Refractions of the periods in the mind of Orlando:
The Poem "The Oak Tree"

1. Introduction
2. Zeitgeist
3. A True Elizabethan
4. "A Nobleman afflicted with a love of literature"
5. Nick Greene
6. Pope, Addison, Swift
7. Nineteenth Century: Marriage
8. The Age of Victoria
9. Conclusion
10. Bibliography

1. Introduction

The problem with writing about Virginia Woolf's Orlando is that it is impossible to separate one theme of the novel from the rest. For example, an essay on the motif of disease and decay in Shakespeare's Hamlet can be complex, thorough, and intelligent without delving into every theme touched on in the play. In Orlando, on the other hand, threads wind and twist, and a thought that begins with a reference to literature afterwards passes through "Zeitgeist" and ends with human nature: "Thus, if Orlando followed the leading of the climate, of the poets, of the age itself, [. . .] we can scarcely bring ourselves to blame him. He was young; he was boyish; he did but as nature bade him do."

This merging of themes is natural and logical; literature, Zeitgeist, and human character are all closely interrelated. Literature is a product both of its age and of the personality which creates it. The age, on the other hand, is a composite of the literature and creative minds which exist in a certain time. Human character is influenced and perhaps formed by the external forces of literature and culture. An analysis of one element is impossible without delving into the others. However, if a clean separation is out of reach, at least one thread can be traced and straightened. Not only is English literature omnipresent through numerous references to contemporary poets and works, but Orlando's own composition is an expression of his/her unseverable connection to the written word. Orlando's poem "The Oak Tree" is the binding thread that relates history and biography, the development of Orlando's character, and the "spirit of the age."

2. Zeitgeist

Orlando was born an Elizabethan; he lives through the Jacobean period, the Enlightenment, the Nineteenth Century, and into the Twentieth. Each of these eras has a certain character which Woolf calls the "spirit of the age," and philosophy "Zeitgeist." Zeitgeist is the "characteristic spirit of a historical era;" for example, the Enlightenment bears the name of its rational and progressive spirit. As Orlando experiences and adapts himself to each age through which he lives, Orlando is himself a "personification . . . of his time." He follows consistently the temper of the time; he is "masculine and violent in the dashing Elizabethan age, pensive and morbid in the early seventeenth century, presides at literary tea parties in the Augustan period, and blushes and swoons in crinolines in the sentimental age of Victoria." Each age has its own culture, to which Orlando attaches and assimilates himself.

Zeitgeist can also be viewed from a more active perspective. From the beginning of the novel in the Elizabethan era, Zeitgeist is a powerful force in Orlando's life; for example, because he is an Elizabethan, he is not to be blamed for his lustfulness, because that is the spirit of the age. While Zeitgeist is usually an abstract concept, Woolf personifies the spirit of the age, at times giving it an starring role in the drama. Unlike the spirits of other centuries, which exist benevolently and passively, the spirit of the Eighteenth Century nags Orlando because she is not married and will not let her write until she has found a husband and conformed, in appearance if not in soul. The spirit of the age is more than a philosophical idea; in Orlando it plays an active role as a "dominating idea [and] dominating social force."

3. A True Elizabethan

Orlando is a writer from the second page of the novel, when Orlando sits down to work on "Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts." His writing style is an essential part of the description of his character; we already know, from Orlando's "half-conscious air of one doing what they do every day of their lives at this hour" and his "old stained goose quill," that his writing is already an established part of his life. Furthermore, his writing style expresses his character; his verbosity comes from his intensity and enthusiasm, and the grandness and abstractness of his subjects from his lack of experience. Because he has not experienced anything yet besides his own home and family, he has no basis from which to write about anything else. The speed with which Orlando becomes distracted is also telling; though he writes intensely, he also becomes distracted easily and leaves to do something else, equally intensely. This tendency towards extremism is carried out more dramatically in his love affair with Sasha, for whom he callously drops his engagement to another noblewoman. Orlando's mood swings constantly; "that was the way his mind worked now, in violent see-saws from life to death, stopping at nothing in between." Woolf attributes Orlando's tendency towards extremism to the Zeitgeist; he lives intensely and passionately because he is an Elizabethan.

Even though Orlando is sensitive to nature and is a "passionate lover of animals," he is curiously distant from other humans. He flies into ecstasy through merely feeling "the earth's spine beneath him," and yet he cares little enough about his first fiancée Clorinda that he does "not much regret it when she died soon after of the small-pox." Indeed, there Orlando shows remarkable hypocrisy. On the same page on which Clorinda dies unmourned by Orlando, he demonstrates his love of animals by breaking off his second engagement. Orlando is compassionate when he chooses, but there is always a certain distance between him and other people. Rather than socializing, he often chooses to spend months and even years of his life secluded in his country house or outside under the oak tree. Blackstone says, "It is this love of solitude and beauty which cuts him off from his kind. . . ." Orlando is always, in spite of his cultural assimilation, ever-so-slightly an outsider.

4. "A Nobleman afflicted with a love of literature"

At the beginning of the novel Orlando is already an amateur writer, but his literary connection began much earlier in his life. As a child, like any good book-lover, he read up past his bedtime. Orlando is, "to put it in a nutshell [...], a nobleman afflicted with a love of literature," in the words of the biographer. Even though his "taste for books" runs counter to the mores of his time and class, he cannot help himself, but must read by whatever means at his command. Contrary to modern attitudes towards books, reading is portrayed as an disease in sixteenth century Orlando:

It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality, so that Orlando, to whom fortune had given every gift - plate, linen, houses, men-servants, carpets, beds in profusion - had only to open a book for the whole vast accumulation to turn to mist. The nine acres of stone which were his house vanished; one hundred and fifty indoor servants disappeared; his eighty riding horses became invisible [...]. So it was, and Orlando would sit by himself, reading, a naked man.

The disease is "fatal," not to Orlando's body but to his fortune. The modern stereotypical image of reading is that in a book, the reader can be as rich and great as his imagination; Woolf turns this pattern upside down. Orlando, who already has everything he could possibly want, loses it all. Thus the scorn of books expressed by the servants; books should be left "to the palsied or the dying," because they have nothing else to lose. The rich and powerful should preserve what they have.

In spite of the predominant Jacobean opinion, Orlando continues to read and even to write. However, he knows that he is not a real writer; he holds poets in awe and attributes them with the status of gods. Orlando believes that poets know "everything in the whole world," and that the medium of poetry can contain and convey that knowledge. In a way this is true, at least in a metaphorical sense, because we often talk about the universality of certain texts; however, Orlando often takes the figurative, like the Zeitgeist, quite literally. Because Orlando thinks so highly of poets, it is naturally his highest aim to be one himself, a "member of that blessed, indeed sacred, fraternity." Even though he is a nobleman, he attempts to convince himself that he is a writer and invites one, Nick Greene, to visit him at his house, in order to determine "whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world;" that is, whether he can write or not.

5. Nick Greene

Nick Greene is in two ways the personification of the literary Zeitgeist. First of all, he contrasts his own era unfavorably to ancient literature. Bitter about only selling five hundred copies of his own poem, he expounds thoroughly on Elizabethan literature, dismissing it as worthless in comparison to the past:

"No, he concluded, the great age of literature is past; the great age of literature was the Greek; the Elizabethan age was inferior in every respect to the Greek. [. . .] Much though it hurt him to say it - for he loved literature as he loved his life - he could see no good in the present and had no hope of the future."

According to Greene's opinion, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Browne, and Donne are all hopeless posers. Through the juxtaposition with the past Greene defines the Elizabethan age as a unit with its own Zeitgeist. Furthermore, when Orlando runs into him again nearly three centuries later, he says the exact same things, only now it is the Elizabethans that he elevates in relation to the Victorian era. The truism "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" comes irresistibly to mind; though Greene has changed so much by this time that Orlando hardly recognizes him, he is still the same critic, with the same attitude towards the age in which he lives.

Orlando, shocked by this blatant disrespect for his heroes and by the critic's satisfaction in his tirade, fails to be dissuaded; in fact, Greene's disreputableness rather confirms his romantic ideas. Despite Greene's attempts to evade Orlando's requests to read his poetry, he eventually accepts "The Death of Hercules," but not until he has left the estate and Orlando has promised to give him a pension of "three hundred pounds a year paid quarterly." Unfortunately for Orlando, Greene's response proves that he is, indeed, the "greatest fool in the world." Orlando had set himself up for disappointment. Unable to resist such rich story-fodder, the poet writes a scathing and very successful satire about Orlando and his failed attempt at tragedy. Though naturally wounded by this betrayal, Orlando continues to pay the pension; he recognizes that Greene gave him not the answer he hoped, but the one he asked for. He is a nobleman, not a poet.

In the disillusionment which followed Greene's visit, he burns all of them except "'The Oak Tree', which was his boyish dream and very short." Orlando has given up his heroic tragedies; however, he has not completely renounced writing. This one poem, which shares the name of he retains and works on for the rest of his life. "Feeling quit of a vast mountain of illusion, and very naked in consequence," Orlando rejects the company of men, buys a pair of elk-hounds, and retreats once again into solitude. He ponders the meaning of life, of truth, and of poetry; he wonders how "true poet, who has his verses published in London" would describe grass or the sky, still imagining that poets are a race apart. Unable to find a satisfactory phrase and haunted by the memory of Nick Greene, Orlando exclaims, "I'll be blasted . . . if I ever write another word, or try to write another word, to please Nick Greene or the Muse. Bad, good, or indifferent, I'll write, from this day forward, to please myself . . . ." Orlando no longer cares about success, acclaim, or publication; writing now is only about self-expression and self-fulfillment.

Through the furnishing of his house with objects and with people, Orlando reenters society. He holds frequent parties, becomes very popular with all his neighbors, and offers poets patronage even though he remembers Nick Greene and is "careful not to consort with writers." In spite of social demands and of Greene himself, Orlando does not abandon his literary pursuits. Stealing away from his own parties, he hides in his room to write and work on his single poem, "The Oak Tree." Though he continues to write as before, his style is much slimmed down from its former effusiveness:

But as he scratched out as may lines as he wrote in, the sum of them was often, at the end of the year, rather less than at the beginning, and it looked as if in the process of writing the poem would be completely unwritten. For it is for the historian of letters to remark that he had changed his style amazingly. His floridity was chastened; his abundance curbed; the age of prose was congealing those warm fountains.

Some of the change is attributable to Nick Greene's chastening effect and to Orlando's decision to write for himself only. Orlando has grown up slightly and changed his writing style accordingly. However, Woolf also attributes the evolution to the influence of the age of prose, which itself is more concise than poetry. The subtle changes in the atmosphere, making tastes, sights, and sounds slightly duller, have the same dulling effect on literature. Orlando, though always partially subject to the spirit of the age, also remains true to himself through writing.

6. Pope, Addison, Swift

Orlando carries her love for literature with her in Constantinople, in the form of the manuscript of "The Oak Tree." Even after her sex change, when she flees the city and lives with the gypsies, she keeps it with her. It is an intrinsic part of her; though she attempts to assimilate herself to the gypsies' down-to-earth philosophy, she is still too passionate. She loves nature and beauty too much, and she has a compulsion to write. She has the "odd conceit of those who write that words written are shared," but in fact she does not care if anyone ever reads her words. She merely needs to write them, so she makes do with berry-ink and margins. It is the compulsion to write that leads to Orlando's leaving the gypsies, because just as the gypsies are nearing the end of their patience with her, Orlando is hit by homesickness and heads back to England, ink, and writing-paper.

On the way into the port of eighteenth-century London, the captain of Orlando's ship points out the sights to her, as well as three poets, Addison, Dryden, and Pope. These three names reverberate in Orlando's head, until after a short interlude in the countryside, in which her renewed attempt at writing "The Oak Tree" is once again interrupted by the Archduke Harry, her old reverence for professional writers reawakens. Returning to London, she enters the parlors of society and seeks the acquaintance of the poets Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, and Joseph Addison. To her disappointment, they turn out to be "much like other people;" though she tries to collect their memorable sayings, there unfortunately are none to be collected. All their genius and all their personalities are expressed and contained in their works. "In short, every secret of a writer's soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works." According to Woolf, we have only to read a few lines of the Rape of the Lock, the Spectator, or Gulliver's Travels to know the fates, foibles, and passions of these three men. This naturally begs the question of whether Orlando's character can be read in her own book, "The Oak Tree." Unfortunately, not more than four lines of the poem itself are printed; those appear towards the end of the novel, at the beginning of the last chapter. However, snippets of Orlando's verse do appear and are used by Woolf to demonstrate the state of Orlando's character at that time. This is in fact a common enough thought; characters are described partly by what they say. However, Woolf expands this idea to encompass the whole life of a writer.

Orlando's familiarity with these three famous poets leads her to further progresses in her own writing. Through their discussion and the "cadence of their voices in speech," they teach her about style, and she begins to write better, and even to create some "very pleasant, witty verses and characters in prose," unlike her former writings, which had been horrible. However, even if Orlando is becoming a better writer, she is still not one of them. Though she spends time in the company of poets, she is still their noble patron, not one of the poets themselves, as she longs to be.

7. Nineteenth Century: Marriage

The nineteenth century in Orlando is the age of damp, sentiment, and fecundity. This is the age in which Orlando departs from her unthinking compliance to the Zeitgeist. Though she adjusted herself painlessly to every other century, this one requires a major change in lifestyle. Orlando had no problem being a single noblewoman in the eighteenth century, but the spirit of the nineteenth century requires her to find a husband before she can finish her poem, "The Oak Tree." She attempts to write, but her powers of personal expression are canceled; the spirit of the age takes over the pen. Frustrated and outraged, Orlando succumbs. It is hard for her, certainly, but she has no choice.

Such is the indomitable nature of the spirit of the age, however, that it batters down anyone who tries to make stand against far more effectually than those who bend its own way. [. . .] But the spirit of the nineteenth century was antipathetic to her in the extreme, and thus it took her and broke her, and she was aware of her defeat at its hands as she had never been before.

By attempting to fight the spirit of the age, she sets herself up for defeat; the only strategy is to admit defeat and to preserve her integrity as best she can. Orlando thus surrenders her arms and goes for a walk, peeking around corners for strange and unexpected males, completely unlike her normal confident self. Luckily, she runs into Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, whom she marries, satisfying the requirements of the Zeitgeist. Shelmerdine is in fact a compromise between Orlando and the spirit of the age; although he is technically a husband, he departs again soon after the marriage, leaving Orlando alone again to pursue her own life, which she does quite happily. Putting her marriage to the test, so to speak, she sits down to write and finds that she can once again express her own voice, which she has been developing for the past three centuries. The test has been passed.

8. The Age of Victoria

Finally Orlando does finish writing "The Oak Tree;" like a new entity to which she has just given birth, it comes to life and starts "shuffling and beating," demanding to be read. Like the Zeitgeist, a poem, which is often figuratively said to have a life of its own, literally comes to life and orders its mistress to have it read. Orlando obeys; with nothing around her but elk-hounds and rosebushes, she must once again break her seclusion and seek human company. She goes to London; there, for the first time, she experiences disorientation. While she was working on her poem, the railway was built and London expanded, filling with people and vehicles and noises. Orlando had not thought about what she was looking for or where she was going; she only wanted someone to read her poem, and she is quite lost in the big, new city.

Luckily, she runs into her old acquaintance Nick Greene, the writer who had so painfully dashed her hopes in the early seventeenth century. However, she hardly recognizes him, because Mr. Greene has become a highly respected literary critic. Orlando is shocked and

unaccountably disappointed. She had thought of literature all these years (her seclusion, her rank, her sex must be her excuse) as something wild as the wind, hot as fire, swift as lightning; something errant, incalculable, abrupt, and behold, literature was an elderly gentleman in a grey suit talking about duchesses.

In fact, part of the attraction of literature for her has always been that it was disreputable. This is why Orlando is so disappointed when she meets Greene again nearly three centuries after the first encounter and realizes that in the meantime literature and Greene himself have become respectable. However, as noted before, Greene is still the same harsh disparager of his own century, even though that century has changed. The Zeitgeist has had its domesticating effect upon Nicholas Greene; however, like Orlando, he keeps his individual personality in spite of the homogenizing effect of the Zeitgeist.

In the course of Greene's and Orlando's conversation, the manuscript falls out of its hiding-place in Orlando's bodice, and Greene seizes upon it eagerly. Although Orlando is more than a little nervous about Greene's reception of it, considering the way she was treated the last time, but this time the verdict is quite different. Greene declares that it must be published right away; the idea is quite foreign to Orlando. Even though the sixteen-year-old Orlando was excessively proud of the one play which he had published privately, the Orlando of the Victorian era had no thought any longer of success or publication. She had not considered it for three hundred years. Nevertheless, she bemusedly allows the manuscript to be taken away, become published, and fulfill its destiny.

9. Conclusion

The writing of "The Oak Tree" and the development of Orlando's writing style parallel Orlando's character development as well as the changing spirit of the age. From the beginning of the novel his devotion to writing is clear. Throughout the novel, Orlando continues to read and write; though the style and circumstances vary greatly during his three-and-a-half-century lifespan, the presence of literature is nearly the only constant. The literature itself, both read and written by Orlando, changes to reflect the variations of ages and also of Orlando himself. Even though he is influenced by the Zeitgeist, he is not completely controlled by it. Literature is the sole way in which Orlando resists the pressure of the age. As Fleishman puts it, "Orlando remains the artist-in-growth, fulfilling his personal destiny, which is to write 'The Oak Tree' and other poems. He is not a pale reflector of historical periods, but a being with enough vitality to insure his individuality, sometimes in the teeth of the age." Throughout the novel, literature is Orlando's resistance against the spirit of the age and his means of personal expression.

10. Bibliography

Woolf, Virginia. (1995). Orlando: A Biography. Great Britain: Wordsworth Editions Ltd. Secondary Sources: Blackstone, Bernard. (1949). Virginia Woolf: A Commentary. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company. Fleishman, Avrom. (1971). The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf. Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fleishman, Avrom. (1975). Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading. Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rotenstreich, Nathan. "Zeitgeist." In: Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas. (1973). Ed. Philip P. Wiener. Volume IV, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

This page created and maintained by Laurabelle (send WebMail).
Best viewed with Internet Explorer or Netscape 6.