Orlando Read Online Free PDF Page B

the major turning points of Orlando’s history (for instance, her sex change, some of her romances, the birth of her son, and even her completion of ‘The Oak Tree’) to offstage scenes, Woolf simultaneously mocks the feigned puritanism of biographers who shudder at scandals even while they recount them and emphasizes the singularity, opacity and privacy – indeed, the unknowability (at least to others) – of major personal ‘events’.
    Just as importantly, in resisting the usual definitions of a ‘lifetime’ (threescore and ten), Woolf points out that an individual’s own perception of duration, as well as her or his sense of the varieties of her/his emotional and intellectual experience, may be far more dramatic than we ordinarily suppose. From adolescence to adulthood, one may undergo personal metamorphoses as radical as the public changes associated with the transformation of the fertile and unruly ‘Elizabethan period’ into the tidily rational ‘eighteenth century’ or the stickily sentimental ‘Victorian period’. And one may feel, as ‘time passes’, that the gulf between one’s adolescence and one’s adulthood is so vast that it ought to be measured not in what we call ‘years’ but in what we term ‘centuries’.
    Conversely, by arbitrarily associating traditionally defined historical ‘periods’ with the life of a single individual, Woolf proposes that our definitions of historical moments – the ‘Elizabethan’, the ‘Romantic’, the ‘Victorian’, the ‘modern’ – may be equally arbitrary. If Orlando, as a kind of paradigmatic spirit of English letters, is still persistently him/herself, single yet multiple, various yet the same throughout these apparent metamorphoses of English society, perhaps historical ‘changes’ themselves are not as easily explicable or describable as we have been taught. Certainly the hilarious rhetoric that Woolf adopts (as her role of biographer/historian heralds each new ‘age’) deflates the pretensions of writers who imply that the complexities of the past can be interpreted through simplistic labels and categories. 31
    The funniest and best-known passage of such rhetoric is probably the one in which, while Orlando gazes at the ‘serene and orderly’ prospect of eighteenth-century London, remembering the ‘tortuous Elizabethan highways’, her parodic biographer suddenly describes a ‘turbulent welter of cloud’ gathering over the city at the stroke of midnight and proclaims that now ‘All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun’ (p. 156). To be sure, Woolf is succinctly and metaphorically summarizing here the difference between the ‘spirit’ of one ‘age’ and the ‘spirit’ of another, but the abruptness and absurdity of the change she depicts puts the very idea of historical ‘transition’ in question. How and why the ‘hypothetical orderliness’ of the eighteenth century gave way to the supposed ‘cloudiness’ of the nineteenth are more difficult questions than most chroniclers are willing to concede.
    Finally, Woolf shows, time itself – the material with which both biographers and historians must inevitably grapple – is far more mysterious than the average scholar would like to admit. Is time what we experience or is it what we are told we experience? Do we, in other words, live primarily by personal internal clocks or are we really governed by an abstract, culturally imposed chronology? These are questions Woolf had already addressed in a number of works. In
Mrs. Dalloway,
for instance, public, official time is represented by ‘Big Ben… with his majesty laying down the law, so solemn, so just’, while what we might call private, experiential time is symbolized by ‘the other clock, the clock which always struck two minutes after Big Ben’ and which ‘came shuffling in with its lap full of odds and ends… all sorts of little things…