『オーランドー』考 : ギリシアへの憧憬 : 花崗岩と虹の牧歌

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Orlando is a fantastic novel, which the author herself called "a writer's holiday", and the most fantastic is Orlando's immense life span and the sex-change in the middle of the work. Because of this metaphorical construction, this novel has been mostly argued in the light of feminism, associated with A Room of One's Own and with Between the Acts as a re-reading of the English history dominated by men. "Orlando offers a wealth of revelations", as Jean Guiguet pointed out, and this novel reveals not only feminism but many other Woolfian concerns. For instance, the metamorphosis from man to woman of Orlando in Constantinople, where "East" and "West" meet, evokes to us the synthesis of the oppositions, and her cultural shock from the barbarian life of the gipsies there and her longing for pen and ink also evokes to us the classical binomial contrasts of country/city, nature/civilization. Orlando repeatedly comes and goes between nature and civilization, longing for the other side when he is not there. Nostalgia for the lost is a perpetual motif of a pastoral. In this sense, Orlando is a pastoral in which modernist Woolf longs for the wholeness of fragmentation, dialectic synthesis of oppositions. The most persuasive scene is in the last stage. She recovers herself from the fragmental experience of identity by motoring fast out of London, at the sight of the green of the country. And her "Oak Tree" gets a prize and is warmly welcomed by the society. It symbolizes reconciliation between Zeus and Prometheus, since the oak tree is a symbol of Zeus and civilized society a metaphor of Prometheus. Orlando, which unites "granite" of biographical facts with "rainbow" of fantasy, is a pastoral dedicated to Vita Sackville-West whom Woolf adores. The writer who is on holiday is very serious and productive.
1993-09-30

『オーランドー』考 : ギリシアへの憧憬 : 花崗岩と虹の牧歌

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