Making Peace with Time
Since I’ve been touching on time and eternity in some of my past posts, I updated + expanded a literary essay I wrote about Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, an iconic novel where her character face ever-changing everything- time-periods, cultures, even genders, as time itself is almost the novel’s antagonist.
Time is ever-constant yet ever-changing. It is one of the dimensions of reality, something that everyone experiences, and a force that is ever-present in daily life. However, time is also a train that stops for no one, shows no mercy, and bends to no will. And while we may struggle with time, our experiences of its maladies are nothing when compared to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. Time itself will kidnap, assault, and hurt Orlando, ripping her from her time period, her comfort, and her family over and over again. However, at the end of Orlando, the reader finds her resolving her complex relationship with time. Literary critic James O’Sullivan weighs in to the importance of time in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando as well, commenting on the depth of the theme of time in Orlando and its significance. Orlando’s final encounter with the first stroke of midnight shows her making peace with the confusion and anxiety that time gave her throughout the novel.
Orlando has a unique experience with time in comparison to most characters. Nothing is constant about her. Orlando begins as a he and ends as a she, she lives over four centuries, and characters come and go constantly. She is known for falling asleep in one era and waking up in another, even sometimes changing cultures or gender in the process. Each time, Orlando must cope with the changes and the reader can see the turmoil she experiences because of these shifts. Orlando experiences the epitome of the idea that time “does not hold absolute personal power, as all individuals experience it differently” (O’Sullivan 43). Even as society becomes more and more reliant on time for societal functions, Orlando must learn to experience time in her own unique way. She must come to terms with how time will impact her and how she will interact with it.
In the last scene, the reader sees Orlando embrace the possibility of change as technology and time progress around her. She hears “the roar of an aeroplane” signifying Orlando’s longevity (241). She was alive for Queen Elizabeth’s court and now she hears aeroplanes, the new technology allowing man to fly. Yet, this change does not bother her or cause her fear. She does not stop and try to ponder how to cope with changing times and technologies. She simply experiences it and continues existing, “baring her breast to the moon” (241). Even after time and it’s unending march that repeatedly tramples Orlando’s sense of place and self, Orlando refuses to be afraid any longer. She takes on a pose of confidence and defiance, telling time and its consequences that she is “a product of her own time” and proud of how her personal, subjective experience of time shaped her (O’Sullivan 45).
The strokes of midnight hold the power of Orlando that she comes to terms with in the final scene. Orlando saw how the sounds of a clock can be a “greeting to Orlando’s many personal milestones but also heralds in an entirely new age” (O’Sullivan 42). She hears a clock at the end of romantic relationships, during times of turmoil, and, most notably, as the sky darkens and she awakens in a new time period. The sky has gone dark and the twelfth stroke of midnight transports her into a whole new confusing era. However as “the first stroke of midnight sounded” in the final scene, instead of a new age coming, Orlando feels “the cold breeze of the present with its little breath of fear” (241). She leans into the present moment and even with its whisper of anxiety and potential horror, she takes away the objective power of time, replacing it with her own subjective experience of time. No longer will a clock and its chimes hold dominion over her narrative, but she will plant herself in the present and listen to what it has to offer her.
Even as she looks “anxiously into the sky”, signifying her mixed emotions, she quickly goes back to experiencing the roar of the wind (241). In her final exchange with the powers of time, she decides that her “dichotomous relationship with time is one in which the subjective holds the greater significance” (O’Sullivan 42). She has been at the mercy of the strokes of midnight, the movements of a clock, and the changing of the sky up until this point in Orlando, but in this final scene, the readers see the night and the strokes of midnight not scare Orlando. She makes peace with the objective powers of time to progress, alter, and march on with her in tow, while also choosing to lean into to the sensory experiences of the present moment. She chooses to make these moments of her life go as slowly or as quickly as she desires, instead of fearing that the clock and the ever-darkening sky could steal centuries from her in a moment. She follows suit with the narrator of Orlando and the novel’s pacing where “the events of a single day can occupy pages, while decades are traversed in a line”, choosing to adopt this same strategy in the final scene of the novel where Orlando embraces one moment for several paragraphs (O’Sullivan 41).
In Orlando’s closing moments, many themes of the novel conclude as well. Woolf explores several topics throughout her tightly-packed novella with how the experience and powers of time being a prevalent theme. O’Sullivan speaks to how Woolf repeatedly steals the objective powers of time, the quantifiable, measurable elements of this dimension of reality, in lieu of the subjective experiences of time, the psychological, self-based elements of this personal phenomenon. Orlando’s final encounter with time illustrates this point in how she chooses to linger and experience the fullness of a moment in time rather than allow the march of midnight to determine her reality. One may believe that this will be Orlando’s present as the novel ends in 1928 and she lives on as a wife, mother, author, and woman. However she lives on, Orlando is at peace with where, when, and who she is and makes her final statement of personal control of her own narrative in the closing scene.
Works Cited
O’Sullivan, James. “Time and Technology in Orlando” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, vol. 27, no.1, 2014. pp 40-45.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. A Harvest Book, 2006.
