Reading readers in Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography

Style, Summer, 1994 by Kathryn N. Benzel

The disruptive nature of the perspective, embedded in the ironic remarks "for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it," asks the readers to question the very bases by which we gain knowledge in the text--biography as literary representation and sexuality as identity. Thus, at the beginning of Orlando, Orlando's sexual ambiguity, an obvious character instability in this text, confuses conventional literary paths to meaning and consequently problematizes the reader's role. The resulting tension influences the narrative reader's perception of Orlando as character and prompts the authorial reader to question the implied author's strategies used to represent truthful, that is biographical, character. Like Mary Carmichael, Woolf's fictionalized author in A Room of One's Own, the biographer-narrator here breaks "the expected sequence" of characterization in order to investigate biography's and narrative's power to reflect reality (AROO 85).

Throughout the first chapter, the biographer self-consciously addresses the audience. We find such statements as "[d]irectly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore" (15); "and the biographer should here call attention to the fact that this clumsiness is often mated with a love of solitude" (17); "here, indeed, we lay bare rudely, as a biographer may, a curious trait in him, to be accounted for, perhaps, by the fact that a certain grandmother of his had worn a smock and carried milkpails" (28); "the biographer must not stop either, but must fly as fast as he can and so keep pace with the unthinking passionate foolish actions and sudden extravagant words in which, it is impossible to deny, Orlando at this time of his life indulged" (46). This emphasis on the difficulty of representing Orlando, coupled with the narrator's failure to provide specific details (though there is a great deal of impressionistic detail), illustrate Orlando's ambiguous identity. The naivete of the narrative audience, reading for representation, allows this confusing and/or inadequate information to be absorbed into the story as a feature of Orlando's characterization: not only do we have a fantastic subject in Orlando but also a quirky biographer. As we cast about for some key or cue to this Orlando, we are only further confused by the narrator-biographer's inability to tell us what we need. At this point, when we become conscious of our inability to read the story because of the biographer's inadequacy or reluctance, the authorial audience's awareness of the novel' s unusual craft is intensified. By the end of chapter 1 neither Orlando nor our reading has yielded meaning in the conventional sense of "rounded" characterization, an imitation of reality, a slice of life. The distance between the reader's two perspectives has grown so wide that the authorial audience can step back in order to view the reading experience of the narrative audience as part of the story's subject. How we read Orlando's story is as much the subject of this text as the character of Orlando.