SOURCE: "Virginia Woolf's Orlando: Metamorphosis as the Quest for Freedom," in his Metamorphosis: The Mind in Exile, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 195-222.

[In the following excerpt, Skulsky examines Orlando's transformation from male to female.]

Unlike Gregor Samsa's abrupt descent into the bondage of the carapace, Orlando's transformation into a woman is the initial stage of a gradual unfolding of comprehensive personal freedom, an unfolding that coincides with Virginia Woolf's narrative as a whole. Transformation in this extended sense has much the rhythm of an organic process—the butterfly's evolving declaration of independence. Orlando traces, by her efflorescence, the outlines of an intricate ideal of freedom. This, at all events, is the general view I should like to defend in what follows. The constraint Orlando manages to overthrow is largely intellectual; it consists of certain shibboleths of what we may broadly describe as bourgeois common sense—the dichotomies of the real and the imaginary, the actual and the possible, the masculine and the feminine. I shall proceed by discussing each of these matters in turn and then offering a general assessment of their connections with the central theme of transformation.

Orlando begins his career, as a young Elizabethan patrician, by presuming on a freedom he has not yet achieved: freedom to explore the imaginary without being put out of countenance by the real: "He was describing, as all young poets are forever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely, he looked (and here he showed more audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters have a natural antipathy: bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre." At this point we are evidently being invited by the ironical narrator to suppose that the hero has caught himself out in a silliness to which the antidote is a certain gruff realism; he has been turning love of literature and of its practitioners into an idolatry: "To his imagination it seemed as if even the bodies of those instinct with such divine thoughts must be transfigured. They must have aureoles for hair, incense for breath, and roses must grow between their lips." Unfortunately, the love of literature is itself a "disease" whose "fatal nature" is "to substitute a phantom for reality, so that Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift—plate, linen, houses, men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion—had only to open a book for the whole vast accumulation to turn to mist." Here, for the moment at least, the fantastic prevails and the real betrays an underlying flimsiness; Lamia, in effect, is having her brief revenge.

Yet it is the solidity of Orlando's ancestral domain, we learn, that usually consoles him for the volatility of his phantoms: "He opened his eyes, which had been wide open all the time, but had seen only thoughts, and saw lying in the hollow beneath him, his house." It is a little ominous, perhaps, that thoughts and material things are put on a par here as being equally objects of seeing; and indeed it turns out that what Orlando chiefly "sees" in the hollow beneath him is a moralized parade of images:

For after all, he said, kindling as he looked at the great house on the greensward below, the unknown lords and ladies who lived there never forgot to set aside something for those who come after; for the roof that will leak; for the tree that will fall. There was always a warm corner for the old shepherd in the kitchen; always food for the hungry; always their goblets were polished, though they lay sick, and the windows were lit though they were dying. Lords though they were, they were content to go down into obscurity with the molecatcher and the stonemason.

The landscapes we encounter in Woolf's romance are rarely without such phantom embellishments as the molecatcher and the stonemason. As Orlando moves through his preternaturally slow ripening, each century of English experience somehow generates the setting and conditions required by its characteristic notion of the real. Thus in the Enlightenment "the very landscape outside was less stuck about with garlands and the briars themselves were less thorned and intricate. Perhaps the senses were a little duller and honey and cream less seductive to the palate." In the Renaissance "the weather itself, the heat and cold of summer and winter, was, we may believe, of a different temper altogether. The brilliant amorous day was divided as sheerly from the night as land from water. Sunsets were redder and more intense; dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our crepuscular half-lights and lingering twilights they knew nothing. The rain fell vehemently or not at all. The sun blazed or there was darkness." The inauguration of the nineteenth century shows once again parallel changes of outer and inner climate: "As the ninth, tenth, and eleventh strokes struck, a huge blackness sprawled over the whole of London. With the twelfth stroke of midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was dark; all was doubt; all was confusion." The mocking account of the young poet's discomfiture by "the thing itself," it is eventually borne in on us, was an irony at our expense; things are not to be brought to bay "in themselves," and if nature proves to be no less a phantom of communal prejudice than its poetic image, the charade of Augustan social "reality" virtually cancels itself out: "This is one of the cases where truth does not exist. Nothing exists. The whole thing is a miasma—a mirage." "At one and the same time therefore, society is everything and society is nothing. Society is the most powerful concretion in the world, and society has no existence whatsoever."

And reality has its geographical as well as its historical variability, as Orlando unsettlingly discovers during her sojourn among the Turkish gypsies, who cannot abide her transcendentalist inclinations:

It sprang from the sense they had (and their senses are very sharp and much in advance of their vocabulary) that whatever they were doing crumbled like ashes in their hands. An old woman making a basket, a boy skinning a sheep, would be singing contentedly at their work, when Orlando would come into the camp, fling herself down by the fire and gaze into the flames. She need not even look at them, and yet they felt, here is someone who doubts; (we make a rough-and-ready translation from the gipsy language) here is someone who does not do the thing for the sake of doing; nor looks for looking's sake; here is someone who believes neither in sheep-skin nor basket; but sees (here they looked apprehensively about the tent) something else.

The gypsies disagree profoundly not only with Orlando's refusal to accept nature as the ultimate reality but with what they regard as her vapid sentimentality about nature itself: "The elder men and women thought it probable that she had fallen into the clutches of the vilest and cruelest among all the Gods, which is Nature. Nor were they far wrong. The English disease, a love of Nature, was inborn in her, and here where Nature was so much larger and more powerful than in England, she fell into its hands as she had never done before." "[Rustum el Sadi] had the deepest suspicion that her God was Nature. One day, he found her in tears. Interpreting this to mean that her God had punished her, he told her that he was not surprised. He showed her the fingers of his left hand, withered by the frost; he showed her his right foot, crushed where a rock had fallen."

The root of these quarrels is simply that the disputants hold (or wish to hold) differing theories of appearances on which they substantially agree; so far, at least, reality takes its place among the discredited phantoms of the narrative:

No passion is stronger in the breast of man than the desire to make others believe as he believes. Nothing so cuts at the root of his happiness and fills him with rage as the sense that another rates low what he prizes high. Whigs and Tories, Liberal Party and Labour Party—for what do they battle except their own prestige? It is not love of truth, but desire to prevail that sets quarter against quarter and makes parish desire the downfall of parish. Each seeks peace of mind and subservience rather than the triumph of truth and the exaltation of virtue—But these moralities belong, and should be left to the historian, since they are as dull as ditchwater. "Four hundred and seventy-six bedrooms mean nothing to them," sighed Orlando. "She prefers a sunset to a flock of goats," said the gipsies.

As Lycius under Lamia's tutelage awakens from one trance into another, Orlando congratulates herself paradoxically at one point on her spiritual progress: "'I am growing up,' she thought … 'I am losing some illusions … perhaps to acquire others'."

The moral that Orlando eventually draws from these reflections is emphatically not the lotus-eating romanticism that the narrator mercilessly parodies at one point, and that rather suggests a caricature of Keats's diatribe against Apollonius:

A man who can destroy illusions is both beast and flood. Illusions are to the soul what atmosphere is to the earth. Roll up that tender air and the plant dies, the colour fades. The earth we walk on is a parched cinder. It is marl we tread and fiery cobbles scorch our feet. By the truth we are undone. Life is a dream. 'Tis waking that kills us. He who robs us of our dreams robs us of our life—(and so on for six pages if you will, but the style is tedious and may well be dropped).

Orlando is little less adroit than the gypsies in getting her bearings among physical objects—sheepskins, baskets, or mountains; on an elementary level, her inventory of such objects matches that of her hosts. What she comes to reject is the interpretation of such reassuring agreements embodied in realism, whether the naive realism of the gypsies or the sophisticated version purveyed to Bloomsbury by G. E. Moore.

In Moore's version, which is a useful foil to Orlando's emerging view, all objects of perception, including sensible qualities, are outside the mind:

Whenever I have a mere sensation or idea, the fact is that I am then aware of something which is equally and in the same sense not an inseparable aspect of my experience. The awareness which I have maintained to be included in sensation is the very same unique fact which constitutes every kind of knowledge; "blue" is as much an object, and as little a content of my experience, when I experience it, as the most exalted and independent real thing of which I am ever aware. There is, therefore, no question of how we are to "get outside the circle of our own ideas and sensations." Merely to have a sensation is already to be outside the circle. It is to know something [for example, "blue"] which is as truly and really not a part of my experience as anything which I can ever know.

To say that an expanse of sensible color is "outside" or is "not a part" of its respective sensation is to deny any necessity for such expanses to be sensed in order to exist; for what would such a necessity be like? Not, surely, the necessity with which the incidence of evenness depends on that of number, or of loudness on that of sounds. It may be that properties like evenness or loudness are necessarily restricted to qualifying some kinds of things and cannot otherwise occur, but there is no useful analogy to be drawn from this fact. For the object of an awareness is not a property of the awareness at all. A sensation of blue, for example, need not itself be blue. Perhaps, indeed, it cannot be blue, for a sensation is simply an act of sensing, and there is room at least for doubt that one can sense bluely. It is, for Moore, a fallacy to consider that sensations are not acts but images—images whose likeness or unlikeness to external objects is a plausible subject for dispute. [In his Philosophical Studies, Moore states:] "We have no reason for supposing that there are such things as mental images at all."

Orlando's evolving view is very nearly the denial of all this, and the heart of it is the conviction that our mental images all too eloquently vindicate their own existence, though their role in sensations is not quite the one Moore so easily dismisses. If one were to distill a formal position from the meditative passages I shall be considering in a moment, the result, I think, would be roughly as follows. Sensations, to be sure, are not acts varying somehow by color and shape; but this is because they are not acts at all, with objects whose independence of being acted on could serve to show the ease with which we may get outside the circle of our experience. When we say that someone has a sensation of a round blue patch we mean that he is in a particular state of mind—for that is the sort of thing a sensation is—and that this particular species of sensation accompanies one's seeming to see the round blue surface of a physical object. Being of a round blue patch is the analogue in sensation of being round and blue in physical appearance. For these appearances the only evidence is the sensations that accompany them, but conceptually the appearances have priority; reports about physical objects in themselves are simply confidently elliptical reports of appearances. It is these objects, in short, and not images, whose status is in doubt; for the consciousness that encircles us is less diaphanous than Moore allows.

No doubt the sequence of appearances and images that occur to Orlando tallies in part with the experience of others, and defines the order that common sense ascribes to real things. But to dichotomize the world into the real and the apparent or imaginary is to fall into the demoralizing error of regarding consciousness as at best a spyhole into a world from which the mind is essentially excluded. A real object is simply an apparent object that has met a test of coherence with other appearances, and it is as imaginary as any hallucination in the radical sense that, as it happens, without images there are no appearances—no conceptual episodes of seeming to see physical objects. The natural environment of such seemings consists of images, and while certain practicalities are served by discounting the latter, an important freedom and an important truth are redeemed, for the artist especially, by surrendering to their ubiquity.

The spiritual transformation by which Orlando reaches this view is, at the outset, embarrassed by realist misgivings. The callow Jacobean poet deprecates his inability to focus on the real: "Every single thing, once he tried to dislodge it from its place in his mind, he found thus cumbered with other matter like the lump of glass which, after a year at the bottom of the sea, is grown about with bones and dragon-flies, and coins and the tresses of drowned women." Even his current thought, Orlando reflects to his annoyance, is encumbered with metaphors expressing the same sort of impertinent matter:

"Why not simply say what one means and leave it?" So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue and so to propitiate the austere spirit of poetry whom still, though at a great distance, he could not help reverencing. "The sky is blue," he said, "the grass is green." Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the sky is like the veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hair; and the grass fleets and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods. "Upon my word," he said … "I don't see that one's more true than another. Both are utterly false." And he despaired of being able to solve the problem of what poetry is and what truth is and fell into a deep dejection.

This odd mixture of compassion and mockery is characteristic of Virginia Woolf's treatment of the adolescent Orlando's frustrations. The metaphorical turn of mind, as it blesses or afflicts the young man, is simply the habit of transcribing the text of subjective history without the deletions required to make it intersubjective:

He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the earth's spines beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a horse that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling ship—it was anything indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which he could attach his floating heart to; the heart that tugged at his side; the heart that seemed filled with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out.

What Orlando feels the need of, at this stage, is the notion of a physical world that transcends appearances, possible or actual; it is the need of something he will eventually recognize as chimerical: "Hair, pastry, tobacco—of what odds and ends are we compounded … What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meeting place of dissemblables."

The context of the physical items Orlando mentions is the mind, or minds, of which they are ingredients, and the result of contemplating physical appearances in their mental context is phantasmagoria: "Everything was partly something else, and each gained an odd moving power from this union of itself and something not itself so that with this mixture of truth and falsehood her mind became like a forest in which things moved; lights and shadows changed, and one thing became another." At least once we are offered an illustration of precisely how something becomes nothing; when, on her homeward voyage from Turkey, Orlando surveys the English coast, she is affected by a puzzling visual image:

There now rose, like a dome of smooth, white marble, something which, whether fact or fancy, was so impressive to her fevered imagination that she settled upon it as one has seen a swarm of vibrant dragonflies alight, with apparent satisfaction, upon the glass bell which shelters some tender vegetable. The form of it, by the hazard of fancy, recalled that earliest, most persistent memory—the man with the big forehead in Twitchett's sittingroom … The truth was that the image of the marble dome which her eyes had first discovered so faintly that it suggested a poet's forehead and thus started a flock of irrelevant ideas, was no figment, but a reality; and as the ship advanced down the Thames before a favouring gale, the image with all its associations gave place to the truth, and revealed itself as nothing more and nothing less than the dome of a vast cathedral rising among a fretwork of white spires.

Notably, the image does not give way to truth by withdrawing; what it reveals as "reality" is only itself in a new guise or under a new interpretation. It transpires that the "fancy" is of the kind that prompts us by the dense texture of fancies that cohere with it to announce the presence of a "reality."

Licensed by this phenomenalism, Woolf's narrator rejects the view that history—the account of what happens to perceiving selves—is to be restricted to the "objective," and hence to the partial. An epoch of hyperbolic feelings is better and more accurately served by reproducing its own hyperbolic vision of itself, as the narrator serves the Jacobeans in a surreal and rather Ovidian bagatelle:

The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young country-woman … was seen by the onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs … The fields were full of shepherds, ploughmen, and little bird-scaring boys all struck stark in the act of the moment, one with his hand to his nose, another with the bottle to his lips, a third with a stone raised to throw at the raven who sat, as if stuffed, upon the hedge within a yard of him … The court was at Greenwich, and the new King seized the opportunity that his coronation gave him to curry favour with the citizens. He directed that the river, which was frozen to a depth of twenty feet and more for six or seven miles on either side, should be swept, decorated, and given all the semblances of a park or pleasure ground, with arbours, mazes, alleys, drinking booths, etc., at his own expense.

Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last Autumn, overladen with apples. The old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips hinted the truth. 'Twas a sight King James liked to look upon, and he would bring a troupe of courtiers to gaze with him.

Here, at any rate, is the Jacobean myth vividly illuminated: the fascination with freaks and pageants, with life conceived as a brilliant and intricate masque, with death conceived as a dance of grotesquely ornate drollery. And the style of description, a series of pictorial flashes of macabre transformation and elemental caprice, is in the same idiom as Ovid's jeux d'esprit on the flood of Deucalion and the effects of the Gorgon's stare. In Orlando, however, the idiom is at the disposal not of a despairing ironist but of a chronicler of the imagination for whom accuracy consists, in effect, in framing the sketch of a room with a suspicion of the side of the sketcher's nose, or perhaps (if he is sitting) with a foreground of his hands and lap. To explode the myth of the thing in itself is, for Orlando the poet, to justify the autonomous exercise of the imagination, and hence to regain an essential freedom.

Talk of regaining a freedom runs the risk of misunderstanding, so I shall take this opportunity of emphasizing that the phenomenalist interpretation of experience we have been considering is hardly a piece of cultural subversion, or a precursor of late twentieth-century anomie. One might as plausibly cast in that ideological role Prospero's conviction that we are such stuff as dreams are made on. The point, once again, is not so much to dethrone the real as to exalt the imaginary by showing that, for the hardest-headed among us as for the dreamers, the reading of "see" on which "he sees an oak tree" is consistent with the tree's nonexistence is more fundamental than the reading that implies its existence; in either case one has to do with an image. For their own legitimate purposes, common sense and science partition experience into the objective and the subjective, and this proceeding becomes perverse only if it is allowed to impoverish our sense of reality. Common sense, tradition, even conventional social manners (if prevented from tyrannizing) are good things in their place—beside and not over against the creatures of the mythic imagination. Orlando is too history-haunted, too private, too libertarian a romance to reflect the iconoclasm of an ideologue. Its mischief has nothing in common with vandalism.

The narrative demonstrates a different sort of freedom, I think, in its ambiguous handling of time; for we are left to contend as best we can with the fact that the central figure, among others, has lived through more than three centuries of varied history by the end of the narrative while growing no older than thirty-six. This is easily enough accounted for if we assume that the years are measured in intersubjective or public time and the centuries in private; the sense of duration, as the narrator delights in reminding us, is wonderfully elastic:

An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. This extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind, is less known than it should be and deserves fuller investigation.

All which [that is, Orlando's lionization by Victorian society] is properly enclosed in square brackets, as above, for the good reason that a parenthesis it was without any importance in Orlando's life. She skipped it, to get on with the text. For when the bonfires were blazing in the market place, she was in the dark woods with Shelmerdine alone. So fine was the weather that the trees stretched their branches motionless above them, and if a leaf fell, it fell, spotted and gold, so slowly that one could watch it for half an hour fluttering and falling till it came to rest at last on Orlando's foot.

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 synchronise the sixty or seventy different times which beat simultaneously in every 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 times not registered by clock or tombstone apparently divide up the units of public time into arbitrary units of private; presumably, the general rule is that the more eventful or highly valued a span of experience, the swifter it seems in the having and the longer in retrospect, and the reverse with empty or oppressive time. On this interpretation, the narrator has simply chosen to ignore the conventional hierarchy of precision or objectivity among measures of duration. The resulting paradox is a variation on Rosalind's metaphysical impudence toward quite another Orlando in As You Like It:

ROSALIND. Time travels in divers paces with divers persons. I'll tell you who time ambles withal, who time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal.

ORLANDO. I prithee, who doth he trot withal?

ROSALIND. With a priest that lacks Latin, and a rich man that hath not the gout; for the one sleeps easily because he cannot study, and the other lives merrily because he feels no pain; the one lacking the burthen of lean and wasteful learning, the other knowing no burthen of heavy tedious penury. These time ambles withal.

ORLANDO. Who doth he gallop withal?

ROSALIND. With a thief to the gallows; for though he go as soft as foot can fall he thinks himself too soon there.

ORLANDO. Who stays it withal?

ROSALIND. With lawyers in the vacation; for they sleep between term and term, and then they perceive not how Time moves.

The operative word, on what we may call the Shakespearean model of the vagaries of time, is "perceive"; and as applied to the narrative attitude toward the real or objective in Orlando, we shall understand that the clock is only one measure—the public measure—among others, all rooted in perception and subject to its contingencies.

The difficulty with this approach is that the Shakespearean model clarifies only part of what Virginia Woolf's narrator is enabled to say by his treatment of time; that Orlando's public years are private minutes does not by itself palliate the miracle that she manages to live through three hundred years of public events, beginning as an Elizabethan and still carrying on in the reign of George V, and the historical evocations are too elaborate and highly charged to be the machinery of a pointless joke. I should like to suggest that the subject of the historical part of Orlando's temporal paradox is not the status of fact, but the multiple possibilities of the central figure. For these are not all-inclusive; we may reasonably entertain not only the innocuous claim that it is logically possible for Orlando to have lived in any one of several epochs, but also the more interesting claim that given Orlando's essential character the roles she would respectively have played in them are as they are represented in the narrative. Construed in this way, the narrator's flight of fancy turns out to have the assurance and complexity typical of informed claims about what would be true in circumstances that happen not to hold.

With its ellipses filled in, the current claim would, I think, take roughly the following form: there are alternative schemes of things, or total states of past, present, and future affairs—possible worlds, shall we say—that are very similar to the actual world in the things they contain, their laws of nature, and what happens in them. In those similar worlds that the narrator, at least, would pick out as especially similar to the actual world, Orlando never figures as an Elizabethan nobleman without also having the experiences we are reading about. On this interpretation, each historical episode in the narrative is the main clause of a conditional sentence contrary to fact with the if-clause and the subjunctive mood suppressed: "Orlando (would have) aspired to piratical adventure (if he had been a young Elizabethan nobleman)." The "biography" is a direct exploration of what we may call Orlando's historical possibilities. But if this reading is sound, why does the narrator drop the prefix "it is possible that" or "it would have been the case that," and dart from one alternative world to another—from one in which Orlando is Elizabethan to another in which she is Augustan—as if they were all on a par with the actual world?

The answer seems to be that this is precisely the insidious point of the narrative; that the dethronement of the actual is part of the same subversive libertarian program as the dethronement of the real. For the entities that are the fundamental bearers of truth and possibility—the so-called propositions—are no respecters of worlds. That Orlando is an Elizabethan nobleman is true in some possible worlds and false in others, just as it is true at some moments and false at others that Orlando is in Turkey. "Now" and "actually" are not (as common sense would have it) the labels of a privileged moment and world; they are not labels at all, but expressions that vary in reference with the moments and worlds in which sentences containing them are uttered. To evaluate a particular utterance of "Orlando is now in Turkey," one notes the time of utterance and then ascertains whether Orlando is in Turkey at that time. Thus the narrator uses "the present moment" archly here and there as if just one date could be so described, but permits the date mentioned to vary ironically.

To contemplate the possible truth of a proposition on this view is to enjoy a kind of freedom of which the utterance in some particular world of "now" or "actually" is a crass interruption. To measure truth by reference to such interruptions is to allow them to immure the self in but one of the universes to which it is native, and since "now" names no moment, being taken in by the hallucination of a Present Moment par excellence is an experience of peculiar dread, a confrontation with the void.

The narrative is strewn with such dread confrontations:

Her thoughts became mysteriously tightened and strung up, as if a piano tuner had put his key in her back and stretched the nerves very taut; at the same time her hearing quickened; she could hear every whisper and crackle in the room, so that the clock ticking on the mantelpiece beat like a hammer. And so for some seconds the light went on becoming brighter, and she saw everything more and more clearly, and the clock ticked louder and louder until there was a terrible explosion right in her ear. Orlando leapt as if she had been violently struck in the head. Ten times she was struck. In fact it was ten o'clock in the morning. It was the eleventh of October. It was nineteen twenty-eight. It was the present moment. No one need wonder that Orlando started, pressed her hand to her heart and turned pale. For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, and the future on the other.

She saw with disgusting vividness that the thumb of Joe's right hand was without a fingernail and there was a raised saucer of pink flesh where the nail should have been. The sight was so repulsive that she felt faint for a moment, but in that moment's darkness, when her eyelids flickered, she was relieved of the presence of the present. There was something strange in the shadow that the flicker of her eyes cast, something which (as anyone can test for himself by looking now at the sky) is always absent from the present—whence its terror, its nondescript character—something one trembles to pin through the body with a name and call beauty, for it has no body, is as a shadow and without substance or quality of its own, yet has the power to change whatever it adds itself to. This shadow now while she ffickered her eye in her faintness in the carpenter's shop stole out, and attaching itself to the innumerable sights she had been receiving, composed them into something tolerable, comprehensible.

The shadow that the self casts on the moment it contemplates, and that subdues its terror, is the sense of unity, of transcending any particular moment or possible state of affairs. The enjoyment of this unity, I think, is ultimately connected with the narrative insistence on counterfactual history, and the strange egalitarianism with which it presents the incompatible worlds it contemplates.

Our way of determining from the outside what shall count as an individual is a matter of convention. If our problem is to decide whether Orlando the Elizabethan courtier and his namesake the Caroline Ambassador are one and the same, we look for a schedule of continuous passage between the point and moment at which the courtier was last located and the point and moment at which the Ambassador was first located such that each point-moment position on the schedule was occupied by one or the other of them. Continuity in space and time will allow us to identify the courtier with the Ambassador even though it would be logically permissible to take two consecutive positions on the schedule as those respectively on which one individual ceases to exist and a second begins; indeed, if the contrast between the courtier and the Ambassador were as catastrophic as that between Gregor and the beetle, an outsider might be tempted to embrace the latter alternative with some enthusiasm. Even the narrator, who knows better, verges once on treating Orlando's change in sex as if it were a question of identifying distinct parts of a whole consisting of two successive individuals:

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. (emphasis added)

From the inside, however, from Orlando's perspective, it is simply axiomatic that if she has a memory at all, it is an awareness "of her past," the past of an indivisible subject; there is ultimately no danger of her shrinking away, as perceiver, into the nothingness of the present and the actual. Terms like "Elizabeth's favorite courtier" or "the Caroline Ambassador to Turkey"—the terms of merely conventional statements of identity—are descriptions that change their reference from moment to moment or from one possible world to another; in this respect they are no different from "now," "actually," "the English monarch in 1590" (variable from world to world), or "the English monarch" (variable from time to time and world to world). Proper names and their associated pronouns, on the other hand—in the narrator's ordinary usage, at any rate—do not vary at all in the context of "now" or "it is possible (is actually the case) that." The entire point of our being told, concerning Orlando, that "she reviewed … the progress of her own self along her own past" depends on our understanding that the reference of the pronouns "she," "her own self," and "her" is identical despite contextual differences in tense and mood. In the current jargon phrase, the terms are all "rigid designators."

It is true that side by side with pronominal "self" or "herself" we find "self" and "Orlando" serving as common nouns in the plural, and that this may suggest a flirtation with anxieties about the unity of the person:

For she had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousand. Choosing, then, only those selves we have found room for, Orlando may now have called on the boy who cut the nigger's head down; the boy who sat on the hill; the boy who saw the poet; the boy who handed the Queen the bowl of rose water; or she may have called upon the young man who fell in love with Sasha; or upon the Courtier; or upon the Ambassador; or upon the Soldier; or upon the Traveller; or she may have wanted the Woman to come to her; the Gipsy; the Fine Lady; the Hermit; the girl in love with life; the Patroness of Letters… All these selves were different, and she may have called on any of them.

Perhaps; but what appeared certain (for we are in the region of "perhaps" and "appears") was that the one she needed most kept aloof, for she was, to hear her talk, changing her selves as quickly as she drove—there was a new one at every corner—as happens when, for some unaccountable reason, the conscious self, which is the uppermost, and has the power to desire, wishes to be nothing but one self. This is what some people call the true self, and it is, they say, compact of all the selves we have it in us to be; commanded and locked up by the Captain self, the Key self, which amalgamates and controls them all.

The list of Orlando's "selves" consists not of individuals but of individual concepts or roles satisfied by the same "she" at different times in different possible worlds. They are her possibilities of transformation, the selves she has it in her to be. Certain traits, on the other hand, are essential to the role-bearer or "Captain self"; for "through all those changes she had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same. She had the same brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same passion for the country and the season." There is thus an opportunity of choosing to be an essential or "true" self—to play in one's imagination a role that epitomizes the rest; though the motive for such an averaging, is, says the narrator, "unaccountable." To rejoice imaginatively in the rich multiplicity of one's "selves," it is clear, is to celebrate the unity and energy of the protean Self that, by its joint presence in more than one possible world, impersonates them all.

Suppose—to explore the contrasting possibility—that we deny Orlando's axiom, as in effect Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll tries to do, by assuming that one cannot intelligibly ask whether the Jekyll of one moment is literally the same as the Jekyll of the next; they are distinct objects—stages, let us say—that pass our conventional test (of resemblance and continuity) for parts of the whole that is Jekyll tout court, a whole that (like a relay race or dynasty) is extended in time as well as space. In Jekyll's exceptional case, unfortunately, the whole is not continuous; stages of Jekyll periodically end in stages of Hyde. To make matters worse, each stage of Jekyll is also a stage of his submerged alter idem, of a Hyde in hiding—"the cavern in which [the mountain bandit] conceals himself from pursuit."

It is, indeed, ostensibly with a view to ending this agonizing duality that Jekyll first resorts to chemical means of achieving an antiseptic alternation between respective stages of the "polar twins": "The unjust might go his way … and the just could walk steadfastly … no longer exposed to disgrace and penitence." But the plan, on Jekyll's account, has gone wrong; as before, Hyde is unadulterated, and Jekyll "a mere polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent citizens." In another respect, however, on the assumption that Jekyll and Hyde are not and cannot be identical, the experiment appears to be partly successful: though Jekyll concedes that he is guilty of conniving at Hyde's infamy, "even now I can scarce grant that I committed it"; connivance is presumably far less burdensome to conscience than commission. The "depravity," after all, is merely "vicarious."

As the insistent irony of Stevenson's tale makes clear to us, this account will not do. Connivance is itself a form of commission, that "heresy of Cain" to which (in its venial form) the narrative raisonneur Utterson confesses in Stevenson's prologue: "I let my brother go to the devil in his own way." But not all such heresies are venial. To release Hyde—to let him go despite the horror of his "way"—is clearly to go with him. But what is worse, Jekyll is lying. His language betrays him. Far from being vicarious, his sadistic pleasures are simply "the secret pleasures that I had enjoyed in the disguise of Hyde." "Hyde," in short, is the name Jekyll goes by in disguise, under the influence of the drug that both disfigures him and relieves him of his inhibitions; he is no more subject to multiplication by the number of his conflicting urges or transformations than is the drunkard with whom he compares himself. The monster whose deeds he remembers performing is ipso facto himself, as he fitfully realizes. To sum up "my life as a whole," for Jekyll, is to include the life of Hyde.

And yet the lie of the exculpatory third person persists to the end: "He, I say—I cannot say, I." The amateur of "transcendental medicine" remains the dupe of his own intellectual quackery, and especially of his muddled ontology of the self as process rather than as the subject of process. But what Jekyll so strenuously denies, his story forbids us to overlook: under whatever name or condition or disguise, Jekyll endures from stage to stage of his history. It is only the stages endured that are necessarily distinct. There is, in short, a crucial difference between the delusive multiplicity of selves in which Jekyll seeks refuge from his responsibility and the imaginative multiplicity of roles in which Orlando and Jekyll himself (to his grief) find opportunities for the exploration of their freedom.

The "biographer" whom Virginia Woolf has provided for Orlando, if I am thus far right, by blithely renouncing conventional narrative fidelity to the real and the actual, demonstrates (to his own satisfaction at least) a more inclusive fidelity to concrete human experience and its alternative possibilities. To achieve liberty, one must take liberties; and of all the conventions with which such liberties are taken in Orlando, none is more mischievously derided than the convention that one's sex ordains how one ought properly to think, to behave, and above all to be treated. The allegorical figures who act out their masque of disapproval and departure in the bedchamber where the sleeping Orlando is changing sex are in effect the three goddesses of sexual propriety: Purity, Modesty, and Chastity, supercilious idols of "those who prohibit; those who deny; those who reverence without knowing why; those who praise without understanding; the still very numerous (Heaven be praised) tribe of the respectable; who prefer to see not; desire to know not; love the darkness."

For the "tribe of the respectable," Orlando's sexual transformation is socially null—a case not covered by the gender-specific rules for responding to persons; hence their enthusiasm for finding ways to avoid acknowledging it: "The change seemed to have been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such a way that Orlando herself showed no surprise at it. Many people, taking this into account, and holding that such a change is against nature, have been at great pains to prove (1) that Orlando had always been a woman, (2) that Orlando is at this moment a man." In the same spirit, the legal case against her right to her own inheritance charges her in desperation with being dead as a male and disqualified as a female from holding property: "Thus it was in a highly ambiguous condition, uncertain whether she was alive or dead, man or woman, Duke or nonentity, that she posted down to her country seat, where, pending the legal judgement, she had the Law's permission to reside in a state of incognito or incognita as the case might turn out to be." One is unknown, insoluble, without the conventional label that defines the roles of those one has to do with.

Orlando's new acquaintance with being a woman permits her, of course, to compare the advantages of the feminine and masculine labels. At first, on her sea voyage home from Turkey, she supposes, like Ovid's Teiresias, that in some respects the feminine lot is the more agreeable:

Then she had pursued, now she fled. Which is the greater ecstasy? The man's or the woman's? And are they not perhaps the same? No, she thought, this is the most delicious (thanking the Captain [for the offer of a slice of corned beefj but refusing), to refuse, and see him frown. Well, she would, if he wished it, have the very thinnest, smallest sliver in the world. This was the most delicious, to yield and see him smile. "For nothing," she thought, regaining her couch on deck and continuing the argument, "is more heavenly than to resist and to yield; to yield and to resist. Surely it throws the spirit into such a rapture that nothing else can. So that I'm not sure," she continued, "that I won't throw myself overboard, for the mere pleasure of being rescued by a bluejacket after all." (It must be remembered that she was like a child entering into possession of a pleasaunce or toycupboard; her arguments would not commend themselves to mature women, who have had the run of it all their lives.)

The sardonic parenthesis, as it turns out, is grotesquely understated; the game with which Orlando has allowed herself to be beguiled is stultifying to both sides:

"To fall from a mast-head," she thought, "because you see a woman's ankles; to dress up like a Guy Fawkes and parade the streets, so that women may praise you; to deny a woman teaching lest she may laugh at you; to be the slaves of the frailest chit in petticoats, and yet to go about as if you were the Lords of Creation.—Heavens!" she thought, "what fools they make of us—what fools we are!" And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither.

The full insidiousness of the prescribed roles emerges only when Orlando's critical neutrality wavers and threatens to give way to the delusion that the roles are more than a game: "Do what she would to restrain them, the tears came to her eyes, until, remembering that it is becoming in a woman to weep, she let them flow." "That men cry as frequently and as unreasonably as women, Orlando knew from her own experience as a man; but she was beginning to be aware that women should be shocked when men display emotion in their presence; and so, shocked she was."

All this, it is true, has the makings of comedy, and nowhere more than when Orlando feels obliged by Purity, Modesty, and Chastity to register shock:

Here she turned to present the Archduchess with the salver, and behold—in her place stood a tall gentleman in black. A heap of clothes lay in the fender. She was alone with a man.

Recalled thus suddenly to a consciousness of her sex, which she had completely forgotten, and of his, which was now remote enough to be equally upsetting, Orlando felt seized with faintness.

"La!" she cried, putting her hand to her side, "how you frighten me!" "Gentle creature," cried the Archduchess, falling on one knee and at the same time pressing a cordial to Orlando's lips, "forgive me for the deceit I have practised on you!"

Orlando sipped the wine and the Archduke knelt and kissed her hand.

In short, they acted the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour and then fell into natural discourse.

But the comedy takes an acrimonious turn as Orlando comes to see that the convention of femininity entails not only irksome restrictions but deeply insulting dispensations. To get rid of her unwanted lover, Orlando tries to persuade him of her unworthiness by grossly cheating him at a game; to her irritation, she is eventually spared the punishment she has worked so hard to deserve:

To love a woman who cheats at play was, he said, impossible. Here he broke down completely. Happily, he said, recovering slightly, there were no witnesses. She was, after all, a woman, he said. In short, he was preparing in the chivalry of his heart to forgive her and had bent to ask her pardon for the violence of his language, when she cut the matter short, as he stooped his proud head, by dropping a small toad between his skin and his shirt.

In justice to her, it must be said that she would infinitely have preferred a rapier. Toads are clammy things to conceal about one's person a whole morning. But if rapiers are forbidden, one must have recourse to toads.

There is clearly as much outrage as mischief in the bestowal of the toad; it is a substitute for the home thrust of a rapier.

As Orlando proceeds on her tour down the centuries, she pauses at the eighteenth to collect perennial canards about women like a connoisseur of grievances culling specimens. To Addison, we are informed, woman is "a beautiful romantic animal"; to Lord Chesterfield, a child "of a larger growth." Another eighteenth-century wit declares that "when they lack the stimulus of the other sex, women can find nothing to say to each other. When they are alone, they do not talk; they scratch." Still another, that "women are incapable of any feeling of affection for their own sex, and hold each other in the greatest aversion." In the nineteenth century, the injustice of sexual convention begins to be somewhat more evenhanded: "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 practised on both sides." Victorian marriage in particular is an institution of stifling dependency into which men and women are herded by the morbid roles imposed on them, roles that in the case of women require a wardrobe calculated to constrain free movement and an array of obligatory phobias (such as the fear "lest there should be robbers in the wainscot") with the same effect: "All these things inclined her, step by step, to submit to the new discovery, whether Queen Victoria's or another's, that each man and each woman has another allotted to it for life, whom it supports, by whom it is supported, till death them do part. It would be a comfort, she felt, to lean, to sit down; yes, to lie down; never, never, never to get up again."

And the twentieth-century Lawrentian reaction against propriety, Orlando finds, has scarcely been an improvement; in the name of a vital freedom it has merely substituted a new decorum by which the self is confined (especially in the official paradigm of femininity) to harping on the single note of eros, and a dehumanized eros at that:

Surely since [Orlando] is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin to think, at least, of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing, either). And make an assignation for Sunday dusk; and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window—all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible subject for fiction. Surely Orlando must have done one of these things? Alas,—a thousand times, alas, Orlando did none of them. Must it then be admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity that do not love? She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love—as the male novelists define it—and who, after all, speak with greater authority?—has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one's petticoat and—But we all know what love is.

Behavior is not the only slave of the sexual role, whimsical artifact though the latter is; unfortunately for Orlando, one cannot go through the motions of conformity for long without losing one's inner autonomy; the flimsiness of the eighteenth-century gown, the weight of the Victorian crinoline are in the end a very efficient means of subjecting the mind and the body:

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than merely to keep us warm … There is much to support the view that it is clothes that wear us and not we them; we may make them take the mould of arm or breast, but they mould our hearts, our brains, our tongues to their liking … If we compare the picture of Orlando as a man with that of Orlando as a woman we shall see that though both are undoubtedly one and the same person, there are certain changes. The man has his hand free to seize his sword; the woman must use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face, as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it, full of subtlety, even of suspicion. Had they both worn the same clothes, it is possible that their outlook might have been the same too.

Each of these costumes carries with it a particular limitation on outlook, on the range of experience. In the eighteenth century, Orlando accordingly defends her freedom by a tactical transvestism: "Her sex changed far more frequently than those who have worn only one set of clothing can conceive; nor can there be any doubt that she reaped a two-fold harvest by this device; the pleasures of life were increased and its experiences multiplied. From the probity of breeches she turned to the seductiveness of petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally."

If the identification of probity with being male and of seductiveness with being female is indeed a fiction ordained by convention and subtly reinforced by the symbolism of dress, then the narrator's talk of "the mixture in her of man and woman" can hardly be taken on its face; it is a parody of the same ludicrously false dichotomies that underlie the hesitations of Orlando's friends about how to classify her:

The curious of her own sex would argue how, for example, if Orlando was a woman, did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man's love of power. She is excessively tenderhearted. She could not endure to see a donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. Yet again, they noted, she detested household matters, was up at dawn and out among the fields in summer before the sun had risen. No farmer knew more about the crops than she did. She could drink with the best and liked games of hazard. She rode well and drove six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again, though bold and active as a man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the most womanly palpitations. She would burst into tears on slight provocation. She was unversed in geography, found mathematics intolerable, and held some caprices which are more common among women than men, as, for instance, that to travel south is to travel down hill.

For the mentality that regards every strength or weakness of character or intellect as an essential peculiarity of one sex or the other, Orlando's biological nature will hardly determine her sex; her inability or refusal to sustain a consistent role implies the lack of any definite nature at all. Orlando, as her biographer twice warns us, is sometimes a little at odds with our expectations, sometimes "a trifle clumsy": "Yet it is true that there was an absentmindedness about her which sometimes made her clumsy; she was apt to think of poetry when she should have been thinking of taffeta; her walk was a little too much of a stride for a woman, perhaps, and her gestures, being abrupt, might endanger a cup of tea on occasion."

One might gather from all this that the ideal of "clumsiness" being burnished by Orlando's biographer is a kind of bisexual aestheticism in thin disguise. That the suggestion is far too narrow is sufficiently indicated by the pains the biographer takes to provide that clumsiness with a foil in the freakishness of Orlando's admirer and fellow transvestite Harry Archduke of Finster-Aarhorn, who throws off his pretense to confess

that he was a man and always had been one; that he had seen a portrait of Orlando and fallen hopelessly in love with him; that to compass his ends, he had dressed as a woman … that he had heard of her change and hastened to offer his services (here he teed and heed intolerably). For to him, said the Archduke Harry, she was and would ever be the Pink, the Pearl, the Perfection of her sex. The three p's would have been more persuasive if they had not been interspersed with tee-hees and haw-haws of the strangest kind. "If this is love," said Orlando to herself, looking at the Archduke on the other side of the fender and now from the woman's point of view, "there is something highly ridiculous about it."

There is something highly ridiculous in a charade of romanticized prurience. It may be, as the biographer speculates, that the romance and the prurience in love are "so strictly joined together that you cannot separate them"; but in the Archduke it is grotesquely obvious which is the directing impulse: "It was Lust the vulture, not Love the Bird of Paradise that flopped, foully and disgustingly, upon [Orlando's] shoulders." The egoism and impersonality of the Archduke's obsession are stupidly confining, and so far in sharp contrast to the inclusiveness of experience and sympathy the biographer eventually celebrates on the eve of Orlando's motherhood: "Hail, happiness! kingfisher flashing from bank to bank, and all fulfillment of natural desire, whether it is what the male novelist says it is; or prayer; or denial; hail! in whatever form it comes, and may there be more forms, and stranger."

Orlando's continuing fascination with a person of her own sex, unlike the Duke's harlequinade, is presented to us as something serious, validated by inner kinship, and made tragic by betrayal:

As all Orlando's loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggardry of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man. For now a thousand hints and mysteries became plain to her that were then dark. Now, the obscurity, which divides the sexes and lets linger innumerable impurities in its gloom, was removed, and if there is anything in what the poet says about truth and beauty, this affection gained in beauty what it lost in falsity.

Here, as she was fingering the linen abstractedly, one of the swing-doors between the departments opened and let through, perhaps from the fancygoods department, a whiff of scent, waxen, tinted as if from pink candles, and the scent curved like a shell round a figure—was it a boy's or was it a girl's—furred, pearled, in Russian trousers—young, slender, seductive—a girl, by God! but faithless, faithless!

The sexual duality (by the conventional standard) of the people Orlando loves—not only of the Elizabethan aristocrat's mistress but of the twentieth-century poet's husband—seems to me to be offered, like Orlando's transformation itself, both as a reversal of the process by which "the sexes drew further and further apart," and more fundamentally as the pattern for a general response to the doubt that behind another's behavior lie feelings like one's own. It is a doubt one cannot plausibly reason away by appealing to the likeness of behavior in the Other to what in oneself in variably accompanies feeling of such and such a kind; this would be to generalize from a single instance (oneself). Perhaps one might proceed by noting that the sum of one's characteristics is clearly enough to produce or admit of the pairing of behavior and inner events one observes in oneself and seeks assurance of in others. Among these characteristics some will be necessary to such pairing. The more like oneself the others are, the more likely it is (by the uniformity of nature) that they too satisfy these necessary conditions. If one could eliminate one's differences from a given class of others without finding an alteration in the pairing, then one would know that these differences at least had not disqualified the others from sharing one's feelings, and indeed perhaps had qualified them to have other sorts of feelings as well, of which one had had no suspicion. But of course, most of the changes required by the experiment are quite impossible: "There are a great many properties of which I cannot divest myself and a great many that I cannot acquire; and among them are properties which are peculiar to me, or peculiar to some other person." But an experiment in empathic transformation that cannot be conducted in fact can still (perhaps) be conducted in imagination; and the poet Orlando is peculiarly fitted to conduct it.

For the rest, those who, like Orlando and her husband, have emancipated themselves from artificial norms of sexuality, find that their most fragmentary utterances hold no mystery for their partners—that at a profound level their minds turn out to be formed on the same pattern: "'Are you positive you aren't a man' he would ask anxiously, and she would echo, 'Can it be possible that you're not a woman?' and then they must put it to the proof without more ado. For each was so surprised at the quickness of the other's sympathy, and it was to each such a revelation that a woman could be as tolerant and free-spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman, that they had to put the matter to the proof at once." The only matter they are putting to the proof here is their physical difference; tolerance and subtlety have turned out not to be criteria of sex at all.

Orlando rebels against the tyranny of the real, the actual, and the stereotypical by casually trespassing on boundaries she comes to regard as artificial; her transformation is simply the temporal emblem of her multiple residence in universes that are held by common sense to be mutually inaccessible. But the sequence of universes we look into is far from arbitrary; they turn out at last to have been framed in the awareness of the twentieth-century woman who alone among Orlando's avatars is able, like Eliot's Teiresias, to achieve a synoptic vision. The worlds in which that vision occurs may not enjoy a privileged status of actuality, but they alone are the scene of Orlando's maturity and fulfillment, and they alone are the measure of likeness among possible worlds that gives meaning to the counterfactual idiom of Orlando's "biography" (in all like worlds in which Orlando enjoys a given form, her experiences in that form are as registered in the world of the mature woman's awareness). In this sense the subject of that "biography" is a woman, and the earlier sequences of the book are perversely misleading. Why is the womanhood of the most inclusive Orlando reserved by the device of transformation as a surprise? Why, for that matter, does the tone of the narrative as a whole mislead us by transforming itself by degrees from fantasy to mimesis, from parody to directness?

The answer, I think, is that part of the subversive function of Orlando's transformation is craftily rhetorical. To be taken seriously, in the face of rooted prejudice, as the heroine of a quest for creative mastery, it is as well for the heroine to begin by introducing herself as a hero; for "the truth is," says her biographer with more than a touch of irony, "that when we write of a woman, everything is out of place—culminations and perorations; the accent never falls where it does with a man." The Shakespearean mistress of an earlier Orlando is able to exercise the full force of her personality, to take command of her play, only after she assumes the disguise of a gentleman, and drops the name of "Rosalind" for the questionable nom de guerre of "Ganymede." Virginia Woolf's Orlando refines the stratagem by acting under a far more valiant name—Orlando is Roland—and retaining it even when she has thrown off her disguise. Now, however, it is inalienably the name of a woman. By taking command of a literary kind reserved by prejudice for men, Orlando achieves still another freedom of the imagination for herself and for us.