The Curious Case of Orlando’s Timelessness Anonymous College

Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando: A Biography presents time in a nebulous, almost abstract manner, following a main character whose life spans an unnatural number of years. The titular Orlando is born as a man during the reign of Elizabeth I, but mysteriously changes sex and goes on to live far into the following centuries, as far as the 1920s. This peculiar presentation of timelessness is intrinsic to Orlando; time is used as a central motif of the novel, but due to its absence more than the role that it actually plays in the story. Days can last for pages and years can pass in mere lines — and the seemingly immortal protagonist is set against a backdrop of a world that continues to move forward whether she notices or not. However, this strange portrayal of time conflicts with itself through Woolf’s own construction of the past, the present, and the relationship between these temporal concepts. The symbolism which Woolf weaves into her notions of time and timelessness, such as the clock and Orlando’s manuscript, intrinsically link the past and present, further complicating all of the temporal themes which Woolf attempts to characterize in the novel. Therefore, the relationship between past and present in Orlando problematizes...