SOURCE: The Symbolism of Virginia Woolf, Oxford University Press, London, 1965, 171 p.

[In the following excerpt, Thakur analyzes symbolism in Orlando.]

Talking about Orlando, David Daiches says [in The Novel and the Modern World], 'It would be a weary task to disentangle the profoundly symbolic from the deliberately irresponsible …', and, I would add, the historically true. Yet it is a fascinating study to see how from the available factual material Virginia Woolf has created a delightful novel, though, like Defoe and Fielding who name their novels 'The Life, Adventures and Pyracies of..', and 'The History of…', she calls it 'A Biography'.

It is based upon Victoria Sackville-West, Knole, and the Sackvilles. The heraldic leopard, the swaying tapestry, the gilded furniture, and the depth of mirrors that Virginia Woolf mentions in Orlando, are directly taken from Victoria Sackville-West's book Knole and the Sackvilles. Hall, the falconer; Giles, the groom; Mrs. Grimsditch, the house-keeper; and Mr. Dupper, the chaplain, are all in Knole and the Sackvilles having their dinner at the Parlour Table or the Long Table of 'the Right Honourable Richard, Earl of Dorset, in the year of our Lord 1613'. The character and temperament of Orlando changes according to the temperaments of the various Sackvilles who lived during the different ages—the Elizabethan, the Restoration, and the Victorian—and he/she reflects their several tastes and pleasures. Orlando no doubt is, as Stephen Spender says [in World within World], 'a fantastic meditation on a portrait of Victoria Sackville-West'. In spite of all this it is not a merely biographical novel. Just as To the Lighthouse goes beyond the biographical notes of Sir Leslie Stephen and his family to reflect Virginia Woolf's ideas about 'reality' and its intuitive realization, Orlando, besides fantastically portraying the Sackville-West family, symbolizes Virginia Woolf's ideas about time, personality, literature, and the art of biography.

Orlando begins with the closing reign of Queen Elizabeth who was growing 'old and worn and bent', and closes on 'the twelfth stroke of midnight, Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight'. Orlando, its protagonist, living through this long period—more than three hundred years—attains the age of thirty-six years. This extraordinary discrepancy symbolizes Virginia Woolf's idea about the two different ages of man, which are determined by 'time on the clock and time in the mind', and not by a sort of 'bogus "time"' which, according to Wyndham Lewis [in Men without Art], the Bloomsbury people have created 'to take the place of the real "Time"'. Writing about time, Virginia Woolf says:

… time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock lengths; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepiece of the mind by one second. (Orlado)

So of Orlando she writes that it 'would be no exaggeration to say that the he would go out after breakfast a man of thirty and come home to dinner a man of fifty-five at least'.

The age of a person, as determined by 'time in the mind' varies according to the poetic temperament and the imaginative faculty of that person. The unimaginative, she feels, 'live precisely the sixty-eight or seventy-two years allotted them on the tombstone'. Imaginative people

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. (Orlando)

Orlando who, being modelled after Victoria Sackville-West, is a poet and thirty-six years of age according to the time on the clock, is more than three hundred years old according to the time in the mind. Victoria Sackville-West had evidently lived the past in her imagination because in addition to Knole and the Sackvilles she wrote, at the age of thirteen, 'an enormous novel' about Edward Sackville and his two sons. She loved Knole, and in the old house 'the past mingled with the present.…'

The house is not haunted, but you require either an unimaginative nerve or else a complete certainty of the house's benevolence before you can wander through the state-rooms after nightfall with a candle. The light gleams on the dull gilding of furniture and into the misty depths of mirrors, and startles up a sudden face out of the gloom; something creaks and sighs; the tapestry sways, and the figures on it undulate and seem to come alive. [Knole and the Sackvilles]

This quality of having lived the past imaginatively Virginia Woolf portrays symbolically by making Orlando a fantastic character who lives through the Elizabethan, Restoration and Victorian ages and yet is only thirty-six in nineteen hundred and twenty-eight.

De Quincey compares the human brain to a palimpsest:

What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such a palimpsest … oh reader! is yours. Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went before. And yet, in reality, not one has been extinguished.

Virginia Woolf appears to agree with De Quincey that ideas, images, feelings, like the words on a palimpsest, continue to live in one's brain. While writing about William Hazlitt in 1930, only two years after the publication of Orlando, she says,

He loves to grope among the curious depths of human psychology and to track down the reason of things. He excels in hunting out the obscure causes that lie behind some common saying or sensation, and the drawers of his mind are well stocked with illustrations and arguments.… He is speaking of what he knows from experience when he exclaims, 'How many ideas and trains of sentiments, long and deep and intense, often pass through the mind in only one day's thinking or reading!' Convictions are his life blood; ideas have formed in him like stalactites, drop by drop, year by year. [The Times Literary Supplement, 18 September 1930]

Orlando's fantastic age represents the idea that the impressions gathered by Victoria Sackville-West and the emotions she experienced while walking through Knole at night with a taper in her hand and while musing in the family chapel alone, formed into imperishable stalactites and left an indelible imprint on the palimpsest of her mind.

Orlando's being as old as the Sackville family suggests another train of thought. In Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, two novels immediately preceding Orlando, and in The Waves, immediately following it, Virginia Woolf repeats her idea about the continuance of life after death. Clarissa Dalloway feels that she will survive in the trees at home and in the house there, in other people, and especially in the people she knew best. Mrs. Ramsay believes that she will survive in others as long as they live. Bernard puts it more pithily when he says, 'we are the continuers, we are the inheritors'. By making the long line of the Earls and Dukes of Dorset and the Lord Sackvilles live in Orlando, Virginia Woolf makes him a symbol, if not of the whole racial and collective unconscious described by Jung, at least of that part of it which we may name 'the family unconscious'. All these ideas make the fantasy about Orlando's age highly symbolical.

Orlando's change of sex, also, is used symbolically to suggest another group of ideas. In Symbols of Transformation Jung mentions that 'Among the primordial water which was in the beginning' was known as 'the father of fathers, the mother of mothers'. He also mentions that in Egyptian and Babylonian mythologies the 'generative primal matter' and 'the primordial mother' are both bisexual by nature. Talking about 'anima' Jung says,

Since the anima is an archetype that is found in men, it is reasonable to suppose that an equivalent archetype must be present in women; for just as the man is compensated by a feminine element, so woman is compensated by a masculine one.

In support of his thesis he quotes Edward Maitland and Nicholas of Flue, two Christian mystics, who saw reality in a bisexual form—'Mother as well as Father', and as 'majestic father', and 'majestic mother'. Poets and philosophers, too, have believed in the androgynous state of man. Virginia Woolf herself, while discussing the 'Unity of mind', questions 'whether there are two sexes in the mind corresponding to the two sexes in the body'. She comes to the conclusion that

in each one of us two powers preside, one male, one female; and in the man's brain the man predominates over the woman, and in the woman's brain the woman predominates over the man. (A Room of One's Own)

This idea of a person's being both 'Hee and Shee', Virginia Woolf also mentions in The Waves, though on a slightly different plane, when she makes Bernard say, 'nor do I always know if I am man or woman'. Orlando's being first a man and then a woman, besides suggesting man's being androgynous, represents the change in the historical character represented by Orlando.

It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of a woman's dress and of a woman's sex.… Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place.…

For it was this mixture in her of man and woman … that often gave her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue, for example, if Orlando was a woman, how did she never take more than ten minutes to dress? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby? … 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.

This lack of a feminine concern for clothes, and having a manly interest in farming, drinks and games of hazard, show the predominance of man in Orlando. But at another time the feminine in her—giving birth to and bringing up children, and the running of the household, as represented by her buying 'sheets for a double bed' becomes upper-most.

In Knole and the Sackvilles Victoria Sackville-West, describing Charles, the Sixth Earl, says,

… let us call him the Restoration Earl—the jolly, loose-living, magnificent Maecenas, 'during the whole of his life the patron of men of genius and the dupe of women, and bountiful beyond measure to both'… he disturbed London by a rowdy youth; he was reported to have passed on his mistresses to the king.…

When it comes to John Frederick Sackville, she describes him as follows:

He belonged to an age more delicate, more exquisite; an age of quizzing glasses, of flowered waistcoats, of buckled shoes, and of slim bejewelled swords.

A little earlier in that book she also mentions how the rowdy way of life of the Restoration had changed to the 'good breeding, decency of manners, and dignity of exterior deportment of Queen Anne's time'. This change in the Sackvilles from the robust masculine to the delicate more feminine behaviour of a later age along with the fact that on the death of the Duchess Arabella Diana 'her estate devolved upon her two daughters, Mary and Elizabeth'—from male to female descendants—are other points of significance in Orlando's change of sex.

In Orlando the house, nine acres of stone, massed like a town with 'stables, kennels, breweries, carpenters' shops, wash-houses, places where they make tallow candles, kill oxen, forge horse-shoes, stitch jerkins', like the broad-backed moors and the Parthenon in Jacob's Room, and like the house and the 'Noble Barn' in Between the Acts, becomes a symbol of historical time against which Virginia Woolf shows the passage of different ages. The house and the oak tree still stand after generations of Sackvilles, having played their parts, have departed. Virginia Woolf seems to believe with Sir Thomas Browne, whom she mentions in Orlando, that 'the irregularities of vain-glory, and wilde enormities of ancient magnanimity… must diminish their diameters and be poorly seen in Angles of Contingency'. She externalizes this idea by describing the crypt of the family chapel, where Orlando's ancestors lay, coffin piled upon coffin, for ten generations together.

The place was so seldom visited that the rats had made free with the lead work, and now a thigh bone would catch at his cloak as he passed, or he would crack the skull of some old Sir Malise as it rolled beneath his foot. It was a ghastly sepulchre; dug deep beneath the foundations of the house as if the first Lord of the family, who had come from France with the Conqueror, had wished to testify how all pomp is built upon corruption; how the skeleton lies beneath the flesh; how we that dance and sing above must lie below; how the crimson velvet turns to dust; how the ring (here Orlando, stooping his lantern, would pick up a gold circle lacking a stone, that had rolled into a corner) loses its ruby and the eye which was so lustrous shines no more.

The crypt with the lead work destroyed by the rats, and with the thigh bone and skulls rolling about suggests death, decay and corruption. The destruction of the symbols of pomp, power, and glory—the crimson velvet turning to dust, the ring losing its ruby, and the eye its lustre—heightens the sense of the transitoriness of human life and glory.

Virginia Woolf feels that if an individual life, and even the glory of an age, is so transient, there is no reason for any-one to be proud of pomp and power. (This idea is dealt with again … in Between the Acts.) The absurdity of having 365 bedrooms which had been in the possession of the family for four or five hundred years, and of being proud of having earls, or even dukes as one's ancestors, is high-lighted by mentioning the simple gipsy whose family went back two or three thousand years, whose ancestors had built the Pyramids centuries before Christ was born, and who lived a life of 'making a basket' or 'skinning a sheep', and laughed at the 'vulgar ambition' of earls and dukes who snatch land or money from people and accumulate 'field after field; house after house; honour after honour'.

Victoria Sackville-West was a novelist and a poet. She had won the Hawthornden Prize for her poem, The Land. Many of her ancestors were poets and writers. Orlando, reflecting their various talents, becomes a symbol of the literary traditions of the family. During the Elizabethan Age, like Thomas Sackville the first Earl of Dorset, who contributed to Gorboduc and The Mirror of Magistrates, he writes Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts; like Richard Sackville who was a friend and patron of Beaumont, Ben Jonson, Fletcher, and Dray ton, he is a great lover of scholars. Victoria Sackville-West once offered hospitality to a poet, a friend of General Franco, who afterwards, according to Stephen Spender [in World within World], wrote against her; Orlando patronizes Mr. Nicholas Greene of Clifford's Inn, a poet, who in return for his hospitality writes 'a very spirited satire' about a visit to a nobleman in the country. Nick Greene, the 'sardonic loose-lipped man' whose ridicule of Orlando's tragedy had not only hurt Orlando but also made him destroy his fifty-seven poetical works, stands for the 'irresponsible' reviewer whose reviews affect the sensibility of authors.

Ultimately Orlando swears, 'I'll write, from this day forward, to please myself', and indulges in profound thoughts as to the nature of obscurity. In this he resembles his creator. 'I write,' Virginia Woolf says, 'what I like writing and there's an end on it.' At another place she records, 'I'm the only woman in England free to write what I like,' and she has described the advantages of 'obscurity' to a writer in A Room of One's Own.

Orlando, the writer, like Lily Briscoe, the artist in To the Lighthouse, and Miss La Trobe, the producer in Between the Acts, becomes a symbol of a creative artist, and reflects the 'rigours of composition'. He 'wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile'; he alternated between ecstasy and despair, and wondered whether he was 'the divinest genius or the greatest fool', and these feelings, reflecting Virginia Woolf's own as we find them scattered throughout her diary, attain symbolic value.

In Orlando Virginia Woolf also portrays the successive ages of English life and letters, which she was to develop again in The Years and Between the Acts. Whereas in Between the Acts she describes them in a more terse and symbolic way through the pageant, in Orlando she is more explanatory, and uses atmosphere and seasons as symbols, a method that she was to employ again in The Years. About the Elizabethan Age in Orlando she says:

… their morals were not ours; nor their poets; nor their climate; nor their vegetables even. Everything was different.… Sunsets were redder and more intense; dawns were whiter and more auroral. Of our crepuscular half-lights and lingering twilights they knew nothing.… The sun rose and sank. The lover loved and went.

The redder and more intense sunsets symbolize the ardent poets and the lovers of the 'garden flower' and of 'the wild and the weeds', and the bold and free manners of men and women who narrate 'how Jakes had lost his nose and Sukey her honour'.

One important result of the Augustan Age was to produce a style of exemplary clarity, to write 'as Locke recommended lucidly and without mystifying aura'. Virginia Woolf describing the change in Orlando's style says,

His floridity was chastened; his abundance curbed; the age of prose was congealing those warm fountains. 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.

The duller scenes and senses, contrasting with the 'ingrained habit of colour and passion' of the Elizabethans, become apt symbols of the Age of Reason.

Similarly Virginia Woolf uses frost, the darkness of night, clouds and dampness, and the clear and uniform skies, as symbols to suggest the temper of an age, or the state of mind of an individual. The Great Frost, when 'birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground', not only provides an occasion for Virginia Woolf to indulge in her flights of fantasy, and a place for the escapades of Orlando and the revelries of the new king, but also serves as a symbol of the callousness of the court: 'while the country people suffered the extremity of want', the capital, because the new king wanted to 'curry favour with the citizens', enjoyed a carnival of utmost brilliancy. The river, which had frozen, was 'to be swept, decorated and given all the semblance of a park or pleasure ground'.

The darkness and blackness, which Virginia Woolf mentions fifteen times in six pages, and which make the night of 'so inky a blackness that a man was on you before he could be seen', creating a sinister atmosphere, becomes symbolic of the deceit of Sasha, the Muscovite, and of the black mood of Orlando, the cheated. When 'with an awful and ominous voice, a voice full of horror and alarm', St. Paul's struck the stroke of midnight, Orlando, standing in the doorway of an inn near Blackfriars, knew that his doom was sealed.

He stood in the doorway in the tremendous rain without moving. As the minutes passed, he sagged a little at the knees. The downpour rushed on. In the thick of it, great guns seemed to boom. Huge noises as of the tearing and rending of oak trees could be heard. There were also wild cries and terrible inhuman groanings.

The 'huge noises' and the 'wild cries' and 'inhuman groanings', symbolize the lacerating of Orlando's heart and his anguished cry at being cheated by Sasha. Similarly the 'turbulent yellow waters', the mere look of which was 'enough to turn one giddy', which Orlando saw instead of 'the solid ice' the river had been for three months, become symbols of the riot and confusion of his mind.

When he saw the ship of the Muscovite Embassy standing out to sea, Orlando flung himself from his horse, and in his rage tried to breast the sea:

he hurled at the faithless woman all the insults that have ever been the lot of her sex. Faithless, mutable, fickle, he called her; devil, adulteress, deceiver; and the swirling waters took his words, and tossed at his feet a broken pot and a little straw.

The broken pot and the little straw, remnants of a wrecked home and a nest destroyed, that the sea tossed at his feet, become symbols of his shattered dreams of a comfortable home that he wanted to found with Sasha.

After describing how Orlando met Pope, Addison, Swift, and Lord Chesterfield, and saw Dr. Johnson, Mr. Boswell, and Mrs. Williams, Virginia Woolf closes the chapter with a description of the spreading clouds.

At length she came home one night after one of these saunterings… and stood there… looking out of the window.… She could see St. Paul's, the Tower, Westminster Abbey, with all the spires and domes of the city churches.… Upon this serene and orderly prospect the stars looked down, glittering, positive, hard, from a cloudless sky. In the extreme clearness of the atmosphere the line of every roof, the cowl of every chimney was perceptible.… She heard the far-away cry of the night watchman—'Just twelve o'clock on a frosty morning'. No sooner had the words left his lips than the first stroke of midnight sounded. Orlando then for the first time noticed a small cloud gathered behind the dome of St. Paul's. As the strokes sounded, the cloud increased and she saw it darken and spread with extraordinary speed.… With the twelfth stroke of midnight, the darkness was complete. A turbulent welter of cloud covered the city. All was darkness; all was doubt; all was confusion. The Eighteenth century was over; the Nineteenth century had begun.

'The extreme clearness of the atmosphere', the 'cloudless sky', the 'glittering, positive, hard' stars, and the 'orderly prospect', evoking the lucid style and the extreme rationalism of Addison, Pope, and Swift, become symbolic of the Age of Reason. Similarly the spreading clouds, and the 'doubt' and 'confusion' symbolize Romanticism and the Victorian Age, which had, as Lytton Strachey says, 'barbarism and prudery', and 'self-complacency and self-contradiction'. Virginia Woolf further expresses her ideas about the Victorian Age by using the ever increasing dampness and ivy as symbols.

But what was worse, damp now began to make its way into every house—damp, which is the most insidious of all enemies, for while the sun can be shut out by blinds, and the frost roasted by a hot fire, damp steals in while we sleep; damp is silent, imperceptible, ubiquitous. Damp swells the wood, furs the kettle, rusts the iron, rots the stone.

This dampness makes men feel 'the chill in their hearts; the damp in their mind'. This condition of the moral and mental state of the Victorians is taken up again and dealt with exhaustively in The Years and Three Guineas. The dampness makes ivy grow in 'unparalleled profusion'. It smothers the bare stones of the houses in greenery. This concealing of even the bare stones by the ivy suggests the, evasions and concealments' that were sedulously practised by both the sexes, and the prudery of the Victorian Age. The dampness not only makes ivy grow, but also makes vegetation become 'rampant'. Cucumbers 'came scrolloping across the grass', and 'giant cauliflowers' tower deck above deck. This 'fecundity of the garden, the bedroom and the henroost' becomes symbolic of the large Victorian families. This fecundity, which is the spirit of the age, is expressed when Orlando, now wearing a crinoline and a plumed hat in the Victorian fashion, wants someone to 'lean upon'.

The cloudy sky, that had engendered dampness and ivy, bearded men, and even muffled furniture, changes with the changing eras.

It was no longer so thick, so watery, so prismatic now that King Edward … had succeeded Queen Victoria. The clouds had shrunk to a thin gauze; the sky seemed made of metal, which in hot weather tarnished.… It was a little alarming—this shrinkage. Everything seemed to have shrunk.

This shrinkage in King Edward's time is symbolic of the change that took place in the dress, manners, and tastes of the age. The dresses became short and less cumbersome, women grew narrow 'like stalks of corn, straight, shining, identical'. Men's faces became 'bare as the palm of one's hand'. The curtains and covers became frizzled up and the walls became bare to be decorated by 'brilliant coloured pictures of real things'. The families, coming within the grip of shrinkage, also ceased to grow large.

In spite of the fact that Virginia Woolf did not have good health and being very sensitive was depressed by the inhuman wars, she was, Clive Bell records [in Old Friends], 'the gayest human being', and she saw 'life itself as a vast Shakespearean Comedy' [according to David Garnett in The Flowers of the Forest]. Thus she is able to create delightful comedies in Orlando and Between the Acts, to see the brighter side of life, and believe in progress. Her last two novels, even though they were written under the shadow of war, show the same spirit of hope and progress. This spirit is symbolized in The Years through the young couple and the rising dawn, and in Between the Acts through the birth of a new life and the raising of the curtain for a new play. In Orlando it is expressed through another symbol:

… as she was thinking this, the immensely long tunnel in which she seemed to have been travelling for hundreds of years widened; the light poured in.… And so for some seconds the light went on becoming brighter and brighter, and she saw everything more and more clearly and the clock ticked louder and louder until there was a terrific explosion right in her ear.… Ten times she was struck. In fact it was ten o'clock in the morning. It was the eleventh of October. It was 1928. It was the present time.

The long tunnel stands for time. The light becoming brighter as the end—the present time—approaches is a symbol of Virginia Woolf's delight in the progress the world has made. This is both material progress—from the muffled overcrowded Victorian houses with their 'small tin bath tubs' to the sanitary and convenient modern houses with their shower baths, from travelling 'for hours with one's feet in dirty straw dragged along the streets by horses' to riding in omnibuses and motor-cars—and also the progress towards mental and spiritual freedom, for Orlando, in contrast to the mothers and unpaid housekeepers of the previous age, is now free to write poetry and win prizes, and to be her own mistress.

As Virginia Woolf calls Orlando a biography, she also presents in it symbolically her ideas about the art of biography. She seems to believe with Lytton Strachey and Victoria Sackville-West, that the function of a biographer is to be truthful. Desmond MacCarthy sums up Lytton Strachey's ideal about the art of biography in the following words:

… biography must aim at being a truthful record of an individual life, composed as a work of art. [Memories]

Victoria Sackville-West feels that to write a biography is not 'to write a panegyric'. Virginia Woolf symbolically expresses these ideas through Our Ladies of Purity, Chastity, and Modesty. Like De Quincey's Ladies of Sorrow who address a new born child, they address the newly changed Orlando. These Ladies, who 'cover vice and poverty', and all those things that are 'frail or dark or doubtful', saying 'speak not, reveal not', and who hide behind 'ivy and curtains', sing in unison thus:

Truth come not out from your horrid den. Hide deeper, fearful Truth. For you flaunt in the brutal gaze of the sun things that were better unknown and undone; you unveil the shameful; the dark you make clear, Hide! Hide! Hide!

This exhortation of theirs that Truth should hide rather than unveil the shameful makes them symbolic of that school of biographers who mention only 'those performances and incidents which produce vulgar greatness' and who, thinking it 'an act of piety', try to hide the faults and failings of the men they portray by not leading the thoughts into their 'domestic privacies' and the 'minutest details' of their private lives.