These Selves

"the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age
is one of infinite delicacy . . ." (266).

Points for Reflection

"The Legacy" (1940; 1985), pp. 281-87

1. How do Angela Clandon’s diary entries morph over time?
2. How does Mr. Gilbert Clandon react to seeing his reflection in a looking-glass?
3. What did Mr. Clandon enjoy most about traveling with his young wife in their early years together?
4. What did B.M. offer Angela Clandon that she did not find elsewhere?
5. For what qualities did Gilbert appreciate Angela?
6. What supposedly “courageous” thing did B.M. do?
7. Woolf wrote this tale around 1940 but did not publish it.  Any thoughts as to why she might have withheld this tale from the public eye?

Orlando, chp. 4 (pp. 153-226)

1. Is Orlando more pleased or discomfited with the changes attendant upon her new (female) sex and social position?
2. Are Orlando's calves, so celebrated by the biographer (and any number of characters) while Orlando is a man, equally appealing once he is a woman?
3. What territory does Orlando's transformation allow Woolf to explore? What is she beginning to suggest about the nature of attraction, gender, and sexuality?
4. Does Orlando’s return to England empower her?
5. Does Orlando appear to prefer the urban or rural, once back in England?
6. For what reasons does Orlando reject Christianity, and what type of religion does she adopt as her own?
7. How has Orlando’s poetic craft changes over the years?
8. How does one get rid of an unwanted male companion when one can no longer challenge him to a duel?
9. Women in Woolf’s fiction often have trouble gazing at themselves in looking-glasses without feeling self-critical.  Is this true of Orlando?
10. Are Woolf's reflections on the social function of clothing meant to be taken seriously?
11. Do the narrator’s observations about every individual’s vacillating, flexile sex presuppose and reinscribe traditional differences between femininity and masculinity, or trouble such distinctions (189)?
12. Under which circumstances do our "illusions" about a given subject or person thrive--in darkness, or under illumination?
13. Our narrator observes—following an allusion to Alexander Pope’s personal qualities—that “every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works” (209).  Assuming this is as true of the hilariously witty Orlando (1928) as it is of the hilariously witty The Rape of the Lock (1712) by Pope, what of Virginia Woolf’s own being is on display in this novel?
14. Do you think it inappropriate for Woolf's narrator to mock Pope for dying "in a madhouse" (211)?
15. What is Nell's occupation?
16. Does the narrator answer the question of what women want when gathered together, safe from prying eyes and ears?

Orlando, chp. 5 (pp. 227-62)

1. What causes the darkness that covers London as the nineteenth century begins?
2. That chill and "damp" which Woolf locates in the nineteenth century impacts what various facets of British life?
3. Why does Eusebius Chubb make such an irreversible decision?
4. With what tone does our narrator describe human fecundity in the nineteenth century?
5. How far does Woolf's critique of the nineteenth century extend? Does it encompass every aspect of Victorian life?
6. What is the "great fact" which "every modest woman did her best to deny," assisted by a crinoline (234)?
7. What attitude towards marriage does Woolf develop across this chapter, beginning with Orlando's noticing the absence of a wedding ring on the second finger of her left hand?
8. What conclusions does the Chancery court finally reach?
9. Why do Orlando and her companion repeatedly question one another’s sex?
10. What word in the marriage vows uttered at the close of chapter five is not heard by anyone?

Orlando, chp. 6 (pp. 263-329)

1. Does chapter six continue the previous chapter's critique of marriage, or complicate it?
2. The narrator notes that “when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman’s whole existence” (268).  Does Orlando . . . love?
3. Orlando's love for Nature finally encounters a limitation in this chapter--what is it?
4. What does “The Oak Tree” want for itself, and does it obtain it?
5. Has Nick Greene changed for the better, since we last saw him in the Elizabethan age?
6. What is the “undeniable event” from which the narrator diverges as a barrel-organ begins to play in the street, and to which the narrator returns as the music ceases?
7. Does Woolf glorify the early twentieth century? What does she include, and what exclude?
8. How does Orlando react to the presence of Big Ben and other loud clocks in London?
9. Does Orlando enjoy driving her own car through the streets (306-307)?
10. What exactly interrupts Orlando's enjoyment of her centuries-old house?
11. Has the novel provided an answer to Orlando's old question of "what poetry is and what truth is" (102), and whether the two can coexist (101)?

In the Grass (1864-65)
Arthur Hughes

Dr. Paul Marchbanks
pmarchba@calpoly.edu