Society Dictates Our Life Orlando By Virginia Woolf Essay Example For Students

Society Dictates Our Life: Orlando By Virginia Woolf Essay 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 Woolfs 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 literature and history. History tells that men were warriors and killed the Saracens, whereas literature is seen as a feminine past time. This was because of the tasks of literature; emotional response, escapism and questions and curiosity, (Doran). He was more involved with love and poetry and not so much concerned with the duties of a man. Orlando masculine but also had an inner self that yearned for love and had a burning desire for poetry. It is during this century that Orlando became a courtier for the Queen as well as one of the well dressed noblemen of the time. Even though Orlando seems to fit into this world there is still the feeling that he doesnt belong. The Abbey appeared like the grey skeleton of a leaf, (Woolf, 55) this leads me to the feeling of a frozen world that is separate from him. Orlando does not seem to feel like he belongs right from the start. At some point in the Queens service, Orlando meets a Russian princess and falls madly in love with her. However his love is short-lived when she does not show up to one of their secret meetings and he discovers that the Russian ship she came on was nowhere to be found (Woolf, 59-60). Having lost his first true love devastated Orlando, and having Mr. Nick Greene put down his beloved poetry (Woolf, 94), but the last issue Orlando could handle in the current society he was in, were the advances of the Archduchess Harriet (Woolf, 114). It is then that Orlando decided to pick himself up and transfer himself into another society. He moved to the land of the Turks in the seventeenth century. Online Dating : A Way Of Life For Millions Of People Around The World examples EssayAs the nineteenth century came around, Orlando married Marmaduke Winthrop Shelmerdine. When she was with him it seemed as if she had finally found someone that she belonged with. He would ask her are you positive youre not a woman? And she would echo Can it be possible youre not a woman' (Woolf, 258)? It is with him that Orlando discovers that a woman can be as tolerant and free spoken as a man, and a man as strange and subtle as a woman (Woolf, 258). Orlando sees that she no longer has to change herself to fit those around her, she could finally be herself. She was a person who was both a man and a woman (in the emotional sense). She no longer had to conform to the way society expected her to behave. In the end she chose to reject conformity and chose to be present in her own reality, where she was who she was. Through the metamorphoses of a single individual the changing spirit of English history and the English way of life is re-created. (Doran) As Orlando went through each phase of her life, she constantly tried to measure up to the ways of each society she entered. Every place she tried to fit in made her feel as if she just did not belong. However, when Orlando became a woman she did not lose the sense of her identity, she retained it and instead of being disappointed that every time she tried to conform she continued to press on until she was finally at a place in her life where she was content to be an independent person, living in her own world. She realized that even though she had matured over the years, she had remained true to herself despite conditions, and the restrictions society had tried to place on her. I think that reading this book can teach a lot to students this day in age. We all believe that to be popular we must follow the dictates of society, but in truth it is following society that makes us the most upset. Both men and women spend most of their lives trying to make the world around them happy. Orlando proves that it is only through accepting ourselves that we can truly be happy. We must learn to accept what we are rather than trying to find a way to make everyone else happy. Instead of bending to societys way we must accept it for what it is and stay true to ourselves. What Woolf is suggesting is that gender roles are not merely biological, but societal. Gender is a concept imposed on people by the society that they live in. When Orlando goes out into the night, a woman dressed as a man, she finds herself taking on traditional male mannerisms. The point is that when society allows the freedom of gender neutrality, people will be free as individuals to act according to thei r nature and personality.