Name :Bhatt Riddhiben D.
Sem :2
Roll No. :15
PG year :2020-2022
PG Enrollment No. :3069206420200004
Paper Name :106 (The Twentieth Century Literature: 1900 to World War II)
Topic Name :Biographical Truth as a Represented in Virginia Woolf’s
ORLANDO:A BIOGRAPHY
Submitted to :Smt. S.B.Gardi Department of English
Biographical Truth as a Represented in Virginia Woolf’s
ORLANDO:A BIOGRAPHY
✅Introduction :
Woolf's lover and close friend, it is arguably one of her most popular novels; Orlando is a history of English literature in satiric form. The book describes the adventures of a poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives for centuries.Considered a feminist classic, the book has been written about extensively by scholars of women's writing and gender and transgender studies.
“Nature, who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case, often of the most incongruous, for the poet has a butcher's face and the butcher a poet's; nature, who has so much to answer for besides the perhaps unwieldy length of this sentence, has further complicated our task and added to our confusion by providing...a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends within us...[and] has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress and a capricious one at that.”
(ORLANDO- A BIOGRAPHY)
✅Where should I start with Virginia Woolf?
Virginia Woolf, original name in full Adeline Virginia Stephen. She was born January 25, 1882, London, England and died March 28, 1941, near Rodmell, Sussex. English writers whose novels, through their nonlinear approaches to narrative, exerted a major influence on the genre.She was best known for her novels, especially Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927). She also wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory, literary history, women’s writing, and the politics of power.
At the beginning of 1924, the Woolfs moved their city residence from the suburbs back to Bloomsbury, where they were less isolated from London society. Soon the aristocratic Vita Sackville-West began to court Virginia, a relationship that would blossom into a lesbian affair.
Virginia Woolf was the daughter of Leslie Stephens, a major scholar and literary critic. She grew up reading and discussing literature not only with her family but also with notable literary figures of the late nineteenth century. After her father's death, she and her sister Vanessa moved to a flat in the Bloomsbury district of London. There they began hosting regular get-togethers of friends interested in art, literature, and philosophy. This group of friends became known as the Bloomsbury Group. It was here that Virginia met Leonard Woolf.
In 1917 the Woolfs began the Hogarth Press. Their policy was to publish new and experimental works of literature. They also published translations of major Russian and German writers and pamphlets on psychoanalysis, politics, aesthetics, and disarmament.
Considered a major Modernist writer, Woolf rejects the "materialism" of many early twentieth-century writers. She is interested instead in a more delicate rendering of areas of consciousness where, she felt, human experience really lay. She experiments with the movement between specific external events and the flow of consciousness where the mind moves between retrospect and anticipation. Her fiction deals with the problem of self-identity, personal relationships, and the significance of time, change, and memory on the individual.
✅What is the definition of biography?
A biography is a description of a real person’s life, including factual details as well as stories from the person’s life. Biographies usually include information about the subject’s personality and motivations, and other kinds of intimate details excluded in a general overview or profile of a person’s life. The vast majority of biography examples are written about people who are or were famous, such as politicians, actors, athletes, and so on. However, some biographies can be written about people who lived incredible lives, but were not necessarily well-known. A biography can be labelled “authorized” if the person being written about, or his or her family members, have given permission for a certain author to write the biography.
✅Significance of Biography in Literature
The genre of biography developed out of other forms of historical nonfiction, choosing to focus on one specific person’s experience rather than all important players. There are examples of biography all the way back to 44 B.C. when Roman biographer Cornelius Nepos wrote Excellentium Imperatorum Vitae (“Lives of those capable of commanding”). The Greek historian Plutarch was also famous for his biographies, creating a series of biographies of famous Greeks and Romans in his book Parallel Lives. After the printing press was created, one of the first “bestsellers” was the 1550 famous biography Lives of the Artists by Giorgio Vasari. Biography then got very popular in the 18th century with James Boswell’s 1791 publication of The Life of Samuel Johnson. Biography continues to be one of the best selling genres in literature, and has led to a number of literary prizes specifically for this form.
✅What are the qualities of a good biography?
5 Common Traits Of A Successful Memoir
Drama – It Entertains You. It is the memoirist's duty to make the memoir come alive for the reader. ...
Relevance – It Makes You Think. Readers of memoirs want to relate to the story. ...
Authenticity – It Makes You Feel. Readers want to feel a connection. ...
Character Arc – It Makes You Learn. ...
After Effect – It Makes You Remember.
✅Is Virginia Woolf’s “ORLANDO” biography ?
Orlando: A Biography, published in 1928, was not Woolf's most famous work, but it was one of her most intense considerations of gender. Through the life of the extraordinary character Orlando, Woolf examines the meanings of masculinity and femininity as these definitions changed in Europe over the course of four hundred years. In tracing those changes, Woolf presents a feminist overview of history from the days of Elizabeth the First to the end of World War I. Orlando, who was modeled on Woolf's close friend VitaSackville-West, goes from being a young man in Queen Elizabeth's court to a love affair with a Muscovite princess; from Ambassador Extraordinary to encounters, now as Lady Orlando, with the famous English writers Pope, Addison, and Swift; finally, Orlando experiences childbirth.
Woolf was inspired to write Orlando when Sackville-West took her to Knole, to show her the place where she had grown up, that had belonged to the Sackville family for centuries, and as Sackville-West bitterly noted she would have inherited if only she had been born male.It had lasted three years, beginning at Christmas 1925, and Sackville-West had altered Woolf's mind. The author had used every ounce of the affair to propel her own writing, and to alter how fiction could be written – and, in A Room of One's Own, to discuss how women might soon alter the world with their writing.
As the protagonist and title-character of the novel, Orlando is the primary interest of the narrator. The narrator is a biographer whose duty it is to tell the facts of Orlando's life as clearly and truthfully as possible.
✅Overview of Orlando:
Orlando is the connection between fact and imagination. In Woolf's review of Harold Nicholson's Some People, she opened with this analogy: "if we think of truth as something of granite-like solidity and of personality as something of rainbow-like intangibility and reflect that the aim of biography is to weld these two into one seamless whole, we shall admit that the problem is a stiff one and that we need not wonder if biographers, for the most part failed to solve it." The metaphor of granite and rainbow emerges again in her own novel when she discusses Nature "who has played so many queer tricks upon us, making us so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite, and stuffed them into a case."
Woolf suggests that there is no realm of imagination separated from a realm of fact; "rainbow and granite" are stuffed into one case. Everything (internal and external, fact and imagination) are linked together by our memory, and we will grow to "understand" when we realize that neither memory nor history can be easily ordered and divided. Fact is a subjective quality, and the 'truth' emerges when we realize the interconnectedness and relativity of everything and everyone around us. It is such a unity of experience, not a triumph of "fact" that emerges victorious over time
Orlando's sexuality seems to play no role in her life at all. But when she travels on board the English ship, in women's clothes, she immediately begins to feel the difference. The skirts that she is wearing, and the way that people react to her make her feel and act different. What Woolf is suggesting here is that gender roles are not biological, but societal. Gender is a concept imposed on people who live in society. When Orlando goes out into the night, a woman dressed as a man, she finds herself taking on traditional male mannerisms. The point is that when society allows the freedom of gender neutrality, people will be more free as individuals to act according to their nature and personality.The determination of difference between the genders is a main theme in Orlando. Are men and women really different? If so, why? Orlando's sex change is a very important scene for determining the answers to these questions. As Orlando wakes up a woman, she looks at her body in a full-length mirror and composedly walks to her bath. She is not at all disconcerted by her change in gender because she feels no different than she did before. At first, she acts no differently, either. When she lives in the gypsy camp in the hills of Turkey, away from society and civilization.
But such conformity becomes oppressive to Orlando. She grows tired of changing herself to fit those around her. Ultimately, when she reaches maturity in the twentieth century, she resists conforming, choosing instead to exist in her own internal world. She realizes that though she has matured, as people do, she has always been the same person all along. This theme of 'conforming to society' plays an important role in the novel. As Orlando grows to be an independent mind, she rejects the idea of conformity, choosing to remain however she chooses to be.
✅Biographical Truth as a Represented in Virginia Woolf’s ORLANDO: A BIOGRAPHY
The purpose of this topic is to define and expound on the truth to be found in the biographical representations of Woolf’s fantastical text, Orlando, and also to provide a framework for an assessment of that truth.The question of biographical truth in Orlando belongs to a broader spectrum of investigation which deals with the modes of representation in biographical writing used by a specific group of writers who, in the 1920s and 1930s, developed a new form of modernist biography, called “The New Biography” by Virginia Woolf in her essay of 1927. Lytton Strachey, Harold Nicolson and André Maurois were Woolf’s new biographers and she brought them together in what she defined as a “new school of biographies”.
How is it possible to consider that there is any biographical truth in Orlando, which narrates the life story of an Elizabethan courtier that exceeds three hundred years? The first question to ask is: what does Orlando represent? At the time of its publishing, it was no mystery for the tuned-in reader that Orlando stood for Woolf’s friend and lover at the time, the writer Vita Sackville-West; but, in which way can that particular mode of representation be defined? In Woolf’s vision of biography, only the techniques of literary fiction had the required creativity to grasp and convey truth about a subject.
Woolf considered metaphor as the most effective form of representation in digging out the truth about Vita’s character, introducing fictionalised adventures in which Vita’s personality would be conveyed as it had been experienced by Woolf herself. A factual chronicle would not have produced any more that an empty shell: in Woolf’s view, we are made “so unequally of clay and diamonds, of rainbow and granite,”16 and fantasy allowed Woolf to express that. The ingenuity resides in the book having several levels of reading, ranging from the public level, accessible to the common reader, to the very intimate level, which only these two women could have experienced. As Vita Sackville-West’s biographer, Victoria Glendinning, writes, “There are references that anyone who knew Vita well would recognise, and others – like the ‘porpoise in a fishmonger’s shop’ – that were private between Vita and Virginia.”17 Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville’s son, famously called Orlando “the longest and most charming love letter in the history of literature”18 ; this is part of the meaning produced by Vita’s life emplotted19 in the form of a fanaticism epic, in which the hero is engaged in a quest for truth through poetry.
Finally, Orlando is to be considered a territory for Woolf’s biographical investigations of Vita Sackville-West and, at the same time, offers a set of representations of certain aspects of her life and personality. The answer to the question whether, on the one hand, Woolf’s exploration of her subject enabled her to grasp who Vita was as well as the deployment of her life, and whether, on the other hand, the representation of the aspects of her subject was truthful, lies in the reception of the text itself by those who knew Vita, whether directly or indirectly. knole House,Vita’s poetry, her tumultuous love affair with Violet Trefusis, her bouts of travesty.
✅References:
- Brown, Susan, et al. “An Introduction to the Orlando Project.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, vol. 26, no. 1, 2007, pp. 127–134. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20455312. Accessed 6 June 2021.
- Craft-Fairchild, Catherine. “‘Same Person...Just a Different Sex’: Sally Potter's Construction of Gender in ‘Orlando.’” Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 7, 2001, pp. 23–48. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24906451. Accessed 6 June 2021.
- "Virginia Woolf's Orlando: The Book as Critic". www.tetterton.net. Retrieved 7 May 2016.
THANK YOU....
No comments:
Post a Comment