Back at my school desk from spring break - my feet are tingling as they go numb...there's no heat. Funny how ironic 'spring break' is when I'm wearing a sweater and want to be under my covers!
I have to vent somewhere today, I just finished reading Orlando by Virginia Woolf - and someone PLEASE tell me why we still have this book in print? I'm not just whining, I'm not writing it off, I am asking a serious question.
Here is the premise since I don't know a single other person who has read the book....
Orlando is a boy who loves nature, has deep thoughts, and is apparently a servant to the Queen and is therefore obsessed with her hands. Orlando grows up -in a home with 400+ rooms which he walks through every night all the way through his life. He has a romantic fling with a Russian named Sasha during which time London is frozen - so much so that that river becomes the center of social life. Then suddenly amidst a rain storm the river melts and floods everything and his planned escape with Sasha doesn't happen. His heart is broken and for an undetermined amount of time he sulks, in nature, in writing, in admiring other artists from afar. Then he takes off as an ambassador and while away he falls into company with a gypsy. Get this - then he falls asleep and sleeps for 7 days, when he wakes up, he is a WOMAN. Yes he mysteriously underwent a sexchange in the 18th century.
SHE now enjoys being female and spends 50 some odd pages comparing life as a female versus that as a male and then decides to return home to England where no one questions her. She shares in the company of accomplished artists like Pope, Swift, and others - learns to be a hostess etc. She watches the century change - still only barely 30 (how?) and sees a whore who he reveals his masculine side to... weird. Somehow amidst various role-changes where She/He choses when to be male and when to be female, she begins to wear the skirts that women wear when they are pregnant and then suddenly feels compelled to be married. She runs outside and decides she must be nature's wife and trips and falls among roots. Suddenly a man appears and they fall in love and get married within what appears to be 9 days although is described as a few minutes. He sails to Cape Horn and she remains alone...at some point seems to have a child - at which point it is March but then it is October on the next page.
Her manuscript of a poem she has been working on for - 3oo years?! - is published by a dear old friend who she describes as literature itself. Then she begins to talk to her different selves and naming them and pulling in different habits and phrases from other parts of her life into the life she is currently living - and only at the age of 36. She begins to talk of a wild goose and suddenly it becomes clear that the entire novel, with it's random and informal direct words to the reader from the 'biographer' is a commentary on the impossibility of art and achieving greatness.
Or is it?
I finished the book unsure of what I read - all 339 pages of it.
And at 6pm I will go to class to discuss it. Hmmm
Meanwhile my feet are growing numb and I have two papers to write - this doesn't count as academic work. So welcome back to school cold feet and oh Happy St. Patrick's Day.
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