SOURCE: "Virginia Woolf, Orlando, and the Feminist Spirit," in The Western Humanities Review, Vol. XV, No. 1, Winter, 1961, pp. 51-8.

[In the following excerpt, Samuelson discusses Woolf's "defiant feminist spirit" in Orlando.]

Orlando is virtually the only work of Virginia Woolf's in which critical questions about her "feminism" have not repeatedly arisen. Moreover, the problem of what "type" of literature it belongs to has been with us since its appearance in 1928. Its method is fantasy, of course; the work begins with Orlando, the hero, a young man during the late 1580s, but in the middle of it all, Orlando's sex magically changes, and the novel ends with Orlando a woman, thirty-six years old, in the late 1920s.

Of this novel, covering more than three hundred year time during which the same person changes from a ma to a woman, most of the critics have suggested that th work is apparently doing no more than playing facetiously with notions of Bergsonian flux. But the trouble is that good deal more is involved in the sex change than would be necessary to do merely this. Orlando's sex change occurs fairly early in the novel, and is introduced in such a way as to suggest there exists no essential difference between men and women, other than the physical. This point is made very carefully:

We may take advantage of this pause in the narrative to make certain statements. Orlando had become a woman—there is no denying it. But in every other respect, Orlando remained precisely as he had been. The change in sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.

As a woman, Orlando finds herself confronted with a host of new problems, of which, when she was a man, she had been unaware:

"Lord! Lord!" she cried again at the conclusion of her thoughts, "must I then begin to respect the opinion of the other sex, however monstrous I think it? If I wear skirts, if I can't swim, if I have to be rescued by a bluejacket, by God!" she cried, "I must!"

Here is certainly the feminist spirit asserting itself, under a thinly disguised veil of the "humor" involved in a situation wherein a man turns into a woman. The point is that there is no essential difference between the sexes, but that women are treated as if there were. In the general situation of the novel (and revelatory in the following quotation) there exists an enactment of revenge on the world of men, with Orlando himself serving as the sacrificial vessel. For in turning into a woman, Orlando sees how inconvenient it becomes to exercise her freedom, and is presumably dogged by the notion that her former male self is partially responsible for creating this world in which she is now so imprisoned spiritually.

She remembered how, as a young man, she had insisted that women must be obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled. "Now I shall have to pay in my own person for those desires," she reflected; "for women are not (judging by my own short experience of the sex) obedient, chaste, scented, and exquisitely apparelled by nature.…"

Orlando, of course, is also a writer—a poet—and when he becomes a woman, his vocation becomes a special problem it had not been before. Soon after the sex change from man to woman, Orlando finds herself with a camp of gypsies. The desire to write is still with her as strongly as ever. However, "slowly, she began to feel that there was some difference between her and the gypsies which made her hesitate sometimes to marry and settle down among them." And the difference is not that she is English, but that she is a writer and a woman.

She returns to England. Her life is relatively pleasant for a time, but gradually Orlando unconsciously takes on certain of the attributes she knows women are supposed to have. She plays her role as a woman, and that this will do real harm to her writing is the clear implication. Certain "changes" take place in her:

For example, it may have been observed that Orlando hid her manuscripts when interrupted. Next, she looked long and intently in the glass … She was becoming a little more modest, as women are, of her brains, and a little more vain, as women are, of her person.

Soon the eighteenth century has arrived, and while Orlando is delighted to find herself in the witty company of Swift, Pope, and Addison, the passage Virginia Woolf chooses to quote from one of Addison's Spectator papers—a clear implication of male superiority and dominance—shows the effect the eighteenth century must have had on a woman's spirit of independence.

It is the nineteenth century, however, which is the worst for women: the century is characterized by doubt, confusion, by thick, black clouds—fitful gusts of rain "which were no sooner over than they began again." The weather turns chilly; beards appear on men; women spend all their lives bearing children, and have time for nothing but this and raising them. The roles they play seem more constricting than ever. "Mrs. Bartholomew nodded. The tears were already running down her cheeks but as she wept she smiled. For it was pleasant to weep. Were they not all of them weak women?"

The third finger of Orlando's left hand begins to itch unnaturally for a ring. Orlando begins to desire not a "lover" as she (and he) always had in the past, but a "husband." Finally, Orlando gives way to her desire for a ring. She marries, and the conflict between her marriage and her writing comes immediately to the fore. Is this really marriage, she asks herself, "if one still wished, more than anything in the whole world, to write poetry."

This is followed by a facetious scene in which the writer wins out over the wife for possession of Orlando. Sitting at a desk, she decides to see if it is actually possible to write while married.

But she would put it to the test. She looked at the ring. She looked at the ink pot. Did she dare? No, she did not. But she must. No, she could not. What should she do then? Faint, if possible. But she had never felt better in her life.

She finally determines to go ahead and write something, and as she dips her pen in ink, she is amazed that "there was no explosion."

Always, however, it is the nineteenth century—the century of Virginia Woolf's childhood—which is returned to with the greatest seriousness. We are told, for instance, that

Orlando had inclined herself naturally to [other periods]. But the spirit of the nineteenth century was anti-pathetic to her and broke her, and she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before.

These last are almost embarrassingly serious words, and utterly out of harmony, again, with the intended "humor" of Orlando's general plight, and with the popular critical opinion that the only reason Virginia Woolf has Orlando change from a man into a woman is to reveal that the sexes in some vague and delightful manner "intermix." On the contrary, it is rather the serious combat of the female Orlando versus "the world" that underlies the more consciously wrought, surface texture of the novel.

As readers of literature, we can be thankful, once again, that Virginia Woolf took very seriously what Aileen Pippett saw as her "problem"—thankful that Virginia Woolf saw it and used it in the way any writer uses any experience. As James Baldwin has said [in Notes of a Native Son], "Any writer … finds that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way.…" That this is true of a great many writers of first-rate talent attests to the fact—obvious to writers themselves—that out of a dynamism between personality and environment comes literature.

In Orlando, at times, the feminist point of view is often giving vent merely to embarrassingly aggressive tendencies.… At its best, however, the feminist spirit has nothing to do with all this, but shows rather Virginia Woolf's strong desire simply to be herself, and among other things to be true to a point of view representative of some of the experiences and feelings of her sex. It is not by accident that one of the characters in Virginia Woolf's first novel The Voyage Out makes the penetrating observation that Jane Austen may be the best woman novelist because she is the only woman novelist who did not try to write like a man. This spiritual recognition of Jane Austen as one of her true forbears was an exceedingly good thing to have happened to Virginia Woolf. Without the self-conscious awareness of her sex as reflected in Orlando and elsewhere, we would lose immensely—lose the compellingly poetic, almost mystical intuitions experienced, for instance, by Mrs. Ramsay and Mrs. Dalloway. And to return to the work at hand: it is not quite an accident that the reader remembers Orlando as a woman, not a man—certainly not a combination of both—and not by accident that such a subject as a sex change would present itself to Virginia Woolf as the tool for evolving a sometimes comic, sometimes deadly serious, satire on one phase of her relations with her world.