[In the following excerpt, Squier analyzes Orlando as Woolf's challenge to the tradition of realistic novels initiated by Daniel Defoe.]

On March 14, 1927 Virginia Woolf recorded in her diary the symptoms of an "extremely mysterious process … the conception last night between 12 & one of a new book."

I sketched the possibilities which an unattractive woman, penniless, alone, might yet bring into being… It struck me, vaguely, that I might write a Defoe narrative for fun. Suddenly between twelve & one I conceived a whole fantasy to be called "The Jessamy Brides"—why, I wonder?… No attempt is to be made to realise the character. Sapphism is to be suggested. Satire is to be the main note—satire & wildness.

That Woolf's sixth novel represents an act of comic tribute to her loving friend Vita Sackville-West has been well documented. However, a return to the diary record of Orlando's conception suggests that the work was more than the playful tribute to Sackville-West or the escape from works of a more "serious poetic experimental" nature which some critics, following Woolf's lead, have judged it to be. Instead, Orlando completes the labor of self-creation which Woolf began in her autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse (1927). In that earlier novel, she laid to rest the ghosts of her parents, establishing herself as an adult woman independent of their potentially eclipsing examples. In Orlando (1928), which, [according to Helen MacAfee in the Yale Review, 1929], bears "the clear stamp of her mind in its maturity," and "might in a sense have been called an autobiography," Woolf went further. Claiming her literary majority, she confronted the influence of both literal and literary fathers to reshape the novel, and so to create a place for herself in the English novelistic tradition which was their legacy to her. Orlando may be read as a serious work of criticism as well as a love-tribute, then, and its major concerns are prefigured in Woolf's diary entry of March 14, 1927: the confrontation with one's literary precursors and the impact of gender upon literary genre.

With Orlando's subtitle, "A Biography," Woolf issued a challenge both to her father, Sir Leslie Stephen—who had achieved his prominence as the editor of the Dictionary of National Biography—and more broadly to the patrilineal tradition of English literature which Stephen traced in his important volume, English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century. Preeminent in that tradition was Daniel Defoe, who to Leslie Stephen was the father of the English novel. Stephen wrote of Defoe as typifying the middle class values which led to the rise of the novel as genre; individualism, nationalism, and resourceful pragmatism. But Defoe was also the aesthetic father of Orlando. To Woolf, Defoe led the list—as the announced in the Preface to Orlando—of those "dead and so illustrious that I scarcely dare name them, yet no one can read or write without being perpetually in their debt." Woolf's homage to Defoe, like her relationship with Leslie Stephen, was far from simple, however; consideration of Defoe's role as acknowledged precursor of Orlando will reveal the scope and nature of Woolf's designs on the English novel. In acknowledging her debt to Defoe, Woolf was also subverting his influence and challenging the genre of the realistic novel which he initiated. Moreover, by challenging that genre, she framed a gender-based critique of the patriarchal ideology in which the novel has its origins.

In her bicentenary essay on Daniel Defoe, Woolf wrote of him as "one of the first indeed to shape the novel and launch it on its way." This position of precedence makes itself felt in Orlando, which in both narration and plot recalls Defoe's Moll Flanders. As early as 1919 Woolf had praised that novel for the "briskness of the story," and her own Orlando—written less than a decade later—shares the light picaresque mode and brisk pacing of Defoe's novel, as well as its episodic plot. Aspects of the characters also resemble each other: both novels have protagonists who disguise themselves as men; who consort with prostitutes and gipsies; who are experienced and capable international travellers; who are mothers (Moll, repeatedly); and who explore the different strata of London society. Yet their stories seem to be inverse mirror images: Moll Flanders develops from a position of social marginality (as a pickpocket, whore, and bigamist) to a penitent identification with conventional social values, while Orlando moves from a position of privileged centrality (due to his aristocratic lineage, great hereditary wealth, and masculine prerogative) to a position of social marginality as a woman and poet, a position both character and novel affirm. Despite the characters' different developmental paths, Woolf's comments in "Defoe" suggest that she borrowed the spirit of Orlando from Moll Flanders, for she asserts there that Defoe's work contained a subterranean affirmation of his protagonist which the author's overt moralizing belied.

The interpretation that we put on his characters might … well have puzzled him. We find for ourselves meanings which he was careful to disguise even from himself. Thus it comes about that we admire Moll Flanders far more than we blame her. Nor can we believe that Defoe had made up his mind to the precise degree of her guilt, or was unaware that in considering the lives of the abandoned he raised many deep questions and hinted, if he did not state, answers quite at variance with his professions of belief.

In choosing a "Defoe narrative" as her model for Orlando, Woolf was engaged in the same technique of revisionary reading that she demonstrated in "Defoe." She chose to find in Defoe's novel meanings which, while they might have puzzled him, were nonetheless crucial to her at that stage of her artistic development. Admiring Moll rather than blaming her, Woolf found in the character qualities upon which she modeled her own literary emancipation, for that was the task at hand following her completion of To the Lighthouse.

As Woolf understood Moll Flanders, the novel's admirable spirit of briskness was due "partly to the fact that having transgressed the accepted laws at a very early age she [Moll] has henceforth the freedom of the outcast." The idea that alienation could liberate was appealing to Woolf, who from her early years had struggled with feelings of exclusion from social and literary London. By the time she wrote Three Guineas (1937) she firmly believed that the outsider position was the best vantage point from which to work for peace and sexual equality. However, roughly ten years earlier her mind was not yet made up on this issue, and she found in Orlando an opportunity to try out the outsider's experience—not only in the person of her protagonist, but also in the novel's very form and style. Like Moll Flanders, Orlando transgresses "accepted laws," but those laws are not only social, but literary.

Consideration of the rules of characterization which Orlando contravened demonstrates the novel's liberating revision of the genre "launched" by Defoe. A crucial challenge to writers in the novel's early years was the creation of individuated characters, rather than the stock characters, allegorical figures, or types which peopled earlier literary genres. Four techniques contributed to the creation of this new character, according to Ian Watt [in The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding]: a detailed presentation of characters in relation to their environment; the use of past experience as cause of present action (in contrast to the earlier stress on disguise and coincidence in plotting); a more minutely discriminated time scale; and finally the use of realistic proper (first and last) names, rather than emblematic or conventional single names. Woolf's earliest plans for Orlando expressed her opposition to the cardinal tenet of the developing novel tradition, the creation of individuated characters: "No attempt," she specified in her diary entry of March 1927, "is to be made to realise the character." Moreover, throughout Orlando she maintained her opposition to traditional novelistic practice, by inverting all of the techniques for character creation in order not to emphasize identity, but to call the very concept into question. So, Orlando's single name (hereditary titles aside) makes him/her the very type of comic gender reversal, in its allusion to Shakespeare's As You Like It. The more minutely discriminated time scale of the realistic novel here becomes a life of more than five hundred years which alternately flash by without commentary and creep along second by second. While in the realistic novel the plot introduced a new logic of cause and effect; in Orlando the preeminent dramatic action—Orlando's gender change—seems uncaused by any previous event, and is accompanied both by coincidence (the trance occurs at the same time as the Turkish revolt against the Sultan) and disguise (Orlando passes for a Turkish boy and a gipsy after the gender change). Finally, the realistic novel's careful presentation of character in relation to environment becomes, in Orlando, a survey of the protagonist's contrasting experiences of Elizabethan, Jacobean, Carolinean, Restoration, Augustan, Victorian and Modern England, as well as of Constantinople before and after the Sultan's fall. This extensive topographical and temporal detail, far from increasing our belief in Orlando as an actual person, rather causes us to view him/her as the type of symbol of the British poet, nobleman/woman, and statesman.

Woolf's treatment of Orlando's character thus demonstrates her divergence from what she has seen, in 1919, as the key ingredient of the Defoe narrative—the conviction that "the novel had to justify its existence by telling a true story," or what Ian Watt has defined as the principle of "formal realism":

the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms.

Intimations of Woolf's motives for so diverging from Defoe's novelistic technique appear in her 1919 essay. There, she wrote of Defoe's works as "prosaic," characteristic of the "great plain writers, whose work is founded upon a knowledge of what is most persistant, though not most seductive, in human nature." Her view recalls Leslie Stephen's indictment of Defoe for "absence of any passion or sentiment," and his dry judgement that "the merit of De Foe's narrative bears a direct proportion to the intrinsic merit of a plain statement of the facts." Yet a more recent and deeply felt influence than Leslie Stephen's prompted Woolf to subvert Defoe's realism and plain speaking. The sexual metaphor buried in the prose of both father and daughter—the notion of Defoe as lacking a certain sexual quality, as being neither seductive, passionate, nor full of sentiment—suggests that sexuality or gender may have played a part in Woolf's decision to revise Defoe's style. Indeed, a connection may be made between Defoe's prose style and character creation and the world view of the literary tradition Defoe fathered, suggesting that it was a desire to reevaluate the patriarchal literary tradition and culture—under the influence of her new love for Vita Sackville-West—which promoted the form and style of Orlando.

When Vita first read Orlando, in October 1928, she wrote to Virginia Woolf, "I am completely dazzled, bewitched, enchanted, under a spell." The novel's style brought to her mind "a robe stitched with jewels." Sackville-West's comments indicate the elements in Orlando which most fully subvert the influence of Defoe: Orlando's unrealistic, even fantastical and magical plot and character, and Orlando's ornate diction. Moreover, Vita's comments suggest Woolf's reason for challenging the patriarchal bias of the novel genre in Orlando: her novel's celebration of qualities unacceptable to traditional realism. The eighteenth century fathers of the novel adhered to a strictly referential use of language, corollary to the commitment to formal realism which aligned them with the realist philosophers. That this linguistic probity had moral and cultural ramifications for them was most tellingly expressed in Locke's observation, in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that "eloquence, like the fair sex, involves a pleasurable deceit." This assumed connection between eloquence, deceit and femininity which lay at the basis of formal realism would have made such a technique inappropriate for Orlando, a novel written to celebrate the seductive, passionate character of Vita Sackville-West, by a writer who admitted, "It is true that I only want to show off to women. Women alone stir my imagination." For if Defoe's realism eschewed elaborate diction as deceitful, seductive, and above all feminine, Woolf turned in Orlando to elaborate diction and fanciful plotting precisely because it could best embody the complex woman poet to whom the novel paid homage. Woolf turned the realistic novel on its head in Orlando, playing with distinctions between reality and fantasy, truth and lying, masculinity and femininity. Her challenge to the conventions of realism, boldy emphasized by her prefatory tribute to Defoe, reflects the realization that the rules of genre are shaped by the politics of gender. As Nancy Miller has pointed out:

The attack on female plots and plausibilities assumes that women writers cannot or will not obey the rules of fiction. It also assumes that the truth devolving from verisimilitude is male. For sensibility, sensitivity, "extravagance"—so many code words for feminine in our culture that the attack is in fact tautological—are taken to be not merely inferior modalities of production but deviations from some obvious truth. The blind spot here is both political (or philosophical) and literary. It does not see, nor does it want to, that the fictions of desire behind the desiderata of fiction are masculine and not universal constructs. ["Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction," PMLA, January 1981]

Challenging the universality of the "fictions of desire" basic to the realistic novel, Woolf was both following and subverting her literary and literal fathers. Not only did she contravene Defoe's style of moralistic truth-telling nearly point-for-point, but she also revised Stephen's approach to literary criticism, in which he had been—according to Noel Annan [in Leslie Stephen: His Thought and Character in Relation to His Time]—the first writer to consider the impact of changing social classes upon the production of literature and the development of new literary genres. By shifting her index from his focus on economic and social class to her own interest in sex class, Woolf subverted her father's approach in order to consider specifically the impact of gender upon genre. While all of Orlando is a meditation upon this issue, perhaps the most pointed statement of Woolf's concern comes near the novel's end, in one of the "biographer's" numerous asides to the reader (and we might mark Woolf's sly glee at putting such a speech in the mouth of one of her father's fellow biographers):

we must here snatch time to remark how discomposing it is for the biographer that this culmination and peroration should be dashed from us on a laugh casually like this; but the truth is 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.

With the veiled allusion to other sorts of climaxes, Woolf intimates the sexual and gender-related motives for her revision of her father's art as biographer and literary critic. To the novelist/biographer writing of a woman, "truth" takes a different form than it does with a man. Woolf's metaphor encompasses not only the multiple climaxes of the female orgasm, but the multiple high-points of Orlando's life—the birth of her child, the publication of "The Oak Tree," her marriage, winning the Burdett Coutts' Memorial Prize for her poem. Furthermore, Woolf's metaphor suggests that language, like the shape of a literary work, shifts when it is called upon to describe not the man around whom a novel or biography is typically composed, but rather the woman who discomposes it. Working in the spirit of her father's criticism, Woolf subverted the matter, calling into question both gender divisions and the literary form enshrining them.

The sexually liberating nature of Orlando's homage to Defoe—and the realistic novel he fathered—lies in the fact that to challenge the constraints of the literary canon is to confront the deepest politics or philosophy linking gender to genre. As Nancy Miller has pointed out, both style and character creation reflect ideology:

To build a narrative around a character whose behavior is deliberately idiopathic … is not merely to create a puzzling fiction, but to fly in the face of a certain ideology (of the text and its context), to violate a grammar of motives that describes while prescribing … what wives, not to say women, should or should not do.

In beginning with the idea of "an unattractive woman, penniless, alone," Woolf in her choice of a heroine defied the ideology ascribing to a woman value depending upon her worth to a man. It is this ideology which Mrs Ramsay espouses, in To the Lighthouse, when she urges "Minta must, they all must marry, since … an unmarried woman has missed the best of life." And by settling on Orlando, a character whose gender changes midway through the novel, Woolf further violates the ideology shaping patriarchal culture itself: what Gayle Rubin has termed the "sex/gender system." Woolf both invoked and defied this system when she first planned to title the novel "The Jessamy Brides." "Jessamy," "a man who scents himself with perfume or who wears a sprig of Jessamine in his buttonhole … a dandy, a fop," had by the time Woolf wrote Orlando been paired conceptually with an equally transgressive parallel term, "Amazon," a woman whose stature and physical prowess were more conventionally masculine than feminine. In its evocation of the gender line crossings embodied by a foppish male bride, a feminine man, and an "Amazonian" woman, the initial title for Orlando prefigures Woolf's protagonist, who in the course of a long life loved both sexes passionately, contracted a marriage to a man whom she jokingly suspected of being a woman (and who entertained the corresponding suspicion that Orlando was a man), and who at the novel's conclusion summons herself ("Orlando?") only to be answered by a multiplicity of selves—of both genders and sexual orientations. The provisional title also brings to mind the lovingly unorthodox marriage of Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, which encompassed homosexual affairs for both parties while remaining their primary and most honored tie. In its allusions to a variety of unorthodox marriages, "The Jessamy Brides" not only embodies the disobedient briskness which Woolf admired in Moll Flanders, but it replicates Woolf's own defiance of social conventions in her love affair with Vita Sackville-West.

That love affair was already underway when Woolf finished her autobiographical novel, To the Lighthouse, and she gave Vita an elaborately bound copy of the novel enscribed, "Vita from Virginia (In my opinion the best novel I have ever written.)" Yet when Vita opened the expensively bound volume, she found only blank pages. This gesture of the blank-paged book both encompasses the past and anticipates the future, supporting what Louise DeSalvo has cogently documented: that the relationship with Vita was for Woolf an important artistic turning point. Underscoring the homage to Woolf's two mothers, Julia Stephen and now Vita Sackville-West, in its evocative blank pages this gift also intimates the coming challenge to two fathers, Leslie Stephen and Daniel Defoe, in the rupture with the patriarchal novelistic tradition to come. For the gift of this blank-paged book suggests that whatever Woolf's "best novel" is to be, if it is to reflect her love for Vita Sackville-West it will be unreadable within the patriarchal tradition of English literature and culture. And indeed, even the conception of that novel still to come challenged the form at the heart of To the Lighthouse, "father and mother and child in the garden." For having found herself "virgin, passive, blank of ideas" for a number of weeks following the completion of To the Lighthouse, Woolf on that mysterious March night of 1927 found stirring within her Orlando—the consummation of her love for Vita. In its defiance of the "Defoe narrative" as in its evocative embodiment of another form for both gender and genre, Orlando stands not only as a serious work of criticism in and of the tradition of Leslie Stephen, but as Woolf's gesture of literary emancipation.