Stef Craps
Image into Identity: Constructing and Assigning Identity in a Culture of Modernity. Ed. Michael Wintle. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 175-90.
Publication year: 2006

Orlando has often been regarded as little more than a playful interlude in Virginia Woolf’s oeuvre, and has suffered considerable critical neglect as a result. The responsibility for the dismissive mode adopted by many critics partly lies with Woolf herself, who disparagingly described the novel as “a joke”, “farce”, “a writer’s holiday”, “an escapade” (qtd. in Minow-Pinkney 1987: 117). When Orlando is not simply omitted from critical discussion altogether, it tends to be read as a fictionalised biography of Woolf’s friend and lover Vita Sackville-West. Matching the novel’s characters and events with their counterparts in the real world becomes the sole objective of critical inquiry. What this type of response hides from view, however, are the very serious, non-biographical concerns motivating the text’s apparently frivolous play. These issues have only come to be appreciated in the last few years, which have seen a marked increase in scholarly work on the novel. Taking my cue from some of these writings, I argue that Orlando, far from being an insignificant jeu d’esprit, is in fact a radical text, whose subversion of deep-seated and taken-for-granted assumptions about gendered behaviour is suppressed by its reduction to an escapade or a mere tribute to Vita Sackville-West.