any man.

Orlando can drink like a man, and has a love for “games of hazard,” and she can dive “six horses at a gallop over London Bridge.” However, the sight of someone in danger brings “on the most womanly palpitations,” and she finds “mathematics intolerable” and believes that “to travel south is to travel downhill.” At this point, whether Orlando is “most man or woman, it is difficult to say and cannot now be decided,” the narrator writes.  

The next day, Orlando wakes to several invitations from “the greatest ladies in the land” who all desire “the honour of her acquaintance.” Suddenly, Orlando is thrust “upon the waters of London society.” A true account of society, in London or anywhere, the narrator notes, is surely impossible to any biographer or historian. “Only those who have little need of the truth, and no respect for it—the poets and the novelists—can be trusted do it, for this is one of the cases where the truth does not exist. Nothing exists,” the narrator says, “The whole thing is a miasma—a mirage.”

Society during the reign of Queen Anne is certainly polished. The “graces are supreme,” and no education is “complete” without “the science of deportment” and the “art of bowing and curtseying.” Yet Orlando has “an absent mindedness” that makes her “clumsy,” and she often thinks of poetry when she should be thinking of “taffeta.” Her “stride” is “too much” for a woman and her gestures “abrupt.” Additionally, she has “too much of that black humour which runs in the veins of all her race,” the narrator writes. 

“What the devil is the matter with me?” Orlando asks her spaniel, Pippin, on “Tuesday, the 16th of June, 1712,” as she bursts into tears. “I don’t care if never meet another soul as long as I live,” Orlando wails. She has had many lovers in her time, but life has “escaped her.” She looks to her dog. “Is this what people call life?” she asks, falling into the deepest despair. Orlando is “determined” to “forswear society forever,” when an invitation to attend a gathering at Lady R.’s arrives. Orlando immediately accepts, for “Lady R.’s reception room has the reputation of being the antechamber to the presence room of genius.” 

Orlando thinks back to the “three honeyed words dropped into her ear” aboard the ship to England. “Addison, Dryden, Pope.” Despite Orlando’s awful experience with Nick Greene, “such names still exercise over her the most powerful fascination.” Only the most accomplished members of intellectual society are admitted to Lady R.’s, and nothing is said to be uttered inside that is not “witty.” When Orlando arrives, she sits near the back of the room “with a deep reverence in silence,” and after three hours, she “curtseys profoundly” and leaves.

Orlando expected Lady R.’s guests to speak “the wittiest, the profoundest, the most interesting things in the world,” but they say “nothing.” The “truth” of the matter (“if we dare use such a word in such a connection,” the narrator says), is “that all these groups of people lie under an enchantment.” Lady R. is the “modern Sibyl” and “lays her guests under a spell.” They all think themselves “witty” and “happy” and “profound,” but this is an “illusion.” The truth is that “no real happiness, no real wit, no real profundity are tolerated where the illusion prevails.” To encounter such things would “destroy” said illusion.

On Orlando’s third visit to Lady R.’s reception room, a “little gentleman” enters and Orlando does not at first catch his name. The intellectuals go on talking about nothing at all, and the “little gentleman” says three “witty” things in row (“these sayings are too well know to require repetition,” the narrator interrupts, “and besides, they are all to be found in his published works.”). “Mr. Pope,” Lady R. says to the gentleman with “sarcastic fury” in her voice, “you are pleased to be witty.” The entire room sits in uncomfortable silence for nearly 20 minutes, and then, as if suddenly dismissed, everyone begins to leave the room “one by one.”

As doors “slam” and carriages are called, Orlando finds herself alone on the stairs with Mr. Pope and invites him to come home with her. He agrees, and as they drive the poorly lit streets of London, they find themselves alternately in the dark and light. In the darkness, Orlando begins feel “the most delicious balm” come over her. She is honored to be in the presence of Mr. Pope and counts herself “blessed.” However, as the light comes around again, she curses herself. “What a foolish wretch I am!”

Suddenly, there is darkness, and Orlando’s thoughts again change. “How noble his brow is,” she thinks (“mistaking a hump on a cushion for Mr. Pope’s forehead in the darkness”). “What a weight of genius lives in it!” she thinks. “Without genius we should be upset and undone. Most august, most lucid of beams—” Suddenly, they are in the light again, and Orlando realizes she is “apostrophizing” a hump in a cushion. “Wretched man,” she thinks now, “how you have deceived me!” In the light, Mr. Pope is “plain,” “ignoble,” and “despicable.” He is “deformed and weakly,” and there is nothing in him to “venerate,” only to “pity” and “despise.”

“It is equally vain,” Orlando thinks of Mr. Pope, “for you to think you can protect me, or for me to think I can worship you. The light of truth beats upon us without shadow, and the light of truth is damnable unbecoming to us both.” While Mr. Pope is “at first disappointing,” his presence at her house means other poets stop by as well, and Orlando begins to enjoy living “in the company of men of genius.” Addison, Pope, and Swift are “fond of tea,” and they also like “arbours” and “grottoes.” Orlando keeps a book to write down all the witty things they say, but the book “remains empty.” 

Still, Orlando is content to pour tea for Mr. Pope, Mr. Addison, and Mr. Swift, and in the “Round Parlour” of her home, she hangs their pictures in a large circle. That way, Orlando claims, Mr. Pope cannot say “that Mr. Addison came before him, or the other way around.” But Orlando soon learns that “their wit is all in their books,” and she has “a positive hatred of tea.” She discovers that the poets have a “high opinion” of themselves but a “low one” of others, and they “demand sympathy.” One day, Mr. Pope asks Orlando to read a “rough [draft] of a certain famous line in the ‘Characters of Women,’” and, “to cool her cheeks,” she must go for a walk in the garden. The “little man’s” words had “struck her,” and she is glad to be alone.

Later that night, Orlando goes to her room and dresses in “the clothes she had worn as a young man of fashion.” They are a bit out of style, but they still are a nice fit, and Orlando goes walking about Leicester Square. She enters a building and, in the direction of a young lady sitting in a chair, Orlando tips her hat “in the manner of a gallant paying his address to a lady.” The woman, Nell is her name, looks to Orlando and, thinking she is a man, is filled with “appealing, hoping, trembling, [and] fearing.” She stands and accepts Orlando’s arm. (“Need we stress the point,” the narrator asks, that Nell is “of the tribe which nightly burnishes their wares, and sets them in order on the common counter to wait the highest bidder?”)

Nell takes Orlando to her room, but Orlando can “stand it no longer.” She quickly removes her disguise, revealing herself as a woman. “Well, my dear,” Nell says. “I’m by no means sorry to hear it. […] I’m not in the mood for the society of the other sex to-night. Indeed, I’m in the devil of a fix.” Nell tells Orlando all about her life, and soon the other “poor creatures” she lives and works with befriend Orlando as well. They “elect her a member” of their society, and Orlando greatly enjoys their company.

During this time, the narrator says, Orlando frequently changes “from one set of clothes to another.” She appears as a Lord in town and “visits the courts” to listen in on her cases. She even “fights a duel” and serves as a captain on one of the King’s ships. She flees “with a certain lady to the Low Countries where the lady’s husband follows them,” but most of all, Orlando is seen outside the windows of coffeehouses, listening. Once, she even stands for 30 minutes “watching three shadows on the blinds drinking tea together in a house in Bolt Court.”

Back at home, Orlando watches a dark cloud form over London. She stands at her window as a clock in the distance strikes midnight and watches the “small cloud” grow and darken with “extraordinary speed.” As the clock strikes the sixth stroke of the hour, the cloud moves north, and by the “ninth, tenth, and eleventh strokes,” the cloud covers all of London. “With the twelfth stroke of midnight, the darkness is complete,” the narrator writes. The 18th century is over, and the 19th century has begun.