Virginia Woolf mentions dogs repeatedly throughout Orlando, and they are symbolic of Orlando’s deep connection to nature within the novel. Orlando’s connection to nature is central to his—later, her—identity, and this connection is reflected in his love of “beasts,” or dogs. Orlando is never without a dog for the entirety of the novel, and he judges other people based on how they treat dogs. For example, after Favilla beats a spaniel for ripping a hole in her stocking, Orlando considers her a “perverse and cruel” woman. On the other, Orlando is willing to forgive Euphrosyne’s introverted and cold personality in large part because she is “never without a whippet or spaniel at her knee” and feeds them from her dinner plate. Orlando’s connection to dogs is so strong that his Seleuchi hound never leaves his side during the week-long sleep that transforms Orlando into a woman, and when Orlando finally wakes up, the dog is “half famished with hunger.”
In Orlando’s experience, people are mostly a disappointment, and after Nicholas Greene gives one of Orlando’s original plays a bad review, Orlando sends his servant to fetch him two of the best elk hounds from Norway. “For,” Orlando says, “I have done with men.” Orlando is repeatedly disappointed by others, and there remains but two things in which he puts his trust: “dogs and nature; an elk-hound and a rose bush.” Dogs remain an integral part of Orlando’s life for hundreds of years. Even as Orlando walks down to the oak tree at the end of the novel to bury her poem, thus repaying her debt to nature, she takes her dogs with her.
Dogs Symbol Timeline in Orlando
