To begin my research into literary awe, I considered the approach taken by Virginia Woolf in parodying the traditional Romantic sublime in her 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography. In doing so, Woolf begins to establish what Kari Elise Lokke called the author’s “comic” or “collective” sublime in her 1992 paper “‘Orlando’ and Incandescence: Virginia Woolf’s Comic Sublime”. This new “modernist sublime” is relevant to my consideration of literary awe, and illuminates new avenues for research which I intend to explore in future posts– including the modernist sublime of Gertrude Stein alongside Woolf, and the fields of ecocriticism, ecofeminism, and ecocritical theology.

The following is a seminar paper that I wrote for a course called “History and/in Fiction”, which I took at Haverford College in Spring 2024 with Professor Alexander Millen. The paper addresses the struggle for mastery in literary representations of the natural world. Though I don’t directly mention the sublime or awe, I believe that this work serves as a useful starting point for my work. In my research, I intend to explore the notion of an awe-based or devotional literary practice– something akin to the kind of “revelatory relationship” I argue the character Orlando has to his/her environment at the end of the paper.

Mastering Nature: Literary Landscapes in Orlando

Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography traces the life of the titular character Orlando through history. One of the central concerns of the text is its nature as a “biography”. The word biography itself illustrates a major challenge of Woolf’s book– that it is an attempt to “graph”, “map”, or even “master” a life. This attempt represents a modernist concern for mimesis— for using the structures of language to approach resemblance of life as it’s really lived. In her speech “Portraits and Repetition” from Speeches in America, Gertrude Stein addresses this challenge with specific reference to literary portraiture. For Woolf, however, the struggle for mimesis comes not solely from the difficulty of containing the centuries-long life of Orlando in a portrait (a depiction of only Orlando) but from mastering the landscape— the natural world— to which Orlando belongs. Woolf explores this drive for mastery of nature through Orlando’s own literary engagements with the landscape throughout the novel. Rather than aiming to depict “the rhythm of a personality” (Stein 293), as Stein’s indexical portraiture does, Orlando works to represent the landscapes around him/her (most notably the oak tree about which he/she writes over the course of the novel). This search for representation of the natural world is a difficult task, one much less easily accomplished through a written medium than a visual one (such as a landscape painting or photograph). Woolf’s novel portrays Orlando’s evolving struggle for literary mastery of his/her landscape as a central element of his/her life, manifested also in Orlando’s evolving gender identification over the course of the novel. In doing so, Woolf makes a powerful argument for the intrinsic value of an unending involvement with the literary landscape.

Just a few pages into Woolf’s novel, in our first introduction to Orlando as a character, Woolf portrays the young, then-male Orlando primarily as a writer. The first literary endeavor Woolf depicts is Orlando trying to describe, as “all young poets are for ever describing, nature” (Woolf 16). Here, Orlando aims to “match the shade of green precisely” (Woolf 16) of the landscape before him. This attempt to “match precisely”–  a task that proves impossible in the face of nature itself– seems a result of Orlando’s urge to master the landscape, to contain it, using literature. This early point in the novel is when the biographer, Woolf’s narrative voice throughout the novel, claims that “nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces” (Woolf 17). Orlando’s first, youthful attempt at “describing nature…precisely” (Woolf 16) exemplifies this supposed “antipathy”. Literary capture of the landscape evades the young Orlando not only in this moment, but also in each of his subsequent attempts at “masterful” writing in the early part of the novel. As he matures and becomes increasingly obsessed with literature, Orlando continues to reach for literary mastery. After deciding that his future is as a writer, not an aristocrat, Orlando begins to write feverishly:

He soon perceived, however, that the battles which Sir Miles and the rest had waged against armed knights to win a kingdom, were not half so arduous as this which he now undertook to win immortality against the English language. Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted his people’s parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world. (Woolf 81-82)

Orlando’s “arduous” struggle with “the rigours of composition” reveals the antipathy that the biographer claims is inherent to the fusion of nature and literature. This passage reveals not only Orlando’s continued struggle to merge nature and letters, to portray the “vales of Tempe…the fields of Kent or Cornwall”,  but also to “win immortality against the English language”. It’s particularly notable that the young Orlando makes “immortality” the goal of this literary project. Rather than accepting the limits of life and of literature, he aims to live beyond his natural limits, to find a literary answer to a fundamental problem of life– that it ends. This yearning is reflective of his youthful desire to master the literary landscape, to capture the world rather than simply struggling with it for its own sake. It is that very desire that makes the portrayal of nature impossible for Orlando. When the goal is mastering uncontainable nature, frustration like Orlando experiences in this passage may be the only viable answer. Does this mean that the biographer is correct from the start, that nature and literature are inherently incompatible? Does it mean it’s futile to even attempt to merge them? 

An answer to these questions doesn’t emerge until much later in the novel. This answer relies on the creation of an alternative goalpost, an aim other than mastery. But when mastery isn’t the goal, what is the purpose of Orlando’s centuries-long involvement with the literary landscape? The purpose doesn’t become eminently clear until late in Orlando’s literary (and personal) development, long after she becomes a woman. After struggling to write about nature for centuries (particularly encapsulated by her ever-continuing work on the poem Orlando began as a young man, “The Oak Tree”), Orlando is so taken in by the poem that she does nothing but sit and write for many months. Rather than describe this sitting and writing, which the biographer considers to be the opposite of life, the biographer turns to a rhymed description of the world outside: 

Let us go, then, exploring, this summer morning, when all are adoring the plum blossom and the bee. And humming and hawing, let us ask of the starling (who is a more sociable bird than the lark) what he may think on the brink of the dustbin, whence he picks among the sticks combings of scullion’s hair. What’s life, we ask, leaning on the farmyard gate; Life, Life, Life! cries the bird, as if he had heard…(270) 

 This is a point at which the biographer takes up the very task with which Orlando herself is concerned– the literary landscape. The biographer’s experience in this passage, with reaching to capture nature through the tools of literature, reflects Orlando’s own struggle. The question (“what is life?” ) sung by the birds is the same question asked by both the biographer, writing about Orlando, and by Orlando herself with “The Oak Tree”: What is life/nature, and how can we contain it in literature?  In this passage, the prosaic structures that Woolf has used throughout the entire novel now collapse in the face of the natural world. The biographer, like Orlando, must resort to different tools, to poetry. The prose’s breakdown suggests not only that mastery of nature (of life) is impossible, but that the only real value is in the attempt. When prose fails, maybe we must turn to poetry to seek mastery. Maybe we must ask every living being, every part of nature itself, for the answer. Or maybe, as Woolf ends the section, we “must go back and say straight out to the reader who waits a tiptoe to hear what life is–Alas, we don’t know” (Woolf 271). In her essay “Portraits and Repetition”, Gertrude Stein argues that living a full life– a literary life– means engaging in a constant cycle of unending dialogue. “Listening and talking”, she says, “is action and not repetition”(Stein 296). The seemingly repetitive attempts Orlando makes to write about the oak tree, though they begin with mastery as the sole goal, are that kind of action. Rather than ever actually reaching mastery, literary engagement with nature is a practice of Steinian “listening and talking” rather than of conquering nature, of ultimately mastering it. Straining to master the literary landscape, then, is the ongoing practice of a lifetime– of Orlando’s lifetime.

Orlando carries the manuscript of “The Oak Tree” against her skin, on her person, for about a hundred years. It is always with her, the project to which she returns, over and over, for just about the total length of the novel. It is a “living document” in all senses of the phrase, reflecting Orlando’s own evolution and self-fashioning right alongside the changes to the natural landscape it aims to depict. When Orlando first becomes aware that the poem is as finished as it can ever be, she finds that “the manuscript which reposed above her heart began shuffling and beating as if it were a living thing” (Woolf 272). This moment– when the manuscript begins to physically manifest its liveliness– is when Orlando decides that her life’s work, her continued practice of landscape writing, will begin a new form of engagement: with a readership. The work of landscape is published, and complete (in the sense that Orlando can no longer write endless edits in its margins), but will now begin a life of its own, a new sort of perpetual action and relation– the kind that exists between reader and literature.

Orlando’s self-fashioning in the novel has a great deal to do with his/her literariness, but also with his/her evolving gender identification. Orlando begins the novel as a young man– a person who, incidentally, could have been referred to using the title “Master” at the time and place (Elizabethan England) in which he/she lived as a young man. As the novel progresses and Orlando matures, he/she moves away from a male and towards a female gender identity– losing the title of “master”. The loss of this particular form of gendered “mastery” gives way as Orlando reaches increasingly towards another form of mastery: of the landscape through literature. Orlando’s ongoing struggle with and for mastery is also reflected in the fluid way in which he/she moves between genders. Just as the natural landscape that Orlando observes from the beginning of the novel cannot ever be fully mastered by literature, so neither can Orlando remain “master” in title, contained (“mastered”) by one gender categorization. Once Orlando has dismantled this gendered mastery and changed her goal from containing nature in literature to simply engaging with it actively, she finally finds “Life!” and “A Lover” (Woolf 244). Orlando meets and marries Shelmerdine, with whom she continues to live a thoughtful, literary life (the two even invent new ways of using language, forever attempting to approach mimesis). She finally publishes “The Oak Tree” and finds that her lifelong obsession with the world of those like Nick Greene, the literary critic (who would perhaps consider himself a “master” of the literary world), means nothing in comparison to the internal rewards of an active literary practice.  After finally publishing “The Oak Tree”, she wonders: “was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?” (Woolf 325). Now, finally, it has become clear— not only to the biographer and the reader, but to Orlando herself— that the power of literature is personal, “secret”, and internal. Finally Orlando sees that a Steinian “listening and talking” is the closest she can ever get to capturing nature, that true mastery will never be reached. “The Oak Tree”, Orlando’s life’s work, is itself her “stammering answer” (Woolf 325) to nature’s refusal of mastery. The poem is all the “finished” literature she can at this point muster in the face of the landscape. The point, then, is the practice itself, the action, the revelatory relationship that the attempt of mastery gave Orlando to the nature she loved so much she couldn’t stop writing about it for 300 years.

The interminable desire for mastery reflected in Orlando’s lifelong preoccupation with the literary landscape is, Woolf ultimately argues, what makes literature a worthwhile endeavor. The continual reaching for literary mastery is exactly where all the meaning is located, for Orlando and for the biographer. Orlando the novel ends in the present, on the very same day it was published: “Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight” (Woolf 329.) Perhaps Orlando’s literary project comes to a close as the novel runs out of pages, but Woolf’s– and ours, as readers– doesn’t. The present begins just as the novel ends– and Woolf’s literary work, her ongoing, active engagement with the world, runs right through, into life itself.

Works Cited

Stein, Gertrude. “‘Portraits and Repetition.’” Lectures in America, 1935, pp. 287–312.

Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. Mariner Books, 2022.