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The Explicator
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Erotic Daydreams in Virginia

Woolf's ORLANDO
Robert E. Kohn

Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

Version of record first published: 08 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Robert E. Kohn (2010): Erotic Daydreams in Virginia Woolf's
ORLANDO, The Explicator, 68:3, 185-188
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2010.499085

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The Explicator, Vol. 68, No. 3, 185188, 2010

C Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
Copyright

ISSN: 0014-4940 print / 1939-926X online
DOI: 10.1080/00144940.2010.499085

ROBERT E. KOHN
Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

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Erotic Daydreams in Virginia Woolfs ORLANDO

Keywords: fantasy, Sigmund Freud, gender ambiguity, psychoanalysis, Vita
Sackville-West

In its first sentence, Orlando establishes that its protagonist is male and acts
male, although the fashion of his clothing forewarns that his gender could be
ambiguous. That ambiguity dissolves a few pages later, when the sixteen-year-old
Orlando is portrayed on a summer evening:
He sighed profoundly, and flung himselfthere was a passion in his
movements which deserves the wordon the earth at the foot of the
oak tree. He loved, beneath all this summer transiency, to feel the
earths spine beneath him; for such he took the hard root of the oak
tree to be; or, for image followed image, it was the back of a great horse
that he was riding; or the deck of a tumbling shipit was anything
indeed, so long as it was hard, for he felt the need of something which
he could attach his floating heart to. (19)
There is a Mediterranean water lily called the floating heart, whose flower
encloses the kind of hollow space that for Sigmund Freud symbolized the feminine
genital orifice. This, writes Paula Bennett, connotes the Language of Flowers
that has been Western cultures language of women, . . . through which womans
body andeven more particularly for this essay womens genitals have been
represented and inscribed (242). Alternatively, a rounded heart resembles the
glans in glans clitoris, which means acorn in Latin and associates it with the oak
tree whose root Orlando had chosen to fall upon.
185

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With the description of the heart that tugged at his side and seemed filled
with spiced and amorous gales every evening about this time when he walked out
(19), there is a sense of sexual longing. But this is more the image of a teenage
girl, rather than a boy, masturbating against the oak trees root until gradually
the flutter in and about [her] stilled itself; . . . as if all the fertility and amorous
activity of a summers evening were woven web-like about [her] body (19) The
implication of this Freudian interpretation of the floating is that, though born
female, Orlando posed as a malethe novel hints that this was done to skirt old
English law that women could not hold real propertyfor it was not until she had
become a duke and King Charless ambassador to the Turks that she was safely in
control of her estate and could present herself as the woman she actually was.
Freuds essay, Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming, was first translated into
English in 1925, three years before Woolf wrote Orlando, and she is likely to
have read it. (It was subsequently retranslated by James Strachey and included in
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
published by Hogarth Press in 1953.) In the essay, Freud wrote that the creative
writer does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of fantasy, . . .
which he invests with large amounts of emotion (144). It may be presumed
that Woolf, to use Freuds words, cherishe[d her] fantasies of masturbating in
her own childhood (145). In volume 15 of his complete works, as translated by
James Strachey, Freud argues that dreams of flying, so familiar and often so
delightful, have to be interpreted as dreams of general sexual excitementor,
more specifically, as erection dreams (155). Leonard Woolf reports that in the
decade before 1924 in the so-called Bloomsbury circle there was great interest in
Freud and psychoanalysis (164). Although Woolf herself, came close to outright,
antagonist rejection of Freuds psychoanalytic therapy, she indicated a qualified
belief in Freudian dream theory, writing that in our dreams the submerged
truth sometimes comes to the top (Goldstein 442, 453). Freud generalized his
insight when he noted that he was in the habit of describing the element in
the dream-thoughts which I have in mind as a fantasy. I shall perhaps avoid
misunderstanding if I mention the day-dream as something analogous to it in
waking life (The Interpretation of Dreams 491).
A second episode of flying, floating, and hovering occurs at the end of the
novel. Orlando, happily married, looked anxiously into the sky, . . . [which] was
dark with clouds now. The wind roared in her ears. But in the roar of the wind she
heard the roar of an aeroplane coming nearer and nearer (328). She guides it in
by reflecting the moonlight:
Here! Shel, here! she cried, baring her breast to the moon (which now
showed bright) so that her pearls glowed like the eggs of some vast

Erotic Daydreams in Virginia Woolfs ORLANDO

187

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moon-spider. The aeroplane rushed out of the clouds and stood over
her head. It hovered above her. Her pearls burnt like a phosphorescent
flare in the darkness.
And as Shelmerdine, now grown a fine sea captain, hale, freshcoloured, and alert, leapt to the ground, there sprang up over his head
a single wild bird. It is the goose! Orlando cried. The wild goose.
(32829)
There are multiple signifiers of sexuality in this paragraph: Orlando bearing her
breast, Shelmerdine erect and hovering above her, and Orlandos pearls, which
are mentioned twice in the passage. The metaphorical pearl, Kathryn Simpson
writes, is and is not the clitoris (47). Even the moon has erotic significations, for
in heraldry, it is always pictured as a crescent, with the cavity either facing up, to
the bearers right or to his left. To the right it represents an increscent moon, to the
left decrescent, all three directions having genital implications. An artist in New
Mexico told me that a moon spider can be any spider which is large, has a bulbous
abdomen, is usually pale yellow in color, and, seen in its webwhich is always
safely beyond reachlooks rather like the full moon hanging in the sky. Perhaps
Woolf intended the moon-spider to evoke the earlier erotic scene in which all the
fertility and amorous activity of a summers evening were woven web-like about
[Orlandos] body (19). Perhaps she intended this final embrace with Shelmedine
as a homoerotic fantasy for Vita Sackville-West, to whom she boldly dedicated
the novel.
But what of the wild goose? Since Orlandos childhood, s/he has sought to
capture it, but
Always it flies fast out to sea and always I fling after it words like nets
(here she flung her hand out) which shrivel as Ive seen nets shrivel
drawn on deck with only sea-weed in them. And sometimes theres
an inch of silversix wordsin the bottom of the net. (313)
The conflation of sexuality and the words in the bottom of the net affirms Harold
Blooms view that Orlando expresses what it means to be in love with literature
(445). In that vein, the novel concludes by marking the twelfth stroke of midnight,
Thursday, the eleventh of October, Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-eight, which
corresponds to Anne Bells editorial note in Woolfs diary that Orlando was
to appear in New York in October of 1928 (Bell 183n). The joy of the gander
welcoming the goose substitutes the birth of a book for that of a child, as if to
expel the despondency over her childlessness that she nevertheless bore for the

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rest of her life (Ozick 38). Not until her final novel, however, was she granted
Shantih, shantih, shantih (see Kohn).

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Works Cited
Bell, Anne Olivier, ed. The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume Three, 19251930. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1980. Print.
Bennett, Paula. Critical Clitoridectomy: Female Sexual Imagery and Feminist Psychoanalytic Theory. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18.2 (1993): 23559. Print.
Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace,
1994. Print.
Freud, Sigmund. Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Translated from the German under the General Editorship of
James Strachey. Vol. 9. London: Hogarth, 1953. 14153. Print.
. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: Basic, 1955. Print.
. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Translated
from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. Vol. 15. London: Hogarth, 1963.
Print.
Goldstein, Jan Ellen. The Woolfs Response to FreudWater-Spiders, Singing Canaries, and the
Second Apple. Psychoanalytic Quarterly 43 (1974): 43876. Print.
Kohn, Robert E. Buddhism in Virginia Woolfs Between the Acts. Notes & Queries. 255. 2 (2010):
23336.
Ozick, Cynthia. Mrs. Virginia Woolf. Commentary 56.2 (1973): 3344. Print.
Simpson, Kathryn. Pearl-diving: Inscriptions of Desire and Creativity in H.D. and Woolf. Journal
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Woolf, Leonard. Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919 to 1939. San Diego:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975. Print.
Woolf, Virginia. Orlando: A Biography. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928. Print.