Orlando by Virginia Woolf Read Free Book Online

speculations on time past and time present, that so occupied the creator of a fantastic hero/heroine who lives through 500 years of cultural change. If history can be reimagined and sex roles reconstituted through such a reimagining, what might be the
future
towards which a newly conceived past and present would lead? This was a topic on which Woolf had also brooded throughout her career, beginning in the early ‘Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn’, whose fifteenth-century diarist confesses that each morning ‘with my cheek leant upon the window pane I like to fancy that I am pressing as closely as can be upon the massy wall of time, which is for ever lifting & pulling & letting new spaces of life in upon us.’ 47 Even at the end of her writing life, as Alex Zwerdling has reminded us, Woolf was still addressing this question. ‘The outline for
Reading at Random,
the cultural history she left unfinished at the time of her death,’ he notes, ‘is reasonably familiar and straightforward from the Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. But then comes the injunction “Skip present day. A Chapter on the future”.’ Yet as he also observes, ‘What eluded her was any understanding of how the present could conceivably lead to the future she imagined’ – a future, I might add, in which the liberation symbolized by the lively shape-shiftings of Orlando and the reborn genius of ‘Judith Shakespeare’ would be not only literarily but literally possible. 48
    Perhaps, however, it was through the intensity of the highly metaphorical, lyrical, even incantatory language with which
Orlando
concludes that Woolf did begin to imagine at least the inception of a future that would be radically different from the past she had so yearningly revised. Certainly as her record of a changed and changing history mounts to an almost erotic climax on ‘Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen hundred and Twenty Eight’, she offers us – not just comically but seriously –a vision of transformative promise that amounts to a sort of annunciation, an impregnation of ‘reality’ by the forces of ‘fantasy’. Imperiously invoking her husband while stationing herself beside the totemic natural object that has been her aesthetic subject for centuries (‘ “Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine!” she cried, standing by the oak tree’), Orlando bares ‘her breast to the moon… so that her pearls glowed like the eggs of some vast moon-spider’ (p. 227). And as she does so, she sets in motion a ‘moment of being’ that is also a moment of mysterious change.
    Below her, Orlando sees what is figuratively speaking ‘the great house’ of the past, where all is ‘lit as for the coming of a dead Queen’. Above her, the ‘fine sea captain’ Shelmerdine hovers, ‘coming nearer and nearer’ in an aeroplane. And then, in an allusion to the annunciatory gesture – the epiphany of dove or swan – through which the supernatural intervenes in human affairs, ‘a single wild bird’ springs up over Shelmerdine’s head. Together, Woolf implies, the past of a dead queen and the present of October 1928, the culture of house and aeroplane and the nature of moon and ‘moon-eggs’, the sea of Shelmerdine the explorer and the earth of Orlando the land lady, all incarnated in the revisionary love of a ‘womanly’ man and a ‘manly’ woman, may conspire to conceive an ‘unwilled’ but ‘potent’
vita nuova.
    Sandra M. Gilbert 1992
NOTES
    1. Letter to Vita Sackville-West, 9 Oct. 1927,
Letters,
III, pp. 428–9.
    2.
Diary,
III, 20 Dec. 1927, p. 168.
    3. ibid., 14 March 1927, p. 131.
    4. ibid., 20 Sept. 1927, p. 157.
    5. ibid., 5 Oct. 1927, p. 161.
    6.
Moments of Being,
p. 73.
    7.
Diary,
III, 21 Dec. 1925, p. 52.
    8. ibid.
    9. Quentin Bell,
Bloomsbury
(Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973, p. 42).
    10. Alex Zwerdling,
Virginia Woolf and the Real World
(University of California Press, 1986, p. 168).
    11. Quentin Bell,
Virginia Woolf: A Biography,
I