Orlando Read Online Free PDF Page A

‘Rosina Pepita’, and in the second,
she
disturbs the gypsies by writing poems, admiring sunsets and longing for her English manor house. Finally, when she returns to England, the lady Orlando is always slightly out of step with the march of time around her. In the eighteenth century, she dresses as a man so that she can visit – and hear the tales told by – the communities of fallen women who walk the London pavements. In the nineteenth century, she marries a sea captain and produces ‘lachrymose blot[s]’ (p. 167) of poetry, but her husband is an eccentric explorer, not a Victorian patriarch, and her writing of sentimental verse is ‘much against her natural temperament’. In the twentieth century, she finally wins a prize for her poem ‘The Oak Tree’ but wires her husband a sardonically encoded comment on the meaning of literary achievement: ‘ “Rattigan Glumphoboo”, which summed it up precisely’ (p. 196). Always on the margins of history, she nevertheless glimpses Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Charles II, Nell Gwyn, Alexander Pope, the Carlyles and even, in the book’s firstdraft, one ‘Volumnia Fox’ – a pseudonym for none other than Virginia Woolf. 26 But her glance passes over these luminaries with the luminous indifference of, say, a lighthouse beam. Within sight of shore, she is always offshore, at sea in the wilder waters of history.
    Nevertheless, as Woolf depicts him/her, Orlando
is
history, if only because the light of her mind is the lamp that lights up time for Woolf’s readers, and her stately mansion, with its allegorically resonant 365 bedrooms and 52 staircases, is the house whose endurance-through-change is the metaphor that Woolf gives us for human duration. Whether offshore or on the edge of time, Orlando’s supposedly marginal perspective, a perspective both Stephen and Strachey might have excluded or ignored, becomes the central point of view from which we must view the world as we try to come to terms with the terms of history. In fact, as Woolf ranges over them – obliquely envisioning them, slyly appropriating them, subversively revising them – the terms of history become Orlando’s terms, and finally even history itself becomes Orlando’s story, the tale of a body now male, now female, which embodies that thread of alternative truth Woolf was to call, in
A Room of One’s Own,
‘the common life which is the real life’ as opposed to ‘the little separate lives… we live as individuals’. 27
    Thus, the psychosexual development of this parentless creature (for Woolf never really introduces Orlando’s parents into her ‘biography’) constitutes a novel narrative indeed, for it is generalized, parodied and ultimately transcended in the course of Orlando’s fantastic intersections with history. Simultaneously redefining and questioning conventional periodization, the so-called Elizabethan period recapitulates Orlando’s childhood and pre-adolescence, with a timeless pre-Oedipal frost and an Oedipal flood exaggerating and mocking the meaning of ‘growing up’. Similarly, the seventeenth century, with its sex change, offers Orlando a new kind of adolescence, comically marking a moment of sexual transformation and self-realization, while the eighteenth century represents her ostensible (that is, what should be her)‘young ladyhood’. Again, the nineteenth century reproduces her bemused confrontation with the exigencies of patriarchally defined female maturity (wedlock, maternity); and the twentieth century, with its adumbration of an apocalyptic ‘new world’, reflects a mature ‘moment of being’, a liberating encounter with ‘the Captain self, the Key self, which amalgamates and controls them all’ (p. 214).
    In this uncanny conflation of the personal and the political, both the processions of ‘King following King’ that make up official history and the permutations of ‘the lives of the obscure’ that constitute the ‘other history’ appear, to use a