The First Orlando: The Laugh of the Comic Spirit in Virginia Woolf's "Friendships Gallery" - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2001 by Karin E. Westman

The Comic Spirit laughed meanwhile.

"Friendships Gallery" (284)

If Orlando (1928) has typically been read as the literary consequence of Woolf's call for a new "art" of biography that could negotiate the tension between fact and fiction--between the "granite" and the "rainbow" of life, as Woolf's metaphor figures it in her review essay "The New Biography" (1927)--the early biographical sketch "Friendships Gallery" questions Orlando's pride of place in that critical narrative. [1] The laughter of the Comic Spirit in "Friendships Gallery" is a harbinger of the revisionary spirit that runs through Virginia Woolf's early essays and prose fiction and into her later work. Its text bound in violet leather and typed with purple ink, Woolf's gift to her childhood friend Violet Dickinson is the direct antecedent to the later "mock" biography Orlando, and in that capacity "Friendships Gallery" illustrates Woolf's growing control over her literary inheritance as she satirically mocks the failures of biography and novels to capture the "granite" and the "rainbow" of individuals' lives . For Woolf, the ideological connection between these traditional narratives of experience must necessarily come under investigation, particularly if a woman's life is to be told. Her narrative's self-conscious, satiric use of established forms illustrates how these forms in turn could be reconstructed for different ideological ends.

The comic tropes of Woolf's "Friendships Gallery" (her emphasis on Violet's physical height and persistent laugh, the disruptions of narrative time) as well as the biographer's self-conscious rejection of sentimental and realistic narrative forms suggest the sketch's pivotal position in Woolf's feminist revisions of literary traditions. In this more "proper writing of lives" (15 April 1908, Letters 1: 325), "Friendships Gallery" tells Violet Dickinson's history by way of a dialogic emphasis on voice, in order to convey the energy and strength of Violet's character from birth through middle age--a range of female experience not traditionally recorded within the conventions of either the nineteenth-century biography or novel. By explicitly calling on both the historiographic and novelistic conventions for writing a woman's life, Woolf's biographical sketch of Dickinson reveals how these narrative forms can limit a woman's material existence within a capitalist society's histories and stories. Woolf therefore e xplicitly writes into her narrative what patriarchal ideologies and, consequently, history often elide: a woman's individual character, expressed through body and voice.

Since the tension between biographical truth and literary fiction is explicitly worked out in the pages of this early biographical sketch, "Friendships Gallery" offers early evidence for Woolf's goal of a new "art" of biography that strives to capture "the truth of real life and the truth of fiction," however "antagonistic" and "incompatible" those truths may be ("The New Biography" [1927], 154-55). John Stape's assertion that we find the roots of Orlando in "The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn" (1906), "Memoirs of a Novelist" (1909), and "The Jessamy Brides" (1927) is therefore appropriate but incomplete (xi). While these three texts certainly contribute to the development of Woolf's art, I believe that "Friendships Gallery" best represents the complex root system from which Orlando grows. In the pages of "Friendships Gallery," we see nearly all of the qualities Stape identifies in his description of Orlando: a "hybrid genre of mock forms," "simultaneously a novel, a treatise on biography, a study of the ar t of fiction, a work of feminist social criticism, a revisionist literary history and the fantastically reinvented life history of Woolf's friend" (xi).

The sketch's three chapters each offer a view of Violet's character that balance, in varying combinations, the "truths" of life and fiction: the first, untitled, chapter comically tells of Violet's birth, childhood, and first season; "Chapter Two: The Magic Garden" offers not only a comic but also a fantastic narrative of Violet's early years in society; and, finally, "Chapter Three: A Story to Make You Sleep" shifts almost completely into the realm of the fantastic by relating Violet's trip to Japan as a tale of a giant princess who saves a village from monsters by laughing and brandishing her umbrella. After briefly placing "Friendships Gallery" in the context of Woolf's other

early biographical writings and noting its critical reception since its publication in 1979, I will identify three ways in which this early comic sketch anticipates Orlando and the feminist concerns of Woolf's later work: first, through her questioning of a third-person, omniscient narrative style typical of historiography and biogra phy; second, through her revisions to Meredith's definition of the Comic Spirit, embodied by Violet's character in "Friendships Gallery"; and third, through her choice of romance and fantasy as alternative narrative forms for the telling of a woman's life. My goal is not only to recover an early sketch for further critical study but also to identify the importance of "Friendships Gallery" to our critical narrative of Woolf's development as a feminist writer.