Identity in Woolf’s “Orlando” and Rilke’s “Notebook”

Virginia Woolf and Rainer Rilke were roughly contemporaries in that their literary careers both straddled the first decades of the 20th century. One common theme that had just begun to be explored in the literature of the time was that of personal identity. This related to gender roles, feminine emancipation, and questions of just what constituted the “self.” This coincided with a period in history when women’s suffrage, labor movements, and democratic liberalization signaled a greater awareness of the role and the worth of the individual. Both Wolff and Rilke explore this in the context of protagonists who are aspiring writers and whose very nature of identity is unclear.

Orlando is originally a male courtier in Elizabeth I’s court. He is briefly the elderly queen’s lover. After the queen dies, he has a brief love affair with Sasha, a young Russian who may be of royal lineage. She departs suddenly and Orlando, heartbroken, accepts a diplomatic posting in Constantinople. He awakes one day to discover that he is now a woman. His adventures continue as he periodically wakes up to find out that he has not only switched genders but also moved forward in time, usually several decades. In each reality, though, he finds persons that seem to have followed him from his original timeline.

Orlando is intrigued by his first transition into the body of a woman. She notes that women are actually more powerful than men and wonders how she can use that to her advantage: “Praise God that I’m a woman!” she cried. […] Now, the obscurity, which divides the sexes and lets linger innumerable impurities in its gloom, was removed” (Woolf ch. 4) Continuing threads are her attempts to finish her novel, The Oak Tree, and her ongoing relationship with Nick Greene, a famous poet. There is also a comical situation where Orlando, as a male, had been tormented and pursued by a duchess, and on returning to the court as a woman, figures that at least she will be free from this harassment, only to discover that the duchess is actually a man and the pursuit resumes as before. Orlando continues to switch both voluntarily and involuntarily between sexes and gender roles, exploring the dynamics of each.

Rilke’s Malte is a writer in the throes of existential angst. He is alienated and isolated. Like Woolf’s Orlando, he is enduring a crisis of identity; like Orlando, he is an aspiring writer seeking to complete his work and so define himself. Malte notes that sometimes people assume and keep certain identities for a long time, while others switch identities constantly: “There are those who wear one face for years on end, […] Other people change their faces one after another with uncanny speed and wear them out” (Rilke 3). Who, then, is a person? Is he or she the person you observe, or is there a more fundamental aspect to identity that transcends appearance and role?

Woolf explores personhood in the context of gender roles quite thoroughly and entertainingly through the evolution of her literary characters. Significantly, the same people (those who follow Orlando through his shifts in time) react to Orlando pretty much the same way: Nick Greene becomes friends with him and helps him nurture his talent; the Archduchess pursues him/her; poets of the various eras treat every incarnation of Orlando with high regard. Orlando does note that even when he is a given sex, that it is easy to assume the opposite gender role simply by adopting the appropriate dress and mannerisms. His having switched back and forth and thus, having experienced what it is like to be a man and to be a woman makes him quite adept at this.

The major difference between Orlando and Malte is that Orlando’s redefined existence opens up myriad possibilities for him, while Malte’s struggle for self-definition is a continuing torment. Rilke was greatly influenced by Nietzsche, and that shows here in Rilke’s portrayal of Malte as a person on the threshold of nonexistence (the concept of nihilism). Malte cowers in a hotel room, observing rather than participating in the world, while his possessions stay in storage. He is the last of his line, and wonders whether that will end with him. Malte could be seen as a metaphor for the alienation and facelessness that the modern world imposes on people, lost in the cogs of industrial machinery and suffocated by urban society. Malte is defined mostly by what he is not—not free, not a success, not a writer, and worst of all, not defined.

Of course, Orlando isn’t very well defined, either. But unlike Malte, Orlando embraces this condition and takes full advantage of it. What Orlando needs and finally achieves is independence. She, in her final incarnation, no longer needs Nick Greene to become a successful writer. Malte, by contrast, at first can’t break free from his constant contrasting of himself with other writers; it’s plain to see that until he stops doing that, he’ll never manage to write anything meaningful until he solidifies his identity as a writer.

However, “identity” is a concept that has many components. We identify ourselves by our names, our genders, the jobs we hold, the places we come from, the places we live now, and so forth. Aside from all that, though, is there some fundamental, immutable part of the self that exists in the same form no matter what identity markers we assume? Are we the same persons even if we switch roles, genders, or professions? Woolf’s Orlando seems to answer that question in the affirmative; Orlando’s personal growth, after all, is linear and no matter where he appears, Orlando is still Orlando.

In examining the characters of Malte and Orlando, it’s easy to see the autobiographical tags here. Rilke was a poet primarily; Notebooks was his only novel. Yet, he surely knew the crises of self-doubt that plague writers. Malte compares himself to other writers in attempting to form a coherent self-image that he can live with. What finally emancipates him is the realization that such comparisons are pointless: just as a person can’t be defined by what other persons he is not, so a writer can’t be defined by comparing him with other writers. The fact that other writers are more successful and lead happier lives than Malte shouldn’t matter. In the case of Woolf’s Orlando, the author was a woman in a male-dominated age and a male-controlled profession. The sign of the times was in women’s emancipation and struggles for equality. Orlando breaks the shackles of gender (which were those of being a man originally) and becomes the writer she has always wanted to be. Woolf likewise achieved success both because of and in spite of her gender. Her thinking was as advanced for her time as Orlando’s was as he/she flitted through time.

While Woolf’s thinking may have been advanced for her time, that doesn’t mean that she operated without constraints. It seems as if Orlando achieves the freedom that Woolf wants. After all, Orlando finds both professional success and true love and marriage by the end of the novel. Woolf may have felt (and admittedly, this is somewhat speculative) that achieving an independent voice was difficult for her. Though by the time she wrote Orlando (1928), her career was well advanced and she had achieved a good measure of fame and renown, that success would have been achieved with a great deal of effort: then as now, every writer struggles for acceptance. Woolf puts it nicely when she describes the palpable relief that Orlando feels when she is at last able to write freely: “And she heaved a deep sigh of relief, as, indeed, well she might, for the transaction between a writer and the spirit of the age is one of infinite delicacy, and upon a nice arrangement between the two the whole fortune of his works depends” (Woolf ch. 6). The concept of the “transaction between the writer and the spirit of the age” is significant. The writer doesn’t get something for nothing; he or she gives up his time, his effort, and indeed subsumes part of his or her identity to the task. This is especially germane here since the spirit of the times was, in fact, a dawning awareness of the worth and the power of the individual, especially the individual woman. Orlando realizes that this is, in fact, perfectly all right; her identity is not in her gender or societal role, but rather, that of a writer.

While Orlando’s epiphany is that she doesn’t need anyone else’s assistance or approval to write, Malte’s epiphany is that he is free to give himself his own approval. He movingly discusses this in the context of the parable of the Prodigal Son: “It is difficult to persuade me that the story of the Prodigal Son is not the legend of one who did not want to be loved” (Rilke 84). In other words, Malte has been in self-exile. His self-comparisons with other writers have only served to hinder him. In his ultimately successful quest for identity, he has to and does cut through his self-doubt and crucially, his tendency to observe rather than act.

Acting rather than observing is a crucial step for a writer. If “I am a writer” is a major marker of one’s identity, then one must write, However, in writing as in many other artistic endeavors, “Am I good enough?” and “How does my work compare with that of those who came before me?” are always in the background. In order to establish their identities, Woolf and Rilke and their avatars, Orlando and Malte, each need to establish their separate and distinct identities as writers and therefore as human beings. The concept of the self and the necessity of that concept are beautifully illustrated and, at least to some extent, resolved in these two works.

Works Cited

Rilke, Rainer Maria. “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.” 1910. Translation by W. Needham. Retrieved from https://archive.org/details/TheNotebooksOfMalteLauridsBrigge. Community Books.

Woolf, Virginia. “Orlando.” 1928. Adelaide, Australia: ebooks@Adelaide, 2013.