Emily Pillinger
A stranger has come
To share my room in the house not right in the head,
A girl mad as birdsBolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
Dylan Thomas, “Love in the Asylum”
The language and figure of the prophet are the same from age to age and nation to nation. The clarity of his vision and the burden of his knowledge are too great a load for human senses, and the disbelief and mockery of his hearers tip the balance so that what might have been merely a strange urgency comes close to madness; the apocalyptic vision is expressed in magnificent but unconnected images which to the workaday mind of the hearer seem only to confirm the suspicion that the prophet is deranged.
Bernard Knox, Word and Action (1979, 46)
In his own splendidly portentous language, Knox (above) identifies a set of continuities that can be found in all representations of the visionary prophet. The prophet is blessed with knowledge that is a curse: his is a privileged understanding that spills beyond normal linguistic and cerebral capacities and destabilizes him, particularly in the eyes and ears of a skeptical audience. A figure whose mental state is challenged by divinely inspired visions, and whose difficulty in sharing those visions serves to detach him from the very community that should value the knowledge most, the prophet either pitches towards insanity or projects the appearance of insanity. The masculine possessive pronouns in the quotation are misleading, however, for Knox is responding to a specific character: to Cassandra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, the prophet cursed by Apollo to speak the truth but never be understood. It is the characteristics peculiar to Cassandra’s role as prophetess – her sexual vulnerability as a woman, her tortured but inspired speech, her undervalued knowledge, her identification with certain myths of metamorphosis, and her existence on the precipice of insanity (“mad as birds”) – that quietly haunt Virginia Woolf, one of the most important writers on the self in the early twentieth century.
Woolf had an ambivalent relationship with the classical world. As a reader, essayist, and creative writer of catholic tastes, she could not be untouched by the literature of Rome and, to an even greater extent, Greece. She writes in her famous essay “On Not Knowing Greek”: “it is to the Greeks that we turn when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of the Christianity and its consolations, of our own age” (Woolf 1984, 38). At the same time, as a woman, excluded from many of the educational institutions that fostered a sense of ease and familiarity with the Classics, she was painfully alert to the elitism of classical scholarship. The patriarchal classical canon had been reinforced by generations of male scholarship, and women were still not fully accepted within the realms of either the scholars or the creative artists inspired by those ancient texts. As Woolf notes in “A Room of One’s Own,” “women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves” (Woolf 2008, 141).
Nonetheless, while Woolf was often anxious about her piecemeal understanding of ancient languages and literature, in “On Not Knowing Greek” she also hints at the peculiar insight that comes from having avoided conventional indoctrination, from remaining conscious of the unknowability of ancient Greece (Evangelista 2009, 2). She alludes to this when she opens the essay with the sly comment that schoolboy Greek surely sounds nothing like the language spoken in ancient Greece. Woolf balances her more general sense of educational disadvantage with an awareness of her distinctive capacities in the introduction to the first volume of The Common Reader, in which “On Not Knowing Greek” was published. There she defines herself as the figure behind the book’s title:
The common reader, as Dr Johnson implies, differs from the critic and the scholar. He is worse educated, and nature has not gifted him so generously. He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others. Above all, he is guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole – a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing.
(Woolf 1984, 1)
According to this model (another generalization with recourse to provocatively masculine pronouns), the technique of selectively and instinctively drawing on canonical culture contributes to an original perspective; Woolf makes a proud virtue of necessity. Woolf presents herself as the “common reader” with respect to the Classics perhaps more than she does with any other branch of literature. Indeed, her defiant amateurism not only allows her to find new paths of meaning in ancient texts where others slip into scholarly ruts, but it even permeates her lived experience: “Greek, for all my ignorance, has worked its way into me” (quoted in Fowler 1983, 347). Responding to the always‐alien language and literature of ancient Greece helped Woolf to develop her own idiosyncratic style of writing, one designed to expose the strange self that she inhabited, as well as to compose the many selves found in both her fiction and her non‐fiction.
The most intense interplay between ancient Greek culture and Woolf’s writing on the self occurred during the author’s renewed Greek studies in the 1920s. Early in the decade Woolf read Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, producing her own crib and notes on the text, and the experience of getting to grips with Aeschylus’ language informed and inspired “On Not Knowing Greek.” As Prins and Dalgarno have shown, in that essay Cassandra becomes a figure for Woolf’s Benjaminian understanding of Greek and the process of translation: Woolf finds that in Aeschylus’ play “meaning is just on the far side of language” (Woolf 1984, 31; with Prins 2006 and Dalgarno 2001 and 2012). Working outwards from Woolf’s quotation of Cassandra’s first otototoi in the Agamemnon, dubbed by Woolf a “naked cry” of sound detached from semantic sense, Prins shows how Woolf treasures the character whose linguistic richness defies any facile communication of meaning, either on the page or on stage, in the distant past or in contemporary readings. Woolf also had a personal interest in Cassandra’s voice. The production of non‐sense, as Knox explained, is a marker of Cassandra’s prophetic authority, but it is also associated with real or perceived madness. Woolf, seriously troubled by mental ill health, was driven to present her condition through her own articulation of Greek‐inspired “naked cries.” In turn, the freedom of Cassandra’s voice, unbounded by the normal constraints of time or language, offered Woolf a model for a form of writing therapy (Peters 2009, 39). This therapy involved Woolf allowing her own voice to range with similar freedom across the cultural canon, reformulating mental trauma and dislocated authority as inspired creativity that could be valued in the present moment.
In her essays Woolf shows how silences, sounds, and words can create a language of mental and physical illness. For example, Woolf’s use of ellipse becomes a reference to the enigmatic internal self: in “A Room of One’s Own” its frequency has been interpreted as reflecting repression, unconscious desire, and self‐conscious questioning (Allen 2010), and in her letters it bears sexual connotations (Cramer 2010). When it comes to portraying the most inaccessible forms of inspiration and delusion, Woolf turns to foreign literature, that which the non‐native reader perceives as “the far side of language.” In “On Being Ill,” an essay that insists on the connection between mental and bodily suffering, Woolf writes of what it feels like to read when ill:
In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning … In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poem by Mallarmé or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent and distil their flavour.
(Woolf 2012, 21)
In other words, Woolf grants her readers permission to identify her various pathologies as a true melding of pathos and logos: a medical phenomenon that always retains an intellectual and aesthetic dimension. Lee, sensitively warning against the danger of biographers dispossessing Woolf of her own illness, notes that Woolf herself “transforms illness into a language of power and inspiration” (Lee 1997, 194).
One much‐analyzed story epitomizes the impossibly interwoven nature of Woolf’s analytical, creative, and hallucinatory experiences in the context of Greek language and myth. According to Woolf, during her second mental breakdown in 1904 she lay in bed “thinking that the birds were singing Greek choruses and that King Edward was using the foulest possible language among Ozzie Dickinson’s azaleas” (Woolf 2002, 45). The story was repeated by Woolf’s family members and biographers, from her husband Leonard (who also applies it to a later breakdown) to her nephew Quentin Bell, who concludes his account with, “All that summer she was mad” (Bell 1972, 89–90). Dalgarno interprets these auditory hallucinations according to Woolf’s ideas on the strained language of illness:
in her biography Greek stands for the most distant horizon of intelligibility, the point beyond which the sane mind does not reach. Birdsong is communication in a language that the listener does not know, and to acknowledge it as language albeit unknown compromises the listener’s social identity in a way that invites being labelled insane.
(Dalgarno 2001, 33)
For Poole (1995), the vision exposes Woolf’s sense of her limited knowledge of the Classics, a mortification compounded by the humiliation induced by the sexual advances she suffered from her half‐brother George Duckworth, which she described in the context of a Greek lesson, and by her difficult sexual relations with her husband Leonard, another accomplished classicist. Poole’s interpretation links Woolf’s impression that the birds were singing Greek to her discussions of birds from specific myths elsewhere in her work. In “On Not Knowing Greek” Woolf talks of Sophocles’ tragedies: “Here we listen to the nightingale whose song echoes through English literature singing in her own Greek tongue” (Woolf 1984, 28). From her references to the words of Sophocles’ Electra on the grief of the nightingale Poole connects Woolf’s hallucinations of Greek‐singing birds to the myth of the sisters Procne and Philomela, the tale of literally unspeakable sexual and domestic violence. Philomela, raped and with her tongue cut out by her sister’s husband Tereus, tells her sister what has happened by weaving the tale into a tapestry. In vengeance Procne and Philomela slaughter Itys, the child of Procne and Tereus, and feed him to his father, before in a mass metamorphosis all protagonists are transformed into birds. Tereus becomes a hoopoe, while Procne and Philomela become a nightingale and a swallow respectively (in most versions): Procne laments the loss of her son in her beautiful song, while Philomela chitters incomprehensibly as the swallow.
While Poole has Woolf allude to the myth to express her feelings of shame and cultural inadequacy, others identify more optimism in the references. Dalgarno (2001) focuses on the power of the nightingale’s voice, tracing the myth of Procne and Philomela through texts Woolf had mastered, including Aristophanes’ Birds (which Woolf saw performed as the Cambridge Greek Play in 1903 and read in 1924); Prins (2006) explores Woolf’s enthusiasm for the deliberate evasions of both birds. In fact it is the confusion between the two birds’ voices that links the myth of Procne and Philomela to the prophet Cassandra in Aeschylus’ drama, and Woolf picks up on this flexibility of association. In the Agamemnon Cassandra’s inability to communicate is mapped onto the myth: initially Clytemnestra suggests that the prophet may speak a foreign language sounding like a swallow’s song (1050–1051). Just a few lines later the chorus responds to Cassandra’s voice with the suggestion that she is like the nightingale Procne:
you cry forth about yourself
a song that is no song, like a vibrant‐throated bird
wailing insatiably, alas, with a heart fond of grieving,
the nightingale lamenting “Itys, Itys!” for a death
in which both parents did evil.
(Sommerstein 2008, 1140–1145)
Cassandra responds with the despairing wish that she were indeed Procne:
Ió ió, the life of the clear‐voiced nightingale!
The gods have clothed her with a feathered form
and given her a pleasant life with no cause to grieve.
(Sommerstein 2008, 1146–1148)
Cassandra does not see herself as “clear‐voiced,” knowing as she does that her voice is defined by what Prins calls the “Cassandra effect”: “something untranslatable in Greek, a foreign element within any language that sounds like the twittering of a swallow” (Prins 2006, 183).
The communicative difficulties and identity problems of Procne and Philomela reflect the multiple dimensions of Cassandra’s vocal (dis)ability, a state to which Woolf responds as both a patient and a writer. To her listeners, Cassandra’s language is strange and fragmentary, and at times beautiful. Her identification as either the swallow or the nightingale is not absolute, but something that occurs to her audience in the process of responding to her voice. When Cassandra intervenes to dismiss any comparison of herself with the nightingale, she effectively joins the audience in detached observation of her own dubious double. Woolf constructs a similarly fluid relationship with her avian counterparts, not only when she identifies (with) the language of the birds outside her window, but also when she uses the notion of Greek‐speaking birds to describe the chorus in Greek drama as the refracted and externalized versions of an authorial mind. They are:
the old men or women who take no active part in the drama, the undifferentiated voices who sing like birds in the pauses of the wind; who can comment, or sum up, or allow the poet to speak himself or supply, by contrast, another side to his conception.
(Woolf 1984, 29)
In her fiction Woolf develops the idea of birdsong as a marker of troubled creativity. While Woolf was writing the essays of the first Common Reader, she was also writing the novel Mrs Dalloway. In Mrs Dalloway a devastating subplot concerns the veteran, Septimus, who is portrayed as gradually succumbing to the horrors of a breakdown following shellshock suffered in the Great War. Meanwhile his anxious Italian wife Rezia and his blusteringly incompetent doctors look on uncomprehendingly, moving further and further from any kind of communication with Septimus. Septimus sees visual and aural patterns where others see everyday life, responding to a very English bird: “The sparrows fluttering, rising, and falling in jagged fountains were part of the pattern […] Sounds made harmonies with premeditation; the spaces between them were as significant as the sounds” (Woolf 1996, 21). Septimus also suffers from the impression that birds are speaking Greek, just as Woolf had done during her illness. The sparrows have replaced the swallow’s lament “Itys, Itys” with a new lament for Septimus:
He waited. He listened. A sparrow perched on the railing opposite chirped Septimus, Septimus, four or five times over and went on, drawing its notes out, to sing freshly and piercingly in Greek words how there is no crime and, joined by another sparrow, they sang in voices prolonged and piercing in Greek words, from trees in the meadow of life beyond a river where the dead walk, how there is no death.
(Woolf 1996, 23)
As with Woolf’s hallucinations, it would be reductive to gloss Septimus’ mental trauma as simply a literary function, but there is no doubt that Woolf wanted to connect Septimus’ suffering with a particular way of experiencing words, texts, literary traditions. Septimus’ illness involves a shift in his sensory perceptions that approaches a kind of poetic sensibility: “He was attaching meanings to words of a symbolical kind. A serious symptom” (Woolf 1996, 96). This takes the man into a space where he feels capable of making unique sense of the cultural productions of the Western canon:
He, Septimus, was alone, called forth in advance of the mass of men to hear the truth, to learn the meaning, which now at last, after all the toils of civilization – Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare, Darwin, and now himself – was to be given whole to… “To whom?” he asked aloud”
(Woolf 1996, 67; the ellipse is Woolf’s)
Septimus becomes a medium for speech from the past, relaying it to his wife:
His friend who was killed, Evans, had come, he said. He was singing behind the screen. She wrote it down just as he spoke it. Some things were very beautiful; others sheer nonsense. And he was always stopping in the middle, changing his mind; wanting to add something; hearing something new; listening with his hand up. But she heard nothing.
(Woolf 1996, 142)
A song heard only by the traumatized becomes, in the process of translation, a jumble of nonsense and poetry, voice and writing, quotation and supplementation. As Septimus spirals deeper into suicidal mania he finally sees Aeschylean swallows, but appearing as the pattern on the screen that had previously hidden Evans, they represent a frightening invasion of reality and expose the very frailty of his hallucinations.
There was a screen in front of him, with black bulrushes and blue swallows. Where he had once seen mountains, where he had seen faces, where he had seen beauty, there was a screen.
(Woolf 1996, 147)
Mrs Dalloway picks up on elements of Woolf’s experience of psychological trauma to describe Septimus’ mental disintegration. The less the patient is understood by family and acquaintances, the more this inspires a kind of trans‐historical cultural awareness, an awareness that is marked by birds(ong) fluttering out of Cassandra’s distant story of visions and obscured communications. The myth of Procne and Philomela that underpins this birdsong is certainly one of terrible violence. Yet it is also a myth of metamorphosis‐as‐therapy. After rape and revenge, the protagonists are whirled out of their incestuous world and transformed into birds, to sing their Greek song to the few listeners whose minds are uniquely tuned to their frequency: the prophet Cassandra, and now the veteran Septimus, and the writer Virginia Woolf. The characters who “hear” the Greek birds in their madness are strangely sensitive to the ebb and flow of literary tradition: they know, or show, how trauma is transformed into art. Herein lies the therapeutic potential of the myth. For Woolf, metamorphosis is not just about modernist tropes, or ancient mythography, but personal renewal, and this belief underpins two of her other novels of the 1920s: To the Lighthouse and Orlando.
To the Lighthouse is a novel primarily about family and social class, and about the passage of time as it is measured by Woolf’s memories of her own family at the turn of the century. It is an Odyssey of sorts, with the past configured as an Underworld. In To the Lighthouse a story of visual creativity punctuates the verbal fireworks of the narrative: Lily Briscoe paints in the face of the arrogant scholarship of Mr Ramsey, Mr Bankes, and Mr Charles Tansley, returning obsessively to Tansley’s awkward remark that “women can’t paint, women can’t write.” Early in the novel Lily’s mental language swirls around her defiant efforts to paint in an abstract style that baffles Mr Bankes. She is tackling a scene that will be brought together by the correct placement of a tree. Free‐associating words and surreal images combine in a mind on the verge of inspiration: “to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one’s pencil” (Woolf 2000, 29). As Lily’s ideas race on, birds appear in a sudden climax provoked by a young character’s exploits with a shotgun:
her thought which had spun quicker and quicker exploded of its own intensity; she felt released; a shot went off close at hand, and there came, flying from its fragments, frightened, effusive, tumultuous, a flock of starlings.
(Woolf 2000, 29–30)
Lily’s experience of the birds has them appear at points when she is most determined to assert her power as an individual and as an artist. In two episodes Lily replays in her head scenes of Mrs Ramsey pressuring her to marry, and in both she notices that birds are singing outside the window. The second time around the chant “Septimus, Septimus” is rephrased as Mrs. Ramsay insisting “‘Marry, marry!’ (sitting very upright early in the morning with the birds beginning to cheep in the garden outside)” (Woolf 2000, 190). By now, though, a decade has passed and Lily has mastered the uneasy memory; with this comes a transformation in Lily’s creative work and in Woolf’s novel. Lily’s development of her artwork out of past trauma stretching into classical antiquity mirrors Woolf’s: “as she dipped into the blue paint, she dipped too into the past”; meanwhile the “winy smell” of the sea that surrounds the narrative brings the colors of Homeric Greek into Lily’s painterly mind and into Woolf’s writing, translated through a sense‐perception that is neither visual nor verbal (Woolf 2000, 187, 191). Both artworks draw to a close in the final lines, where Lily places the final touch on her painting. There she draws the single line in the center of her canvas that represents the correctly‐placed tree, and with that, her comment on the image concludes Woolf’s novel: “I have had my vision” (Woolf 2000, 226).
In its negotiation of family history as both stimulus and obstacle to artistic creativity, To the Lighthouse offered a real form of therapy for Woolf, who claimed that after writing it she stopped thinking of her parents on a daily basis: “writing The Lighthouse, laid them in my mind” (Woolf 1977–1984, Diary III: 1925–1930, 208). In her next novel, Orlando: A Biography, myth‐inspired metamorphosis as therapy for the creative artist becomes the conceit that drives the entire narrative, through the metamorphosis of the main character and through literary, rather than family, history. The novel is a self‐referential piece of writing. The novel is dedicated to Vita Sackville‐West, with whom Woolf was passionately involved in the 1920s. However, while the trappings of the book’s narrative are modelled on the house and heritage of Sackville‐West, in its central preoccupations the book is as autobiographical as it is biographical (Raitt 1993).
This chapter began with a clutch of misleading masculine pronouns. Orlando begins with one of the most loaded pronouns in English literature: “He – for there could be no doubt of his sex.” The “biography” of Orlando is structured by two fantastic impossibilities: Orlando’s Tiresias‐like (though effortless and unmotivated) shift from a male to a female existence, and the fact that this existence lasts for multiple centuries. The life of Orlando as an author sits at the center of the novel, mapping out a literary history that embraces both male and female experiences of writing (De Gay 2006; Gualtieri 2000). Woolf’s “common reader” had reached into the past to create a personal but coherent narrative of the canon: “some kind of whole.” The writer Orlando, by contrast, experiences literary history as his/her fragmented present – “she had a great variety of selves to call upon” (Woolf 1992, 314) – and reaches forward to a time, place, sex, and literary mode in which to flourish as an individual, whole and complete. It is only once Orlando attains this that his/her writing, which has been undergoing its own metamorphoses in tandem with the writer, can meet its potential.
Over the course of the biography Orlando’s writings keep transforming, shifting to suit the age in which they are written. Orlando’s early years see his uncontrolled emotions inspiring florid poetry; he declares his love for the Russian princess Sasha through the narrator’s mocking alliteration: “the words coming on the pants of his breath with the passion of a poet whose poetry is half pressed out of him by pain” (Woolf 1992, 47). The narrator also teases Orlando for his derivative efforts, referring to a cabinet full of his Elizabethan writings on the subjects of Greek myth:
One was inscribed “The Death of Ajax.” Another “The Birth of Pyramus,” another “Iphigenia in Aulis,” another “The Death of Hippolytus” another “Meleager,” another “The Return of Odysseus,” – in fact there was scarcely a single drawer that lacked the name of some mythological personage at a crisis of his career.
(Woolf 1992, 76)
Yet there is one artwork that evolves alongside Orlando and, as with Lily Briscoe’s painting, it all hinges on the representation of a tree. At the beginning of the novel Orlando sits as a boy under an oak tree that, like Odysseus’ olive, marks the place that is his home. He returns to it regularly while its sprouting and falling leaves measure the passing of years, and stands under it as a woman at the end. “The Oak Tree” is also a poem on which Orlando works for several centuries. The natural feature and the poem together form a kind of identity for Orlando, who is a tree to his admirers: for Queen Elizabeth he is “the oak tree on which she leant her degradation,” while for Sasha he is like “a million‐candled Christmas tree” (Woolf 1992, 26, 54). Indeed, Orlando’s relationship with the tree as both art and lived experience recalls the tale of Apollo and Daphne, the first erotic myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Daphne is transformed into a laurel tree (and thence into poetry) as she flees Apollo (Brown 1999, 206‐207). This association is reinforced by the presence of a tapestry in Orlando’s house that portrays the myth, to which Orlando also repeatedly turns as a source of reassurance: “rising and falling on the eternal faint breeze which never failed to move it. Still the hunter rode; still Daphne flew” (Woolf 1992, 317).
The tapestry as a symbol of the overlaps between Greek myth, art, and life, offers a faint echo of Philomela, who wove her autobiography into a tapestry. Orlando’s creativity concerning her own life is associated with another kind of needlework. Orlando’s memory is “a seamstress,” who “runs her needle in and out,” and by the time of the nineteenth century the narrator tells readers that the manuscript of “The Oak Tree,” in a charmingly mundane twist on the theme, “looked like a piece of darning most conscientiously carried out” (Woolf 1992, 78, 236). Nor is this the only appearance of Procne and Philomela. Orlando sees a return of the imagery of birds that represented the sisters’ escape through metamorphosis, and, as in To the Lighthouse, the appearance or singing of birds now marks the artist’s development into a healthy whole: “a single self, a real self” (Woolf 1992, 314).
In the middle of Orlando the discombobulated protagonist ponders her version of hearing the birds sing Greek, in a typical combination of lofty philosophizing and bathos:
“What a phantasmagoria the mind is and meeting‐place of dissemblables. At one moment we deplore our birth and state and aspire to an ascetic exaltation; the next we are overcome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the thrushes sing.” And so bewildered as usual by the multitude of things which call for explanation and imprint their message without leaving any hint as to their meaning upon the mind, she threw her cheroot out of the window and went to bed.
(Woolf 1992, 176)
Later, the birds become more tightly linked to Orlando’s creative spirit through the feather as writing implement. Here, as for Lily Briscoe, the connection is made at a point where the artist is resisting the pressure to marry; as Orlando’s ring finger tingles the pen starts to produce sentimental doggerel against Orlando’s will, displaying a mind of its own in what Orlando identifies as “some infirmity of the quill” (Woolf 1992, 238).
Unlike Lily, though, Orlando ultimately finds a healthy resolution in marriage, partly because she and her husband Shelmerdine consistently challenge each other in their gender roles: “‘You’re a woman, Shel!’ she cried. ‘You’re a man, Orlando!’ he cried” (Woolf 1992, 252). So the birds start to align in a mark of good omen with this new partnership. Orlando’s first meeting with Shelmerdine is prefaced by a mysterious walk punctuated by falling birds’ feathers, after which:
some strange ecstasy came over her. Some wild notion she had of following the birds to the rim of the world and flinging herself on the spongy turf and there drinking forgetfulness, while the rooks’ hoarse laughter sounded over her.
(Woolf 1992, 248).
After their marriage Orlando speaks to her husband in an affectionate voice that transforms Woolf’s traumatic hallucinations of birds singing Greek in the azalea shrubbery outside her window: readers are told to imagine of Orlando’s voice that “a nightingale might be singing even so among the azaleas” (Woolf 1992, 257). Soon the very sounding of their names further exorcises the memory. After a jay shrieks “Shelmerdine,” husband and wife call out to each other, and just as they always grasp each other’s meaningful nonsense (such as “Rattigan Glumphoboo,” found in Orlando’s telegram to Shelmerdine), so the fragmentation of language that the birds represent becomes a positive force. The chapter concludes:
the words went dashing and circling like wild hawks together among the belfries and higher and higher, further and further, faster and faster, they circled, till they crashed and fell in a shower of fragments to the ground; and she went in.
(Woolf 1992, 262)
In the next and final chapter, Orlando will complete the triumph that is “The Oak Tree,” and the birds will mark the very ordinariness and sanity of the world in which she now lives.
Orlando pushed away her chair, stretched her arms, dropped her pen, came to the window, and exclaimed, “Done!” She was almost felled to the ground by the extraordinary sight which now met her eyes. There was the garden and some birds. The world was going on as usual.
(Woolf 1992, 271)
Orlando brings to a comforting resolution the myths of Daphne and Procne and Philomela. It also, albeit indirectly, rewrites the mythic story of Philomela’s literary descendant, Cassandra. Cassandra suffered a terrible and personal penalty for the mental time‐travel caused by her prophetic gift. External audiences of the ancient texts that tell her story understand that she looks forward into the future, but in failing to communicate to her immediate interlocutors the narrative that tells of those events, her own existence is doomed. Orlando positively reframes Cassandra’s situation in several respects. “The Oak Tree” is ultimately understood and well‐received by an internal audience, though the readers of Orlando are not privileged to read or hear the poem. However, those external readers of the biography do get to perceive the moment where lived experience finally produces a text that finds its perfect audience, in Shelmerdine’s conjugal understanding, and in the “spirit of the Age,” which enables Orlando both to write and to reach an appreciative readership. Meanwhile the external readers also get to appreciate the text of Woolf, the profoundly uncommon Common Writer, who has produced “a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age, a theory of the art of writing,” all in perfect synchrony. In place of Cassandra’s doomed voice crying out truthfully but incomprehensibly into the future, Orlando tells of two apparently contented and productive writers, Orlando and Woolf, both finding sanctuary in the age they inhabit and equipped with powerful responses to the mythic and literary past. Orlando’s “biographer” hears birds singing not of loss, sexual shame, exclusion, or miscommunication. Rather, at least for a moment, “Life, Life, Life! cries the bird” (Woolf 1992, 269–270).
For the challenges faced by women seeking to study and write about classical antiquity at the turn of the twentieth century see Delgano (2001), Fiske (2008), Fowler (1983; 1999), Hurst (2008), Marcus (1987), Olverson (2008), Prins (1999), Richlin (1992), Stray (1998). Woolf’s theories of translation and her identification of Greek as “the perfect language” are imaginatively explored by Dalgarno (2001; 2012) and Prins (2006). Koulouris (2011) addresses Woolf’s adoption of Greek culture more broadly. On Woolf’s feminist reinterpretations of the broader literary canon see De Gay (2006) and Gualtieri (2000). The ethical and scholarly difficulty in untangling the “fictions” and “realities” of Woolf’s mental illness is sensitively addressed in the superb biography of Lee (1997), following earlier works by Caramagno (1992) and Trombley (1981).