Blooms Literary Themes - THE TRICKSTER.pdf - ymerleksi - home

ORLANDO
(VIRGINIA WOOLF )
,.
“With Orlando in Wonderland”
by Rossitsa Artemis, University of Nicosia, Cyprus
Virginia Woolf has earned both notoriety and admiration among
scholars and common readers for a number of “diffi cult” but beautiful
works like Th e Voyage Out (1916), Jacob’s Room (1922), Mrs Dalloway
(1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), and Th e Waves (1931). Yet she is also
well-known for the journalistic eloquence and essayistic power she
demonstrates in other works, especially A Room of One’s Own (1929)
and Th ree Guineas (1938).
Considered by many literary critics a key text in feminism and,
undoubtedly, a signifi cant Modernist text, Orlando: A Biography
(1928) especially challenges the readers’ understanding of three key
concepts in fi ction: time, setting, and character. Although Woolf had
already successfully questioned the function of these concepts in her
novels Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Orlando generated a few
unexpected twists of its own: For a book conceived by Woolf as a
“writer’s holiday,” the work poses some serious philosophical questions
for the interpretation of “time” and “self ” (Diary, III: 168). It
also irreverently tackles the genre of biography. Th e diffi culties in
interpreting Orlando, then, are the result of the book’s complexity as
an unorthodox philosophic contemplation on time and self, all packed
into a parodic biography of a (wo)man of protean quality, a trickster
not in disguise but in full display of her unthinkable powers to reshape
gender and sexual politics over a period of some fi ve centuries.
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