Woolfian Boundaries - Clemson University

From All This Diversity…
Th e whole of her darkened and settled, as when some foil whose addition makes the
round and solidity of a surface is added to it, and the shallow becomes deep and the
near distant; and all is contained as water is contained by the sides of a well. So she
was now darkened, stilled, and become, with the addition of this Orlando, what is
called, rightly or wrongly, a single self, a real self. And she fell silent. (299)
Orlando is re-inscribed and reconstituted into the possibility of biographical discourse.
Her water-like fl uidity is contained and her ebb and fl ow is limited; her multiple subjectivities
are commanded, locked up, amalgamated, and controlled. Th e fi nal published
version of Orlando also employs the word “compact” (296) to describe this newly reconstituted
subject. However, Woolf’s holograph manuscript reveals her uncertain use of this
expression and, where it occurs in the draft, it is crossed out and an alternative is inscribed
above: “medly [sic]” (267). Th e holograph draft does not, however, produce an endless
and multiple subjectivity: the eponymous heroine only fragments into a duality, the “tangible”
and “other” Orlando (267). With this duality being exceeded in the fi nal version,
so too is the potential for harmony and control implied by the musical terminology. As
Orlando’s subjectivity fragments into chaotic multiplicity, Woolf reinstates her fi rst term
with all its implication of constriction, limitation, and solidity. At the beginning of the
novel, Orlando is marked by verve, vitality, and luminescence. Sasha describes him as a
“million candled Christmas tree…hung with yellow globes; incandescent,” glowing with
“radiance, from a lamp lit within” (52). However, as this later Orlando enters her family
estate—enters the solidity of its walls and its history—she is reconstituted as a fi xed,
stable, and readable self. Her vitality is stilled, her light is darkened, and her internal colloquy
is silenced; the result, Woolf’s draft notes reveal, of Orlando’s new “unity,” her being
now “entire: contented” (277).
Th e reconstitution of the subject in Orlando was the aesthetic cost of calling the text a
biography, and thus biographical discourse is revealed to provide a restrictive fi ction of coherent
and limited subjectivity. Th e eff ect of the “green screens” (293) upon Orlando is an illusion,
a visual metaphor for the trick of narrative. Orlando’s narrator-biographer describes human
subjectivity as “a perfect rag-bag of odds and ends…lightly stitched together by a single
thread” of memory (75). Th is thread runs “in and out, up and down, hither and thither,”
a chaos of “odd, disconnected fragments” (75, 76). However, a biographical discourse will
seek to organise this chaos, to order, direct, and fi x the thread of subjectivity. Th e martial and
authoritative image of a Captain or Key self reveals the inherent coercion of narrative’s fi xing
of identity, a forced subjective order. Inscribed through narrative, Orlando is compared to
the containment of water in a well, an uncertain and artifi cial containment with the threat
of fl ood and dissolution still latent. Despite the provisional nature of this watery image, such
boundaries and limits are shown to be desirable and necessary. Makiko Minow-Pinkney has
argued that Orlando’s newly “totalised self” is dependent upon secure and rigid distinctions
(149). Th e Captain or Key self is repulsed by the image and threat of transgression. Orlando
is shocked by exposed fl esh, a fi nger without a nail, and her violent reaction is due to the
“confusion of what should have been separated”: the “vulnerable inside” that should have
been “covered by the fi ngernail (the tough…outside)” (Minow-Pinkney 150). A discourse
of biography restricts the threat of such transgression, maintains distinctions, and holds the
illusion of a totalised self together.
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