Orlando

Orlando, the book’s protagonist, is the biographer’s subject. Over the course of the nearly 400 years of the book, Orlando only ages from 16 years old to 36 years old. Throughout the centuries, Orlando loves animals. Yet as Orlando lives through the major eras of English society, Orlando’s identity shifts in an attempt to conform to the expectations of the time. During the Victorian era, Orlando feels particularly at odds with social expectations. Only when she comes to terms with her own identity through her poetry can she create an honest self that can exist in different eras. The book climaxes with her maturity that culminates in the fusion of these different selves as they unite into a “single self, a real self” (229-230).

The biographer describes how Orlando’s “form combined in one the strength of man and a woman’s grace” (102). In the initial description of Orlando, both masculine and feminine features are described. He has classical male beauty, such as an “arrowy nose” (12) and “a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his temples” (13). But like the standards of feminine beauty, Orlando has a youthful “red of the cheeks” (12) and “eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them” (13).