When I finished Oliver Sacks' On the Move, I decided to take a break from my book club assignments. I looked over the choices on my Kindle and iBooks readers and settled on a couple of classics, both well known to me, but neither of which I'd read. The first was Henry James' Daisy Miller, and the second was Virginia Woolf's Orlando. These are two very different sorts of novels, but I was struck by something they had in common. Both seem rather unexpectedly modern.
Now that isn't too surprising in the case of Daisy Miller. James sets out to explore the modern American girl almost at the moment of her arrival on the scene. Although the story, or novella, first appeared in England's Cornhill Magazine in 1874, the type James was describing had already begun to emerge among the offspring of successful American families. Of course, the true "modern girl," so called, would not arrive until the 1920s, but the notable characteristics of young liberated American females were already in evidence not only in stories by James but also those of Kate Chopin, Willa Cather, and Edith Wharton. It's difficult to know how to respond to Daisy Miller. Was she really only an early instance of "girls just want to have fun," or was there some sort of Jamesian morality tale at work? And if it was really the latter, what or who was the target or subject of his moral lesson? In any case, one also sees James's more typical clash of cultures in Daisy's insistence on her own freedom to do as she likes and his hero Winterbourne's often thwarted and misguided attempts to protect and tame her. The (spoiler alert!) sad ending does little to dispel the reader's lingering feelings of frustration and sympathy. I was also reminded once again that Henry James is the master at describing a world and inhabiting it with interesting and attractive characters.
Orlando, on the other hand, one expects to be modern. After all, Virginia Woolf is one of the classic modernist writers. Indeed, her book brings us up to its date of publication on October 11, 1928, near the very epicenter of the modernist era in England. But, of course, everyone knows that this novel is most famous for its depiction of a mysterious English aristocrat who, although born in the age of Elizabeth I, unaccountably lives on through the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, and into the twentieth. What is even more remarkable, after a notable career as an English knight, gentleman, and diplomat, while serving as English ambassador in Constantinople, Orlando falls into a deathlike slumber after a night of rioting, mayhem, and reckless love making only to arise seven days later miraculously metamorphosed into an equally attractive and accomplished woman. For the remainder of the novel, which Woolf insists is actually a biography, we observe our hero/heroine coming to terms with exactly what it means to be, or have been, both male and female, and how the two sexes (or genders, as we would have them) differ and compare.
I can think of few writers more self-regarding than Virginia Woolf, and yet Orlando seems to go beyond that in its concentration on the inner life of her central character. There are many ways to read such a book. I'm sure critics and scholars enjoy mining this one for clues to Woolf's own obsessions and preoccupations, especially as a writer, since Orlando is essentially the tale of a frustrated author. But while every novelist must come to terms with the challenges of gender, particularly in the creation of believable characters, Woolf goes beyond that to explore a wide variety of othernesses in her quest for imaginative and artistic truth. In some respects her book is an exploration of Keats's term, "negative capability," a concept of great significance to modernism. And I think this was what made the novel seem so current, this and its fascination with gender identity, which has been much on our minds these days, particularly with respect to public facilities! I wonder where Orlando would go to the bathroom in North Carolina?
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