In Orlando, Virginia Woolf implies that biographies of the past have failed to effectively capture a subject because they rely too heavily on what is perceived as objective fact. The book’s subject, Orlando, is a fictional character based upon Woolf’s real-life friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, and Orlando’s unbelievable life spans some 400 years. Orlando is also a history of English literature, and it was written specifically with Woolf’s elite circle of friends (each of them writers and artists), known as the Bloomsbury Group, in mind. Woolf has an incredible connection to Orlando—personally, culturally, and artistically—which serves to underscore her opinion that remaining completely objective when writing a biography is impossible. Furthermore, Woolf suggests that collecting and recording facts, such as is done in the writing of biographies, is difficult because to do so relies (at least in part) on another person’s memories, which are highly fragmented and specific to each individual. Thus, with the surreal biography, Orlando, narrated by a fictional biographer, Woolf at once argues the unreliability of memory, while claiming simultaneously that time and truth are ultimately subjective. A biography should, instead, capture the overall essence of its subject rather than attempt to make a strict account of specific events.
Woolf repeatedly draws attention to time’s subjectivity in Orlando, which, she asserts, makes the biographer’s job difficult. The narrator notes that Time (with a capital “T”) makes “animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality,” but it “has no such simple effect upon the mind.” An hour, the narrator says, “may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length”; or, “an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second.” The perception of time, then, is decidedly individual and circumstantial, not universal. Traditional biographies rely on a universal understanding of time, but the passing of time in Orlando is nearly imperceptible and would appear absent all together if not for the narrator’s mention of it. “Time passes” specifically as Orlando perceives it, not based on the clock. The narrator claims “the task of estimating the length of human life (of the animals’ we presume not to speak) is beyond our capacity.” Furthermore, “it would be no exaggeration to say” that Orlando can go “out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man of fifty-five at least.” Time, especially that of years, is incredibly subjective in Orlando. Individual moments have far more influence on Orlando than decades or even centuries, and as such, the novel often belabors a single minute but glosses over a hundred years. The narrator contends that “the true length of a person’s life […] is always a matter of some dispute. Indeed, it is a difficult business—this time keeping.” By the end of the biography, Orlando has lived over 400 years; however, Woolf does not mean to imply that people are capable of such longevity. Her point, on the contrary, is that Orlando is ultimately a mixture of everyone and everything that has come before her, such as her ancestors and the literature of the past. To adequately capture Orlando’s life, Woolf therefore argues, it is necessary to capture all that Orlando considers her life to be.
Woolf also interrogates truth in Orlando, which she does by way of Orlando’s search for truth through various means. However, Orlando ultimately learns that truth, like time, isn’t so concrete. Orlando chiefly looks for truth in poetry but is “despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is,” and falls “into a deep dejection.” Truth, it seems, can’t be found. Like time, Truth in Orlando is not universal, and it is not something that can be pointed to and written down, such as in a traditional biography or historical account. Truth is elusive and frequently changes, much like Woolf’s unconventional writing style. Orlando’s search for truth continues in the drawing room of Lady R., where the brightest and most famous writers and minds of the age gather. Lady R.’s intellectual gatherings have the reputation of hosting “genius,” and Orlando hopes to discover truth and “profundities.” But nothing profound is ever said and Orlando leaves bored. Truth, in this case, is an “illusion,” and at times “does not exist” at all. As such, factual truth is sparse in Orlando, and Woolf instead relies on Orlando’s personal truth, which, she argues, more adequately captures the essence of Orlando’s life. The most prominent, and perhaps most puzzling, moment of truth within Orlando is the point in which Orlando first wakes having transformed from a man into a woman. “THE TRUTH!” the narrator declares in capital letters. “Truth! Truth! Truth!” the narrator repeats. “[Orlando] is a woman.” Many in the novel set out to prove that Orlando was a woman all along, or that she is indeed not a woman now, but the fact remains that Orlando had been a man and is now a woman. Actual truth, Woolf implies, is often unbelievable and not accepted across the board.
In addition to the complications of time and truth, the book also contends with Orlando’s Memory (with a capital “M”), which the narrator claims is the “seamstress, and a capricious one at that,” of Orlando’s life. “Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither,” the narrator explains. The scattered and random nature of Orlando’s memory is reflected in Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style of writing, and, like truth, it can be difficult to pin down. The aim of biography—to capture the life and essence of a person—is nearly impossible, Woolf implies, at least in the way biographies have traditionally been written. Thus, Woolf offers a completely new type of biography—one that relies on subjectivity rather than fact.
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Subjectivity, Truth, and Biography Quotes in Orlando
But there, sitting at the servants’ dinner table with a tankard beside him and paper in front of him, sat a rather fat, rather shabby man, whose ruff was a thought dirty, and whose clothes were of hodden brown. He held a pen in his hand, but he was not writing. He seemed in the act of rolling some thought up and down, to and fro in his mind till it gathered shape or momentum to his liking. His eyes, globed and clouded like some green stone of curious texture, were fixed. He did not see Orlando. For all his hurry, Orlando stopped dead. Was this a poet? Was he writing poetry? “Tell me,” he wanted to say, “everything in the whole world”—for he had the wildest, most absurd, extravagant ideas about poets and poetry—but how speak to a man who does not see you ? who sees ogres, satyrs, perhaps the depths of the sea instead?
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.
The biographer is now faced with a difficulty which it is better perhaps to confess than to gloss over. Up to this point in telling the story of Orlando’s life, documents, both private and historical, have made it possible to fulfil the first duty of a biographer, which is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers; regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads. But now we come to an episode which lies right across our path, so that there is no ignoring it. Yet it is dark, mysterious, and undocumented; so that there is no explaining it. Volumes might be written in interpretation of it; whole religious systems founded upon the signification of it. Our simple duty is to state the facts as far as they are known, and so let the reader make of them what he may.
Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s; nature, who delights in muddle and mystery, so that even now (the first of November, 1927) we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again, our most daily movements are like the passage of a ship on an unknown sea, and the sailors at the masthead ask, pointing their glasses to the horizon: Is there land or is there none? to which, if we are prophets, we make answer “Yes” ; if we are truthful we say “No” ; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us—a piece of a policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil—but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread.
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.
Then the little gentleman said,
He said next,
He said finally,*
Here, it cannot be denied, was true wit, true wisdom, true profundity. The company was thrown into complete dismay. One such saying was bad enough; but three, one after another, on the same evening! No society could survive it.
“Mr. Pope,” said old Lady R. in a voice trembling with sarcastic fury, “you are pleased to be witty.” Mr. Pope flushed red. Nobody spoke a word. They sat in dead silence some twenty minutes. Then, one by one, they rose and slunk from the room.
[…]
*These sayings are too well known to require repetition, and besides, they are all to be found in his published works.
It was happy for Orlando, though at first disappointing, that this should be so, for she now began to live much in the company of men of genius, yet after all they were not much different from other people. Addison, Pope, Swift, proved, she found, to be fond of tea. They liked arbours. They collected little bits of coloured glass. They adored grottoes. Rank was not distasteful to them. Praise was delightful. They wore plum-coloured suits one day and grey another. Mr. Swift had a fine malacca cane. Mr. Addison scented his handkerchiefs. Mr. Pope suffered with his head. A piece of gossip did not come amiss. Nor were they without their jealousies. (We are jotting down a few reflections that came to Orlando higgledy-piggledy.) At first, she was annoyed with herself for noticing such trifles, and kept a book in which to write down their memorable sayings, but the page remained empty.
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
“Ah!” he said, heaving a little sigh, which was yet comfortable enough, “Ah! my dear lady, the great days of literature are over. Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson—those were the giants. Dryden, Pope, Addison—those were the heroes. All, all are dead now. And whom have they left us? Tennyson, Browning, Carlyle!”—he threw an immense amount of scorn into his voice. “The truth of it is,” he said, pouring himself a glass of wine, “that all our young writers are in the pay of booksellers. They turn out any trash that serves to pay their tailor’s bills. It is an age,” he said, helping himself to hors d’oeuvres, “marked by precious conceits and wild experiments—none of which the Elizabethans would have tolerated for an instant.”
That Orlando had gone a little too far from the present moment will, perhaps, strike the reader who sees her now preparing to get into her motor car with her eyes full of tears and visions of Persian mountains. And indeed, it cannot be denied that the most successful practitioners of the art of life, often unknown people by the way, somehow contrive to synchronize the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every normal human system so that when eleven strikes, all the rest chime in unison, and the present is neither a violent disruption nor completely forgotten in the past. Of them we can justly say that they live precisely the sixty-eight or seventy-two years allotted them on the tombstone. Of the rest, some we know to be dead, though they walk among us; some are not yet born, though they go through the forms of life; others are hundreds of years old though they call themselves thirty-six. The true length of a person’s life, whatever the Dictionary of National Biography may say, is always a matter of dispute.
