Of Woolf and love

Moral policing and censorship ride the peaks and troughs of history with depressing regularity. The resulting discontent manifests itself in letters, campaigns and now hashtag-driven Twitter storms. Virginia Woolf, who drowned herself in 1941, found a way to fight this policing with her novel Orlando: A Biography, an account of the woman she loved, poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West.

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Those were dangerous times for homosexuals. Modernism in the early 20th century was fighting to free itself from the Victorian era’s corsets. James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence were hounded by censors; E.M. Forster did not publish his homosexual romance, Maurice, for fear that it would be banned; Sackville-West changed the gender of a female character in Challenge so it adhered to heterosexual mores.

Woolf published Orlando in October 1928 at a time when lesbian author and poet Radclyffe Hall was caught in a maelstrom of outrage over her novel, The Well of Loneliness. The plot — an upper-class woman falling in love with a female WWI ambulance driver — was eclipsed by the theatre of censorship that followed its publication. It was tried under the Obscene Publications Act in Britain and on November 16, 1928, Chief Magistrate Chartres Biron ordered that all copies of the book be destroyed.

Though Woolf gave The Well a scathing review in private, she was vocal in her support for Radclyffe and the freedom to write about lesbian love. Contrary to the popular depiction of Woolf as sexually repressed, she loved deeply. Letters and diary entries give us a glimpse of the complex relationship she had with Sackville-West. They were acquaintances who became friends and then lovers for a few years in the 1920s. “I have missed you. I do miss you. I shall miss you. And if you don’t believe it, you’re a long-eared owl and ass,” was Woolf’s answer to a letter in which Sackville-West described herself as “a thing that wants Virginia.” Orlando was the fruit of their relationship.

The novel places a 16-year-old male, Orlando, in the Elizabethan Age, and ends in 1928, with the protagonist a 36-year-old woman. Just like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa who woke up to discover he had six legs and a shell, Orlando emerged from a deep sleep to find that he had become a woman. As a man, Orlando loved women. As a woman, Orlando’s love for women was more intense. Through this narrative, Woolf was able to poke fun at the ‘guardians’ of morality without giving them ammunition to suppress the novel.

In her essay published in the 1997 anthology Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, Leslie Kathleen Hankins, professor of English at Cornell College, described Orlando as a “letter addressed not only to Woolf’s ‘common reader’, but lovingly to Vita (the lesbian lover); mockingly to the censor (intent on banning lesbian love) and polemically, to straight, gay and lesbian readers.” If there was ever an elegant way to thumb her nose at the censor, Woolf did it with Orlando.

Anjali Thomas is with The Hindu’s Bengaluru bureau