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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1994 by Caroline Webb

On further consideration an attentive reader might perceive not an irony but a discontinuity in that these writers' mastery was displayed in very different forms. As Woolf had written in her diary in 1925, "I don't think it is a matter of 'development' but something to do with prose & poetry, in novels. For instance Defoe at one end; E. Bronte at the other. Reality something they put at different distances" (3:50). Distance from reality, indeed, will be a central question in Orlando, which Woolf herself thought of at first as a jeu d'esprit: the hero/heroine moves through times and spaces that are carefully documented (at one point the biographer must pore over the scraps of a half-burned journal) yet of a joyfully fictitious nature: Orlando and her household are relatively untroubled by her agelessness or by his change of sex--"No one showed an instant's suspicion that Orlando was not the Orlando they had known" (170). (His/her alteration produces a comic confusion of titles merely: when the housekeeper greeted Orlando on her return as a woman after a prolonged absence, "making as if to curtsey, [she] was overcome with emotion and could do no more than gasp Milord! Milady! Milady! Milord! until Orlando comforted her with a hearty kiss on both cheeks," an aptly dual gesture [169]). Woolf's acknowledgment to great writers pays tribute, in fact, to the intermerging of fact and fiction found in Defoe's elaborate documentation of Moll Flanders's "history" and Lockwood's story-in-story recounting of Wuthering Heights as well as in the historian Macaulay's imaginative renderings of ancient Rome. Thus the list does indeed acknowledge a debt owed by the text; but it is not quite the debt suggested by the careful scholarship of its tone. Again, however, if this is humor it is subtle indeed.

In the remainder of the list Woolf again either locates names appropriately, in the case of the famous, or explains them satisfactorily, in the case of those unknown to the public. The result is a judicious mingling of scholarly acknowledgments to real authorities with the more personal acknowledgments of assistance from friends that ostensibly mirrors similar biographical prefaces; only an insider, sometimes one who has read the novel, sometimes only a member of her circle, would understand the jokes, still less perceive their implications. The humor remains disturbingly unlocatable, vanishing if we stare at it directly -- like Woolf's debt to not only the identity but the writings of her model, Vita Sackville-West(6) -- and evaluate Woolf's claims to scholarship.

Thus she adds, "I am specially indebted to Mr. C. P. Sanger, without whose knowledge of the law of real property this book could never have been written"; Sanger was a recognized authority on this area of law, which indeed plays an important part in Orlando's history.(7) But Woolf's treatment of property inheritance in the novel mocks its patriarchal operation: Orlando's claim to lands he has owned for two hundred years is challenged when he becomes a woman (by his putative illegitimate sons, in fact). At issue is not only her identity -- whether a female Orlando is the same as a male Orlando is a question the protagonist herself gives much consideration -- but her status: "The chief charges against her were (1) that she was dead, and therefore could not hold any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts to much the same thing" (168). The case itself depends on an impossibility in order to highlight an absurdity, and is paradoxically resolved after another century when she is declared a woman and her estates restored "to descend and [be] tailed and entailed on the heirs male of [her] body" (255). The court can, it seems, accept that Orlando, once the legitimate male heir, is now still the owner, though female; yet it insists on retaining the fiction of primogeniture, that "heirs male" are so different from female descendants that they alone can legitimately inherit -- the fiction that displaced Vita Sackville-West, her parents' only child, in favor of her male cousin. If C. P. Sanger indeed helped his friend understand the law of real property that governed the inheritance of Knole, she does not accord it the reverence her preface suggests.