# Reading > Forum Book Club >  March '05 Book: Orlando

## Sitaram

Today I purchased my paperback copy of Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" for $3, from the Wordsworth Classics series, which has a website at www.wordsworth-editions.com (I purchased it in a local bookstore).

"Orlando Spoilers" would be a great name for a professional sports team.


I am gearing myself up for this month's reading. I have hired some highschool cheerleaders to do some Orlando cheers (GIve me an O.... O!) and then spell out Woolf in pom-poms..... 

OK, guys and gals.... enough... off to the locker rooms.....

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/orlando/context.html

Orlando was written at the height of Woolf's career. It was an extremely popular book when it was published. In the first six months after publication it sold over eight thousand copies, whereas To the Lighthouse sold less than half that amount. Woolf's income from book sales nearly tripled with the publication of Orlando.




> "So, Virginia (may I call you Virginia?) you made a little money off this Orlando gig!"


Virginia's manic-depression was worst just as she was finishing a novel. Unable to handle criticism, Woolf was vulnerable to breakdowns.

A perfectionist, she labored over her novels until the very last moment.


Orlando closes himself up inside his house with 365 rooms and fifty-two staircases.




> Vat ees dis ve have here, der symbolism?





> Ya, here comes zum temporal hankapank, yust vait und zee!



Orlando becomes engaged to Euphrosyne, a woman of incredibly high birth and connections. 

It is interesting that, in ancient Greek, SOPHrosyne means restraint, moderation, prudence. But Euphrosyne has a different meaning.

http://www.theoi.com/Kronos/Kharites.html

And Eurynome, the daughter of Okeanos, beautiful in form, bare him [Zeus] three fair-cheeked Kharites (Graces), Aglaia, and Euphrosyne, and lovely Thaleia, from whose eyes as they glanced flowed love that unnerves the limbs: and beautiful is their glance beneath their brows." -Theogony 907

"There [on Olympos] are their [the Mousai's] bright dancing-places and beautiful homes, and beside them the Kharites (Graces) and Himerus (Desire) live in delight." -Theogony 53

EUPHROSYNE was one of the three KHARITES and the goddess of mirth and merriment.

"Open of yourselves, you doors, for mightly Ploutos (Wealth) will enter in, and with Ploutos comes jolly Euphrosyne (Mirth) and gentle Eirene (Peace)." -Homer's Epigrams XV

Nota bene: SASHA is a nickname for ALEXANDER, it is a boy's name.

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## mono

To begin the discussions with Sitaram, I thought to include this random page I found - artwork inspired by Virginia Woolf's _Orlando_:
http://www.mortonarts.com/orlando.html
Happy reading!

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## papayahed

I have the book and read the first couple of pages - My first impression is that I'm not going to like this book.


The artwork Mono linked to is pretty interesting though.

Has anyone seen the movie?

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## Scheherazade

How many pages is it, Papayahed?  :Goof:

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## papayahed

:Brickwall:  In my copy it's 329.

Ever the optomist, I'm sure it'll get better.  :Banana:

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## Sitaram

Nice link to artwork, Mono! I like these lines from that link:




> The most successful practitioners in the art of life walk among us; unknown.
> Some are not yet born, though they go through the forms of living.
> Others are hundreds of years old, though they call themselves thirty-six.


============

My copy of "Orlando" (paperback) is 162 pages.

I am looking at page 9, 




> "He seemed in the act of rolling some thought up and down, to and fro in his mind till it gathered shape or momentum to his liking."


============
pg. 10 




> "For women's hearts are intricate."


What does it mean to have an intricate heart? 

How may we see the intricacy of a woman's heart as we progress through this novel? 

How may we describe men's hearts? Is it good or bad, better or worse, this intricacy? 

A labyrinth is intricate and conceals a monster. Does intricacy conceal or reveal? 

Is such an intricacy easier to enter into, or to escape from? 

How intricate is the word itself? How intricate is intricacy? Is intricacy a form of governent, like democracy? Is it a kingdom, a world, a universe? As I peer into this intricate world, I see a trinket. Look! Can you see it too, the trinket in intricate?

I am chatting with someone 15 as I read and post. I just now wrote this verse for them:

Somewhere long from now and far from here 
When you are old an grey 
You shall think of me, long gone,
And you shall say 
(to someone younger still)
"Dont wish your life away!"
Just as my mother used to say to me
When I, impatient, used to ask
"Is it Christmas yet?"
"Are we there?"
"If only I were 10!"


I must not wish my life away by counting the pages of this book. Each page is a plain between two mountain ranges. Each paragraph is a hill or valley. Each sentence is a grove of trees; each word, a rock a leaf, a world, a galaxy.

So, how may I enter now into "intricate"; enter as an insect enters into amber, frozen and immortalized. How may I enter once, and stay, and learn to never wish my life away?

It is so simple to be happy and so difficult to be simple.




> She flashed her yellow hawk's eyes upon him as if she would pierce his soul.

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## Scheherazade

> My copy of "Orlando" (paperback) is 162 pages.


Sitaram,
Are you sure your copy is an unabridged edition? The copy on amazon is 333 page as well.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...375030-5322457

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## Sitaram

Good. question,.... hmmm..... on the cover it says "Complete and Unabridged".... however, the print is very small,..... and you get this little magnifying glass which comes with the book (... just kidding).... oh.. and the actual size of the book is 2 feet by 3 feet (also kidding...) 

Really, the print is very small indeed

Actually, Scherazade, they are not far from you at all:

http://www.wordsworth-editions.co.uk/classic.asp

Email [email protected] 

Telephone +44 (0) 1920 465167 Fax +44 (0) 1920 462267 

You could ring them up for me and ask about Orlando.

Here are details on their edition of "Orlando"
http://www.wordsworth-editions.co.uk...ails.asp?e=856

====

Hmm... while searching on ORLANDO WOOLF PAGES, I found THIS little gem:

http://www.glbtq.com/literature/woolf_v,5.html

And yet Woolf's one venture into female eroticism ended with Orlando, capturing in print what she wasn't able to have in life due to Vita's infidelity and her own stifled sexuality. Originally entitled "The Jessamy Brides" ("Jessamy" referring to a dandy or fop), Orlando represents both what Woolf could never be or have except through her art.

=========================

This club is really helpful to motivate me to look at things I might otherwise ignore..... and to attempt to look deeply.... plus there is all the variet of what other members see... added to the variety we find through search engines.

John Climacus, 6th century, author of 'Ladder of Divine Ascent' said:

A horse thinks he is running very fast when he runs by himself. But when he runs with a herd, he realizes that he is not fast enough.

(written to demonstrate the value of corporate activity in a community)

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## Scheherazade

It is interesting that there should be such difference between two editions (the amazon one is twice as much). Hope you wont be straining your eyes too much!  :Wink: 

On a different note, the local library doesn't have a copy of Orlando so had to order it. Which means I won't be able to start reading it till next week  :Frown:

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## papayahed

> It is interesting that there should be such difference between two editions (the amazon one is twice as much). Hope you wont be straining your eyes too much! 
> 
> On a different note, the local library doesn't have a copy of Orlando so had to order it. Which means I won't be able to start reading it till next week


Lucky You

s10cr

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## Stanislaw

> It is interesting that there should be such difference between two editions (the amazon one is twice as much). Hope you wont be straining your eyes too much! 
> 
> On a different note, the local library doesn't have a copy of Orlando so had to order it. Which means I won't be able to start reading it till next week


Indeed I shant be able to comment untill monday. I have a readers digest version at home 160 pages, I don't think it will have the same content as your versions though, So I did order an unabridged version!

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## Sitaram

http://gendertree.com/Mythology%20and%20Demonology.htm


Tiresias, a Theban soothsayer, is reported to have been walking on 
Mt. Cyllene when he came upon two snakes coupling. He killed the 
female, and for this act was changed into a woman. Later, after 
coming to look favorably on his new form and testifying that womans 
pleasure during intercourse was ten to mans one, he was changed 
back into a man - again as punishment.

The Tiresias myth noted previously parallels a related folk tale in East 
Indian lore. According to legend in the Mahabharata, a king was 
transformed into a woman by bathing in a magic river. As a woman he 
bore a hundred sons whom he sent to share his kingdom with the 
hundred sons he had had as a man. Later, he refused to be changed 
back into a man because the former king felt that a woman takes 
more pleasure in the act of love than does a man. Contrary to the 
fate of Tiresias, the transformed king was granted his wish.[13]a 
Accounts exist from the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome of those 
grossly discontent with their gender role. Philo, the Jewish philosopher 
of Alexandria, wrote, Expending every possible care on their outward 
adornment, they are not ashamed even to employ every device to 
change artificially their nature as men into women. Some of them 
craving a complete transformation into women, they have amputated 
their generative members. [26]a 

http://drblayney.com/Asclepius.html

The mythical origin of his magic twin serpent caduceus is described in 
the story of Tiresias. Poulenc, in "Les Mamelles de Tiresias" (The 
Breasts of Tiresias) tells how Tiresias--the seer who was so unhelpful 
to Oepidus and Family- found two snakes copulating, and to separate 
them stuck his staff between them. Immediately he was turned into a 
woman, and remained so for seven years, until he was able to repeat 
his action, and change back to male. The transformative power in this 
story, strong enough to completely reverse even physical polarities of 
male and female, comes from the union of the two serpents, passed 
on by the wand. Tiresias' staff, complete with serpents, was later 
passed on to Hermes... 

http://reptile.users2.50megs.com/research/r082100c.html

If the snake in itself is already magically potent, the coupling of two, 
seen by human eyes, is fatal: v. the myth of Tiresias: it brings 
blindness with either homosexuality or change of sex: ref. Ovid 
(Metam. 3, 323ff.); 

http://www.allaboutturkey.com/sozlukmit2.htm

In Greek mythology Tiresias was a blindprophet. He was the son of 
Everus and Chariclo. There are at least two versions of how he 
became to be blind. In the first he was out hunting and found two 
snakes coupling in a clearing. He killed the female one at which point 
Gaia changed him into a woman. Seven years later by chance he (then 
a she) found another two snakes in the same place and this time 
killed the male, and was immediately changed back into a man. As he 
had several lovers while both a man and a woman, Zeus and Hera 
decided he could settle an argument over which gave better 
satisfaction in sex, a man or a woman. Tiresias agreed with Zeus that 
men do, and Hera blinded him in rage, but Zeus rewarded him with 
prophetic powers. In a second variation, he went blind after seeing 
Athene bathing, and after plees from his mother Athene compensated 
Tiresias for his blindness with prophetic powers. 


http://www.chloe.uwa.edu.au/outskirt.../Feature1.html

The concept of "woman" was, for Woolf; problematic. As she remarked 
in A Room of One's Own: "Women; but are you not sick to death of the 
word? I can assure you that I am."(5) Orlando's daughter, therefore, is 
Potter's potent image of hope for women.

Like Tiresias, Orlando only gains knowledge and understanding of 
social subjectivity by living through both sides of gendered 'reality'. 

Irony remains the film's multi-targeted detonator, adding an elusive 
sexual intoxicant, that "something queer".

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...?oneclick=true

Perhaps the boldest gender-bending novel is Jeanette Winterson's 
Written On The Body, a sensual hymn of praise to a beautiful, beloved 
woman. We never find out whether her lover is male or female. But 
here again, nothing is new. The androgynous narrator goes right back 
to Homer's Tiresias, the blind poet who lived as both a man and a 
woman. Women have better sex than men, he said. Nine times better.

http://newyorker.com/online/content/...n_onlineonly01


JEFFREY EUGENIDES: My interest took conscious form at least fifteen 
years ago when I read Michel Foucault's "Memoirs of a 19th Century 
French Hermaphrodite." Foucault found these memoirs in the archives 
of the French Department of Public Hygiene. I thought they would be a 
great read. The hermaphrodite in question, Herculine Barbin, was a 
student at a convent school. She was tall, thin, flat-chested, and 
scholastically gifted. She fell in love with her best friend and they 
began a clandestine love affair. These were the facts of the case, and 
I was eager to read the memoirs because they contained a lot of 
elements that stirred my imagination: an amazing personal 
metamorphosis, a hothouse passion, and a medical mystery. There 
was only one problem: Herculine Barbin couldn't write. Her prose was 
wooden. Exclamation marks ended every second sentence. She was 
given to melodrama and, worse yet, she skipped over the important 
parts. "Middlesex" began as an urge to fill in those gaps, to tell the 
story Herculine Barbin couldn't. I knew from the beginning that I 
wanted to write about a real, living hermaphrodite. Hermaphrodite 
characters in literature have been either mythical figures, like 
Tiresias, or fanciful creations, like Virginia Woolf's Orlando. I wanted 
to be accurate about the biological facts.

Why does the question of gender interest you? 
It's not just me. It interests lots of people. It has interested humanity 
for a very long time, which is why hermaphrodites appear in so many 
classical epics and creation myths. Plato claimed that the original 
human was hermaphroditic.These two halves were sundered and now 
must go eternally in search of each other, which is apparently why it's 
so hard to get a dinner reservation on Valentine's Day.

http://www.hku.hk/english/course/woolf.htm

Woolf also liked the sound of several other lines from the Tiresian 
section of "The Fire Sermon": 

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the 
desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting 

(215-7) 

Like Eliot, Woolf draws a parallel between human beings who wait 
and machines that idle: "Everything had come to a standstill. The heat 
[sic; presumably 'beat'] of the motor engines sounded like a pulse 
irregularly drumming through a whole body" ("The Prime Minister," 
321). Again, Woolf's scene has little to do with Eliot's, except that in 
each, modern city dwellers pause for a moment before continuing 
with their day. Woolf develops the moment out of Eliot's phrase, not 
his scene. When these lines are revised for Mrs. Dalloway, their origin 
becomes even more evident: "Everything had come to a standstill. The 
throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming 
through an entire body" (20). The change of "beat" to "throb" clarifies 
the provenance of Woolf's lines in "The Fire Sermon," where both the 
human engine is "throbbing" and Tiresias himself is "throbbing 
between two lives" (217, 218). 

Even recent collections, such as Virginia Woolf: Themes and Variations 
(1993) echo the celebratory and laudatory tone of Sandra Gilbert and 
Susan Gubar, who read the novel as Woolf's unmitigated celebration 
of sexual indeterminacy.(8) Insisting that "unlike [Eliot's] Tiresias, 
upon whom the worst of both sexes has been inflicted, Orlando has 
the best of both sexes in a happy multiform that she herself has 
chosen" (Gilbert and Gubar, 345), virtually all the scholarship on 
Orlando has interpreted its use of androgyny using anachronistic, 
character-centered 1970s definitions of the term.(9) 

The price we have paid for our disregard and/or misreadings of 
Orlando has been the perpetuation of an incomplete understanding of 
Woolf's aesthetics. What Woolf's dismissive comments about the 
novel reveal is not so much a failure in the work itself or in herself, as 
an uncomfortable realization of the conclusions the novel reaches and 
the frightening implications of these conclusions for the success of 
her artistic method. More specifically, they gesture toward the painful 
and insistent struggle in the text between art and the body, and the 
more subliminal crisis over how to enable former without disabling or 
repressing the latter. Like Woolf's own equivocal comments about it, 
Orlando presents a portrait of the artist which is ultimately unfinished 
and unresolved - sexually, artistically, and historically. Rather than a 
novel about identity, it is a novel about identity crisis, gender trouble, 
and cultural change that ultimately presents not "Orlando" or "Virginia 
Woolf" but rather the struggle behind both artists' attempt at "being." 

http://ebc.chez.tiscali.fr/ebc1400.htm

In The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, the erotic and its 
eroto-energy are directly linked to the themes of power and of the 
formation of the individual subject. Dr. Hoffmans version of the cogito 
is a demonic parody of the Lacanian I desire therefore I exist. In The 
Passion of New Eve, Carter crosses genre borders in a complex 
parodic play that inescapably links genre to gender, and both to 
desire. She plays with magic realism, the picaresque, the romance, 
the Hollywood love story, Virginia Woolfs Orlando and Monique 
Wittigs Les Guérillères. Her hero-turned-heroine is a modern Tiresias, 
made into a physical woman, but retaining a doubled sense of her/his 
subjectivity. The movie star he/she once admired, Tristessa, may be 
modelled on Garbo, but she turns out to be a male in disguise, as if 
womanliness were something to be assumed and worn like a mask 
(recalling Joan Rivières famous paper on Womanliness as 
Masquerade).




> The curious thing about two snakes is that one cannot easily distinguish the male from the female. There is no deliberation or premeditation on the part of Tiresias to kill either the male or the female: the gender slain is purely a matter of chance or fate.


The facts on snake reproduction:

http://mzone.mweb.co.za/residents/net12980/sex.html

Now, someone might argue that the myth of Tiresias was not in Woolf's mind as she wrote Orlando. But it is certainly the case that the Tiresias myth is in the mind of the modern readers and movie producers.

=====================

Excellent notes on Virginia Woolf's life and work:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/e/...surv/woolf.htm

(excerpts) :

--1917: Partly as therapy for Virginia, Leonard and Virginia purchase a small printing press (that fits on a kitchen table). Hogarth Press is born! Virginia sets the type herself for a long time


--1919: Hogarth Press publishes T. S. Eliots Poems, and in 1923, publishes The Wasteland

--1925: begins intimate relationship w/ Vita Sackville-West (who sought out Virginia Virginia becomes one of a long line of Vitas lesbian lovers.) Vita was an accomplished romance poet and world traveler, whom Virginia sees as an androgyne (a person who combines both male and female characteristics) and casts her the main character of her Orlando (see 1928, below)
(Both Vita and Virginia are married, and their husbands to varying degrees tolerate the lesbian affair, although Leonard is concerned that it might bring on another nervous breakdown.) 

--1940: The Blitz: London was bombed relentlessly for months 
by German aircraft. The Woolfs and Hogarth Press 
moved to a quieter suburb of London (in Sussex), 
and *made arrangements to end their lives* 
if the Nazis invaded Britain.




> As I read "Orlando," I am making note of those passages and phrases which seem a morbid preoccupation with death.


--1941, 28 March: Virginia (age 59) commited suicide: filled her pockets with heavy stones and walked into the River Ouse, drowning herself. Her last note to her husband indicated despair over the war (which to many Londoners--and indeed to many Europeans--seemed endless and apocalyptic), as well as despair at facing another mental attack.


--She's one of the major Modernist writers in Britain, and thanks to her independent press, T. S. Eliot and other important early twentieth century writers and theorists got their start. In particular, Woolf's press made controversial, new psychoanalytic writings available. In the 1920's, Woolf's Hogarth Press famously undertook publication of Sigmund Freud's theories--and literally introduced Freud's writing to English readers.


Stream-of-consciousness: Woolf applies a cubist multiplicity of perspective to her novel, using an experimental literary technique known as stream-of-consciousness. The term had first been introduced in 1890 by the psychologist William James (Henry James's brother)-- referring to the mind's flow of thoughts upon awakening. (William James, Principles of Psychology)

--James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are credited with applying this to novels, as they broadened the term into a narrative method: an unconventional, unobjective way to describe unspoken thoughts and emotions, without providing an objective framework of an all-knowing narrator. The character takes over the narrative voice, and the reader is provided with completely subjective experiences and points of view. 

--Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past--literal French translation: "In Search of Lost Time") (1913-1927): This enormous, foundational modernist work was a major influence on Virginia Woolf's writing. In it, Proust defined the artist's duty as to release the creative energies of memory from burial within the unconscious mind. Proust's call for the artist to access of half-conscious, or unconscious mental operations, subjectively recording the passage of time, underlies much modernist literature. 




http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Po...ot/Waste_3.htm

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.


(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
==============================
The following link has a drawing of Virginia Woolf setting type for Hogarth Press:

http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/...ress/case3.htm

==============================

http://www.outuk.com/index.html?http...es/bloomsbury/

Soon after their father's death in 1904, Vanessa Stephen, a painter, and her sister, Virginia, an aspiring novelist, began to host regular meetings for other wealthy young intellectuals at their London home. It was known simply as Bloomsbury after the area of London round the British Museum in which the sisters lived. 
Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours
©2002 Paramount Pictures 
The Bloomsbury salon became a haven for artists and writers - including many gays and bisexuals - who wanted to break free from the artistic and sexual restrictions of the era. 
Bloomsbury's first members were the Cambridge University friends that Thoby Stephen brought to his sisters' home for dinner - historian Lytton Strachey, economist John Maynard Keynes, and writers Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf. The guests in turn invited others to the group, including artist Duncan Grant, who had been sexually involved with both Strachey and Keynes. Within Bloomsbury, these gay men found support for their sexual orientation at a time when the imprisonment of playwright Oscar Wilde in 1895 for sodomy was still a very fresh memory. 

The Bloomsbury group has gone down in history for the many contributions its members made to literature, art, and the social sciences. The group's intellectual core was Virginia Stephen, who became Virginia Woolf when she married in 1912. Today she is recognized as one of the great modernist novelists. She and her husband, Leonard, founded Hogarth Press, a publishing house that brought some of the most significant literature of the era into print when no one else would, including T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. In other fields, Keynes became one of the pre-eminent economists of his day, while Strachey achieved renown as a biographer. 


But the romantic record of the group's members is also noteworthy, because they demonstrated a sexual freedom and fluidity that was remarkably ahead of their time. Beginning in 1925, Virginia Woolf had a passionate affair with the dashing Vita Sackville-West. In the first flush of romance, Woolf wrote what has become a classic of queer fiction, the experimental fantasy Orlando (1927), which argued that *love and passion ignore gender*, and that gender itself is fluid. 




> The phrase "love and passion ignore gender" reminds me of my initial observation that the gender of snakes is indistinguishable, male from female.


==========================

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0255.html

In literature, the movement is associated with the works of (among others) Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and Knut Hamsun. In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writers introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices:

the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative; the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause and effect development thereof; the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call into question the moral and philosophical meaning of literary action; the adoption of a tone of epistemological self-mockery aimed at naive pretensions of bourgeois rationality; the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective discourse; and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. (Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment" 68)
Modernism is often derided for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in language and its processes. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning ("That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all" laments Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock), the modernists generally downplayed content in favour of an investigation of form. The fragmented, non-chronological, poetic forms utilized by Eliot and Pound revolutionized poetic language.

Modernist formalism, however, was not without its political cost. Many of the chief Modernists either flirted with fascism or openly espoused it (Eliot, Yeats, Hamsun and Pound). This should not be surprising: modernism is markedly non-egalitarian; its disregard for the shared conventions of meaning make many of its supreme accomplishments (eg. Eliot's "The Wasteland," Pound's "Cantos," Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Woolf's The Waves) largely inaccessible to the common reader. For Eliot, such obscurantism was necessary to halt the erosion of art in the age of commodity circulation and a literature adjusted to the lowest common denominator.

Some Essays by Virginia Woolf

"Professions for Women"
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au...1d/chap28.html

When I came to write, there were very few material obstacles in my way. Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was not broken by the scratching of a pen. No demand was made upon the family purse. For ten and sixpence one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeareif one has a mind that way. Pianos and models, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, masters and mistresses, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.

These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The firstkilling the Angel in the HouseI think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerfuland yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?




> It is so simple to be happy, but so difficult to be simple.


=========

Here is a very useful page of links from "The Virginia Woolf Society"

http://orlando.jp.org/VWSGB/dat/material.html


Here is a link on Virginia Woolf's psychiatric history:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...mi/VWFRAME.HTM

Here are details of the sexual abuse which Virginia Woolf suffered in early childhood:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...mi/VWFRAME.HTM

During her life Virginia Woolf had several intense friendships with women, mostly older. Some, like Vita Sackville West, a lesbian, were sexual, but it is unlikely that any of these affairs were carnal, although Vita claimed to have gone to bed with Virginia twice. In 1926 she wrote to her husband Harold Nicolson:'..I am scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her, because of the madness. I don't know what effect it would have, you see; 
*it is a fire with which I have no wish to play*. I have too much real affection and respect for her. Also she has never lived with anyone except Leonard, which was a terrible failure, and was abandoned quite soon.' 




> *it is a fire with which I have no wish to play* 
> 
> This image of playing with a fire intrigues me. I want to look further into what "The Fire Sermon" is for Eliot (where references to Tiresias are made) as well as what "The Fire Sermon" was for the Buddha (Eliot studied Sanskrit, Hinduism and Buddhism).



For her generation, Virginia was - in language at least - remarkably uninhibited and 'liberated' in sexual matters. She went swimming in the nude with Rupert Brooke, she typed bawdy material for Lytton Strachey, and she wrote to her sister about Leonard's wet dreams without restraint. And yet she writes late in her life, to Ethel Smyth, her last close female friend: '...but I was always sexually cowardly, my terror of real life has always kept me in a nunnery.' 



Buddha's "Fire Sermon"

http://www.saigon.com/~anson/ebud/ebsut026.htm

http://www.buddhismmiufa.org.hk/buddhism/Bali/burn.htm

Footnote:

1 It is interesting to note here that Section III of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot is is called The Fire Sermon. In the note to line 308: Burning burning burning burning , Eliot writes: The complete text of the Buddha`s Fire Sermon {which corresponds in importance to the Sermon on the Mount }from which these words are taken ,will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren`s Buddbism in Transtation {Harvard Oriental Series }.

Listen to a minute of Virginia Woolf's actual voice:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...mi/VWFRAME.HTM

----------


## Scheherazade

Wow, Sitaram! You have time to read the book AND all these articles? Have you finished the book by the way?

*is envious*

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## Sitaram

You won't believe this, Scheherazade, but.... as I posted this morning, in my mind's eye (well, way in the back of my mind, in that third eye I have behind my head), I actually saw you making such a post as this in reply, asking me such things as whether I REALLY have an unabridged book, or how I have the time to do all of this, or whether I have finished yet, or whether that teeny tiny print isn't too much of a strain on my eyes (honest to God, I'm not joking....)


No, I have not finished the book yet. 

A snake eats a pig by starting at its head, working its way slowly, engulfing it in a linear fashion, from beginning to end, until the tail disappears down the gullet, and then digests it. A spider dines by poking a hole in its prey, filling it with digestive juices, digesting it OUTSIDE of its own body, and then, finally, drinks in all the essence. I am more like the spider in my reading than like the snake.

I carry the book with me wherever I go. Frequently, during the day, when I have some moments, I open the book at random and read one page, with my pen in hand, and try to enter into the world of that page, into a phrase or a word. 




> But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade, with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepieze of the mind by one second.
> 
> ...
> 
> The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart,...
> ...
> 
> 
> 'It is the moor. I am nature's bride,' she whispered, giving herself in rapture to the cold embraces of the grass as she lay folded in her cloak in the hollow by the pool. 'Here will I lie. (A feather fell upon her brow.) I have found a greener laurel than the bay. My forehead will be cool always. There are wild birds' feathers - the owl's, the nightjar's. I shall dream wild dreams. My hands shall wear no wedding ring,'
> ...



This practice of reading at random is like diving for pearls. Every once in a great while, we come up with something. Most of the time we come up empty handed. But if we find a gem... well, it is most precious when it is in a SETTING, as a finished adornment.

Of course, I set aside time for reading in a traditional, linear fashion.

Wallace Stevens wrote a funny little poem which has stuck with me since childhood:

"Frogs eat butterfiles,
Snakes eat frogs,
Hogs eat snakes,
And men eat hogs."

This notion of reading as eating is interesting. We slowly digest what we read (and sometimes we read Digests). In the Synagoge, one reads the "Torah PORTION." The Christians will say, "Come, let us break open the Word together" as if they are breaking bread. We RUMINATE over what we read, just as a cow, a ruminating animal with four stomach, chews its cud.

The poem of Stevens is sort of an explanation of Postmodernism. That book a mintue site summarizes Pinchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" as: "A V2 missle drops 30,000 pounds of symbolism on your head."

The frog eats the butterfly, the snake eats the frog, the hog eats the snake, the man eats the hog, the man writes a novel filled with layer upon layer of butterflies, snakes, and hogs, and we, the readers, deconstruct the narrative back into its primordial noah's ark of a zoo.

How about that actual things I am posting? Does anyone find them useful or interesting? I was astounded to learn that the printing press was on their kitchen table, that Virginia possibly sat there and set the type for Eliot's "Wasteland", that they had a social circle with all these famous people who were sort of vague in their gender identity. I want to hunt for things like Tiresias' Myth and Buddha's Fire Sermon and the Sermon on the Mount. I want to know that Virginia was abused by her own brothers in childhood and could never enjoy her own body. It is like Virgina is wounded, and she can only experience what she wants in what she writes, but not in real life. It is like Hemingway and that nurse in Italy. In real life, the nurse dumped him, so in "Farewell to Arms" Hemingway rewrites it so she is madly in love with him and dies in childbirth. Perhaps all of us who make words our world are wounded in some fashion. Perhaps we cannot enjoy what we wish in real life, so we turn to literature, either the reading or writing of it, to wish what we enjoy. Robert Frost speaks of being "immortally wounded" by a poem's line.

"The mind is its own (beautiful) prisoner." - e.e. cummings


This is posting of mine is sort of how I think out loud as I read. I hope for some one sentence or word to open up to me and yield something for me that is diffent, new, provocative, that will shake up someone else's world of ideas.....

That fellow forum member who wants to study chemistry because it is so neat to blow the lid off a paint can.... well this is my chemistry.... I want to blow the lid off someone's mind, if only my own. But, perhaps I already flipped my lid a long time ago. It is my hope that posts like this will get into the search engines and draw students here like a pilgrimage to a literary Mecca. Perhaps I am foolish and deluded.

As I write this post, a forum member, who is reading this Orlando thread, is telling me in MSN:

"Orlando doesnt sound like my kind of thing. I don't think I will read it."

I reply "It didn't sound like my kind of thing either, but I decided to MAKE it mine... force myself towards something different from my usual inclinations."

----------


## papayahed

> But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerfuland yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?


I'm wondering what other women think of this? Do you believe it is still the case today?

----------


## Scheherazade

> You won't believe this, Scheherazade, but.... as I posted this morning, in my mind's eye (well, way in the back of my mind, in that third eye I have behind my head), I actually saw you making such a post as this in reply, asking me such things as whether I REALLY have an unabridged book, or how I have the time to do all of this, or whether I have finished yet, or whether that teeny tiny print isn't too much of a strain on my eyes (honest to God, I'm not joking....)


 I am predictable like!  :Tongue: 



> A snake eats a pig by starting at its head, working its way slowly, engulfing it in a linear fashion, from beginning to end, until the tail disappears down the gullet, and then digests it. A spider dines by poking a hole in its prey, filling it with digestive juices, digesting it OUTSIDE of its own body, and then, finally, drinks in all the essence. I am more like the spider in my reading than like the snake.


 Thanks for the vivid imagery! Did me lotsa good before lunch!  :Biggrin: 

On a serious note... Just back from the library;still no 'Orlando'... Visited the only book shop in town and they don't have a copy either. *sighs*

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## Scheherazade

I have finished reading Chapter I. I am quite amused with the way Woold describes her main characters;the gender ambiguity is really interesting... Probably an insight to Woolf's own feelings.




> I'm wondering what other women think of this? Do you believe it is still the case today?


It would depend on one's cultural background surely but in my opinion what obstacles women face come from the 'intricacy' of their hearts mostly.

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## Sitaram

> It would depend on one's cultural background surely but in my opinion what obstacles women face come from the 'intricacy' of their hearts mostly.


I see the problems which women have faced for millenia as coming from patriarchal societies and religions, imposed upon them from the outside, and not from "intricacies" of their hearts, as if a woman's heart is my nature essentially different from the heart of a male.

One given individual woman may be brutal and insensitive, and a particular male might be quite sensitive or compassionate. I think these are differences in individuals and not gender specific.

Woolf, in her essay "A Room of One's Own" is prophetic when she predicts that in time women will assume all the jobs which in her day were reserved for males. 

A little known fact, the first elected woman leader of a nation in modern times was the prime minister of Sri Lanka, after it gained independence (former Ceylon). She passed away recently.

I think it was Kemal Attaturk who said, towards the end of the 19th century "How can our nation compete with the west when one half of our population, the women, are uneducated."

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## Scheherazade

Kemal Ataturk was born in 1881 so he probably said that in the 20th century. 

When I refer to women's hearts, I don't assume that there would be physical differences but that men and women in general tend to look at love and sex differently. It is true that there will always be exceptions but in general women get more involved and attached.

The cultural background plays a very important factor how one experiences and relates to love and sex but I think it is particularly hard for women to express themselves even in so-called more 'open minded' societies.

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## Sitaram

When, in the Book of Samuel, God tells the prophet Samuel that God is the "only knower of hearts", no one assumes that God is saying He is a cardiovascular surgeon. We all know what "heart" means, hopefully, in this context, as something emotional, intellectual, or spiritual, but not that lump of muscle in the chest that constantly goes "Lub Dub".

But, suppose we WERE speaking of that physical organ which we call the heart. Some people, perhaps many, would have signs of cardiovascular disease. Some would have larger organs, others smaller. Some would be in excellent physical shape and last a long time. Others would have congenital defects from birth. Others would have damage because of some disease, or injury, or parasititic infection.

Why should the emotional realm, which we metaphorically call "the heart", be one thing for males, and another for females?.... look at the famous Phulan Devi, the female bandit in India... 

I can see the validity of saying that each person is different as an individual.... I am not so certain I am convinced by blanket (no pun intended) assertions that all women are mostly one way, and all males are some different way...

And were that the case, then why would there be so many males in the world who desire to become women,... and perhaps a lesser number of women who desire to become men....

I think this whole notion that you present, of women being essentially different needs some debate, some investigation.....

If there is some fundamental difference between males and females, then it seems to me that such a difference should manifest statistically in some fashion, in educational testing, for example. Do we see the same number of female poets as male poets, or novelists? What can we say of actors and actresses? In nations where military service is compulsory for all males and females, what differences can be measured?

I am searching google unsuccessfully for answers:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...nce&vi=reviews


The Gendered Society Reader 
by Michael Kimmel

Designed as a companion volume to Kimmel's forthcoming book, The Gendered Society, the overall purpose of The Gendered Society: Readings is to provide students with a sense of different discourses on gender that have been produced by a wide range of disciplines. In a series of readings, both classic and contemporary, from the biological sciences, anthropology, cross-culture studies, psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, and gender studies, Kimmel focuses on the two major issues in the study of gender - difference and domination - looking at such fundamental questions as: How are males and females different? What do these differences mean? Why does it mean different things in different cultures to be male or female? Why is it that virtually every society differentiates people on the basis on gender? Why is that virtually every known society is also based on male domination? The first sections are organized by discipline, collecting classic statements of different theoretical perspectives and research inquiries. The final sections address various substantive issues such as: sex; gender and work; and love, sex, and the family. In its focus on both empirical and theoretical issues, its broad interdisciplinary perspective, and its emphasis on including both men and women, this reader is both informative and entertaining and appropriate for both scholars and students.

============
Here are some scholatic testing studies:

http://www.judithkleinfeld.com/ar_st...rformance.html

(excerpt) :

In a nutshell: On standardized achievement tests of basic school skills, females surpass males in writing ability and reading achievement while males surpass females in science and mathematics. Generally, these gender differences are small. The one exception is the significant female advantage in writing skills. Indeed, the female advantage on standardized tests of reading and writing achievement substantially outstrips the male advantage on standardized tests of science and mathematics. 

As for the male advantage in mathematics and science, it is shrinking. The National Assessment of Educational Progress has measured the knowledge of 9-, 13-, and 17-year-olds in mathematics and science for over 20 years. In mathematics, the gender gap among 17-year-olds has declined significantly since the 1970s and no longer reaches statistical significance. In science, the gender gap has also declined. 
======================
BUT CONSIDER THIS: Suppose it were demonstrated scientifically that, statistically, as a group, males have, lets say, a math advantage, while females have, lets say a verbal advantage.... It is still the case that one male with a high verbal advantage might be working with a female with a low verbal capacity.... so.... it still boils down to the individual... and some individuals with less talent, will make up for that with persistence and hard work, and will overcompensate, while a gifted individual may be lazy, and not develop their innate gifts

----------


## Scheherazade

I really like these two passages:




> Soon, however, Orlando grew tired, not only of the discomfort of this way of life, and of the crabbed streets of the neighbourhood, but of the primitive manners of the people. For it has it has to be remembered that crime and poverty had none of the attraction for the Elizabethans that they have for us. They had none of our modern shame of book learning;none of our belief that to be born the son of a butcher is a blessing and to be unable to read a virtue;no fancy that what we call 'life' and 'reality' are somehow connected with ignorance and brutality;nor, indeed, any equivalent for these two words at all. Chapter 1, _Orlando_


 Very nicely sums up our times...




> But if sleep it was, of what nature, we can scarcely refrain from asking, are such sleeps as these? Are they remedial measures -trances in which the most galling memories, events that seem likely to cripple life for ever, are brushed with a darkwing which rubs their harshness off and gilds them, even the ugliest and basest, with lustre, an incandescence? Has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living? And then what strange powers are these that penetrate our most secret ways and change our most treasured possessions without our willing it? Had Orlando, worn out by the extremity of his suffering, died for a week, and then come to life again? And if so, of what nature is death and of what nature life? Chapter 2, _Orlando_


 Can't help wondering if Woolf was talking from experience. Being susceptible to depression and emotional breakdowns herself, she knew only too well how it felt. And what an interesting way of looking at sleep: 'Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?' Very nice indeed.


How are you enjoying the book so far? I find it a little hard work and slow (definitely not a picnic), but still a good read;like 'Portrait'.

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## Sitaram

If I tell you that the last words of the story are "The End" have I spoiled it for you? My edition does not say "The End". Movies, in the 1950s, always seemed to flash "The End" on the screen.

I like the book. I would never have chosen it on my own. Participation in this reading group is beneficial.

Yesterday, I began to wonder about the significance of Woolf casting her character as a male, who one day wakes up as a female. Woolf herself seems like a woman who would prefer to be male if only for the fact that males are more free to pursue writing and access university library resources. What does it mean that Woolf has Orlando progress from male to female? What if Orlando had progressed from female to male? I suspect such questions may be useful and revealing.

It seems like Woolf intends for her book to have a happy ending. I am wondering at the significance of the final date in the final sentence being the date of the books publication. I almost get the feeling that Woolf herself marries her book.

This book is not considered science fiction, and yet a person who lives 400 years changes from a male into a female. Ursula LeGuin used the term "speculative fiction" for her work.

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## Scheherazade

My copy does not end like that either but with a date. Did you read it on the net that the book ends like that? Does anyone have a copy that ends with those words? Wondering if it was an addition by the publisher (like in the movies) rather than by the author.

I think more or less all movies end like with 'The End'? It is one of the first things I learnt in English because I saw it ever so often at the end of the movies  :Smile:

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## Sitaram

As a little kid, I would fall in love with whatever movie I was watching, and get all sad when it was over, and my mother and I would both say together "THeeeee Eeeennnnddd" and stretch out the two words. I remember feeling so attached to "Beau Jeste" which I watched as an old rerun on late night television.

I guess I was too sentimental as a child.

Just now, out of curiosity, I glanced at my bookshelves, and randomly opened a "Scribner Library" paperback of "Look Homeward, Angel" by THomas Wolfe, which I purchased around 1965. The last page says "The End".

I keep thinking about the issue raised yesterday (above) which I shall attempt to restate as: "Is the so-called essential difference between male and female real or imagined?"

I think Virginia Woolf would disagree with the notion that "what obstacles women face come from the 'intricacy' of their hearts."

As we see from the following link, Woolf envisions some sort of Platonic "form" or Jungian archetype of "maleness" and "femaleness" between which individuals pass back and forth freely under various circumstances.

http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.p...=true&UID=2988




> What Woolf called in her diary a change about from one sex to another opens up into a comical-but-serious examination of the role of women in historical and contemporary society: a project she would continue in A Room of One's Own (1929). After she becomes a woman, Orlando sees the folly of much of her behaviour as a man; and, because she has once been a man, her present situation now serves to highlight the quite unreasonable expectations that men appear to have imposed upon women through the ages. Quite subtly, and with great humour, the arbitrary and unnatural status of gender roles is exposed. The presentation of gender in Orlando can be summed up as an anticipation of the argument Simone de Beauvoir would later put forward in The Second Sex (1949): One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature. 
> 
> One particularly interesting question raised by Orlando's change of sex is the question of sexuality. In a diary entry that prefigures both Orlando and The Waves, Woolf describes her plan for a book entitled The Jessamy Brides. One of its key features, she notes, is that Sapphism is to be suggested. Writing about same-sex desire in England in the 1920s was not something that one did lightly. Critics frequently make the link between Orlando and another Sapphic novel published in 1928, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. Hall's novel, notoriously and shamefully, was banned for obscenity (seemingly on account of the line, and that night they were not divided, which refers to the nocturnal activities of its two female protagonists). The prosecution of The Well of Loneliness spoke volumes about the misogyny and patriarchal bias of early twentieth-century British society. Even Woolf's own friends were not immune. She noted in her diary that the novelist E. M. Forster (who was, incidentally, homosexual), thought Sapphism disgusting: partly from convention, partly because he disliked that women should be independent of men. But the fact remained, as Woolf was moved to point out in A Room of One's Own (written in the aftermath of the Well of Loneliness trial), sometimes women do like women.


Look at this passage from "Orlando":




> 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 and female likeness, while underneath 
> the sex is the very opposite of what it is above. Of the complications 
> and confusions which thus result every one has had experience; but 
> here we leave the general question and note only the odd effect it 
> had in the particular case of Orlando herself.


And here is what Sparknotes says about the above passage:




> In this passage from chapter four, the narrator draws a general 
> statement from the particular situation of Orlando. She suggests that 
> gender identity is not fixed, but can change throughout life 
> independently of biological makeup. The novel explores many 
> permutations of this idea. Woolf believes that sexes are intermixed, 
> that though an individual may seem a woman, she really has the 
> qualities of a man, and vice versa.
> 
> This idea applies not only to the literal gender of individuals, but more 
> ...

----------


## papayahed

I have a question for the writers out there: In chapter 2 Woolf spends several paragraphs descibing the writing process, she makes it sound like it is very difficult. Is this true for other writers, or does this come from her emotional state?

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## Sitaram

I heard that "Red Badge of Courage" was written by Stephen Crane in 10 days flat.

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## Scheherazade

> "Is the so-called essential difference between male and female real or imagined?"


As I mentioned earlier, I do believe that culture, hence, society, plays a gret role in shaping our gender identites and what is expected of us. The differences are very much there;they are not imagined, in my opinion. Whether they stems from the individual or are impressed upon us by the society, they are there.



> I think Virginia Woolf would disagree with the notion that "what obstacles women face come from the 'intricacy' of their hearts."


I am not sure if Woolf would really disagree. In my opinion, there are gender differences, which show themselves from birth. What Woolf disagrees with, and I humbly too, is the different treatment due to these differences. People should have equal rights regardless of their gender or sexual tendencies, which I think is the idea heavily explored and debated in 'Orlando'.

And if Woolf disagrees... She is entitled to her opinion, just like I am to mine  :Wink: 





> I have a question for the writers out there: In chapter 2 Woolf spends several paragraphs descibing the writing process, she makes it sound like it is very difficult. Is this true for other writers, or does this come from her emotional state?


 I remember reading while at university that for Woolf writing was a painful process and she worked very hard, painstakingly trying to get everything right. If you have read further, there is mention of Greene writing his piece about Orlando and he seems to be working with ease and finishes it quickly once he gets the inspiration.

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## Sitaram

Of course there are real differences between the genders, but are they the result of nature or nuture? Is gender a difference of degree, or a difference of kind? One expects to find a y chromosome in the cells of males, and two X chromosomes in females. But is there some essential difference in the heart and spirit and mind of a male, in contrast to a female?

I guess we are all entitled to be wrong... in fact, I am certain that "being wrong" or mistaken is a common state of being for most of us, myself included. A few are concerned with "truth" and the vast majority are concerned with "entitlement".

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## Scheherazade

Sitaram,
I respect your opinions and I sincerely do hope that you can do the same for the others as well.
Thank you.

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## mono

> I have a question for the writers out there: In chapter 2 Woolf spends several paragraphs descibing the writing process, she makes it sound like it is very difficult. Is this true for other writers, or does this come from her emotional state?


Similar to many eclectic writers, both modern and classical, Virginia Woolf suffered extensively from mental illness, suspected bipolar disorder. I have heard elsewhere that Woolf wrote almost her entire collection of books standing, due to a constant energy, most likely from the 'manic' episodes specified in a certain mental disorder; accomodating this restlessness, one could easily determine that her attention could drift. Chapter 2 I find brilliantly written, but I cannot imagine how much effort and time Woolf had to devote to its extensive detail and rhetoric.

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## Scheherazade

It has happened! He is a she now! I guess because Woolf has been working so hard to keep him as androgynous as possible that it does not come as a total shock somehow. However, her thoughts during the trip to the UK makes me wonder if Woolf believed in the 'superiority' of females? (I am only in the begining of this chapter so this might change) She seems to regret not being able to do certain things such as swimming etc but enjoys having 'power' over men.

Any thoughts on that?

The other thing:Mention of his house of with '365 rooms and 52 stairs' keep coming up in the book. How do you think this is significant? (Number of days and weeks in a year but...?)

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## Scheherazade

> The letter S, she reflected, is the serpent in the poet's Eden. Do what she would there were still too many of these sinful reptiles in the first stanzas of 'the Oak Tree'. But 'S' was nothing, in her opinion, compared with the termination 'ing'. The present participle is the Devil himself, she though (now that we are in the place for believing inDevils). To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet, she concluded, for as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely than lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all, she continued. His words reach where others fall short. No time, no devotion, can be too great, therefore, which makes the vehicle of our message less distrting. We must shape our words till they are the thinnest integument for our thoughts.


Seems like this passage from Chapter 4 shows how Woolf herself looked at the writing process and how hard she worked to get it 'right'. 

Is there a significance to Orlando's persistent attempts to write 'The Oak Tree'?

I am enjoying each chapter more than previous ones (though I am still not converted; still not a fan of Woolf  :Wink: ). This chapter is almost funny, full of humourous remarks about gender and genius. I am glad I have not given up on it  :Smile:  Mind you, one chapter a day only;I could not handle more!  :Biggrin:

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## Taliesin

We have finished it! 
We actually liked it.
The constant self-irony (you know, it went like this and that and we could talk about it for six pages and it would be very boring et cetera) was amusing; and though the constant using of "we" of VW was annoying in the beginning(talk about splinters in a fellow man's eye), for it seemed a bit like some kind of bad cliche as the writer and reader hover together through the book, it became reasoned in the end, for it seemed to refer a bit to the many selves of Orlando and VW, it was a gentle hint to shizophrenia then.

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## Jay

Just borrowed another book... yeah, don't yell yet  :Tongue: 
It's Art Objects by Jeanette Winterson, it's a collection of essays and there's an essay on Orlando and I thought you might be interested in reading it. Just a thought.

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## papayahed

I've just gotten to the part where he is now a she, it seems like an odd passage whith the three "I forgot their names" coming in....doesn't really work for me. I'll have to bring the book tomorrow to figure out what I'm trying to say here.

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## Scheherazade

Any thoughts on why all of a sudden Orlando became a woman? What triggered the change?

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## papayahed

That's what I'm wondering, why did those three chicks decide to visit at that time?

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## papayahed

So, I'm continuing with this book and I'm beginning to think it's outdated in it's views? Anybody else?

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## Scheherazade

I felt out of touch with most of the sentiments the book expresses... however, I am not sure which 'views' you are refering to exactly...

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## Scheherazade

Why you think all of a sudden, out of the blue, Orlando changed gender?

he fell asleep, i remember
broken heart?
boredom?
do not remember
maybe thought (subconciously) that he could not find a female beloved one

I really could not connect with that book...
supposed to be a feminist work

well, it was supposed to be new or something

but even so, even as a female, I cannot see what she is trying to achieve

a secret plot to turn alll men to women?

there would be a shortage of shoes and matching handbags in the world

you remember that critic?
greene i think was his name

To me she is as if trying to say 'it is better to be a man', which is not the feminist view IMHO

do you think he was like - the spirit of the time
like representing what people thought at the time

I thought he was representing the literary spirit of the time

perhaps orlando did the similar thing 
i think that the ageless were like somekind of non-human

i do not remember well, but did the novel start in africa? 

no
in london
when Queen Elizabeth visits their house

yeah, but the first pages seemed like africa
when he played with the head of that native

he thinks of people who are fighting there, I think
wants to be a soldier/hero
kill non-christians etc

let me think
if i am not mistaken, the crusades were like in the 13th century 

yes

but what happened in the 15th century

The idea of the crusade corresponds to a political conception which was realized in Christendom only from the eleventh to the fifteenth century;
from an online source

but why didn't he fit in with the 19th century?
or the 18th

the novel opens in the 16th Century

there was a line like: he had fit in with 15th, 16th, 17th century,but not with er 19th or 18thc

but orlando's parents and grandparents were from crusade-age
with all their head-chopping and stuff

wars were fight in that way 
lots of head chopping etc
till the invention of rifle etc

why do you think Woolf really wrote this book?

um, she needed money?

to me it looks like a private thing meant for her Bloomsbury friends

she wanted to look stilish and modern?

probably... that is always a good reason

actually i remember the dedication too

the book is full of private jokes and references...

inside-joke

the kind only Vita, her lover and her close friends would undersatnd

exactly.. an inside joke

they make me feel like an outsider

and I really cannot see what is so great about it

being an outsider, like you said 

she feeling all great and stilish and all the others pretending that they understand

I am not even clever enough to pretend I understand
The copy I had had soem references at the back and also I kept reading online resources
hoping to understand it better

mine had also something
it was a long list of people to whom she dedicated it
probably some where just in the room when she was writitng it and asked her to put them in

very kind of her

I am not being objective though
I dont like Woolf

do you think the biographer was Oralndo herself?

do you think Orlando actually didnt change gender as such but decided that he was gay?
and started acting like a female? 

like, the style changing through the centuries

sometimes in the 17tth or 18th he was quite an androgyne

metro
like, flirting with females with mens clothing and with males in female clothing

like Archduchess Henrietta / Archduke Harry 

i remember them 
they were the really boring people who were in love with him

so you think that henrietta changed also sex because of her love

or pretended it

pretended it, yes
I think he openly says so in the book

perhaps orlando changed sex to get rid of henrietta?

that he pretended to be female because he fell in love with Orlando, the male

didnt work, did it?

woolf was a lesbian herself too if i remember correctly

yes, she was bisexual
she was married but had lovers

explains quite a lot

exactly

perhaps she pictured orlando a bit as herself

which is why I thought Orlando just realised he was gay anddecided to act like a female
I was wondering if Woolf also felt she was actually a man trapped in a female body

only to mirror it
like the opposite of herself

yes

orlando got hurt when he was very young with a relationship of the russian woman

sasha, who left him for a sailor

do you think he stopped liking women then

maybe

well yeah the change took some centuries

his description in the book has always been a little ambiguous
what do you think of that?
the fact that she doesnt age?
also the fact that none really seems surprised that Orlando is a she

remember wwhen he ran to the sea when sasha left him
perhaps he, like, symbolically died then
but how did she live all those centuries
she didn't work or anything
and she lost her fortune in the 19th century
to the lawyers

guess we shouldjust take the book as what it is
a fantasy
and treat it like that

till I would be happy if I knew what Woolf was trying to say

trying to make justice to her bisexuality?

ie if she had a message for wider reader

and an inside-joke

yes

I think it was an inside joke

accidentally gone public

and still selling 

maybe she was not so good a writer, but she was a marketing genius

she was I guess

they owned a company
printed her own books, conveniently 

do you remember that poem?
do you think that when she had finished it, the meaning of her life had gone
oak-tree i think was the heading


i read that Woolf herself used to work on her works for a long time 
trying to get it right
I wonder if she was making fun of herself a little there

but probably not centuries

uhm, possibly not 

when was woolf born
 
19th i think

do you remember that man whom she loved
was a sailor if i am not mistaken

yes, shel. and their love was funny
very victorian novel

and in his youth he was dumped because of a sailor

2 minutes after meeting they knew everything about each other

but two sailors are quite different 

the one sasha ran away with is a burly, masculine, low class sailor
whereas Shel is a noble man... a captain 

so no connection there

I doubt it

but maybe also some kind of genius tempi

and interestingly I think Shel does not age either
because at the end of the novel she hears he is safe and coming back or something like that

you remember when she compared the company to the poodle?
that there was nothing different 

and Shel is also very ambigious

tell me something in that novel that isn't

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## Isagel

This is one of my favorite books, but it was a long time since I read it. For me the tale of Orlando is both a story about individual growth, but also a way of describing how we are influenced by our society - not only the part we play but our very identity and wishes. ( I remember how Orlando during the 19 century is overcome by an urge to write romantic poetry) I think the gender switch is partly a way of letting Orlando see the society from the opposite side. He/she has had to love affairs and the situation in the two love affairs are alike, but Orlando has different parts in them. 

But there is also interesting similarity to both the myth of the changing hermafrodite and the french 18- century person Chevalier D´Eon ,a male writer/poet/spy who changed and lived like a woman from the middle of his/her life. Some reserachers have argued that it was an ethical choice - that D´Eon disliked the characteristics that defined men and their part of society during that period. Others have argued that it was a question of sexuality, others have said both.

My personal opinion is that the ambigiouty is the best part of the book ; What is to male? What is to be female? What is it to live in a certain age/culture/family? What is Orlando? Can what Orlando is be separated from these things? Is there something about Orlando that is consistent during his/her life? What is the core ins Orlandos being? What am I?

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## papayahed

I've finally finished this book!!!! I didn't much care for it, to me it was more about writing then it was about male vs. female. 

And I really didn't get the ending, did shel come home?

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## Scheherazade

He is supposed to be coming home; Orlando gets the news of his arrival (I think).

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## Scheherazade

New quizes on Woolf and _Orlando_ have been added to the Forum: http://www.online-literature.com/for...iz.php?catid=1

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