His Swollen and Violent Heart

"while fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist;
obscurity is dark, ample and free; obscurity lets the mind
take its way unimpeded" (104).

Points for Reflection

"Gipsy, the Mongrel" (1939; 1985), pp. 273-80

1. Why does Tom find himself unable to eliminate Gipsy, despite her improper behavior?
2. Does this little tale merely entertain? Does it contain any of the customary reflections about existence that usually populate Woolf’s fiction?
3. Does Woolf intend us to accept as true Mary Bridger’s silent interjections, her ponderings and reflections?
4. What proclivities and preferences does Woolf assign Gipsy?
5. At one point in their joint narrative about their dog, Lucy Bagot takes over the storytelling from her husband, Tom, and notes, “If she’d been a woman, you’d have said that some temptation was gradually overcoming her” (273/279 bot).  What do you think?  Does Woolf intend for us to anthropomorphize the mongrel, Gipsy—to see her in her behavior some reflection of human action?

Orlando, chp. 1 (pp. 13-64)

1. does Woolf configure violence as a distinctly male trait?
2. does Woolf associate innocence and beauty with femininity in the first chapter of this novel?
3. what tone dominates the narrator's observation that the Elizabethan age had a different "temper" than Woolf's own era (26-28)?
4. does Woolf construct sexual mores in the Elizabethan age as privileging one sex over the other?
5. what do you make of the enigmatic scene, recalled by Orlando, in which Sasha gnaws a tallow candle (52)?
6. this novel obviously evinces a frankness about sex absent from Woolf's other novels. To what end?
7. does Orlando's relationship with Sasha intensify his sensibility to morbidity?

Orlando, chp. 2 (pp. 65-118)

1. does Orlando's love of reading prime him for becoming a writer, or serve as a deterrent?
2. does Orlando's noble lineage seem, in his own mind, congruous with the dream of becoming a celebrated writer?
3. is the reader supposed to applaud poet Nick Greene's opinions, or deride them? [Isaac R]
4. narratologically speaking, why does Woolf spend so much space elaborating the principle that humans' perception of Time is malleable?
5. do the comic moments in this novel so proliferate throughout this novel that it is impossible to take seriously the occasional reflections on the nature of human existence, or does Woolf's humor throw her seriousness into greater relief?
6. does Woolf's treatment of love and desire in this chapter (116-18) resemble that found in her other novels?

Orlando, chp. 3 (pp. 119-52)

1. during Orlando's transformation (and its revelation), what larger commentaries might Woolf be offering concerning the nature of both society and gender?
2. does Orlando's sexual transformation move him from one side of a binary to the other, or does it position her in a more androgynous middle space?
3. can we locate a cause for Orlando's transformation? Is the male gipsy who helped the disguised Orlando escape Constantinople somehow complicit in his/her sex change?
4. does Orlando revel more in the sex change itself or the alteration of responsibilities and lifestyle enabled by that physical transformation?
5. once upon a time, "Nature and letters [seemed] to have a natural antipathy" (17). Is this still the case, for Orlando?
6. does Orlando's reliable affection for the lower classes feel inconsistent with not only his own socioeconomic status but his artistic aspirations, or is Woolf indirectly promoting some kind of bohemian ideology?
   

"A Portrait of a Young Man (c.1470-75)
Sandro Botticelli

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu