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

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1994 by Caroline Webb

Such subversion may be seen, for instance, at that climactic moment when Orlando is revealed as a woman. The masque scene, appropriate to the period, features the three allegorical sisters Purity, Chastity, and Modesty circling Orlando with their veils in the effort to conceal his/her naked and disturbing sexuality; their ritual pleas are foiled by the trumpet cry for Truth. The scene is handled with just that seriousness with which the Preface has treated its scholarly pretentions. Here the ritual dance of goddesses is presented without comment, framed only by the present-tense state direction / description of their movements. The very consistency of the episode itself highlights the discrepancy between this moment and what has preceded it: in place of the sympathetic attention the biographer has lavished on Orlando we are invited to watch, as it were, the staging of just such attention. And the voices of the sisters after all reveal the absurdity of the drama -- and perhaps of the biographer's anxiety -- as well as of the reverence for these virtues implied by their allegorical embodiment:

The Sisters become distracted and wail in unison, still circling and flinging their veils up and down.

"It has not always been so! But men want us no longer; the women detest us. We go; we go. I (Purity says this) to the hen roost. I (Chastity says this) to the still unravished heights of Surrey. I (Modesty says this) to any cosy nook where there are curtains in plenty." (136)

The masque defeat of the sisters, itself formally characteristic of such a production, is underscored by a moment of twentieth-century humor. The virtues' goals are surprisingly banal, and Chastity's words engage in a literary play that sharply questions her claim to value. The lofty "still unravished heights," with its Keatsian overtone, is undercut by the banal "of Surrey"; this is no bride of quietness but a partner of the estate agents, involved in the urban Londoner's flight to an, idealized countryside. As with the ironies of the preface, this phrase takes force from the identity of its elements: the phrase "still unravished heights" is a Romantic description and a suburban sales pitch in the same moment, indeed is commercially successful because of its elevated metaphor. It is unsurprising then that Modesty's goal implies a self-interpretation much more superficial than the association with Purity and Chastity would suggest; the traditional hierarchy of virtue is subverted here as thoroughly, and as modestly, as is the traditional hierarchy of authority by Woolf's Preface.

Thus the Preface gains point from the novel it introduces, for we are eventually able to recognize that it is a subversive impersonation of a twentieth-century form -- the scholarly biography -- as the above moment impersonates the seventeenth-century masque. But it also invites us to understand the nature of the novel itself and its relation to the literary and biographic tradition. For if Orlando can be placed on the bookstore shelf with real biographies (to Woolf's distress, as recorded in her diary for Saturday September 22, 1928: it was, she says, "a high price to pay for the fun of calling it a biography" [3:198]), that questions the status of texts, of biographies in general, as surely as the character of Orlando, immutable yet ever changing across the centuries, questions the notion of identity itself. Like its protagonist, the Preface stands outside history and questions its production; its parody, so close as to feel remote, undoes our understanding of what it means to read and learn from a text.