Orlando, the protagonist and title character of Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, undergoes profound personal and physical changes in the novel, and he lives in a world that likewise drastically transforms. When the narrator first introduces Orlando, he is a young boy of 16 in Elizabeth I’s court, sometime around the mid-1670s. By the end of the novel, however, Orlando is a 36-year-old woman who gets out of her car on “the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight.” Orlando lives through incredible changes of time and place, and even mysteriously changes gender. “What the future might bring,” the narrator declares, “Heaven only knew. Change was incessant, and change perhaps would never cease.” Despite the changes in both Orlando and the world, however, the person Orlando is deep down remains consistent. He begins the novel as a poet who deeply loves nature and women, and that is exactly who Orlando is at the close of the novel as well. In this vein, Woolf effectively argues that regardless of social changes and personal transformations, who one is—that is to say, one’s identity—remains the same.
Orlando experiences many transformations during the novel; however, with each change, Orlando remains the same person. This steadiness of Orlando’s identity underscores Woolf’s argument that people don’t really change. After Orlando is rejected by Sasha, his love of the 16th century, he falls into a deep “trancelike” sleep for a week, and upon waking, “some change” is perceived to “have taken place in the chambers of his brain.” Orlando appears “to have an imperfect recollection of his past life,” especially of Sasha, but he still escapes into writing and poetry, a constant love in his life. Orlando’s major transformation is when he changes from a man into a woman. Despite this radical physical change, “in every other respect,” the narrator asserts, “Orlando remains precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.” In other words, man or woman, Orlando is essentially the same person. Of all Orlando’s changes, it is perhaps most difficult for her to grasp the expected change from loving women to loving men: “And as all Orlando’s loves had been women, now, […] though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved.” Orlando’s sexuality cuts to the deepest part of her identity and does not change along with the physical, surface changes of her body.
Woolf also underscores the transformation of England through the centuries. The alteration in London society is nearly as drastic as the changes in Orlando herself, but even through sweeping changes in society, Orlando remains essentially the same person, again reflecting a consistency of identity. By the time the Victorian era begins, the narrator notes the “constitution of England” is “stealthily, and imperceptibly” “altered.” While this transformation is evident “in every part of England,” the narrator claims that Orlando prefers to “pretend that the climate is the same.” Despite the drastic changes in society, Orlando hasn’t changed a bit, and even goes so far as to deny the obvious changes that have taken place. Again, during the Victorian era, Orlando forgets “that ladies are not supposed to walk in public places alone,” and she is accosted by a crowd of people. Society’s gender expectations have greatly changed from the 18th to the 19th century, but Orlando operates much in the same way she always has. During the 19th and 20th centuries, English society is greatly transformed and modernized, but when Orlando decides to go into London, she yells to her servant to ready her carriage. The servant, a bit confused, says that Orlando still has time “to catch the eleven forty-five.” Despite living through inventions such as the steam engine, electricity, the automobile, and the elevator, Orlando is slow to adapt to her surroundings, again suggesting that people don’t really change much, if at all.
Despite all the changes Orlando endures, she realizes toward the end of the novel that she remains “fundamentally the same.” After over 400 years and transforming from a man into a woman, Orlando has “the same brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same passion for the country and the seasons.” Orlando’s identity, who she is deep down—her sexuality, her respect for nature, and her dedication to poetry—remains with her through it all. While much of Orlando’s life relies on the limitations and expectations of an ever-changing society, her identity remains uniquely her own, untouched, and uninfluenced, by external factors.
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Identity and Transformation Quotes in Orlando
Then, suddenly Orlando would fall into one of his moods of melancholy; the sight of the old woman hobbling over the ice might be the cause of it, or nothing; and would fling himself face downwards on the ice and look into the frozen waters and think of death. For the philosopher is right who says that nothing thicker than a knife’s blade separates happiness from melancholy; and he goes on to opine that one is twin fellow to the other; and draws from this the conclusion that all extremes of feeling are allied to madness; and so bids us take refuge in the true Church (in his view the Anabaptist) which is the only harbour, port, anchorage, etc., he said, for those tossed on this sea.
But if sleep it was, of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from asking, are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures—trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life for ever, are brushed with a dark wing which rubs their harshness off and gilds them, even the ugliest, and basest, with a lustre, an incandescence? Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Having waited well over half an hour for an answer to these questions, and none coming, let us get on with the story.
For once the disease of reading has laid hold upon the system it weakens it so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing. […] The flavour of it all goes out of him; he is riddled by hot irons; gnawed by vermin. He would give every penny he has (such is the malignity of the germ) to write one little book and become famous; yet all the gold in Peru will not buy him the treasure of a well-turned line. So he falls into consumption and sickness, blows his brains out, turns his face to the wall. It matters not in what attitude they find him. He has passed through the gates of Death and known the flames of Hell.
Orlando had become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. 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. His memory—but in future we must, for convention’s sake, say ‘her’ for ‘his,’ and ‘she’ for ‘he’—her memory then, went back through all the events of her past life without encountering any obstacle. Some slight haziness there may have been, as if a few dark drops had fallen into the clear pool of memory; certain things had become a little dimmed; but that was all. The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it.
What was to be done, Orlando could not think. To leave the gipsies and become once more an Ambassador seemed to her intolerable. But it was equally impossible to remain for ever where there was neither ink nor writing paper, neither reverence for the Talbots, nor respect for a multiplicity of bedrooms. So she was thinking, one fine morning on the slopes of Mount Athos, when minding her goats. And then Nature, in whom she trusted, either played her a trick or worked a miracle—again, opinions differ too much for it to be possible to say which.
The difference between the sexes is, happily, one of great profundity. Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath. It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex. And perhaps in this she was only expressing rather more openly than usual—openness indeed was the soul of her nature—something that happens to most people without being thus plainly expressed. For here again, we come to a dilemma. 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 it is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result every one has had experience; but here we leave the general question and note only the odd effect it had in the particular case of Orlando herself.
But the change did not stop at outward things. The damp struck within. Men felt the chill in their hearts; the damp in their minds. In a desperate effort to snuggle their feelings into some sort of warmth one subterfuge was tried after another. Love, birth, and death were all swaddled in a variety of fine phrases. The sexes drew further and further apart. No open conversation was tolerated. Evasions and concealments were sedulously practiced on both sides. And just as the ivy and the evergreen rioted in the damp earth outside, so did the same fertility show itself within. The life of the average woman was a succession of childbirths. She married at nineteen and had fifteen or eighteen children by the time she was thirty; for twins abounded. Thus, the British Empire came into existence
