Reviews with content warning for Racial slurs - Orlando

The racism on page one is hard to get past and confronting without prior knowledge of continued racial slurs. Woolf’s prose and lyrical style are beautiful and make for an interesting read as are the early thoughts on gender. One day, with this knowledge perhaps I’ll return and attempt to finish it. Or perhaps someone will rewrite a contemporary version as compelling as the queer film adaptation I enjoyed recently.

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krysa_'s review

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adventurous challenging reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

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pencilspeaker's review against another edition

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emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

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heshe's review

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adventurous funny hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

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helen_jackets's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional funny inspiring reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

I usually give star ratings to help myself know how I felt about a book at the time I read it. It’s more for myself than for others. I do not feel capable of giving a star rating to Orlando because I am so conflicted about it, so I am writing this instead.

I loved reading Orlando—Woolf’s prose is alive and often very funny, and she accomplished her satirical examinations of gender and class with deftness and beauty. There is a reason Woolf is so beloved, and it is on full display here. But I was stopped in my tracks by the book’s very first line [content warning for racism here]—“He — for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it — was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”

We begin with a white British nobleman disfiguring a Black man’s severed head. I was shocked by the amount of dehumanization on display from the get-go. I had heard before that Virginia Woolf’s writing is “of it’s time” and that it doesn’t hold up to “today’s standards” but I didn’t realize what these euphemisms referred to. The only other book I’ve read by Woolf is To the Lighthouse, and I loved it. I don’t remember any overt racism in that book but I read it my freshman year of college and am a white person. I thought I might have missed something in that work as well due to my own ignorance and biases, and, sure enough, when I looked it up it seems I missed a lot. I want to return to To the Lighthouse sometime soon to see how I feel about it now that I’m in my later twenties.

Orlando is a sharp critique of gender and class structures, and their relationship with time. Woolf also uses the n-word liberally and propagates Orientalist stereotypes. If one was being extremely charitable in interpretation of her work, one could say that the racism of the characters also reflects how race is structured/how it relates to time, just like gender and class. Except there are no characters of color who are ever given pathos like the main characters. At the same time, there is another example in the novel of dead people who are dehumanized in Britain’s Great Frost during the reign of James I. I want to take a look at parts of this passage for a moment—

“The Great Frost was, historians tell us, the most severe that has ever visited these islands. Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual robust health and was seen by the onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs as the icy blast struck her at the street corner. The mortality among sheep and cattle was enormous. Corpses froze and could not be drawn from the sheets. It was no uncommon sight to come upon a whole herd of swine frozen immovable upon the road. The fields were full of shepherds, ploughmen, teams of horses, and little bird-scaring boys all struck stark in the act of the moment, one with his hand to his nose, another with the bottle to his lips, a third with a stone raised to throw at the ravens who sat, as if stuffed, upon the hedge within a yard of him. The severity of the frost was so extraordinary that a kind of petrification sometimes ensued; and it was commonly supposed that the great increase of rocks in some parts of Derbyshire was due to no eruption, for there was none, but to the solidification of unfortunate wayfarers who had been turned literally to stone where they stood. The Church could give little help in the matter, and though some landowners had these relics blessed, the most part preferred to use them either as landmarks, scratching-posts for sheep, or, when the form of the stone allowed, drinking troughs for cattle, which purposes they serve, admirably for the most part, to this day. [Passage in which Woolf writes about the frozen River Thames] Near London Bridge, where the river had frozen to a depth of some twenty fathoms, a wrecked wherry boat was plainly visible, lying on the bed of the river where it had sunk last autumn, overladen with apples. The old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side, sat there in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the world as if she were about to serve a customer, though a certain blueness about the lips hinted the truth. ’Twas a sight King James specially liked to look upon, and he would bring a troupe of courtiers to gaze with him. In short, nothing could exceed the brilliancy and gaiety of the scene by day.”

I can’t work on writing this much longer, as I have to go to work, but this passage in conjunction with the book’s themes and its opening kind of boggles my mind. We have corpses being used for sport and entertainment in both parts. I don’t think Virginia Woolf sees the mutilation of the “Moor” in the same light as she sees the bumboat woman. I could be wrong.

In this book, Woolf often makes fun of groups of male writers and their genius. Orlando goes and hangs out with a group of prostitutes and finds their talk much more engaging than she finds the talk of the “wits” of the day. This scene made me wonder how Orlando saw herself and her white collection of authors, the Bloomsbury group. Did she ever stop to think how insular their whiteness could be? Did she even see them all as white, with her antisemitism? She loved her husband Leonard Woolf, from what I understand of her own history, but she was also notably antisemitic.

The contradictions are making me think it would be super interesting to see a person of color rewrite Orlando. Maybe this is a thing that’s already been done. If it has, I will have to look it up later when I am not rushing to get to work. Obviously, my ramblings here should not be taken as some definitive guide for anyone else. I hope you get something out of them if you’ve had similar thoughts to mine about Virginia Woolf’s writings. I’m just thinking of how horrible H. P. Lovecraft was as a person and how I’m so grateful that works by N. K. Jemisin, Cadwell Turnbull, and other Black writers who have inspired by his mythos exist. I hope that is true for Virginia Woolf’s works.

Humans, race, sociology, linguistics, all incredibly complicated subjects. If someone told me that they never wanted to read Woolf because she is racist, I’d back them 100% and understand. I loved this book. I am still learning many things about race and I seek to be anti-racist, but I may fail. Not up to me. I actually spent a chunk of time writing this “review” (Idk what this is as this point lol) trying to look up if I should capitalize “white” when talking about race or not. I got tons of different opinions from lots of news sources and Black writers. I decided not to capitalize it right now because that is the standard convention I was taught in college. But isn’t it an interesting political and personal question to ask why that is? Isn’t it an interesting political and personal question to interrogate the social dynamics Woolf is presenting here? I didn’t even talk about how Orlando is also a seminal work of trans and queer literature (one could include lesbian in this as well, but is that erasure of bi people? I’m bi, I don’t want to erase myself). How does transness and queerness interact with race when some of the greatest fighters we’ve ever had for trans rights were Black trans women?

Some people may think I’m overthinking this here, and maybe I am, but reading this reminded me why I love literature. In many ways Orlando is ahead of its time, and I loved our nonbinary, wild protagonist written as a love letter to Woolf’s female lover. Love love love. So much love here. And it’s really racist. No stars. I want to read more. Bye.

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Orlando by Virginia Woolf

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