March '05 Book: Orlando

[Sitaram]

Today I purchased my paperback copy of Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" for $3, from the Wordsworth Classics series, which has a website at www.wordsworth-editions.com (I purchased it in a local bookstore).

"Orlando Spoilers" would be a great name for a professional sports team.


I am gearing myself up for this month's reading. I have hired some highschool cheerleaders to do some Orlando cheers (GIve me an O.... O!) and then spell out Woolf in pom-poms.....

OK, guys and gals.... enough... off to the locker rooms.....

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/orlando/context.html

Orlando was written at the height of Woolf's career. It was an extremely popular book when it was published. In the first six months after publication it sold over eight thousand copies, whereas To the Lighthouse sold less than half that amount. Woolf's income from book sales nearly tripled with the publication of Orlando.

"So, Virginia (may I call you Virginia?) you made a little money off this Orlando gig!"

Virginia's manic-depression was worst just as she was finishing a novel. Unable to handle criticism, Woolf was vulnerable to breakdowns.

A perfectionist, she labored over her novels until the very last moment.


Orlando closes himself up inside his house with 365 rooms and fifty-two staircases.

Vat ees dis ve have here, der symbolism?

Ya, here comes zum temporal hankapank, yust vait und zee!

Orlando becomes engaged to Euphrosyne, a woman of incredibly high birth and connections.

It is interesting that, in ancient Greek, SOPHrosyne means restraint, moderation, prudence. But Euphrosyne has a different meaning.

http://www.theoi.com/Kronos/Kharites.html

And Eurynome, the daughter of Okeanos, beautiful in form, bare him [Zeus] three fair-cheeked Kharites (Graces), Aglaia, and Euphrosyne, and lovely Thaleia, from whose eyes as they glanced flowed love that unnerves the limbs: and beautiful is their glance beneath their brows." -Theogony 907

"There [on Olympos] are their [the Mousai's] bright dancing-places and beautiful homes, and beside them the Kharites (Graces) and Himerus (Desire) live in delight." -Theogony 53

EUPHROSYNE was one of the three KHARITES and the goddess of mirth and merriment.

"Open of yourselves, you doors, for mightly Ploutos (Wealth) will enter in, and with Ploutos comes jolly Euphrosyne (Mirth) and gentle Eirene (Peace)." -Homer's Epigrams XV

Nota bene: SASHA is a nickname for ALEXANDER, it is a boy's name.

[mono]

To begin the discussions with Sitaram, I thought to include this random page I found - artwork inspired by Virginia Woolf's Orlando:
http://www.mortonarts.com/orlando.html
Happy reading!

[papayahed]

I have the book and read the first couple of pages - My first impression is that I'm not going to like this book.


The artwork Mono linked to is pretty interesting though.

Has anyone seen the movie?

[Scheherazade]

How many pages is it, Papayahed?

[papayahed]

In my copy it's 329.

Ever the optomist, I'm sure it'll get better.

[Sitaram]

Nice link to artwork, Mono! I like these lines from that link:

The most successful practitioners in the art of life walk among us; unknown.
Some are not yet born, though they go through the forms of living.
Others are hundreds of years old, though they call themselves thirty-six.

============

My copy of "Orlando" (paperback) is 162 pages.

I am looking at page 9,

"He seemed in the act of rolling some thought up and down, to and fro in his mind till it gathered shape or momentum to his liking."

============
pg. 10

"For women's hearts are intricate."

What does it mean to have an intricate heart?

How may we see the intricacy of a woman's heart as we progress through this novel?

How may we describe men's hearts? Is it good or bad, better or worse, this intricacy?

A labyrinth is intricate and conceals a monster. Does intricacy conceal or reveal?

Is such an intricacy easier to enter into, or to escape from?

How intricate is the word itself? How intricate is intricacy? Is intricacy a form of governent, like democracy? Is it a kingdom, a world, a universe? As I peer into this intricate world, I see a trinket. Look! Can you see it too, the trinket in intricate?

I am chatting with someone 15 as I read and post. I just now wrote this verse for them:

Somewhere long from now and far from here
When you are old an grey
You shall think of me, long gone,
And you shall say
(to someone younger still)
"Dont wish your life away!"
Just as my mother used to say to me
When I, impatient, used to ask
"Is it Christmas yet?"
"Are we there?"
"If only I were 10!"


I must not wish my life away by counting the pages of this book. Each page is a plain between two mountain ranges. Each paragraph is a hill or valley. Each sentence is a grove of trees; each word, a rock a leaf, a world, a galaxy.

So, how may I enter now into "intricate"; enter as an insect enters into amber, frozen and immortalized. How may I enter once, and stay, and learn to never wish my life away?

It is so simple to be happy and so difficult to be simple.

She flashed her yellow hawk's eyes upon him as if she would pierce his soul.

[Scheherazade]

My copy of "Orlando" (paperback) is 162 pages.

Sitaram,
Are you sure your copy is an unabridged edition? The copy on amazon is 333 page as well.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...375030-5322457

[Sitaram]

Good. question,.... hmmm..... on the cover it says "Complete and Unabridged".... however, the print is very small,..... and you get this little magnifying glass which comes with the book (... just kidding).... oh.. and the actual size of the book is 2 feet by 3 feet (also kidding...)

Really, the print is very small indeed

Actually, Scherazade, they are not far from you at all:

http://www.wordsworth-editions.co.uk/classic.asp

Email [email protected]

Telephone +44 (0) 1920 465167 Fax +44 (0) 1920 462267

You could ring them up for me and ask about Orlando.

Here are details on their edition of "Orlando"
http://www.wordsworth-editions.co.uk...ails.asp?e=856

====

Hmm... while searching on ORLANDO WOOLF PAGES, I found THIS little gem:

http://www.glbtq.com/literature/woolf_v,5.html

And yet Woolf's one venture into female eroticism ended with Orlando, capturing in print what she wasn't able to have in life due to Vita's infidelity and her own stifled sexuality. Originally entitled "The Jessamy Brides" ("Jessamy" referring to a dandy or fop), Orlando represents both what Woolf could never be or have except through her art.

=========================

This club is really helpful to motivate me to look at things I might otherwise ignore..... and to attempt to look deeply.... plus there is all the variet of what other members see... added to the variety we find through search engines.

John Climacus, 6th century, author of 'Ladder of Divine Ascent' said:

A horse thinks he is running very fast when he runs by himself. But when he runs with a herd, he realizes that he is not fast enough.

(written to demonstrate the value of corporate activity in a community)

[Scheherazade]

It is interesting that there should be such difference between two editions (the amazon one is twice as much). Hope you wont be straining your eyes too much!

On a different note, the local library doesn't have a copy of Orlando so had to order it. Which means I won't be able to start reading it till next week

[papayahed]

It is interesting that there should be such difference between two editions (the amazon one is twice as much). Hope you wont be straining your eyes too much!

On a different note, the local library doesn't have a copy of Orlando so had to order it. Which means I won't be able to start reading it till next week

Lucky You

s10cr

[Stanislaw]

It is interesting that there should be such difference between two editions (the amazon one is twice as much). Hope you wont be straining your eyes too much!

On a different note, the local library doesn't have a copy of Orlando so had to order it. Which means I won't be able to start reading it till next week

Indeed I shant be able to comment untill monday. I have a readers digest version at home 160 pages, I don't think it will have the same content as your versions though, So I did order an unabridged version!

[Sitaram]

http://gendertree.com/Mythology%20and%20Demonology.htm


Tiresias, a Theban soothsayer, is reported to have been walking on
Mt. Cyllene when he came upon two snakes coupling. He killed the
female, and for this act was changed into a woman. Later, after
coming to look favorably on his new form and testifying that woman’s
pleasure during intercourse was ten to man’s one, he was changed
back into a man - again as punishment.

The Tiresias myth noted previously parallels a related folk tale in East
Indian lore. According to legend in the Mahabharata, a king was
transformed into a woman by bathing in a magic river. As a woman he
bore a hundred sons whom he sent to share his kingdom with the
hundred sons he had had as a man. Later, he refused to be changed
back into a man because the former king felt that “a woman takes
more pleasure in the act of love than does a man.” Contrary to the
fate of Tiresias, the transformed king was granted his wish.[13]a
Accounts exist from the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome of those
grossly discontent with their gender role. Philo, the Jewish philosopher
of Alexandria, wrote, “Expending every possible care on their outward
adornment, they are not ashamed even to employ every device to
change artificially their nature as men into women. Some of them
craving a complete transformation into women, they have amputated
their generative members.” [26]a

http://drblayney.com/Asclepius.html

The mythical origin of his magic twin serpent caduceus is described in
the story of Tiresias. Poulenc, in "Les Mamelles de Tiresias" (The
Breasts of Tiresias) tells how Tiresias--the seer who was so unhelpful
to Oepidus and Family- found two snakes copulating, and to separate
them stuck his staff between them. Immediately he was turned into a
woman, and remained so for seven years, until he was able to repeat
his action, and change back to male. The transformative power in this
story, strong enough to completely reverse even physical polarities of
male and female, comes from the union of the two serpents, passed
on by the wand. Tiresias' staff, complete with serpents, was later
passed on to Hermes...

http://reptile.users2.50megs.com/research/r082100c.html

If the snake in itself is already magically potent, the coupling of two,
seen by human eyes, is fatal: v. the myth of Tiresias: it brings
blindness with either homosexuality or change of sex: ref. Ovid
(Metam. 3, 323ff.);

http://www.allaboutturkey.com/sozlukmit2.htm

In Greek mythology Tiresias was a blindprophet. He was the son of
Everus and Chariclo. There are at least two versions of how he
became to be blind. In the first he was out hunting and found two
snakes coupling in a clearing. He killed the female one at which point
Gaia changed him into a woman. Seven years later by chance he (then
a she) found another two snakes in the same place and this time
killed the male, and was immediately changed back into a man. As he
had several lovers while both a man and a woman, Zeus and Hera
decided he could settle an argument over which gave better
satisfaction in sex, a man or a woman. Tiresias agreed with Zeus that
men do, and Hera blinded him in rage, but Zeus rewarded him with
prophetic powers. In a second variation, he went blind after seeing
Athene bathing, and after plees from his mother Athene compensated
Tiresias for his blindness with prophetic powers.


http://www.chloe.uwa.edu.au/outskirt.../Feature1.html

The concept of "woman" was, for Woolf; problematic. As she remarked
in A Room of One's Own: "Women; but are you not sick to death of the
word? I can assure you that I am."(5) Orlando's daughter, therefore, is
Potter's potent image of hope for women.

Like Tiresias, Orlando only gains knowledge and understanding of
social subjectivity by living through both sides of gendered 'reality'.

Irony remains the film's multi-targeted detonator, adding an elusive
sexual intoxicant, that "something queer".

http://www.theage.com.au/articles/20...?oneclick=true

Perhaps the boldest gender-bending novel is Jeanette Winterson's
Written On The Body, a sensual hymn of praise to a beautiful, beloved
woman. We never find out whether her lover is male or female. But
here again, nothing is new. The androgynous narrator goes right back
to Homer's Tiresias, the blind poet who lived as both a man and a
woman. Women have better sex than men, he said. Nine times better.

http://newyorker.com/online/content/...n_onlineonly01


JEFFREY EUGENIDES: My interest took conscious form at least fifteen
years ago when I read Michel Foucault's "Memoirs of a 19th Century
French Hermaphrodite." Foucault found these memoirs in the archives
of the French Department of Public Hygiene. I thought they would be a
great read. The hermaphrodite in question, Herculine Barbin, was a
student at a convent school. She was tall, thin, flat-chested, and
scholastically gifted. She fell in love with her best friend and they
began a clandestine love affair. These were the facts of the case, and
I was eager to read the memoirs because they contained a lot of
elements that stirred my imagination: an amazing personal
metamorphosis, a hothouse passion, and a medical mystery. There
was only one problem: Herculine Barbin couldn't write. Her prose was
wooden. Exclamation marks ended every second sentence. She was
given to melodrama and, worse yet, she skipped over the important
parts. "Middlesex" began as an urge to fill in those gaps, to tell the
story Herculine Barbin couldn't. I knew from the beginning that I
wanted to write about a real, living hermaphrodite. Hermaphrodite
characters in literature have been either mythical figures, like
Tiresias, or fanciful creations, like Virginia Woolf's Orlando. I wanted
to be accurate about the biological facts.

Why does the question of gender interest you?
It's not just me. It interests lots of people. It has interested humanity
for a very long time, which is why hermaphrodites appear in so many
classical epics and creation myths. Plato claimed that the original
human was hermaphroditic.These two halves were sundered and now
must go eternally in search of each other, which is apparently why it's
so hard to get a dinner reservation on Valentine's Day.

http://www.hku.hk/english/course/woolf.htm

Woolf also liked the sound of several other lines from the Tiresian
section of "The Fire Sermon":

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the
desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting

(215-7)

Like Eliot, Woolf draws a parallel between human beings who wait
and machines that idle: "Everything had come to a standstill. The heat
[sic; presumably 'beat'] of the motor engines sounded like a pulse
irregularly drumming through a whole body" ("The Prime Minister,"
321). Again, Woolf's scene has little to do with Eliot's, except that in
each, modern city dwellers pause for a moment before continuing
with their day. Woolf develops the moment out of Eliot's phrase, not
his scene. When these lines are revised for Mrs. Dalloway, their origin
becomes even more evident: "Everything had come to a standstill. The
throb of the motor engines sounded like a pulse irregularly drumming
through an entire body" (20). The change of "beat" to "throb" clarifies
the provenance of Woolf's lines in "The Fire Sermon," where both the
human engine is "throbbing" and Tiresias himself is "throbbing
between two lives" (217, 218).

Even recent collections, such as Virginia Woolf: Themes and Variations
(1993) echo the celebratory and laudatory tone of Sandra Gilbert and
Susan Gubar, who read the novel as Woolf's unmitigated celebration
of sexual indeterminacy.(8) Insisting that "unlike [Eliot's] Tiresias,
upon whom the worst of both sexes has been inflicted, Orlando has
the best of both sexes in a happy multiform that she herself has
chosen" (Gilbert and Gubar, 345), virtually all the scholarship on
Orlando has interpreted its use of androgyny using anachronistic,
character-centered 1970s definitions of the term.(9)

The price we have paid for our disregard and/or misreadings of
Orlando has been the perpetuation of an incomplete understanding of
Woolf's aesthetics. What Woolf's dismissive comments about the
novel reveal is not so much a failure in the work itself or in herself, as
an uncomfortable realization of the conclusions the novel reaches and
the frightening implications of these conclusions for the success of
her artistic method. More specifically, they gesture toward the painful
and insistent struggle in the text between art and the body, and the
more subliminal crisis over how to enable former without disabling or
repressing the latter. Like Woolf's own equivocal comments about it,
Orlando presents a portrait of the artist which is ultimately unfinished
and unresolved - sexually, artistically, and historically. Rather than a
novel about identity, it is a novel about identity crisis, gender trouble,
and cultural change that ultimately presents not "Orlando" or "Virginia
Woolf" but rather the struggle behind both artists' attempt at "being."

http://ebc.chez.tiscali.fr/ebc1400.htm

In The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, the erotic and its
eroto-energy are directly linked to the themes of power and of the
formation of the individual subject. Dr. Hoffman’s version of the cogito
is a demonic parody of the Lacanian “I desire therefore I exist.” In The
Passion of New Eve, Carter crosses genre borders in a complex
parodic play that inescapably links genre to gender, and both to
desire. She plays with magic realism, the picaresque, the romance,
the Hollywood love story, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Monique
Wittig’s Les Guérillères. Her hero-turned-heroine is a modern Tiresias,
made into a physical woman, but retaining a doubled sense of her/his
subjectivity. The movie star he/she once admired, Tristessa, may be
modelled on Garbo, but she turns out to be a male in disguise, as if
womanliness were something to be assumed and worn like a mask
(recalling Joan Rivière’s famous paper on “Womanliness as
Masquerade”).

The curious thing about two snakes is that one cannot easily distinguish the male from the female. There is no deliberation or premeditation on the part of Tiresias to kill either the male or the female: the gender slain is purely a matter of chance or fate.

The facts on snake reproduction:

http://mzone.mweb.co.za/residents/net12980/sex.html

Now, someone might argue that the myth of Tiresias was not in Woolf's mind as she wrote Orlando. But it is certainly the case that the Tiresias myth is in the mind of the modern readers and movie producers.

=====================

Excellent notes on Virginia Woolf's life and work:

http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/e/...surv/woolf.htm

(excerpts) :

--1917: Partly as therapy for Virginia, Leonard and Virginia purchase a small printing press (that fits on a kitchen table). Hogarth Press is born! Virginia sets the type herself for a long time…


--1919: Hogarth Press publishes T. S. Eliot’s Poems, and in 1923, publishes The Wasteland

--1925: begins intimate relationship w/ Vita Sackville-West… (who sought out Virginia… Virginia becomes one of a long line of Vita’s lesbian lovers.) Vita was an accomplished romance poet and world traveler, whom Virginia sees as an androgyne (a person who combines both male and female characteristics)… and casts her the main character of her Orlando (see 1928, below)
(Both Vita and Virginia are married, and their husbands to varying degrees tolerate the lesbian affair, although Leonard is concerned that it might bring on another nervous breakdown.)

--1940: The Blitz: London was bombed relentlessly for months
by German aircraft. The Woolfs and Hogarth Press
moved to a quieter suburb of London (in Sussex),
and made arrangements to end their lives
if the Nazis invaded Britain.

As I read "Orlando," I am making note of those passages and phrases which seem a morbid preoccupation with death.

--1941, 28 March: Virginia (age 59) commited suicide: filled her pockets with heavy stones and walked into the River Ouse, drowning herself. Her last note to her husband indicated despair over the war (which to many Londoners--and indeed to many Europeans--seemed endless and apocalyptic), as well as despair at facing another mental attack.


--She's one of the major Modernist writers in Britain, and thanks to her independent press, T. S. Eliot and other important early twentieth century writers and theorists got their start. In particular, Woolf's press made controversial, new psychoanalytic writings available. In the 1920's, Woolf's Hogarth Press famously undertook publication of Sigmund Freud's theories--and literally introduced Freud's writing to English readers.


Stream-of-consciousness: Woolf applies a cubist multiplicity of perspective to her novel, using an experimental literary technique known as stream-of-consciousness. The term had first been introduced in 1890 by the psychologist William James (Henry James's brother)-- referring to the mind's flow of thoughts upon awakening. (William James, Principles of Psychology)

--James Joyce and Virginia Woolf are credited with applying this to novels, as they broadened the term into a narrative method: an unconventional, unobjective way to describe unspoken thoughts and emotions, without providing an objective framework of an all-knowing narrator. The character takes over the narrative voice, and the reader is provided with completely subjective experiences and points of view.

--Marcel Proust, A la recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past--literal French translation: "In Search of Lost Time") (1913-1927): This enormous, foundational modernist work was a major influence on Virginia Woolf's writing. In it, Proust defined the artist's duty as to release the creative energies of memory from burial within the unconscious mind. Proust's call for the artist to access of half-conscious, or unconscious mental operations, subjectively recording the passage of time, underlies much modernist literature.




http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Po...ot/Waste_3.htm

At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see
At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives
Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea,
The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights
Her stove, and lays out food in tins.


(And I Tiresias have foresuffered all
Enacted on this same divan or bed;
I who have sat by Thebes below the wall
And walked among the lowest of the dead.)
==============================
The following link has a drawing of Virginia Woolf setting type for Hogarth Press:

http://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/...ress/case3.htm

==============================

http://www.outuk.com/index.html?http...es/bloomsbury/

Soon after their father's death in 1904, Vanessa Stephen, a painter, and her sister, Virginia, an aspiring novelist, began to host regular meetings for other wealthy young intellectuals at their London home. It was known simply as Bloomsbury after the area of London round the British Museum in which the sisters lived.
Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in The Hours
©2002 Paramount Pictures
The Bloomsbury salon became a haven for artists and writers - including many gays and bisexuals - who wanted to break free from the artistic and sexual restrictions of the era.
Bloomsbury's first members were the Cambridge University friends that Thoby Stephen brought to his sisters' home for dinner - historian Lytton Strachey, economist John Maynard Keynes, and writers Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf. The guests in turn invited others to the group, including artist Duncan Grant, who had been sexually involved with both Strachey and Keynes. Within Bloomsbury, these gay men found support for their sexual orientation at a time when the imprisonment of playwright Oscar Wilde in 1895 for sodomy was still a very fresh memory.

The Bloomsbury group has gone down in history for the many contributions its members made to literature, art, and the social sciences. The group's intellectual core was Virginia Stephen, who became Virginia Woolf when she married in 1912. Today she is recognized as one of the great modernist novelists. She and her husband, Leonard, founded Hogarth Press, a publishing house that brought some of the most significant literature of the era into print when no one else would, including T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. In other fields, Keynes became one of the pre-eminent economists of his day, while Strachey achieved renown as a biographer.


But the romantic record of the group's members is also noteworthy, because they demonstrated a sexual freedom and fluidity that was remarkably ahead of their time. Beginning in 1925, Virginia Woolf had a passionate affair with the dashing Vita Sackville-West. In the first flush of romance, Woolf wrote what has become a classic of queer fiction, the experimental fantasy Orlando (1927), which argued that love and passion ignore gender, and that gender itself is fluid.

The phrase "love and passion ignore gender" reminds me of my initial observation that the gender of snakes is indistinguishable, male from female.

==========================

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0255.html

In literature, the movement is associated with the works of (among others) Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Franz Kafka and Knut Hamsun. In their attempt to throw off the aesthetic burden of the realist novel, these writers introduced a variety of literary tactics and devices:

the radical disruption of linear flow of narrative; the frustration of conventional expectations concerning unity and coherence of plot and character and the cause and effect development thereof; the deployment of ironic and ambiguous juxtapositions to call into question the moral and philosophical meaning of literary action; the adoption of a tone of epistemological self-mockery aimed at naive pretensions of bourgeois rationality; the opposition of inward consciousness to rational, public, objective discourse; and an inclination to subjective distortion to point up the evanescence of the social world of the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. (Barth, "The Literature of Replenishment" 68)
Modernism is often derided for abandoning the social world in favour of its narcissistic interest in language and its processes. Recognizing the failure of language to ever fully communicate meaning ("That's not it at all, that's not what I meant at all" laments Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock), the modernists generally downplayed content in favour of an investigation of form. The fragmented, non-chronological, poetic forms utilized by Eliot and Pound revolutionized poetic language.

Modernist formalism, however, was not without its political cost. Many of the chief Modernists either flirted with fascism or openly espoused it (Eliot, Yeats, Hamsun and Pound). This should not be surprising: modernism is markedly non-egalitarian; its disregard for the shared conventions of meaning make many of its supreme accomplishments (eg. Eliot's "The Wasteland," Pound's "Cantos," Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Woolf's The Waves) largely inaccessible to the common reader. For Eliot, such obscurantism was necessary to halt the erosion of art in the age of commodity circulation and a literature adjusted to the lowest common denominator.

Some Essays by Virginia Woolf

"Professions for Women"
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au...1d/chap28.html

When I came to write, there were very few material obstacles in my way. Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was not broken by the scratching of a pen. No demand was made upon the family purse. For ten and sixpence one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare—if one has a mind that way. Pianos and models, Paris, Vienna and Berlin, masters and mistresses, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.

These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first—killing the Angel in the House—I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful—and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?

It is so simple to be happy, but so difficult to be simple.

=========

Here is a very useful page of links from "The Virginia Woolf Society"

http://orlando.jp.org/VWSGB/dat/material.html


Here is a link on Virginia Woolf's psychiatric history:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...mi/VWFRAME.HTM

Here are details of the sexual abuse which Virginia Woolf suffered in early childhood:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...mi/VWFRAME.HTM

During her life Virginia Woolf had several intense friendships with women, mostly older. Some, like Vita Sackville West, a lesbian, were sexual, but it is unlikely that any of these affairs were carnal, although Vita claimed to have gone to bed with Virginia twice. In 1926 she wrote to her husband Harold Nicolson:'..I am scared to death of arousing physical feelings in her, because of the madness. I don't know what effect it would have, you see;
it is a fire with which I have no wish to play. I have too much real affection and respect for her. Also she has never lived with anyone except Leonard, which was a terrible failure, and was abandoned quite soon.'

it is a fire with which I have no wish to play

This image of playing with a fire intrigues me. I want to look further into what "The Fire Sermon" is for Eliot (where references to Tiresias are made) as well as what "The Fire Sermon" was for the Buddha (Eliot studied Sanskrit, Hinduism and Buddhism).

For her generation, Virginia was - in language at least - remarkably uninhibited and 'liberated' in sexual matters. She went swimming in the nude with Rupert Brooke, she typed bawdy material for Lytton Strachey, and she wrote to her sister about Leonard's wet dreams without restraint. And yet she writes late in her life, to Ethel Smyth, her last close female friend: '...but I was always sexually cowardly, my terror of real life has always kept me in a nunnery.'



Buddha's "Fire Sermon"

http://www.saigon.com/~anson/ebud/ebsut026.htm

http://www.buddhismmiufa.org.hk/buddhism/Bali/burn.htm

Footnote:

1 It is interesting to note here that Section III of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot is is called The Fire Sermon. In the note to line 308: Burning burning burning burning , Eliot writes: ‘The complete text of the Buddha`s Fire Sermon {which corresponds in importance to the Sermon on the Mount }from which these words are taken ,will be found translated in the late Henry Clarke Warren`s Buddbism in Transtation {Harvard Oriental Series }.

Listen to a minute of Virginia Woolf's actual voice:

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...mi/VWFRAME.HTM

[Scheherazade]

Wow, Sitaram! You have time to read the book AND all these articles? Have you finished the book by the way?

*is envious*

[Sitaram]

You won't believe this, Scheherazade, but.... as I posted this morning, in my mind's eye (well, way in the back of my mind, in that third eye I have behind my head), I actually saw you making such a post as this in reply, asking me such things as whether I REALLY have an unabridged book, or how I have the time to do all of this, or whether I have finished yet, or whether that teeny tiny print isn't too much of a strain on my eyes (honest to God, I'm not joking....)


No, I have not finished the book yet.

A snake eats a pig by starting at its head, working its way slowly, engulfing it in a linear fashion, from beginning to end, until the tail disappears down the gullet, and then digests it. A spider dines by poking a hole in its prey, filling it with digestive juices, digesting it OUTSIDE of its own body, and then, finally, drinks in all the essence. I am more like the spider in my reading than like the snake.

I carry the book with me wherever I go. Frequently, during the day, when I have some moments, I open the book at random and read one page, with my pen in hand, and try to enter into the world of that page, into a phrase or a word.

But Time, unfortunately, though it makes animals and vegetables bloom and fade, with amazing punctuality, has no such simple effect upon the mind of man. The mind of man, moreover, works with equal strangeness upon the body of time. An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length; on the other hand, an hour may be accurately represented on the timepieze of the mind by one second.

...

The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart,...
...


'It is the moor. I am nature's bride,' she whispered, giving herself in rapture to the cold embraces of the grass as she lay folded in her cloak in the hollow by the pool. 'Here will I lie. (A feather fell upon her brow.) I have found a greener laurel than the bay. My forehead will be cool always. There are wild birds' feathers - the owl's, the nightjar's. I shall dream wild dreams. My hands shall wear no wedding ring,'

...

'I have sought happiness through many ages and not found it; fame and missed it; love and not known it, life and --- behold, death is better.

This practice of reading at random is like diving for pearls. Every once in a great while, we come up with something. Most of the time we come up empty handed. But if we find a gem... well, it is most precious when it is in a SETTING, as a finished adornment.

Of course, I set aside time for reading in a traditional, linear fashion.

Wallace Stevens wrote a funny little poem which has stuck with me since childhood:

"Frogs eat butterfiles,
Snakes eat frogs,
Hogs eat snakes,
And men eat hogs."

This notion of reading as eating is interesting. We slowly digest what we read (and sometimes we read Digests). In the Synagoge, one reads the "Torah PORTION." The Christians will say, "Come, let us break open the Word together" as if they are breaking bread. We RUMINATE over what we read, just as a cow, a ruminating animal with four stomach, chews its cud.

The poem of Stevens is sort of an explanation of Postmodernism. That book a mintue site summarizes Pinchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" as: "A V2 missle drops 30,000 pounds of symbolism on your head."

The frog eats the butterfly, the snake eats the frog, the hog eats the snake, the man eats the hog, the man writes a novel filled with layer upon layer of butterflies, snakes, and hogs, and we, the readers, deconstruct the narrative back into its primordial noah's ark of a zoo.

How about that actual things I am posting? Does anyone find them useful or interesting? I was astounded to learn that the printing press was on their kitchen table, that Virginia possibly sat there and set the type for Eliot's "Wasteland", that they had a social circle with all these famous people who were sort of vague in their gender identity. I want to hunt for things like Tiresias' Myth and Buddha's Fire Sermon and the Sermon on the Mount. I want to know that Virginia was abused by her own brothers in childhood and could never enjoy her own body. It is like Virgina is wounded, and she can only experience what she wants in what she writes, but not in real life. It is like Hemingway and that nurse in Italy. In real life, the nurse dumped him, so in "Farewell to Arms" Hemingway rewrites it so she is madly in love with him and dies in childbirth. Perhaps all of us who make words our world are wounded in some fashion. Perhaps we cannot enjoy what we wish in real life, so we turn to literature, either the reading or writing of it, to wish what we enjoy. Robert Frost speaks of being "immortally wounded" by a poem's line.

"The mind is its own (beautiful) prisoner." - e.e. cummings


This is posting of mine is sort of how I think out loud as I read. I hope for some one sentence or word to open up to me and yield something for me that is diffent, new, provocative, that will shake up someone else's world of ideas.....

That fellow forum member who wants to study chemistry because it is so neat to blow the lid off a paint can.... well this is my chemistry.... I want to blow the lid off someone's mind, if only my own. But, perhaps I already flipped my lid a long time ago. It is my hope that posts like this will get into the search engines and draw students here like a pilgrimage to a literary Mecca. Perhaps I am foolish and deluded.

As I write this post, a forum member, who is reading this Orlando thread, is telling me in MSN:

"Orlando doesnt sound like my kind of thing. I don't think I will read it."

I reply "It didn't sound like my kind of thing either, but I decided to MAKE it mine... force myself towards something different from my usual inclinations."

[papayahed]

But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful—and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?

I'm wondering what other women think of this? Do you believe it is still the case today?