‘She did undoubtedly then feel what men felt.’ Although this remark seems casual enough, what underlay it – and what would have given particular force to Woolf’s attraction to Sapphism as well as to the fascination with transvestism and transsexualism so centrally dramatized in Orlando – was the rise in the early years of the century of the new enterprise of ‘sexology’, whose discourse complemented and supplemented the equally new (and equally sexualized) discourse of psychoanalysis that had now been taken up by so many of the writer’s contemporaries. Where Victorian thinkers had preached that ‘proper’ masculinity and femininity were inborn, that sexuality was essentially immutable, the sexologists and their disciples began to call attention to both the fluidity and the artifice of gender.
Edward Carpenter, an open homosexual and the foremost British prophet of this way of thinking, argued in the 1890s for what he saw as the Utopian existence of a ‘third’ or ‘Intermediate Sex’, whom he called ‘Urnings’ (from Urania, meaning heaven) because they were able to achieve a kind of androgynous transcendence of the narrow limits of heterosexuality. Specifically relating his definition of these privileged beings to the growing movement for women’s rights in which Woolf was herself involved, he declared in 1896 that
in late years (and since the arrival of the New Woman amongst us)… there are some remarkable and (we think) indispensable types of character, in whom there is such a union or balance of the feminine and masculine qualities that these people become to a great extent the interpreters of men and women to each other.13
And that Carpenter’s views would have been known to Woolf is more than likely, because he had met and influenced both E. M. Forster and G. Lowes Dickinson, two important figures who were closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group.
A theme similar to Carpenter’s was later sounded by the playwright and Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw, who also connected changing definitions of sexuality with the transformative impact of the suffrage movement. ‘People are still full of the old idea that woman is a special creation,’ Shaw commented in 1927 – just when Woolf was composing Orlando – but, he observed,
I am bound to say that of late years she has been working extremely hard to eradicate that impression, and make one understand that a woman is really only a man in petticoats, or if you like, that a man is a woman without petticoats [emphasis mine].14
Thus, by 1933, Havelock Ellis, England’s foremost theorist of ‘sexology’ and a friend of both Carpenter’s and Shaw’s, could succinctly summarize such new views of gender in his magisterial book The Psychology of Sex, with the comment that
We may not know exactly what sex is, but we do know that it is mutable, with the possibility of one sex being changed into the other sex, that its frontiers are often uncertain, and that there are many stages between a complete male and a complete female.15
Recently, of course, theorists of gender and sexuality have sought to make careful distinctions between transvestism, transsexualism and (male or female) homosexuality. Male transvestites are not necessarily homosexuals. Clearly lesbians need not be transvestites. And homosexuals of either sex are only infrequently transsexuals – people who experience themselves as having been born into the ‘wrong’ sex. For Woolf’s generation, however, such distinctions were less clear. Shortly after Orlando appeared, Radclyffe Hall’s controversial The Well of Loneliness (1928), an ostensibly realistic portrait of the artist as a lesbian, characterized the ‘invert’ Stephen Gordon, its female protagonist, as a man trapped in a woman’s body.
An avowed lesbian herself, Hall regularly cross-dressed, was called ‘John’ by her intimates, and moved in the Sapphic salons of Paris and London whose other habituees included such sexually rebellious women as her aristocratic lover Una Troubridge and the painter Romaine Brooks, as well as the writers Natalie Barney, Gertrude Stein and Vita Sackville-West. Yet, despite Hall’s own apparently unproblematic repudiation of what the poet Adrienne Rich has lately called ‘compulsory heterosexuality’, the author of the significantly entitled The Well of Loneliness gave a tragic cast to Stephen Gordon’s story, describing her as ‘grotesque and splendid, like some primitive thing conceived in a turbulent age of transition’.16 The bleakness of Hall’s perspective was, in fact, very different from the light-heartedness with which Woolf presented Orlando’s change of sex.
After her male protagonist has become a woman, Woolf observes insouciantly that ‘in every other respect, [she] remained precisely as he had been’ (p. 98), implying that sexually defined selves or roles are merely costumes and thus readily interchangeable. ‘It was a change in Orlando herself that dictated her choice of woman’s dress and of a woman’s sex,’ she explains later, in a clarification of this point, noting that ‘Different though the sexes are, they intermix’ (p. 132). Indeed, not only is Orlando him/herself a multiply sexed being who happily transcends gender because her ‘form combine[s] in one the strength of a man and a woman’s grace’ (p. 98), but her lover and her husband also appear to have available rich wardrobes of multiform sexuality. After Orlando has become a woman, the Archduchess Harriet of Scand-op-Boom becomes Archduke Harry; he/she and Orlando act ‘the parts of man and woman for ten minutes with great vigour and then [fall] into natural discourse’ (p. 126). Similarly, after she has wed the comic but magical sea captain Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Orlando affectionately accuses her simpatico husband of being a woman, and he cheerfully accuses her of being a man, for ‘it was to each… 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’ (p. 179).
Despite the pain explored in The Well of Loneliness and the pleasure represented in Orlando, the two works have in common an assumption about gender, fostered by the theories of such sexologists as Carpenter and Ellis, which radically contradicts Sigmund Freud’s famous assertion that ‘Anatomy is destiny’. Hall sees it as Stephen Gordon’s doom that her sexual destiny has been, as it were, detached from her anatomy, while Woolf defines Orlando’s ability to choose her own sexual destiny as a triumph over anatomy. But both at least implicitly protest against the notion that social or erotic gender roles are inevitably determined by biological sexuality. Thus, although Woolf thought The Well of Loneliness merely a ‘meritorious dull book’,17 she offered to testify on its behalf when the work was seized and confiscated by government censors. Her defence of Hall’s project must have been impelled as much by a sense of kinship with the rejection of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ as it was by a commitment to freedom of speech.
Nor was Woolf alone among Bloomsbury intellectuals in her desire to disentangle anatomy from destiny. Quentin Bell notes that just before she was inspired by her romance with the Sapphic Vita Sackville-West to begin producing her own fantastic portrait of the artist as what we now call a transsexual, she had become fascinated by sex change at a social event where gender fluidity was virtually thematic:
… early in September [1927], Maynard and Lydia Keynes gave a party at Tilton. Jack… Sheppard enacted the part of an Italian prima donna, words and music being supplied by a gramophone. Someone had brought a newspaper cutting with them; it reproduced the photograph of a pretty young woman who had become a man, and this for the rest of the evening became Virginia’s main topic of conversation.18
When Woolf decided, therefore, that the ‘writer’s holiday’ devoted to her friend Vita’s life as ‘Orlando, a young nobleman’ should be simultaneously ‘truthful’ and ‘fantastic’, she was quite accurately articulating a particular vision of gender as well as of history. For if it was ‘fantastic’ to conceive of Vita living for 300 years, from the age of Elizabeth to the ‘present day’, it was, in Woolf’s opinion, perfectly ‘truthful’ to imagine Vita changing her sex as easily and casually as she might change her clothes.
*
If Woolf’s romantic fascination with Vita and with Vita’s Sapphism was one of the major forces that compelled her to write Orlando with unprecedented speed and exhilarati
on, her long-standing interest in history and biography was another crucially influential factor. Her father, Leslie Stephen, had become the first editor of the prestigious Dictionary of National Biography in the year she was born, so she had been preoccupied with the personal but often ‘official’ genre of biography and its relationship to ‘official’ public historiography from early in her career. She was largely educated at home, moreover, and according to Quentin Bell, the studies her father prescribed for her in her adolescence had included most of the historical and biographical classics produced in the nineteenth century, among them Macaulay’s History of England, Carlyle’s French Revolution, Thomas Arnold’s History of Rome, Gibbon’s multi-volumed Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and Froude’s Life of Carlyle. That most of these books centred on the lives and works of men, almost entirely omitting any discussion of the experiences and achievements of women, must have soon become irritating to a young proponent of women’s rights who was eventually to produce two of our century’s major feminist treatises – A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938).
Perhaps, therefore, as a gesture of rebellion against both paternal and patriarchal authority, some of Virginia Stephen’s first writings took shape as biographies and histories which drew upon the form in which her father and his associates worked, while not so subtly satirizing the Lives of Great Men that were the subjects of his dictionary, and which his friend Thomas Carlyle had, in Heroes and Hero Worship, proclaimed the substance of history itself. ‘Friendships Gallery’ and ‘Reminiscences’, her affectionate tributes to Violet Dickinson and Vanessa Bell, were in fact preceded by an attempted ‘History of Women’ (written in 1897 when she was just fifteen and unfortunately now lost) and later by a fanciful meditation on the past entitled ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’ (1906), in which a woman historian named Rosamund Merridew discovers a set of documents purporting to record the life and times of one Joan Martyn, a fifteenth-century diarist who is also a sort of prototype of the mythical ‘Judith Shakespeare’ whose tragic and monitory tale Woolf was to invent in A Room of One’s Own.
As Woolf matured, these early efforts to revise and reimagine a past that had always been depicted as primarily masculine branched out into three major biographical/historical projects that consistently concerned her both as a fiction-writer and as an essayist. First, she frequently attempted to rewrite official history so as to provide what the French feminist theorist Héléne Cixous has named ‘the other history’ – the history not of ‘Great Men’ but of women and of, in Woolf’s own phrase, ‘the obscure’, the history that falls into the interstices between the chronicles of princes and kings so that, when told, it ‘breaks the sequence’ of recorded time. Second, she frequently sought to excavate and inspect family history – to investigate, that is, the chronicles of the person and the personal, the family romances, which stand behind both the Carlylean ‘Lives of Great Men’ and the Woolfian ‘Lives of the Obscure’. Third, in such crucial texts as A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, she produced meditations on education which simultaneously recounted her rejection of the ‘old’ history, her dream of a ‘new’ history, and her desire for a reengendered education – literally (from the Latin educere) a ‘leading into’ – in the new.
Woolf was not, of course, alone in her disaffection with traditional history. As early as 1818, her favourite novelist, Jane Austen, had created in Northanger Abbey a naive young heroine named Catherine Morland who voiced a discontent that would have been congenial to the youthful Virginia Stephen. History, Catherine complained, ‘tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all – it is very tiresome.’19 In seeking to remedy this problem, moreover, Woolf’s own work significantly parallels (or in a few cases almost uncannily foreshadows) the research done by a range of real women historians in the early twentieth century, some of whose writings – for instance, Eileen Power’s Medieval People (1924) – she would later read, but some of whose scholarship – for example, Mary Beard’s Woman as a Force in History (1946) – she would not live to know.
When the Bloomsbury novelist first began to address the ‘tiresomeness’ of conventional male-dominated history, such feminist projects were virtually non-existent, even in her circle of radical intellectuals. Indeed, as late as 1921, the American historian Arthur Schlesinger had observed that
If the silence of historians is taken to mean anything, it would appear that one half of our population have been negligible factors in our country’s history. Before accepting the truth of this assumption, the facts of our history need to be raked over from a new point of view. It should not be forgotten… that all of our great historians have been men and were likely therefore to be influenced by a sex interpretation of history all the more potent because unconscious.20
Though she may never have encountered Schlesinger’s statement, Woolf was to echo it shortly after completing Orlando: in A Room of One’s Own she remarked acerbically that ‘It was certainly an odd monster that one made up by reading the historians’ [views of women] first, and the poets’ afterwards – a worm winged like an eagle; the spirit of life and beauty in a kitchen chopping up suet.’ To remedy the situation, she suggested that the students of Newnham and Girton ‘should re-write history’, for, she noted ironically, ‘it often seems a little queer as it is, unreal, lop-sided’.21
Although she produced a number of essays on women’s past and on female literary traditions that attempted just such re-writings, Woolf’s most sustained attempts at historical revision paradoxically took the form of novels. In her view, as she explained in the ‘novel-essay’ The Pargiters, which was the germ of her late novel-history The Years (1937), ‘it would be far easier to write history [than fiction but] that method of telling the truth seems to me so elementary, and so clumsy, that I prefer, where truth is important, to write fiction.’22 And this was a preference to which, from the start of her writing career, she had consistently clung.
Thus, as a history of the transformed and transforming self which criticizes standard histories and biographies at the same time that it proposes the possibility of an alternative life, Orlando is not an unprecedented work in Woolf’s canon. In The Voyage Out, the arrogant St John Hirst finds it impossible to imagine that Rachel Vinrace has ‘reached the age of twenty-four without reading Gibbon’. In Jacob’s Room (1922), the form of biography encloses an absent subject – a mysterious young man ‘over whom’ we ‘hang vibrating’. In To the Lighthouse, when ‘Time Passes’, major public events are related only parenthetically while an unidentified narrator describes the assaults of nature on the Ramsays’ summer house, and then focuses on the restorative labours of two obscure cleaning women. Throughout these books (and others) Woolf persistently explored the mystifying relationship between the ineffable essence of human reality and the deceptive, usually patriarchal, substance of written records. By the time she came to compose her ‘love letter’ to Vita Sackville-West, therefore, she was ready not only for what she called ‘an escapade’ but also for the creation of what Leon Edel has seen as ‘a fully-fledged theory of biography’, formulated, now, not only in reaction to her father’s ideas but perhaps also in response to the theories of such modernist contemporaries as Lytton Strachey, the flamboyant debunker of Eminent Victorians, and Harold Nicolson, the author of a treatise on biography that was to be published in 1928 by her own Hogarth Press.23
In Edel’s view, it was in fact Strachey himself who helped spark Woolf’s desire to write a novel in the form of a parodic biography. Commenting on Mrs. Dalloway, Strachey proposed to Woolf that perhaps she should write a book with a ‘wilder and more fantastic’ structure than anything she had heretofore attempted, a ‘framework that admits of anything, like Tristram Shandy’.24 But the nature of the history that Woolf did ‘take’ as both structure and subject was far more subversive than anything Strachey had in min
d. For while, in such volumes as EminentVictorians and Queen Victoria, Strachey did ridicule the pomposities of the late nineteenth century, he still preserved the contours of traditional history and biography. Setting himself against the patriotic proprieties of the Victorian establishment, he almost always acquiesced in the subtler pieties of the masculinist Cambridge to which he himself remained loyal. Woolf, however, produced a new kind of record – an exuberant account of a life which, though apparently lived on the edge of patriarchal history, nevertheless appropriates and transforms that history.
Just as Woolf’s paradoxical decision that Orlando should be ‘truthful but fantastic’ accurately summarizes her vision of the gender transformation at the heart of the book, the phrase also offers an appropriate description of the narrative/historical enterprise she undertook as she embarked on this ‘writer’s holiday’. For the Lord/Lady Orlando is a nobleperson whom we first encounter as a young man in the sixteenth century, follow through the courts of Elizabeth I and Charles II to an ambassadorship in Turkey where he becomes a she, meet again living the life of a literary lady aristocrat in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, and finally see when she has become a prize-winning author in ‘the present moment’ of aeroplanes and motor-cars. Certainly, in the free-flying sweep and scope with which it wings over the gravities of history, this life goes beyond even the fantastic, Shandyan parameters Strachey prescribed. Yet at the same time, it is, as Woolf insisted, ‘truthful’ – truthful because it is true to Woolf’s ongoing effort to reimagine history, and truthful because it is true to her developing vision of the secret psychological realities that shape even the most liberated woman’s life.