The visionary words of Virginia Woolf.
When I was a student, one of my teachers suggested that I read a book that I thought was boring. A book written by an author I had vaguely heard of before and never paid much attention to.
I devoured that book. I read and reread it so much that it even got a bit damaged over time.
As for the author, I quickly became fascinated by her work and her life.
The book was entitled “A Room of One’s Own” and the author was Virginia Woolf.
Although Virginia Woolf’s writings date back a century, I quickly recognized myself in her words. As if I needed them in my life.
Her words are absolutely visionary: one might even wonder why her writings aren’t studied more in schools. It could make such a difference.
In this new article, I’m going to talk about the power of Virginia Woolf’s words. Those that gave a different vision of literature while at the same time being those that demanded a long awaited equity.
The pleasure of blurring the lines.
Virginia Woolf left her mark on the world of literature by confusing the genres. Orlando, her book published in 1928, is one of the best examples. Mixing fiction and reality, masculine and feminine, seriousness and humour, this book constantly questions the viewer while subtly conveying important messages.
To create the character of Orlando, Virginia was inspired by Vita Sackville-West, a novelist and poet with whom she had a relationship while married to Leonard Woolf.
Unlike Orlando, Vita didn’t have a sex change but was bisexual and androgynous, just like him. Like Orlando, Vita was worldly, adventurous and seemed to enjoy all the pleasures life had to offer. And like Orlando, Vita was a writer. It seems that in some editions of the book there are even notes referring to Vita as well as to other people.
The full title of the book is “Orlando, a biography” and indeed, when one reads the many passages expressed by a (very) omniscient and present narrator (as when they make assumptions about Orlando’s history because few traces of his past has survived) one would tend to believe that Orlando really existed and that neither his/her person nor his/her story should be questioned.
However, there are several important and obvious elements that quickly make us realise that Orlando’s story is false and that Orlando is really a fictional character.
First of all, there is time: Orlando ages very, very slowly and lives for more than three centuries. This allows him to be close to people like Queen Elizabeth I and to use new technologies such as the car, the plane… Orlando lives a thousand and one lives. An immortality that allows him to evolve, observe and live the different eras.
Sometimes it seems as if the story of a day can be read over ten pages, while a century passes quickly.
An equally surreal element is Orlando’s transformation: for no apparent reason (no will on his part, no operation) Orlando wakes up as a woman after a very, very long sleep of 7 days. This sudden transformation seems inexplicable and unexplained, but the reader accepts it as quickly as Orlando and those around him seem to accept it too. As if this transformation were not so surprising. In any case, Virginia Woolf tells us: man or woman, Orlando will always remain the same person.
“Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact (…) Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them.”
Virginia Woolf-A Room of One’s own
The creation of A Room of One’s Own stems from a reflection that Virginia Woolf was to have on women and the novel.
She tells us at the beginning of the book that to create, a woman must have money and a room of her own. In the rest of the text, she explains how she came to think this.
If the first lines of the essay seem real, Virginia Woolf honestly tells us that it won’t always be the case…
It begins with the example of the Oxbridge University (a university that doesn’t exist in real life but is certainly a contraction of Oxford and Cambridge).
From the beginning, Virginia Woolf invites the reader to play the game and imagine that she is a young woman named Mary.
This character questions the creation of women: why don’t women create as much as men?
So there’s Virginia behind this fictional woman. She uses her imagination to reveal what she observes in reality.
We’re on the verge of autofiction.
Wishing to further illustrate her point, Virginia Woolf doesn’t hesitate to alter Judith Shakespeare’s story. She fully assumes this.
Virginia Woolf describes Judith Shakespeare as William Shakespeare’s sister, but in reality, she was his daughter. Virginia Woolf speaks of Judith Shakespeare as a woman who didn’t have the chance to go to school, who was harassed by her parents to get married, who was mocked when she tried to become an artist, and whocommitted suicide when she found out she was pregnant. Although Judith’s story is quite far from reality, Virginia Woolf’s invention is a very good depiction of the pressure on women at that time.
An assumed freedom
In her personal life, Virginia Woolf demonstrated her thirst for freedom and open-mindedness in various ways: being a woman writer (which was frowned upon at the time), her membership of the avant-garde Bloomsbury group, her homosexual relationship with Vita Sackville-West… And this thirst for freedom is also reflected in her art.
In The Waves, a novel Virginia Woolf published in 1931, the story focuses on seven characters, but the way we move from one to the other is really special.
To be honest, I had a bit of trouble getting into it at first. One might think, without having read the book, that it’s a very “classic” novel in which the characters converse with each other, but it’s really different: it is mainly (with the exception of nine interludes) composed of monologues after another, almost independent of each other but building up almost like waves. There are no longer any real boundaries between them.
The characters observe each other, have feelings for each other, but they never seem to speak directly to each other. All this can be confusing for the viewer, especially as it sometimes takes us a while to understand who is saying/thinking what.
This multiplicity of characters and their monologues seem to evoke the idea that within each of us there are several selves.
“The door opens, but he does not come. That is Louis hesitating here. That is his strange mixture of assurance and he touches his hair ; he is dissatisfied with his appearance. He says, ‘I am a Duke — the last of an ancient race.’ He is accrid, suspicious, domineering, difficult (I am comparing him with Percival). At the same time he is formidable, for there is laughter in his eyes. He has seen me. Here he is.
There is Susan, said Louis. She does not see us. She has not dressed, because she despises the futility of London. She stands for a moment at the swing-door, looking about her like a creature dazed by the light of a lamp. Now she moves. She has the stealthy yet assured movements (even among tables and chairs) of a wild beast. She seems to find her way by instinct in and out among these little tables, touching no one, disregarding waiters, yet comes straight to our table in the corner. When she sees us (Neville and myself) her face assumes a certainty which is alarming, as if she had what she wanted. To be loved by Susan would be to be impaled by a bird’s sharp beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door. Yet there are moments when I could wish to be speared by a beak, to be nailed to a barnyard door, positively, once and for all.”
Virgina Woolf - The Waves
These multiple selves were already perceptible in Orlando’s character, through their androgyny, their transsexuality and their quasi-immortality. It is as if having different identities, different genders and living in different times allows for a better understanding of society and individuals.
The book “Orlando” also reflects a very strong desire for freedom: Virginia constantly played with the limits between reality and fiction, between realism and surrealism, and the character of Orlando also constantly oscillates at will between male and female.
Virginia Woolf was very surprising: she wrote whole paragraphs about landscapes, about the decorations of the castle, but she only very subtly mentioned the fact that Orlando was pregnant and her baby.
Part fantasy, part historical and part biographical novel, Orlando demonstrates Virginia’s desire to go beyond what one might expect from a book.
Not only did Virginia not hesitate to play with the codes of writing, but she also didn’t hesitate to tackle themes rarely dealt with before her, such as homosexuality, feminism (as in A Room of One’s Own), mental disorders (also inspired by her own life) and suicide as in Mrs Dalloway (Virginia committed suicide in 1941).
It is easy to get the impression that this woman was becoming quite different, asserting herself, taking power in front of her sheet of paper.
Feminism without radicalism
Virginia Woolf was what you might call today a feminist writer.
But it’s never extreme or radical: she didn’t want women to be treated better than men, she simply demanded that they be treated equally. A total equity in which women are no longer seen the weaker sex.
Unfortunately very much ahead of her time, her work in Orlando sums up this devaluation of women quite well.
By switching from men to women, Orlando clearly perceives how the two sexes behave towards each other. He realizes, for example, how he looked at women when he was a man, how men often look at women in a hurtful way and how women (like the character Sasha) want to be free.
“For it was the mixture in her of man and woman, one being uppermost and then the other, that often gaver her conduct an unexpected turn. The curious of her own sex would argue how, for example, if Orlando was a woman, did she never take more than ten minutes to dress ? And were not her clothes chosen rather at random, and sometimes worn rather shabby ? And then they would say, still, she has none of the formality of a man, or a man’s love of power. She is excessively tender-hearted. She could not endure to see a donkey beaten or a kitten drowned. Yet again, they noted, she detested household matters, was up at dawn and out among the fields in summer before the sun had risen. No farmer knew more about the crops that she did. She could drink with the best and liked games of hazard. She rode well and drove six horses at a gallop over London Bridge. Yet again, though bold and active as man, it was remarked that the sight of another in danger brought on the most womanly palpitations. She would burst into tears on slight provocation. She was unversed in geography, found mathematics intolerable, and held some caprices which are more common among women than men, as for instance, that to travel south is to travel down hill.”
Virgina Woolf — Orlando
In Orlando’s book, the narrator speaks of men as intellectual, athletic, courageous people, while women are (too) sensitive, futile or even stupid.
Orlando is a bridge between the two sexes, Virgina Woolf allows them to observe and live as a man and a woman, to see the advantages and disadvantages.
In fact, how many times I’ve said to myself, “These men who don’t understand what we go through should put themselves in our shoes”. I don’t think I’m the only woman who’s said that.
Although in the novel Orlando Virginia Woolf speaks of women as a really weak sex, we feel and know very well that she thinks the opposite. The writer constantly stands behind the ironic tone of the main character’s thoughts and the narrator’s opinions. It’s as if she wanted to highlight the limited vision that some men have on women and to denounce between humour and gravity what she observes. There are also the “obligations” that women faced such as marriage, where an Orlando has to find a husband to meet society’s expectations.
And finally, she will marry Shel, an androgynous person (there are several androgynous characters in the book). As if only them could understand her, even though this marriage isn’t the focus of the novel.
“If a woman wrote, she would have to write in the common sitting-room. And, as Miss Nightingale was so vehemently to complain, - ”women never have an half hour…that they can call their own” - she was interrupted.”
Virgina Woolf — A Room of One’s Own
In her following essay, A Room of One’s Own, published in 1929, Virginia Woolf further asserts her views on society. Indeed, she reveals another inequality: the inequality of creation and argues that women could create more if they had financial and spatial independence. If women could get away from their obligations and the power that men and society have over them. Let’s not forget that at the beginning of the book, Virginia Woolf tells us that women had to be accompanied by a teacher or have a letter of recommendation to enter certain libraries.
So the writer tells us the woman artist needs a place where she can be alone, a place that she can lock herself in and where she can concentrate on her work without worrying about the world around her. The freedom of the place symbolizes the the woman’s freedom: her emancipation. It’s about challenging the idea that women are only meant to take care of their husbands, children and the house. And that only those who have no husband or children and with money can create.
To us, this may seem almost absurd today.
And yet…
A model for future generations
“ Moreover, in a hundred years, I thought, reaching my own doorstep, women will have ceased to be the protected sex. Logically they will take part in all activites and exertions that were once denied them.”
Virgina Woolf — A Room of One’s Own
…it’s still sometimes quite sad to see that the relationships between men and women described by Virginia Woolf are often still relevant in the 21st century. However, we must see the glass as half full and recognise the strength of what Virginia Woolf has undertaken.
Through her writing and the themes she dealt with, Virginia Woolf has become an icon. She continues to have a huge impact on women, whether they are artists (like Sylvia Plath, Simone De Beauvoir) or not. Through her words, she gave us advice, warned us of risks and encouraged us. Her words were precursory and told us “Fight! Assert ourself! Be what we want to be!”
Putting women on the same level as men is what Virginia Woolf wanted, and that’s why she made Orlando an androgynous character. This is also why, in the last chapters of a Room of One’s Own, she tells us that great writers are androgynous: by belonging to both sexes, they no longer focus on themselves but on what surrounds them.
For Virginia Woolf, there were no opposites but a whole. And that’s what everyone has to tell themselves in order for this to happen.
