#ahh it was wild - really enjoyed it tho it was a lil rough getting thru for me personally

[theboywhocriedbooks]

Orlando by Virginia Woolf 

[Goodreads]

Virginia Woolf described "Orlando" as "an escapade, half-laughing, half-serious; with great splashes of exaggeration," but many think Woolf's escapade is one of the most wickedly imaginative and sharply observed considerations of androgyny that this century will see. Orlando is, in fact, a character liberated from the restraints of time and sex. Born in the Elizabethan Age to wealth and position, he is a young male aristocrat at the beginning of the story - and a modern woman four centuries later. The hero-heroine sees monarchs come and go, hobnobs with great literary figures, and slips in and out of each new fashion. Woolf presents a brilliant pageant of history, society, and literature as well as subtle appreciation of the interplay between endings and beginnings, past and present, male and female. 

Thoughts: 

This was a wild read. I read it for my queer literature and film class but I have been meaning to get my hands on it for a while before this actually. I’m qualifying it as a queer read because it’s so... queer?? It was hard to get through for me because even though I thought the writing was beautiful, it was also not something I’m super familiar with and also the format of the timeline had me a bit confused at times. That being said, I sort of loved it? I honestly am a little taken by surprise at the actual plot and how the story goes because it still blows my mind that this was published in the 20′s. Virginia really did that. I think it’s a fascinating, funny and wild examination of gender and sexuality, as well as time, love and writing. So if thats something you’re down with then go check it out! Because I shall now go on about it in spoiler-y detail below: 

I’ve been so swamped with school work that I haven’t gotten around to writing this review so here I am doing it a month later. I feel like that was a bad idea because then the detail becomes fuzzy. Overall, I really loved the story but I feel like the writing could be a little difficult to get through at first. It’s done well though because once I know whats happening I’m like oh wow this is feels almost like it could have been written a few years back yet also feels classic.

I think the overall concept is pretty ahead of its time, obviously. I mean, how often were people in the late 20’s writing so much about gender, let alone a character who starts the novel one gender and ends it another. With that comes many different opportunities to compare the experiences of men vs that of women. The idea of the sleep/coma that Orlando being a transformative moment, similar to that of a butterfly cocoon. It is still unclear to me just how this all occurs though. What exactly caused Orlando to transform genders and not age? I didn’t really get a single answer.

One of the interesting things my professor talked about was that the character of Orlando was based off of the woman Virginia Woolf had a long affair with. The woman name was Vita and she was a writer as well, and so the bits about Orlando writing were reference to her. The funny thing is that we were told that she did not think her lover was a good writer, and so the fact that Orlando works on the same poem for about 400 years is a jab at her. When I learned this I both cracked up but also found it fascinating because I couldn’t believe Woolf wrote a novel based on the personality of her female lover in the late 20’s. I was very intrigued with this actual real world basis for the story and it’s characters but also the house that Vita lived in that apparently had  365 rooms.

I didn’t have any deep connections with any of the romantic prospects, but I felt like it was very queer in that way too. One character that liked her, the Archduchess/Archduke who pretended to be a woman but was actually a man and has that gender change in a less literal way. That was strange yet wild and queer. Then theres the masculine, if only in demeanor, Russian princess. And also the man that Orlando marries does not represent the most masculine of qualities, where as Orlando at this point is a perhaps immortal woman with wealth. The most interesting of the bunch is Queen Elizabeth, THE Queen Elizabeth. It becomes all even queerer with the fact that Orlando is somewhat of an androgynous character, in turn making all of these connections a little more complex.

I thought the film was interesting but I don’t think it could have topped the novel. The fact that Tilda Swinton played Orlando was probably a good choice but I think it also changed the way the audience perceived Orlando’s experiences in each gender. I thought the film tried it’s best but also I don’t think the audience had any idea what was going on, even less than that of the novel. There were many good things: Seeing the story come alive in general, the casting of a man as the queen, the maze scene, the child, etc. I just preferred the novel, obviously.