Jeanette Beebe is a poet and journalist. She holds an A.B. in English with certificates in Creative Writing and Gender & Sexuality Studies from Princeton, and she served as an M.A. Scholar at NYU’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program. Twitter: @JeanetteBeebe. www.jeanettebeebe.com.
The subtitle of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) is not "A Novel,” but "A Biography." Though Woolf... more The subtitle of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) is not "A Novel,” but "A Biography." Though Woolf's diaries establish that Orlando's subject owes homage to Vita Sackville-West, her long-time lover, the text's fantastical plot marks it as a work of fiction. Yet Orlando's male narrator insists that his account — Orlando's "life story" — is true. This paper explores this tension by pulling apart what we know as the “subject” (in a biography) vs. “character” (in a novel); biographer vs. narrator; and narrator vs. author. Working through Percy Lubbock's and Marthe Robert's attempts at defining the novel, Boris Tomashevsky's stab at "narrative,” and Hermione Lee's work on "biography,” this paper unmasks the biographer-narrator's pretensions to objectivity and truth-telling. Because Orlando's narrator "has a desire to mislead, to ring true" (Marthe Robert), he is fundamentally a novelist — yet in this text, he is also a character that Woolf dresses up as a biographer in order to ridicule the profession, to mock. Orlando is A Biography, then, because it is a caricature, "a joke,” a romp.
The subtitle of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) is not "A Novel,” but "A Biography." Though Woolf... more The subtitle of Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) is not "A Novel,” but "A Biography." Though Woolf's diaries establish that Orlando's subject owes homage to Vita Sackville-West, her long-time lover, the text's fantastical plot marks it as a work of fiction. Yet Orlando's male narrator insists that his account — Orlando's "life story" — is true. This paper explores this tension by pulling apart what we know as the “subject” (in a biography) vs. “character” (in a novel); biographer vs. narrator; and narrator vs. author. Working through Percy Lubbock's and Marthe Robert's attempts at defining the novel, Boris Tomashevsky's stab at "narrative,” and Hermione Lee's work on "biography,” this paper unmasks the biographer-narrator's pretensions to objectivity and truth-telling. Because Orlando's narrator "has a desire to mislead, to ring true" (Marthe Robert), he is fundamentally a novelist — yet in this text, he is also a character that Woolf dresses up as a biographer in order to ridicule the profession, to mock. Orlando is A Biography, then, because it is a caricature, "a joke,” a romp.
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