Listing to the right: authority and inheritance in 'Orlando' and 'Ulysses.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1994 by Caroline Webb

5 And sometimes even then: David Daiches, among others, remarked how the Preface demonstrates "the seriousness with which Virginia Woolf took her job of historical reconstruction" (99). J. J. Wilson, quoting Daiches with "horrified fascination" (177), insists that "In the so-called 'Writer's Preface' ... the mask drops, the hoax is obvious" (176), but is forced to qualify her statement: "The arbitrariness and acerbity of sentiment and tone are unmistakable to anyone accustomed to the habits of the rabid anti-novelist" (176; my italics). I argue that the original readers of this novel would not expect it to be the work of a rabid anti-novelist, and would fall into the many traps Wilson describes in the course of her illuminating essay.

6 See note 4. Similarly, following Frank Baldanza's observation of Woolf's debt to Sackville-West's history of her family, Knole and the Sackvilles, James Naremore has remarked the parodic nature of the inventory in Orlando chapter 2, which absurdly multiplies items from an inventory given in Knole and the Sackvilles and mocks Sackville-West's deprecation of its quoted length with "Already -- it is an effect lists have on us -- we are beginning to yawn" (109; Naremore chapter 8, esp. 207-08). (Naremore denies the notion that Woolf's general method in Orlando is parodic of literary history.) Although this list is explicitly a document Orlando's biographer quotes as evidence, its actual source again remains unnamed; Orlando's reality is thus attested in the terms of the fiction, but her reality beyond the borders of that fiction remains concealed.

7 C. P. Sanger in fact read a paper to the Cambridge Heretics on Emily Bronte's understanding of the law of real property in Wuthering Heights, as Woolf may have been aware. The implication that her book, like Bronte's, is a fiction, again, occurs on second thought -- and the further point that Sanger's reading of Wuthering Heights treated it as reality later still.

8 The many references to family members that stud this list underline its relation to notions of ancestral tradition -- we may think here of Woolf's famous assertion, "For we think back through our mothers if we are women," a claim speaking not for biological but for literary daughters (Room 76). So Vita Sackville-West, unable to inherit her father's entailed estate, regained it through her long poem "The Land," like Orlando's "The Oak Tree" a celebration of the heart of the country. The novel Orlando: A Biography can be seen as a parodic restoration to Vita of her home, and the fictiveness of the restoration (itself parodying the defeated challenge of Vita's illegitimate uncle to her father's claim) is marked in the fictiveness of Woolf's other acknowledgments, as a necessary ruse to reappropriate the female inheritance.

9 In this context it is interesting to note, as Christy L. Burns has reminded me, that Orlando marked for Woolf a similar revitalization, releasing a comic energy that bubbles through the novel and leads to the linguistic sea change of The Waves.