Reading Readers in Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography

Reading Orlando: A Biography or, for that matter, any of Woolf's novels becomes a venture into uncertain terrain where the reader must sign on with the writer discover the text's construction and thus a path, not necessarily an easy one, its meaning. Recent Woolf critics employ this notion of readership describe the reader's participation in creating an aesthetic experience from engagement with the text. For example, Pamela L. Caughie analyzes Woolf's reader as one who, directed by the writer, performs the text. Woolf's does not just represent a world; it represents as well a mode of producing and a way of valuing that world, which engages the reader in a rhetoric of (84, 31). Additionally, Susan Stanford Friedman discusses this significant reader in Virginia Woolf's Pedagogical Scenes of Reading: Voyage Out, Common Reader, and her 'Common Readers.' Friedman suggests the importance of recognizing the reader's creative activity: Each text sets the ground for its own experiments, which teaches its reader interpret. appeal each text makes, therefore, is a thoroughly active reader who becomes its second author through the act of (105). cooperative process between reader and writer in Orlando is analogous the characterization of Orlando: like the biographer struggling characterize the subject, we as readers struggle create our place in this text. writer, the narrator-biographer, and reader must work overcome the constraints of narrative conventions in order construct a real self, a self that creates a reality in and of the text. From this relationship between writer and reader, a Woolfian aesthetic emerges, an aesthetic that is collaborative, contextual, and compelling. In short, like Orlando's own manuscript The Oak Tree, Orlando wanted be read. It must be read (O 272).(1) significance of this aesthetic is found in the dual nature of Woolf's innovation: that is, as Woolf purposefully deconstructs biography and narrative in Orlando, she not only creates a new narrative form but also redefines the relationship of reader and writer.(2) Her last critical work, variously titled Reading at Random and Turning the Page (a work that remained unfinished at her death in 1941), sets out describe the relationship between writers and readers, a relationship that she has established in her fiction. As Woolf suggests in the introduction that work entitled Anon, by mutually caring for and nurturing the communication process, the writer and reader create a kind of ultimate communal communication where [e]verybody shared in the emotions of Anons [sic] song, and supplied the story (Anon 382). This type of reading posits relational and alternative ways of learning about the world in the text; readers are asked refresh and exercise [their] own creative powers in order to make use of all that the novelist--the great artist--gives [them] (How 3-5).(3) shared aesthetic experience, I believe, motivates Woolf in Orlando as she attempts define and redefine the reader's role as participant creating the biographical characterization of Orlando. As readers, we enter this fiction, waiting and wanting confirm the reality of the story, a biography about a character of some presumed significance. And in spite of the novel's fantastic elements (climactic phenomena, conflation of time, physical incongruities), certain novelistic conventions (particularly characterization and plot) seemingly maintain a natural flow of narrative events for the reader. Similarly, on a thematic level Orlando develops as a rather typical protagonist, one who confronts obstacles his/her growth, overcomes them, and gains self-knowledge in spite of the sex change from male female. audience reads this progression as essential the delineation of Orlando's character as the stated subject of this biography. However, our expectations for the characterization and its manner of presentation are disrupted by a self-conscious biographer, who parodies the biographical form and continually interrupts question the propriety and credibility of this hybrid fiction-biography in representing (truthfully) this character. …