The Hogarth Press was the name of the publishing house that Woolf opened with her husband, Leonard Woolf, in London.
The reference, as well as Woolf's tone and adoption of a nineteenth-century biography style which was dominated by male authors, leads the reader to suspect that Woolf intends the narrator to scan as masculine. The narrator's ideas are generally put forth as echoes of "men's ideas" about women, especially in the section in chapter four where the narrator discusses the transformation of Orlando from Lord Orlando to Lady Orlando. For further discussion of this point, refer to the section from chapter four, and the reference in the notes.
By "everyone whose opinion is worth consulting," Woolf means biographers who are famous for having written biographies in the 19th century, which would mean men. Women, in the Victorian era, generally wrote poetry or novels; biography--like scientific and historic works--were the almost-exclusive bailiwick of male authors. For more information about Victorian authors and literature, see The Victoria Research Web or The Victorian Women Writers Project.
Woolf's narrator defines "life" in the Romantic sense--life is action, bloodshed, accomplishment, emotion, struggle, and passion. Life is not merely contemplation and introspection. In essence, then, the narrator provides a nineteenth-century perspective on life.
Woolf's narrator provides the argument that "Where there is blood there is life" as a statement about the proper subject of biography or of history: the actions (often the violent actions) of men. Wars, battles, conflicts, and other sheddings of blood made up much of the body of historical knowledge in the nineteenth century. Women, who do not shed blood (according to this construct of male and female) are therefore not the proper subject of biography or history.
Here Woolf may be making an ironic argument about war (especially about World War I) by having her narrator, a product of the nineteenth century, present killing as an accomplishment, and killing men as a greater accomplishment than killing wasps. Woolf's pacifism was tremendously important to her; and in fact, she committed suicide in a depression over the onset of World War II.
The narrator lists characteristics that he has established (in chapter four) as female behaviors: "her sighs and gasps, her flushing, her palings, her eyes now bright as
lamps, now haggard as dawns."
Thus the narrator lays out the way in which women's biographies must be written differently than men's: they must focus on that which women, as opposed to men, do. What women do, according to Victorians, is "love," but of course, by the late Victorian era, this "love" would have been transformed from chaste romance to an emerging passionate sexuality. Thus, the narrator presents women's lives as significant only when they come into contact with males' lives as their wives or (less preferably) as their lovers. Contrast this with the ways in which women's historians call for a redefinition of what is significant in order to "find" women in history. The narrator adheres to his general ideas about women as secondary, subservient, and dependent; women's historians argue for women's equality in significance and centrality in their own stories.
The narrator dismisses Orlando's writing and thinking as insignificant and as mere "play"--a pretence that will soon be replaced by "real" performance of her historical role as a woman, which is to love.
This reference to Orlando thinking of a gamekeeper is a reference to the relationship between a noblewoman trapped in a passionless marriage and her gamekeeper depicted by D. H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928), which appeared the same year as Orlando. In Lawrence's novel, he depicted Lady Chatterly's life as a search for passion which was fulfilled by her burly and virile gamekeeper.
In these parenthetical comments, Woolf's narrator states the "common perception" of women's thinking and writing: that if women are thinking of men, then that form of thinking is acceptable, and as long as women are writing men notes about how they are thinking about them, then that form of writing is acceptable, The way in which the narrator states these "truisms" can also be read as Woolf's voice, tinged with sarcasm, peeking though into the text.
Here, the narrator ventures to wonder if Orlando (as a woman) is not a "monster of iniquity" because she "does not love." However, she does do some things which Lord Orlando did and which would be seen as masculine: "She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry." This expression of "love" would be standard and acceptable if Orlando were a male; hence, there is no speculation that Orlando is a "monster." But Orlando, as a woman, is expected to experience and show a vastly different version of love lest she be compared to a monster.
Here, as in the case of the parenthetical comments above, Woolf's voice comes through in her derision of female love being defined by male authors as a woman's yielding of herself sexually to a male, and therefore giving her life meaning.
In stating a biographical subject that refuses to kill or love "is no better than a corpse," Woolf's narrator is providing the reasons why women's stories could remain unwritten: most women did not do anything important enough (kill) to write about, and those women who did something worthy of writing about were unfit for decent people to read about. Thus Victorians might know the names of Queen Victoria and Joan of Arc, but the vast majority of women's names would be unknown. And "propriety" would hold that a woman's name should only appear in a newspaper at three times during her life--at her birth, her wedding, and her death. This dictum would serve to make women's accomplishments and experiences invisible to most observers.
Back to Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography (1928)
Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for History 182 (Women's History and Feminist Theory), The Department of History, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York. Send email to lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu
Woolf also echoes the feminist critique of women's social and political place in Britain, where they lived under the Doctrine of Coverture. This legal Doctrine placed married women under the legal jurisdiction of their husbands--married women had no right to sue or to be sued, to own land, or to vote, for example, because their husbands were held to perfom these duties on their wives' behalf. As a result, many feminists objected to this Doctrine as making married woman, socially and politically, "corpses."
Fall Semester 1997. Last modified: Wednesday 1 October 1997