Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Be aware that racialized violence kicks off in the very first pages and returns intermittently throughout this story. Given my fatigue of colonial art and expression, slogging through the first bit presented a challenge. The author does, however, send Orlando to experience an extended encounter under surprising circumstances with a nomadic people (more slurs) who tell him they won’t hold Orlando’s possession of a vast and sprawling estate against him. LOL.
I heard Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row playing in my head as I read the Chapter One strange account of an historic English freeze, one when birds froze in mid-flight. And Wes Anderson may have derived all of his theatrical rhythms and cadences from Woolf’s depictions of Orlando’s Ambassadorship in Constantinople. These artistic curiosities kept me going through Woolf’s dense prose forms (I do prefer more austere assemblies) so that I could arrive at this early 20th century take (copyright 1928) on transgender experience.
While the question is not directly asked in the text, multiple disappointments and betrayals are on display, and I pictured Orlando entertaining a question many trans people have asked themselves: “If this implicit gender performance I’ve been providing does not serve my happiness, why not just be myself?”
My effort proved worth the perseverance. Woolf offers several refreshing and resonant pages of gender commentary. Just a teaser here:
“Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what is above. Of the complications and confusions which thus result everyone has had experience…”
I especially loved the gender play between Orlando and Shelmerdine and the mirror they provided each other. Five stars.
In addition to showing the timelessness of a trans experience, this faux biography interrogates the very construct of time. The several centuries long plot reveals Orlando witnessing spacious countryside changing to bustling city as masted ships and horses yield first to trains, later to motorcars, and finally an airplane. Certainly germane to the gender bend that occurs, time is also kept in sartorial terms. The reader stays aware of costume as Orlando dresses in and witnesses four hundred years of English sartorial history. Many clothes changes happen between the waistcoat, breeches, and grimy ruff of the seventeenth century and the trousers of 1928 when (suspend your disbelief) Orlando is 36. I’m putting the movie on my watchlist.
As one monarch gives way to the next, I am reminded how these changes become decontextualized in the course of an ordinary lifetime, and how deeper insights and poetry arise from the perspective offered by generations: a perspective that we individuals living in the limitations of singular lifespans must actively seek out to enjoy.
