The Gendered Other in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.
A short essay.
I don’t know what to do
two states of mind in me
— Sappho Fragment 51, trans. Anne Carson.
Antiquity impressed itself upon Virginia Woolf at an early age. By burden of being a daughter, Woolf was not permitted the formal education gifted to her brothers. Woolf was instead privately educated at home, a commonality among middle-class daughters of the time. Her mother taught her elementary Latin and history, and Woolf had unlimited access to her father’s library which provided her with a self-taught understanding of the English literary canon. Despite the public education that was withheld from her as a child, Woolf came upon the classical tradition at King’s College where she attended in the Ladies’ Department. Woolf studied Greek and History. The following year after beginning her classes, she began studying Latin through private tutoring with Clara Pater (Sellers xiii). Woolf’s newfound curiosity toward antiquity developed rapidly. In 1902, she began studying ancient Greek with Janet Case. These Greek lessons proved to be life-altering for Woolf.[1] So began her dichotomic relationship with Greek.
In 1925, Virginia Woolf wrote “On Not Knowing Greek,” an essay that has since come to define the relationship between women’s modernism and antiquity. Woolf maps her anxiety toward the unfamiliar landscape that is the Greek language in its ancient form. Modern readers, as she points out, have no verbal reference as to how the language sounded, and so they are left navigating the metaphorical terrain without a map. Translation provides no relief; it is a failure of “echoes and associations” that cannot quite provide to us the full impression of Greek (56). To demonstrate her argument, she implores readers to imagine the ancient landscape of Greece. It is impossible to do so, for the English reader, without impressing upon it the English countryside. When this imagination is removed, readers are left unknowing what it must have been like to be in such a society, to speak in such a language. This makes “On Not Knowing Greek” Woolf’s most explicitly articulated demonstration of the relationship between modernism and antiquity as Woolf sees it.
Yet Woolf’s impression of this relationship cannot be studied without accounting for her gendered experience of antiquity, language, and modernism as they interrelate. Woolf’s gendered existence is inseparable from her experience of and contributions to modernism, and so too is the gendered relationship between modernism and antiquity for women like Woolf who by burden of their gender could not escape the experience of modernism that diverged from that of men’s. Despite her private tutoring, Woolf was “painfully alert to the elitism of classical scholarship” that was “reinforced by generations of male scholarship” (Pillinger 1). Closed off from traditional study, antiquity, and especially Greek, became for Woolf “a gendered trope” representing the outskirts on which she navigated classicism (McNellie 8). Emily Pillinger suggests that it is Woolf’s “amateurism” that allows Woolf to reinvent the classical tradition to her preferences (272).
Woolf was not the only modernist interested in antiquity. By contrast, T. S. Eliot’s experience of and contributions to modernism, and his representations of modernism’s relationship to antiquity, are shaped by his own gendered existence. Unlike Woolf, Eliot received formal education at Smith Academy where he studied Latin and ancient Greek as a child. He then went on to study literature and philosophy at university (Malamud ix). A traditionalist by nature, Eliot longed for the aristocratic society in which English modernism flourished. In 1915, Eliot married aristocrat Vivienne Haigh-Wood who provided for Eliot upward class mobility. Physical and mental struggles on part of Haigh-Wood and Eliot burned the marriage, accounting for the deeply unhappy nature of it. Haigh-Wood and Eliot separated in 1933.
What came out of this marriage is The Waste Land, a poem Eliot published in late 1922. In the simplest considerations, the poem explores post-war life in England through mythology and allusions to other literatures. Scholars Seymour-Jones, Flanzbaum, and others see this troubled marriage and the homoerotic implications in his poetic writings, such as in The Waste Land, as indicative of Eliot’s own homosexual desire. Regardless of Eliot’s personal sexuality, which I wish not to argue here, the eroticism in his writings is indicative of a gender-sexuality spectrum of which Eliot was keenly aware. The impression of gender upon literature is recognized in complex ways by Woolf and Eliot alike. What separates their gendered impressions of modernism and antiquity is their feminine/masculine experiences and the privilege, or lack thereof in Woolf’s case, of access to the classical tradition through education.
Virginia Woolf’s classical tendencies follow a niche female literary tradition in which women writers reimagine the classical tradition for a female audience.[2] Where Woolf diverges from this tradition of female revisionist writing is her dual gendered approach to her literature, particularly represented by her novel Orlando. Woolf’s novel was at least in part inspired by Ovid’s Metamorphoses which features several classical stories of transformation, physical and gendered in nature.
Likewise, though immensely different in genre, form, and content, T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land features the Greek mythic figure Tiresias, who according to Ovid was a prophet of Apollo who “knew Venus both ways” (cite). In The Waste Land, Tiresias is “throbbing between two lives,” indicative both of his observation of two lovers outside of the narrative and of his dual-gendered existence (73, 218). What unites Orlando and Tiresias are their “othered” existences through their Ovidian metamorphoses. In comparing Orlando and The Waste Land, I aim to create a comparative analysis of modernism’s representation of gendered “others” through the lens of feminism and classicism.
Published in 1928, Orlando: A Biography is a satiric, fictionalized exploration of English literary history. It is inspired by and dedicated to Vita Sackville-West. The first chapter opens with the pronoun he as “there could be no doubt of [Orlando’s] sex” (13). This masculine introduction to Orlando does not indicate the forthcoming metamorphoses, but rather lays the groundwork for masculine engagement with the text. Orlando is presented as a typical boy; he hunts with his father, spends time in nature, and indulges in boyhood at the ripe age of sixteen. Orlando’s forefathers were travelers and adventurers that had “ridden in fields of asphodel,” the first indication of Orlando’s mythological inheritance (13). In Greek mythology, the souls of the dead wandered in fields of asphodel. The mention of asphodel, then, hold a dual meaning: masculinity represents a metaphorical death in the literal death and soul-wandering of Orlando’s forefathers. Whether or not this allusion is foreshadowing Orlando’s forthcoming masculine “death” is left up to interpretation. Orlando’s life as a man is one of privilege and luxury; he is a nobleman in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, and he pays no mind gender divisions in the court. The narrator describes Orlando as an Adonis figure: “red of the cheeks…exquisite…eyes like drenched violets,” the perfect image of youthful masculinity (15). In describing Orlando’s interior life and exterior experiences in explicitly masculine overtures, the later metamorphosis comes as a surprise to the unfamiliar reader. In addition, it emphasizes the feminine qualities of Orlando’s life as a woman.
Orlando’s sexual-gender metamorphosis comes after a series of illnesses in his thirties. The first line in which Orlando is presented with feminine descriptors cleverly combines a masculine pronoun with the label of woman: “he was a woman” (137). Emily Pillinger first makes mention of Orlando’s “Tiresias-like” metamorphoses between male and female identity (276). It is Orlando’s shift from male to female (though not back again) that indicates he is Tiresias figure. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Tiresias is first introduced in book three. He “had known Venus both ways,” and so he could say which gender best enjoyed sexual pleasure. This dual-existence, as a man twice and a woman once, gave Tiresias more insight on the inner workings of gender than most in the physical sense of male and female. Like Tiresias, Orlando’s body experiences “the strength of a man and a woman’s grace…” (138). And yet, as many real-life gender-nonconforming people know, this change from male to female “did nothing whatever to alter [Orlando’s] identity” (138). What this says about the body is that it does not have as much of an impression upon the mind as one may think. While Orlando remains a woman for the remainder of the novel, she still operates as a Tiresias figure on the outskirts of gender binaries. Orlando herself is aware of her position as male and female concurrently:
“And here it would seem from some ambiguity in her terms that she was censuring both sexes equally, as if she belonged to neither; and indeed, for the time being she seemed to vacillate; she was man; she was woman; she knew the secrets, shared the weaknesses of each. It was a most bewildering and whirligig state of mind to be in” (158).
In being man and woman at once, Woolf turns gender into a metaphor that represents her own feelings of being in Greece and England at once. Likewise, Eliot operates in the spatial temporality of gender through The Waste Land. Though Eliot does not see Greece and England in relation to one another, he nonetheless applies mythology to his poem as an exploration of gender implications. In comparison the Orlando and Woolf’s nontraditional classical scholarship, The Waste Land was “consciously classicised” (Brown 203). Eliot has an advantage over Woolf in the regard that he was intimately familiar with language and scholarship of classical studies, and he was welcomed into the literary and scholarly circles of it. Through The Waste Land, there are several references to classical literature not limited to Ovid, but including as well Virgil, Sappho, and Eliot’s own short writings in Greek. Eliot directly names Tiresias in stanza four of “III. The Fire Sermon” in The Waste Land:
“At the violet hour, when the eyes and back
Turn upward from the desk, when the human
engine waits
Like a taxi throbbing waiting,
I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two
lives,
Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see”
Tiresias is a “spectator” of the poem; he watches the scenes before him, the lovers falling apart, and takes it in (84). He does not engage. Yet, despite his blindness he “sees” the events of the poem and the spectrum of gender itself, operating in a dual position as Orlando does. The comparison of Orlando to Eliot’s Tiresias reinforces Orlando’s position as a mythological figure. Eliot, however, is not interested in the gender-sexuality implications of Tiresias as Woolf is; his Tiresias operates as an all-knowing figure to complement the poem’s unsettled landscape. Eliot’s lack of gender-sexual concern here is owed to his position as a man. This is not to say that he didn’t struggle with his own gender or sexual identities, but simply that he did not relate to Tiresias on a personal level, nor did he see the figure as representing his relationship to Greece. In making this comparison, we can see how gender, and mythology, made entirely different impressions upon Woolf, Eliot, and their respective literary writings.
Laura Marcus argues that A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas make up Woolf’s feminist canon. I propose that Orlando should be included as well for its forward-thinking exploration of masculine-feminine dichotomy. As Woolf imagined Greece and England interplaying together, so too did she imagine male and female gender identities. Masculinity, then, for Woolf was a representation of Greece and its unknowable language. It is a state of being which she can never entirely grasp, and yet she tries. This relation of Greece to gender provides pathways toward understanding the dynamics of gender in the context of modernism and antiquity. What this says about modernity’s relationship to antiquity, as I’ve proposed so far, is that modernity is always looking back. It examines the past to move forward as much of literature does. If we apply gender to this time-reversal, then we see the engagement between ancient Greece and mid-century England in a spatial temporality that defies boundaries just as gender non-conformity does. In consideration for further study, continuing to investigate antiquity’s impression upon Woolf’s writings will bring a new understanding of antiquity’s perseverance in modernity and beyond. Likewise, we may further investigate how Woolf herself has contributed to the classical tradition despite her nontraditional education and the implications of such study upon classical scholarship.
[1] “Woolf's England and her Greece enlivened each other through a lifelong encounter that began with her first Greek lesson in October 1897” (Fowler 218).
[2] Adrienne Rich first proposes the idea of female revisionist mythmaking in her 1972 essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” I apply this idea to another of my papers: “Female Mythmaking and the Classical Tradition in English Romanticism: A Study of Mary Shelley’s Myth Writings.”
Works Cited
Brown, Sarah Annes. The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes. St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
Eliot, T. S. The Waste Land and Other Poems. Edited by Randy Malamud. Barnes & Noble Classics, 2005.
Fowler, Rowena. “Moments and Metamorphoses: Virginia Woolf’s Greece.” Comparative Literature, vol. 51, no. 3, Summer 1999, pp. 217-242.
McNellie, Andrew. “Bloomsbury.” The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Edited by Susan Sellers, Cambridge UP, 2nd edition, 2010, pp. 1-29.
Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. D. Melville, Oxford UP, 1986.
Pillinger, Emily. “Finding Asylum for Virginia Woolf’s Classical Visions.” A Handbook to the Reception of Classical Mythology. Edited by Vanda Zajko and Helena Hoyle, John Wiley & Sons, 2017, pp. 271-283.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. Mariner Classics, 1973.
Woolf, Virginia. “On Not Knowing Greek.” The Common Reader. Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1925 pp. 39-59.