Reading readers in Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography

Style, Summer, 1994 by Kathryn N. Benzel

Upsetting conventional notions of biography and characterization in this way complicates the reader's authority. As the narrator-biographer becomes more self-conscious and the biographical subject is parodied, the distance between the narrative and authorial audiences increases. As we attempt to cope with the tension between the narrative and authorial audiences, we are required to reflect on both the story told and the telling of the story, and, consequently, we are prompted to consider the relationship between the character of Orlando and our reading of characterization as representation. What emerges, I believe, is a realization that the multiplicity of the text, of Orlando's character as representation, becomes the central logos of this text and, thus, we are placed in the precarious position of "making up from bare hints dropped here and there the whole boundary and circumference of a living person," that person being both Orlando and reader.

Early in the text, the narrator-biographer replaces the implied author introduced in the prefatory material, and throughout the text the narrator-biographer continues to undermine the reader's expectations of a characterization of Orlando representing a male or female, a masculine or feminine character. The primary questions about characterization as representation and sexuality as identification are found in the first sentence: "He--for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it--was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters" (O 13). Here our attention is first directed to the sentence subject "He," also the subject of the biography, which is separated from its predicate by two narratorial, parenthetical remarks about the subject's sex. This separation highlights the subject seemingly to set up the subject for biographical analysis. We expect to have the pronoun reference clarified, but instead our expectations are interrupted, and our attention is focused on a question about the subject's potential to represent the real world through sexual identity: "for there could be no doubt of his sex." With this clause, the biographer draws into question not only the subject's identity but also its (re)presentation. If the biographer has already labeled the subject "He," why would we or should we doubt his sex? By introducing this doubt, the narrator renders the subject's identity vague and problematizes his authority. By the end of the first sentence, "He" is a "hybrid construction" belonging "simultaneously to [at least] two languages" (Bakhtin 304-05). The more obvious conventional biographical voice speaks to the narrative audience, setting down a historical-biographical rendering by introducing Orlando; however, another voice simultaneously speaks to the authorial audience, spoofing conventional male identification as a way to characterize and to represent the character's consciousness. Consequently, the narrator-biographer creates ambiguity of meaning by saying not just one thing about meaning but also by allowing for perhaps two or even more representations. We have contradiction (Is Orlando fiction or biography?); ambiguity (Is Orlando male or female?); and complication (Is Orlando disguised?), all of which create narrative tension and character instability. Thus, the reading of Orlando is centered in its potential to mean other than "novel" or "biography" and other than "male protagonist." The reader is asked to seek out the relationship between character and characterization in order to make meaning of the text.