Society Dictates Our Life: Orlando by Virginia Woolf

As a person looks around at themselves and their surroundings they can pick up small details about themselves as well as their society. Our society has a large influence on the things that are bought, taken home, and displayed. Society also depicts what things are fashionable and what is not. This leads me to the fact that one acquires the ideals of the society that they live in. Through conforming we seem to make ourselves respectable, but does it mean that one must lose him/herself in order to gain the respect of society? I believe that this is the very struggle that presents itself in Virginia Woolf 's Orlando. Orlando is a story about a young man who transcends into adulthood, finding his own path, by becoming a woman who lives through various periods of English history. In the beginning of the novel, which takes place near the end of the sixteenth century, we are introduced to this young boy (not quite a young man as yet) playing with the head of a Moor, pretending to actually slay it, much like his father and grandfather had done. As soon as the story opens Orlando is described as a boy at the age of sixteen that would "steal away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade" (Woolf, 13). When a boy usually hit the age of sixteen he would have already been called a man for some time, however Orlando seems to be shielded from the average duties of a young man. As he is left behind with his mother, while his father goes off on "massacres", he struggles with himself to become the dominant, head slashing male, like his father. He tries to conform himself to the ideal male figure that hunts and kills, but instead finds himself taking a liking to writing poetry.
This was highly unusual for a son of an aristocratic family. The nobility paid for writers not became them, (Doran). The idea of him being a writer brings into question masculinity and femininity related to

Cited: Doran, Christine. Class discussion. February 28, 2006. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. New York: Harcourt, 1956