Authors: Ruth Gruber
Partly inspired in its title and Elizabethan imagery by Robert Greene’s fragmentary play, “The History of Orlando Furioso” (ca. 1591) “Orlando” takes its hero from Shakespeare to the present, and in all ages, shows the struggle for integrity, the struggle between the poet and the critic. At the hands of Nick Greene, modelled perhaps from the author of the “Orlando Furioso”, Robert Greene the Shakespearian critic, satirist and pamphleteer, Orlando suffers a poet’s torments. In her reverberating accusations against the aesthetic or social critic, Virginia Woolf endangers her objectivity, her crucible of artistry. In her essays, where she is defending or propounding a thesis, objectivity is less vital than in her novels. She meets the danger however, in this fantastic
satire of criticism, by mocking not only critics but poets as well. If she accuses her own oppressors, she laughs too at their victim. The conceits which mark Orlando’s poetry are a travesty upon all romantic imagery. Reality lies only in his imagination, to which he gives wild expression. He is happy, untormented, so long as he writes in solitude. But the moment he shows his work to the critic, his stability is gone. Nick Greene, symbol of the critic of all ages, denounces his style as “wordy and bombastic”
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and holds his allegorical metaphors up to ridicule. Orlando’s desire to create, greater than all else in life, is mutilated. Philosophy, friendship and even nature cannot console him. He wavers between the reality he perceives and the new standard set by the critic. He cannot bring himself to write as Nick Greene would dictate. Yet the criticism of his own style, with its pathetic fallacies, has stung him deeply. He is oppressed by the ominous conflict, observed in Virginia Woolf, the conflict of rationalization and poetic emotion. His images, he is told, are not truthful; he is wildly rhapsodic; he has no idea of objective reality, of “Life”.
He attempts to change his style. Integrity hangs in the balance. “ ‘Another metaphor by Jupiter!’ he would exclaim … ‘And what’s the point of it?’ he would ask himself. ‘Why not say simply in so many words—’ and then he would try to think for half an hour,—or was it two years and a half?—how to say simply in so many words what love is. ‘A figure like that is manifestly untruthful’, he argued, ‘for no dragon-fly, unless under very exceptional circumstances, could live at the bottom of the sea’.”
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He is beginning to seek the truth beyond his imagery, and in condemning conceits, he consciously adopts even the language of ratiocination. “Manifestly”, “under very exceptional circumstances”, these are Latinities which before would have made him shudder. But it is all for truth, and to the professor, truth lies in polysyllables. So he rejects his vision of the dragon-fly because it lacks scientific veracity. “ ‘And if literature is not the Bride and Bedfellow of Truth, what is she? Confound it all’, he cried, ‘why say Bedfellow when one’s already said Bride? Why not simply say what one means and leave it?’ So then he tried saying the grass is green and the sky is blue 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.”
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Under cover of mock biography, Virginia Woolf thus gives expression to the desperate struggle of poetic versus critical realism, of rhapsody versus restraint. For Orlando at least, solution is hopeless. “I don’t see that one’s more true than another. Both are utterly false.”
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Orlando had known no such dilemma before acknowledging the critic. His feelings alone in the early songs of innocence had guided him to what was true and what false. Truth had been emotional, a simple sensation; the critic, bringing experience and self-analysis, makes it involved, an intellectual perception. His dreams are called hollow, his visions, quixotic. Orlando loses first the self-confidence and then the sincerity of a Shakespeare or a Jane Austen to see life as he chooses. He begins to fall prey to tradition. He wavers, he looks about him for props, he wonders what “a true poet, who has his verses published in London, would say about the grass and sky.”
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The lash, almost laid upon Virginia Woolf’s shoulders, is now laid heavily upon his. He cringes to the critic, to Nick Greene, as though Nick “were the Muse in person.”
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He exposes his creations desperately, offering the critic “a variety of phrases, some plain, others figured.”
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But the critic with his eyes cast on Cicero and the “Gloire” of the past, discourages all his attempts whether they be in his old style or his new. And suddenly Orlando sees the light—“I’ll be blasted if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I’ll write, from this day forward, to please myself.”
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Integrity has conquered and “Orlando” takes its place in the long procession of works “In Defence of the Poet Against the Critic”.
The poetry which Virginia Woolf had repressed in “Night and Day” she burlesques here as that romantic, effeminate poetry which revelled in Lorelis and in dark cavernous landscapes. With a few devices to make these extravagant visions seem Orlando’s, she holds no check upon her own fancy. “What woman,” she gushes, “would not have kindled to see what Orlando saw then burning in the snow— for all about the looking-glass were snowy lawns, and she was like a fire, a burning bush, and the candle flames about her were silver leaves; or again, the glass was green water, and she a
mermaid, slung with pearls, a siren in a cave, singing so that oarsmen leant from their boats and fell down, down to embrace her.”
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The tone of “Orlando” is one of arch belittling; the humor is heightened by the very apologies and modifications which in “Night and Day” suggest an aesthetic breakdown, a self-conscious concession to the critic. The luminous color and mystic Pre-Raphaelite images, derived from Virginia Woolf’s own fancy and typical of her feminine creation, are attributed with droll satire to Orlando. “Now the Abbey windows were lit up and burnt like a heavenly, many-coloured shield (in Orlando’s fancy); now all the west seemed a golden window with troops of angels (in Orlando’s fancy again) passing up and down the heavenly stairs perpetually.”
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She apologizes humorously, not only for her extravagant images but for her connotative diction. Made conscious of her feminine flair for associations, she seeks to justify herself with sincerity. Thus letting Orlando fling himself under an oak tree, she justifies the extravagance in the word “flung”, through a hyphenated apology: “—there was a passion in his movements which deserves the word—.”
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In satirizing Orlando, she gives vent to all the lyricism, all the sentimental illusions she had repressed in herself. The onrush of thoughts and words is typical of the liberation of her style. The color and tremendous movement felt here, she repeats throughout the book; the abundance of her visions swells the length of her sentences, and to give them all expression, she reverts to the medieval device of lists. The pure pleasure in words incites such a profusion of kaleidoscopic details that her sentences seem to rock with the burden of single completed visions. In purple rhythms with long lists of swaying verbs: she describes how the lights “dipped and waved and sank and rose, as if held in the hands of troops of serving men, bending, kneeling, rising, receiving, guarding, and escorting with all dignity indoors a great Princess alighting from her chariot.”
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Her style-consciousness reveals to her the danger of incoherence in this rich hurling together of words and images. After a long winding exposition of the incongruities and mysteries in nature, that “the poet has a butcher’s face and the butcher a poet’s,” or “we know not why we go upstairs, or why we come down again”, she breaks her form, and with the personal intrusion of a romantic essayist, acknowledges not only “the perhaps
unwieldy length of this sentence”, but the feminine confusion of unassimilated images in her mind: “a piece of policeman’s trousers lying cheek by jowl with Queen Alexandra’s wedding veil.” “A perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us,”
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is her jocular self-analysis.
Through the medium of healthy humor, she has found herself. In laughing at her conflict, she has risen above it. She perceives that there is truth in each phase of it, that romanticism is not a deeper stylistic experience than realism, or that material fact is not more absolute than the imagination. It is only in ascertaining where, by natural impulses, she belongs, that she can write with the integrity implicit in greatness. The doubt which she satirizes in Orlando after wavering miserably between “plain and figured phrases”, she has herself experienced, like almost every poet Orlando, as a Victorian woman, loses confidence in her vision and style; oppressed by critical standards, she turns to other writers in perplexity. “Here came by a pair of tight scarlet trousers—how would Addison have put that? Here came two dogs dancing on their hind legs. How would Lamb have described that? For reading Sir Nicholas and his friends … they made one feel—it was an extremely uncomfortable feeling—one must never, never say what one thought … They made one feel, she continued, that one must always, always write like somebody else … and though I’m spiteful enough, I could never learn to be as spiteful as all that, so how can I be a critic and write the best English prose of my time?”
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With a violent “Damn it all!” she overturns the influence of the critic and determines to give expression to the realities she has discovered. “Enforcing upon herself the fact”—a fact which Virginia Woolf acknowledges through all her later works and repeats almost literally in the essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” “that it is not articles by Nick Greene on John Donne nor eight-hour bills nor covenants nor factory acts that matter; it’s something useless, sudden, violent; something that costs a life; red, blue, purple; a spirit; a splash; like those hyacinths (she was passing a fine bed of them); free from taint, dependence, soilure of humanity or care for one’s kind; something rash, ridiculous, like my hyacinth, husband I mean, Bonthrop: that’s what it is—a toy boat on the Serpentine, ecstasy—it’s ecstasy that matters.”
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She is driven to this decision by the strength of her natural impulses. She returns to that early state of romantic exuberance, of feminine intuition and a dreamy nature-worship. Typifying the Victorian
romanticists, Orlando now revels in night and moonlight, where sensuous objects grow indistinct and intangible visions seem to usurp the deeper reality. “Night had come—night that she loved of all times, night in which the reflections in the dark pool of the mind shine more clearly than by day.”
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Orlando has struggled between light and darkness, between romanticism and reality, certain now that darkness is her native realm. At last she can give unrestrained expression to the poetry singing within her. She obliterates the critic and his attempt to expose this darkness as a world of shadowy creations, which fall like ghosts before a penetrating searchlight.
When, in integrity, Orlando achieves greatness, she weighs the long sought-for external success with her own impulses, her need for self-expression. “What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”
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She has experienced the greatest happiness possible to the idealistic poet, “the voice answering the voice”, poetry for its own sake, poetry for communication and self-expression. It is this revelation, which now suffuses Virginia Woolf. “Orlando” appears as a great confession of its author’s struggles and her realization of clarity and peace. It lacks that complete objectivity, that detachment of self which she thinks to find in Shakespeare or Jane Austen. But Virginia Woolf does not lose herself in violence or condemnation. If she is bitter against the critical Nick Greene, avenging herself upon the critics who have attempted to impede her, she ridicules Orlando too. Her ability to laugh at herself has saved her from destruction or despair. Through a humorous though profound self-analysis, she has absolved herself from struggles. She has achieved that psychic stability which subdues restlessness and eliminates revolt. Writing with the power of persuasion, she can stand above all constrictions, serenely impervious. Like Orlando, she cringes no longer to critics; periods of doubt and perplexity, recurring inevitably perhaps, she has learned to hold under check. While not insolently deaf to criticism and dissent, she has ascertained the style in which she finds complete ease for expression. As a woman and a dreamer, she gives vent to her imagination, repressing not her visions but a vagueness in expressing them. She has not lost her fire, but learned to control it, possessing eloquence without bombast, imagery without becoming extravagant or fatiguing.
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1
“The Voyage Out” p. 6.
2
Ibid. p. 34.
3
Ibid. p. 80.
4
Ibid. p. 79.
5
Ibid. p. 80.
6
Ibid. p. 29.
7
“The Voyage Out” p. 14.
8
Ibid. p. 13.
9
Ibid. p. 11.
10
Ibid. p. 68.
11
Ibid. p. 78.
12
“Night and Day” p. 40.
13
“The Voyage Out” pp. 1-3.
14
“Night and Day” pp. 1-2.
15
“The Voyage Out” p. 5.
16
“Night and Day” p. 16.
17
“Night and Day” p. 7.
18
Ibid.
19
Ibid. p. 379.