Reading readers in Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography

Style, Summer, 1994 by Kathryn N. Benzel

The gap between the narrative and authorial audiences continues to widen as the narrator attempts to explain Orlando's change from male to female.(2) By drawing attention to the fantastic elements of Orlando's miraculously developed female status, the narrator satisfies the narrative audience's need for a "dark, mysterious, and undocumented" character. And by focusing on the inadequacy of sexuality as a signal to characterization and plausible human consciousness, the implied author presents the authorial audience with a parody of conventional biographical techniques, a self-conscious authorial comment on the difficulty of representing truth of (in) character.

In the following scene the narrator attempts to explain the sex change in a conventional rational way by listing possible causes: "1) that Orlando had always been a woman, 2) that Orlando is at this moment a man. Let the biologists and psychologists determine. It is enough for us to state the simple fact; Orlando was a man till the age of thirty; when he became a woman and has remained so ever since" (O 139). But this approach does not succeed in clarifying Orlando's gender; it serves only to challenge the reader's idea of gender as fact and as reality. The understatement is clear; the "simple fact" is again not so simple if the narrator is unable to explain it and relinquishes the task to scientists. The narrative tension resulting from the instability of Orlando's character and from the narrator's ambivalent stance invites the authorial audience to consider the mode of presentation here. As narrative readers, we look for clues to the sex change, examining the text for signs in the characters' faces, in their behavior, or in Orlando's comportment. Yet, there are no such clues. In fact, Orlando's lack of surprise and complete acceptance of the "new woman" counters the narrator' s confused stance, creating a particular tension between the narrator and character and between the narrator and reader. In the midst of this tension, the narrator's "bare hints" force the reader to take responsibility for characterizing Orlando's sexuality (since the narrator does not). But in order to do so, our thinking must be liberated from conventional biographical standards about "truth" and representation and we must read into the "dark, mysterious, undocumented" reality (O 65). Again, the narrator leaves the subject in the reader's lap. We are asked to fend for ourselves, to make of the story what we may: "let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can" (O 139). The notion of sexuality becomes a thorny subject for the narrator when she is unwilling to use it as a means of identifying Orlando. By avoiding the issue altogether, the narrator liberates us from preconceptions of sexual stereo-typing, allowing the narrative audience to accept this fantastic image of Orlando and encouraging the authorial audience "to join in the chorus" ("Anon" 382).

The narrator's dismissive attitude toward this sex change illustrates the rejection of conventional techniques of character delineation, and consequently the reader's expectations are disrupted, in this instance, to a purpose. Orlando's unexpected sex change and the narrator's difficulty in representing it have the unsettling effect of asking the readers to revalue their authority as readers of this text. As both narrative and authorial readers, we find ourselves in peculiarly awkward positions. We become extremely conscious of the gap between our narrative reading of Orlando' s character and our authorial reading for craft. At this point in Orlando we are asked to work against our narrative reading of typical female or male characterization as we search for an authorial hinge to unify the craft of the text, to bring into some whole the instabilities of Orlando' s character. At the narrative level, we accept the narrator's cues for characterization and progression: Orlando has changed to female, a situation which will affect her goals in the story, and the story will progress. However, the narrator's difficulty in representing this new female Orlando makes obvious the questions about appropriate narrative and biographical conventions and widens the gap between the narrative and authorial audiences.