Eamvijit 1

Virginia Woolf as the Subaltern Muse: Tracing the Subaltern in Orlando: A Biography

1. Introduction

Since modernist movement coincides with the peak and the declination of the Empire,
modernist literature is often regarded to be the precursor of postcolonial movement. However, many
people consider modernist writers less radical and even apolitical since modernist movement is
generally regarded to be an artistic movement with its main focus on experiment with forms and
styles rather than social or political contexts: “The Stress within certain forms of modernism itself
contributed to the wish of the New Critics to avoid political questions” (Booth and Rigby Modernism
3). Virginia Woolf, the high Modernist writer is also considered apolitical. Her writings are usually
considered to be written from the point of view of an elite outsider who does not really understand the
feeling of the oppressed. A critic Q.D. Leavis has assaulted Virginia Woolf for being an apolitical
writer in a review of Woolf’s novel Three Guineas:

Daughters of educated men have always done their thinking from hand to mouth … [Woolf
had written]. ‘They have thought while they stirred the pot, while they rocked the cradle’ I
agree with someone who complained that to judge from the acquaintance with the realities of
life displayed in this book there is no reason to suppose Mrs Woolf would know which end of
the cradle to stir. (qtd in Bhabha 257)

However, I would like to argue that Orlando: A Biography can be read as a postcolonial text
through the close reading of the novel with the theoretical lens of subaltern studies. This paper is
divided into four parts. The first part is the brief explanation of subaltern theory according to Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”. The second part is how the narrative
technique in Orlando: A Biography criticizes homogeneous discourses that silenced the marginalized
people. The second part discusses characterization of Orlando as the Subaltern by showing how his
agency is silenced and (mis)represented in the novel. The last part illustrates how Orlando’s
subalternity leads the reader to see other subaltern in the novel that are more silenced comparing to
Orlando.

2. Historical Developments of the Concept of the Subaltern

The word ‘subaltern originally refers to “any officer in the British army who is lower in rank than
a captain” (“subaltern” 1541). This term was initially used in a political context by Marxist theorist
Antonio Gramsci in The Prison Notebooks (1929 -1935) to refer to the proletariat: “Subaltern classes
are subject to the initiatives of the dominant classes, even when they rebel; they are in a state of
anxious defense” (Guha Prison 21) Afterwards, this term was more widely known during 1980’s from
the emergence of a group called the Subaltern Studies. The founder of the group, Ranajit Guha,
defined the Subaltern Studies as “a name for the general attribute of subordination in South Asian
society whether this is expressed in terms of class, caste, age, gender and office or in any other way”
(qtd. in Louai 6). The members of this group were historians and scholars who practiced new ways of
reading Indian history in order to restore the subaltern whose roles have been erased wiped out from
the history of India’s struggle for independence. This project to resurrect their voices was later
criticized by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a member of the Subaltern Studies, in “Can the Subaltern
Speak?” (1999). Spivak criticizes the paradox of the group’s attempt to resurrect the subaltern voices
by pointing out that the project is problematic. She argues that the group that tries to rewrite the
history for the subaltern, in fact, robs them of their agency at the same time. As a result, the subaltern,
according to Spivak, cannot speak.
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3. Subalternity in Orlando: A Biography

Since the Subaltern Studies group was founded originated in India with the goal of studying and
reconsidering Indian historiography, the idea of the subaltern studies has generally been understood as
a critical approach originating from postcolonial studies. However, the idea of muted voices can, in
fact be traced back to a time before the postcolonial political movement. Virginia Woolf, a modernist
writer, shows her awareness of subaltern voices in Orlando: A Biography (1928). In this
semibiographical novel, Woolf calls the reader’s attention to traces of subaltern voices through a spoof
biographer and characterization of Orlando as the subaltern. Orlando’s status as subaltern leads to
imagining of the other subaltern, who are even more silenced than Orlando.
Firstly, Orlando: A Biography can be read as a parody of two popular writings in Western culture:
biographical and historical writings as discussed in Colleen Donovan’s dissertation “Some Love of
England: Virginia Woolf and English National Culture”: “Among the many objects of Woof’s satire in
Orlando is the novel’s narrator or mock- biographer She modeled his narrator on the ideal Victorian
biographers promoted by her father … , which Jane Marcus describes as ‘a master cultural narrative
of England as a history of the lives of Great Men” (Donovan 191)
On the other hand, women were almost invisible in the history. The eradication of women’s
agency from history in this novel is seen from the beginning. The first scene in the novel, the readers
see Orlando as a child imitating the act of killing the moor as his male ancestors did in history:
“Orlando’s father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had
started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa” (3). However, there is no mention of the
role of Orlando’s female ancestors in the past. Women in are often backdrop in history because the
only duty of females, like Orlando’s mother, is to give birth to great men. As a result, history can be
regarded as masculine space that prevents women from speaking for themselves. Woolf parodies these
dominating male voices through the voice of a spoof biographer. Although biography is assumed to be
a serious form writing that realistically portrays the lives of important people, its reliability is
questioned by the narrative in the novel. Despite the formal pattern of a biography, Orlando’s life is
told by jocular and satirical voice. The biographer’s unreliability is reflected in gaps of evidence,
such as damaged papers that cannot be read, and also in the biographer’s inability to catch every
aspect of Orlando’s slippery identity: For [Orlando] had a great variety of selves to call upon, far more
than we have been able to find room for, since a biography is considered complete if it accounts for
six or seven selves, whereas a person may well have as many thousands” (202).
These metafictional elements in the novel propel the readers to detach themselves from the
presumed veracity of the biographer’s voice and points out the inadequacy of the dominant discourse
as the only interpretation of reality. Another subversion of dominant discourse in the narrative is the
handling of duration. The story contains magical events such as the extraordinary duration of the
Great Frost, and Orlando’s five-century lifespan.
In addition to challenging the veracity of history and biography through the mocking voice of a
spoof biographer, Woolf portrays the inadequacy of dominant discourses though the limitations of
language that is insufficient for describing reality. Limitations of language in this novel are
emphasized through Orlando’s reflection on language as a false representation of nature:

“The sky is blue”, he said, “the grass is green.” Looking up, he saw that, on the contrary, the
sky is like veils which a thousand Madonnas have let fall from their hairs and the grass fleets
and darkens like a flight of girls fleeing the embraces of hairy satyrs from enchanted woods
… Both are utterly false.(62)

and through Orlando’s inability to describe Sasha: “Ransack the language as he might, words fail him.
He wanted another landscape and another tongue” (25). Orlando’s desire to escape from the old
language system urges the reader to reccognize a limitation of one language. The variety and
undecidability of the genre of this novel also suggests alternative interpretations of the reality
including the subaltern. Although Orlando: A Biography seems to claim its genre as biography, it can
be read as (auto)biography, romance, roman à clef, bildungsroman, historical, and even science
fiction. Variety and intermixture of genres in this novel reflect the multiplicity of interpretations of
 Eamvijit 3

reality in order to uncover the traces of the subaltern that have been frozen out of the dominant
interpretation.
Apart from criticizing the limitations of dominant discourses, Woolf also discusses the
victimization of the subaltern by dominant discourses through the characterization of Orlando. Woolf
portrays Orlando as the subaltern whose voice is silenced and (mis)represented by the single dominant
voice. Through Orlando, Woolf is able to open a space for heterogeneity that lets the reader imagine
other subaltern voices in the novel. According to Spivak, the definition of the subaltern is not limited
to people of ethnic minorities or people in subordinate classes:

Simply by being postcolonial or the member of an ethnic minority, we are not

“subaltern.” That word is reserved for the sheer heterogeneity of decolonized space.
(Spivak 2207)

This definition implies that being only the postcolonial subjects is not enough to be
considered the subaltern. The condition includes that in any race, class, gender who has no
opportunity to speak for him/herself and is victimized by (mis)representation of mainstream
discourses. Therefore, Orlando’s noble birth and his English descent do not prevent him from being
one of the subaltern who are silenced. Orlando, as an object of narration, is “spoken for” by the voice
of the biographer. The oppression of Orlando by homogeneous discourses also clearly appears in his
gender transformation scene through the personification of three three female virtues: purity, chastity,
and modesty. Characteristics of the three Muses symbolize the way in which hegemonic discourse
oppresses the subaltern. Lady Purity represents mainstream discourse that covers subaltern voices:
“On all things frail or dark or doubtful, my veil descends. Wherefore, speak not, reveal not”: Lady
Chastity, who freezes Orlando instead of waking him up, and Lady Modesty, who cannot see because
her hair covers her eyes, are similar to hegemonic discourse with a single way of interpretation that
freezes the subaltern in history.
Moreover, the subaltern are controlled and victimized by (mis)representation by
homogeneous discourses and by the subaltern’s internalization of mainstream discourses themselves.
Orlando’s misrepresentation by homogeneous patriarchal discourses can be seen after gender
transformation. After Orlando has become a woman, she is oppressed by the institutions’ explicit
control of matters such as law: “The chief charges against her were (I) that she was dead, and
therefore could not hold any property whatsoever; (2) that she was a woman, which amounts to much
the same thing”(108) and clothing: “The man has his hand free to seize his sword, the woman must
use hers to keep the satins from slipping from her shoulders. The man looks the world full in the face,
as if it were made for his uses and fashioned to his liking. The woman takes a sidelong glance at it,
full of subtlety, even of suspicion” (121). Orlando herself strengthens oppression on women by male
dominant discourses by internalizing social conventions and values. Victimization of the subaltern by
male dominant discourses is emphasized when Orlando goes back to England, where social norms
and values are rooted deeply in the society. Eradication of women’s voices in mainstream discourses
can be seen from Orlando’s reflection about writers when she arrives London: “She thought now only
of the glory of poetry and the great lines of Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Milton” (105). The
reference to these historical figures reflects the silence of female voices. Absence of eminent voices of
women in the literary sphere results from the restriction of woman’s education that robbed them of
power to speak for themselves.
Therefore, it reflects Woolf’s viewpoint that women have no choice but to submit themselves
to the patriarchal discourses produced by men: “‘Ignorant and poor as we are compared with the other
sex,’ she thought, continuing the sentence which she had left unfinished the other day, ‘armoured with
every weapon as they are, while they debar us even from the knowledge of alphabets” (102). The
juxtaposition between knowledge and weapon is also seen when Orlando contemplates her new status
as a woman: “A woman knows very well that, though a wit sends her his poems, praises her judgment,
solicits her criticism, and drinks her tea, this by no means signifies that he respects her opinion,
admires her understanding, or will refuse, though the rapier is denied him, to run her through the body
with his pen” (137). The correlation between weapons and the ability to write well stresses knowledge
as another form of violence and domination. Women who cannot take part in discourse production
become victimized by “epistemic violence”, which is no less brutal than physical oppression. In “Can
 Eamvijit 4

the Subaltern Speak?”, Spivak borrows Michel Foucault’s idea of “episteme“ 1 to illustrate the concept
of violence from production of dominant discourses. According to Spivak, “[Epistemic violence] is,
the forcible replacement of one structure of beliefs with another” (2197). Therefore, language as a
production of mainstream discourses of knowledge functions as another form of violence imposed on
the subaltern in order to silence and efface them from history. Women, robbed of the power to speak
for themselves, are completely silenced by their internalization of dominant values. Orlando, who “is
not born, but rather becomes, a woman”(Beauvoir 301) through internalization of notion of gender
roles in the society. Orlando is oppressed by the very language she adopts. According to Foucault,
power works through language, which shapes people’s identities, their views of the world and controls
what can and cannot be said in the society. The first internalization of male dominant discourses can
be seen when Orlando realizes what she can and cannot say after turning into a woman: “And that’s
the last oath I shall ever be able to swear […] All I can do, once I set foot on English soil, is to pour
out tea, and ask my lords how they like it. D’you take sugar? D’you take cream?”(100). The
internalization is emphasized when Orlando finds herself in The Victorian, where prudishness and
public image are society’s major concerns. She starts to feel embarrassed when discussing crinoline,
which represents pregnancy, a normal condition of women. A crinoline that serves to conceal
women’s pregnancy reflects the power of dominant discourses that both physically and ideologically
confine women. Orlando’s internalization of hegemonic discourses is seen in her anxiety about
marriage. Orlando, who is not interested in marriage, needs to have a husband in order to negotiate
with social expectations. Therefore, Orlando is oppressed through internalization of female values
produced by patriarchal society. Orlando’s attempt to conform to the society reflects the oppression
and silencing of the subaltern. Oppression is not only about physical oppression. Through
internalization of values, dominant discourses become the only way of looking at things and therefore,
eradicate other alternative discourses.
Although Spivak insists in her essay that the subaltern cannot speak, she proposes a solution
for intellectuals to salvage the subaltern’s silenced voices. She propounds that the duty of the
intellectual is to ‘trace’ subaltern voices which tend to be drowned out by the voice of dominant
discourses. In order to offer other alternative ways of interpretation and let them speak in new ways,
Spivak gives an example of traces of the subaltern through the case of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s
suicide that has left traces of her voices through her body although she is no longer alive. Bhaduri
waited until her menstrual period had come before hanging herself in order to communicate with the
society that she did not kill herself because of an illicit love affair since she wasn’t pregnant. As a
result, Spivak’s revisit and rereading Bhaduri’s body as a text is an attempt to suggest alternative
reinterpretation of Bhaduri’s death, what has been generally misunderstood.
In Orlando: A Biography, Woolf calls the attention to traces of subaltern voices through a
characterization of Orlando that subverts dominant social discourses . Firstly, Orlando’s subversive
act against hegemonic discourse can be seen from his/her body. Orlando’s hybridity in both gender
and race disrupts binary oppositions produced by hegemonic discourses. In the first chapter, the
description of Orlando’s appearance reveals Orlando an embodiment of both masculinity and
femininity:

For directly we glance at Orlando standing by window, we must admit that he had eyes like
drenched violets so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them;
and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions
which were his temples (3)

Despite his masculine aggressiveness as seen in his act of slicing the head of a Moor,
Orlando’s physical appearance embodies feminine beauty. Orlando’s androgyny can also be seen in
his cross- dressing after he turns into a woman. Orlando who has become a woman, dresses as a man

1
Foucault offers a definition of episteme in Power/Knowledge as follows: “[Episteme] is strategic apparatus
which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable
within, I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false.
The episteme is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what
may from what may not be characterised as scientific” (197)
 Eamvijit 5

and goes out at night. Orlando’s cross-dressing can be traced as a revolutionary act against the
homogenous gender discourses even though he has already become a woman. Orlando’s androgyny
deconstructs the traditional gender value, which is emphasized when Orlando discusses the
significance of clothing: “Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a
vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or
female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what it is above”(121). Androgyny in
Orlando and other characters such as Archduke Harry or Marmarduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine points
out that the concept of gender is socially constructed and clothes serves as a form of control by this
human-made belief. Orlando’s revolutionary act that disrupts mainstream notions about gender is also
depicted in her relationship with Marmarduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine. Orlando who needs to follow
the female gender role once she is back in England, subverts mainstream convention through her
unconventional relationship with Shel. Her marriage to Shel challenges the mainstream value of
marriage that dominates people’s belief in The Victorian period. Orlando, is aware of the importance
of getting married according to Victorian values that leave so little choice for women. They cannot
support themselves financially, and were instructed to work only in domestic sphere. As a result, a
woman needs a husband in order to make a living. Therefore, Orlando marries Shel in order to
conform to society. However, the reader can see traces of her defiance against the dominant discourses
in her unconventional wedding ceremony and marriage life that challenge the notion of holy, romantic
love and courtship in the Victorian period. Orlando and Shel have become engaged after knowing
each other only for a few minutes. Their genders are ambivalent. Their servant, Mr. Dupper, acts as
priest. During the wedding ceremony, Orlando defies the tradition through the absence of her word
‘obey’ that reinforces woman’s inferiority to her husband: “and now there was a clap of thunder, so
that no one heard the word Obey spoken or saw, except a golden flash, the ring pass from hand to
hand”(170). Orlando’s subversion of traditional courtship and marriage illustrates his/her attempt to
defy dominant discourses concerning traditional relationship and gender roles in heterosexual
relationship.
Orlando’s subversive act can also be traced through his/her attempt to break free from the
monolithic voice of a biographer. Orlando’s poetry “The Oak Tree” illustrates his/her attempt to
subvert the dominant voice of the biographer and speak with his/her own voice. Orlando has been
writing and editing this poem for centuries, but its contents are never revealed in the novel even
though the narrator claims to know so many things about Orlando. The biographer’s ignorance or
inability to reveal what is inside the poem renders the readers to see the traces of Orlando’s subaltern
voice. “The Oak Tree” remains Orlando’s own voice that is still not represented by the biographer’s
voice. Although Orlando’s own voice cannot be heard, the reader can still see his/her attempt to write,
to edit, to revise his/her own work. Therefore, the poem leaves a space for heterogeneity of
interpretations. Another attempt to question the dominant voice of the biographer can also be seen in
Orlando’s desire for a new self. Orlando’s yearning for another self can be regarded as her attempt to
challenge the dominant voice of the biographer that labels him as well: I’m sick to death of this
particular self. I want another self. I want another” (201).
Orlando is not the only subaltern in the novel. Woolf’s portrayal of Orlando as the subaltern is
also the trace to see the other subaltern in the novel whose voices are even more silenced than
Orlando him-herself. At the beginning of the novel, readers can see the silenced subaltern in an image
of the Moor: “He, for there could be no doubt of his sex, in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor
which swung from the rafter. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one,
save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of course, dry, hair, like the hair on a cocoanut” (3).
The description of Orlando’s violence against the anonymous moor illustrates the silence of the
subaltern whose abject body embodies the violence of colonization throughout history. The Moor in
this novel is also an allusion to Shakespeare’s Othello, which can be reflected in Orlando’s jealousy of
Sasha in comparison with Othello’s jealousy of his wife Desdemona: “The frenzy of the Moor seemed
to him his own frenzy, and when the Moor suffocated the woman in her bed it was Sasha he kills with
his own hands” (32). The reference to Othello in Orlando: A Biography, reflects Western
(mis)representation of the Moors, and, at the same time, this recurrent, haunting image of the Moor
that appears throughout the novel can be considered traces of subaltern voice that attempts but fails to
speak out in hegemonic space. The silencing of subaltern voices continues to appear during The Great
Frost when the court joyfully celebrates the coronation of King James I among the suffering lower-
 Eamvijit 6

class people: “But while country people suffered from the extremity of want and the trade of the
country was at a standstill, London enjoyed a carnival of the utmost brilliancy. The Court was at
Greenwich and the new King seized the opportunity that his coronation gave him to curry favour with
the citizens” (17). Upper-class people’s ignorance of the lower-class’ sufferings is emphasized by
frozen country people during the carnival. The portrayal of these frozen lower-class people
symbolizes the exclusion of the subaltern in history by mainstream discourses:

The fields were full of shepherds, ploughmen, team 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 raven who sat, as it stuffed, upon the hedge
within a yard of him. (17)

After Orlando’s attempt to flee from the Archduchess Harriet, who passionately runs after
him, Orlando moves to Constantinople and reaches the peak of his career as an ambassador. Orlando’s
life at Constantinople illustrates the exclusion and misrepresentation of the subaltern by Western
hegemonic discourse. Exclusion of the subaltern from history by Western hegemonic discourses is
clearly seen during the uprising in Constantinople in the novel, which takes place while Orlando is
having a big celebration with other noblemen and ladies. The uprising scene represents the muting of
subaltern voices in the novel in the way that the uprising is told by the Western’s voices, through
Genner Brigge’s diary and Miss Penelope Hartopp’s letter despite the fact that the Turks’ uprising is
Turkey’s own history. The muted Turk that is robbed of the voice to speak for itself and is excluded
from its own history portrays how Woolf thematized the victimization of the subaltern by Western
misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Woolf tries to deconstruct the west’s hegemonic way of
representation through a comment from the spoof biographer. The biographer deconstructs its
authoritative façade by revealing its fragmentation within the so-called absolute truth or universal
historical narrative of Western hegemonic discourse by showing the inaccuracy of John Genner
Brigge’s diary and Miss Penelope Hartopp’s letter. Brigge’s diary is partly destroyed and is full of
praises on the superiority of the British Empire: “I came to the conclusion that this demonstration of
our skill in the art of pyrotechny was valuable, if only because it impressed upon them … the
superiority of the British” (80). On the other hand, Hartopp’s letter is fragmented and does not record
anything except the gaiety of the feast and Orlando’s beauty: “ ‘Ravishing,’ she exclaims ten times on
one page, ‘wonderous … utterly beyond description … gold plate … candelabras …. Negroes in plush
breeches” (81). Western misrepresentation of the subaltern is also seen when Orlando lives with the
gipsies after gender transformation. Orlando enjoys primitive and carefree life with the gipsies until
she has conflicts with them. Orlando and the gipsies have different views on the way they
conceptualize themselves. Orlando, who internalizes the Western stereotypical notion of the gipsies,
considers the gipsies “an ignorant people, not much better than savages” (93). However, Woolf
subverts this Western notion of the Oriental by showing the Gipsies’ perception of themselves: “It
was clear that Rustum and the other gipsies thought a descent of four or five hundred years only the
meanest possible. Their own families went back at least two or three thousand years. To the gipsy
whose ancestors had built the Pyramids centuries before the Chirst was born” (93).

4. Virginia Woolf’s concerns about the Subaltern in her other works

Virginia Woolf’s political awareness of the unheard voices is not limited in this novel only.
Although Woolf does not use the word subaltern herself, she refers to the forgotten unheard voices as
the voice of “The Obscure”. Virginia Woolf’s essay “Lives of the Obscure” (1925) was originally
published in the newspaper Nation and Athenaeum of 30 June 1925, before the publication in 1928
of Orlando: A Biography. In this essay, Woolf refers to people whose lives in their memoirs and
diaries are left untouched in the dusty shadows of library as “the obscure”. Woolf expresses her
interest in lives of forgotten writers by her attempt to revive the forgotten lives by “making
scenes”(Woolf 69), which means to use imagination to fill historical or factual gaps of these people
and through imaginative reinterpretation, the lives of these people can be recovered . In fact, “Making
scenes” is what Woolf tries to propel readers to do in Orlando: A Biography. Woolf uses Orlando as
the trace to lead the reader to imagine the silenced voices of the ‘ultra’ subaltern in the novel such as
 Eamvijit 7

the Moor, the country people, or the Turks. Woolf’s awareness of the lives of the Other is reflected in
her essay on writing a biography, “The Art of Biography”. In “The Art of Biography”, Woolf criticizes
traditional biographies in which the biographer portrays only the so called “righteous” side of people’s
lives. Therefore, the biographies lacked completeness in certain aspects of lives: “And thus the
majority of Victorian biographies are like the wax figures now preserved in Westminster Abbey, that
were carried in funeral processions through the street – effigies that have only a smooth superficial
likeness to the body in the coffin”(“The Art” 109). Woolf who is aware of subjectivity of truth and
dangers of subscribing to only one way of interpretation, asserts a task of a biographer to be aware of
the constant flux of reality as a “Miner’s canary”. Woolf argues that, although biographers are tied by
facts, these facts are subjective and can be altered through time. Therefore, she urges biographers to
be aware of traces of the Other: “Thus the biographer must go ahead of the rest of us, like the miner’s
canary, testing the atmosphere, detecting falsity, unreality, and the presence of obsolete conventions.
His sense of truth must be alive and on tiptoe” (“Art”, 112) and stresses her concerns about the
silenced subaltern voices by encouraging biographers to value unheard, forgotten lives as well as the
lives of great men.
Furthermore, the writing of Orlando: A Biography itself well illustrates Woolf’s attempt to
publicly transgress the dominant patriarchal discourse. Although Woolf claimed to treat this novel “as
a joke” at the beginning with the biographer’s voice that insists to disregard gender issue in the novel:
“let other pens treat of sex and sexuality; we quit such odious subjects as soon as we can” (88),
Orlando: A Biography in fact, directly criticizes the notion of gender and oppression by phallocentric
discourses. Moreover, the fact that Woolf wrote Orlando: A biography as a gift for Vita Sackville-
West’s shows Woolf’s attempt to challenge dominant discourses herself. Woolf restores Vita’s loss in
real life through rewriting. Vita had lost her beloved Knole after the death of her father in 1928
because the law prohibited women from owning property at the time. In Orlando: A Biography, Vita,
as Orlando, can get her house back. Woolf’s recovery of Knole for Vita puts on centre stage the power
of imagination to transcend and defy homogeneous discourses in the society.
Orlando: A Biography is more than just Woolf’s delicate and witty love letter to her beloved
Vita Sackville-West. The novel itself reveals Woolf’s attempt to criticize the dominant discourses and
lead the reader to the traces of the subaltern in the novel. For Woolf, imagination is the key to contest
these dominant discourses about gender, race, and class that have generally been accepted as the only
truth. Imagination offers a space for heterogeneous interpretations. Therefore, the subaltern, despite
the impossibility of speaking for themselves, can at least get closer to being heard.
 Eamvijit 8

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--, “The Lives of the Obscure.” The Common Reader: First Series. Mariner, 2002.

---, “The Art of Biography.” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays, 2012. 12 January 2013
<http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91d/chapter23.html>