Orlando Is A Hero Essay

Right from the beginning, Virginia Woolf gives Orlando the standard “heroic” image. The novel starts off with a stereotypically masculine scene; Orlando slicing at the head of a dead man his ancestors had killed, almost as if it were a game. Woolf starts off as describing Orlando as your typical “masculine” hero. Orlando is seen participating in violent activities, assuring his “power”. Woolf then goes on to explain the amount of power that his ancestors, all male, had as well. “Orlando’s fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed.” Every story of a hero needs to have the pressure of being just as “heroic” as your ancestors were before you.
Woolf then proceeds to sabotage all of the work she just did by describing Orlando in the exact opposite way that most people describe stereotypical heroes.
Many will argue that Orlando isn’t a hero because heroes need to either save people from harm, or always act heroic. The most “heroic” thing that Orlando does is become a duke, but we aren’t even sure if that is true because we have literally no evidence of anything. The narrator of the story follows the great honor with saying, “the revolution which broke out during his period of office, and the fire which followed, have so damaged or destroyed all those papers from which any trustworthy record could be drawn, that what we can give is lamentably incomplete.” Again, it seems as if every time Woolf starts describing Orlando as the “great hero” of the story, she immediately demolishes the illusion of it
herself.
There are many other times where you are almost disappointed with the actions of Orlando. Especially once they fully transition into a woman. Reading this book now, from the perspective of someone from the 21st century, you almost feel as if Orlando would only be able to be a true hero if she had stuck up against gender norms, especially during the Victorian age. Orlando didn’t actually want to get married, but felt as if she needed to because she was now a woman of this time, and that is what women did to fit in. It’s almost like a slap in the face that she just marries quite literally the first man she sees once she has decided that her writing is faltering from her “lack of a real ring on her finger”. Never before had she wanted a husband, but the minute her writing was starting to get affected by this lack of marriage, she immediately went out and found one. Some might say that it’s noble of her, to go and find the exact kind of husband that will fit her needs (mainly one who leaves her when she needs to be left alone, and who isn’t around a good portion of the year), but her concern about having the approval of the times disproves that really. “She was extremely anxious to be informed whether the steps she had taken in the matter of getting engaged to Shelmerdine and marrying him met with its approval.”