Orlando: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Along with the cloud, “a change seems to have come over the climate of England,” the narrator notes. It often rains, “in fitful gusts,” and the sun rarely shines. When the sun does make an appearance, the clouds and the moist air “discolour” the “purples, oranges and reds” and turn them “dull.” Colors are “less intense,” and even the “white of the snow” is “muddied.” Worse than that even, “damp” has begun to settle in every home. This dampness is “insidious” and “imperceptible,” and it “swells the wood” and “rusts the iron.”

“Thus,” the narrator writes, “stealthily, and imperceptibly, none marking the exact day or hour of the change,” England is “altered,” and nobody knows it. Homes now feel “chilly,” and the furniture and walls are “covered” too. Coffee replaces liquor after dinner and fake flowers fill the vases. Everything is “completely altered,” the narrator says. Because of the dampness, ivy now climbs every building, and no garden lacks a “maze.” Men, too, feel “the chill in their hearts,” and words of “love, birth and death are all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases.” The sexes grow “further and further apart” and “no open conversation is tolerated.” Even so, “evasions and concealments are sedulously practiced on both sides.”

“The life of the average woman,” the narrator claims, is “a succession of childbirths.” Women now typically marry young and have 18 children by age 30, for “twins abound.” The damp has also leaked “into the inkpot,” and “sentences swell, adjectives multiply, [and] lyrics become epics.” Even Orlando, who tries to “pretend that the climate is the same,” is forced to admit that things have changed. One day, while riding in her carriage, the sun makes one of its rare appearances, and, bathed in muted “sunbeams” near St. James’ Park, Orlando sees a “vast” statue of Queen Victoria.

Orlando has “never, in all her life, seen anything at once so indecent, so hideous, and so monumental” as the statue of Queen Victoria. “Nothing,” Orlando thinks to herself, “no wind, rain, sun, or thunder, could ever demolish that garish erection.” Arriving at home, Orlando immediately rips the quilt from her bed and wraps herself in it. “I feel chilly,” she says to the housekeeper, even though it is August. “So do we all, m’lady,” the housekeeper answers.

“But is it true, m’lady,” the housekeeper asks Orlando, “that the Queen, bless her, is wearing a what d’you call it, a—” Orlando interrupts her. “A crinoline,” she says. Why does “every modest woman” do her “best” to “deny” and “conceal” the fact that she is having a child, Orlando wonders? “The muffins is keepin’ ‘ot in the liberry,” the housekeeper says as she exits the room. Orlando tries to decipher the “horrid Cockney phrase” of the housekeeper and looks around the room. Queen Elizabeth sat in this very room, and suddenly, Orlando springs to her feet. 

Orlando decides to buy crinoline and a bassinette the next day, although she “blushes” at the thought. “The spirit of the age” is “blowing,” the narrator writes, even if it blows “a little unequally, the crinoline being blushed for before the husband, [Orlando’s] ambiguous position must excuse her.”  In the meantime, Orlando picks up her poem, “The Oak Tree,” and turns to the first page. It is dated 1586. She has been writing the poem for nearly 300 years now, and she can clearly see the changes in style. She had been “gloomy” and “in love with death,” then “sprightly and satirical.” She had written in prose and even tried drama. Still, with all these changes, Orlando has “remained,” she believes, “fundamentally the same.”

After all this time, Orlando has “the same brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same passion for the country and the seasons.” The door to her room is suddenly thrown open, and the butler and housekeeper enter. Orlando tries to ignore them and write, but “no words” come. Just as she thinks it “impossible,” her quill begins to move, writing the most “insipid verse” she has ever read. She writes without stopping until her “abrupt movements” knock the inkpot over, spilling ink over the page. The ink blots out the verse, “she hopes forever,” and Orlando realizes that she cannot write.

Standing at the window, Orlando becomes aware “of an extraordinary tingling and vibration all over her,” which seems to “concentrate in her hands; and then in one hand, and then in one finger of that hand.” Orlando realizes that it is the “second finger on her left hand” that is tingling. She looks down at it, but the only thing she can see is the ring given to her by Queen Elizabeth. Orlando is “positively ashamed of the second finger of her left without in the least knowing why.” She looks to the maid’s left hand, and just as Orlando suspects, there is a plain gold band on the second finger. 

It occurs to Orlando now that “the whole world is ringed with gold.” Wedding rings are “everywhere” in jewelers’ windows, and “couples” fill the streets. It is as if “some new discovery has been made about the race,” Orlando notes. She doesn’t know who made such a discovery, but it doesn’t “seem to be Nature,” since the animals still behave much the same way. “Could it be Queen Victoria?” Orlando wonders. Her finger hurts so badly she is forced to “buy one of those ugly bands and wear it like the rest.” But Orlando’s finger still plagues her, and she can’t write. Her “case” proves, it seems, that writing is not done “with the fingers, but with the whole person.”

Orlando soon realizes that there is nothing she can do but “yield completely and submissively to the spirit of the age, and take a husband.” Whom, she doesn’t know. “Life! A Lover!” Orlando cries, “not ‘Life! A Husband!’” Orlando has always prided herself on her ability to adapt to the spirit of the age—the Elizabethan, and the Restoration, for example—but there is something in the “spirit of the nineteenth century” that is “antipathetic to [Orlando] in the extreme.” She feels “dragged down by the weight of the crinoline” that she “submissively adopted.” It is “heavier and more drab” than anything she has ever worn, and the skirts collect nothing but “damp leaves and straw.”

“Everyone is mated except myself,” Orlando says. “Such thoughts” have never “entered her head,” but now they bear “her down inescapably.” She decides to walk alone in the park, and as she steps onto the grass, she is taken by the beauty of nature around her. Suddenly, “some strange ecstasy” comes over her, and she “quickens her pace.” She breaks into a run, stumbles, and breaks her ankle. She falls to the ground and lies there, unmoving. “I have found my mate,” Orlando says. “It is the moor. I am nature’s bride.”

Orlando lies on the ground for many hours and nearly falls asleep, and then she begins to hear a horse’s hoofs, like a “strange heart beating,” in the distance. She sits up and sees “towering against the yellow-slashed sky of dawn,” the figure of a man. “Madam,” the man cries, “you’re hurt!” Orlando stares. “I’m dead, Sir!” she says.

“A few minutes later,” the narrator writes, “they become engaged.” The next morning, Orlando learns that the man’s name is Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire. “Mine is Orlando,” she says dreamily. They had learned the night before “everything of any importance about each in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or people of substance.” For instance, “Shel” is a “soldier and a sailor” and is just waiting for “the gale” to blow “from the South-west” to set sail. “Oh! Shel, don’t leave me!” Orlando cries. “I’m passionately in love with you.”

Suddenly, “an awful suspicion” rushes “simultaneously” into Orlando and Shel’s minds, and they spring to their feet. “You’re a woman, Shel!” Orlando cries. “You’re a man, Orlando!” Shel cries. As abruptly as the realization comes, they settle back in their seats, and Orlando asks Shel where he will sail to. “For the Horn,” he answers. When at sea, Shel’s life is filled with “the most desperate and splendid of adventures.” As he recounts them, Orlando lovingly stares at him. “I am a woman,” she thinks, “a real woman.” She thanks Shel for giving her “the rare and unexpected delight,” and “had she not been lame in the left foot, she would have sat upon his knee.”

Orlando and Shel’s days are spent in loving splendor. “Shel, my darling,” Orlando says, “tell me…” but what he tells her makes little difference. “For it has come about, by the wise economy of nature,” the narrator writes, “that our modern spirit can almost dispense with language.” At times, “the most ordinary conversation is often the most poetic, and the most poetic is precisely that which cannot be written down.”  Because of this, the narrator leaves here “a great blank” space, “which must be taken to indicate that the space is filled to repletion.” (This passage is accompanied by a large blank space.)

In the coming days, two Royal officers arrive with word of Orlando’s lawsuits. “The lawsuits are settled,” she excitedly tells Shel. She tells him that her Turkish marriage has been annulled. “I was ambassador in Constantinople, Shel,” she says as an aside. The children have been declared illegitimate as well. “They said I had three sons by Pepita, a Spanish dancer,” she explains. “Sex? Ah! What about sex?” Orlando reads. “My sex,” she says, “is pronounced indisputably, and beyond a shadow of a doubt […] Female.”

On October the 26th, Orlando sits outdoors listening to Shel recite Shelley, “whose entire works he had by heart,” when a subtle wind begins to blow. A leaf blows softly over Orlando’s foot, and Shel jumps to his feet. “The wind!” he cries, and they both run through the woods back to the house. The meet Mr. Dupper in the chapel and everyone from the estate gathers around. Mr. Dupper tells Shel and Orlando to “kneel down,” but a “clap of thunder” obscures his voice. No one hears the word “Obey” spoken, but they see a golden ring “pass from hand to hand.” Orlando and Shel stand to the sounds of organ music and walk out into a pouring rainstorm.