Sense of Self and Sense of Place in Orlando: Virginia Woolf’s Aesthetics of Pantomime

Abstract

Virginia Woolf was an open-minded and enthusiastic theatre-goer who enjoyed experimental plays, as well as musicals and pantomimes. She was fully aware of the culture of her time and, along with some highbrow playwrights, she drew upon popular performing arts, adapted some of their features in developing her own aesthetic concerns and translated1 them into her own poetics. In this chapter, I draw parallels between Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928) and modern dramatic texts, performances and moving pictures. In so doing, I do not draw up a mere list of potential or likely influences on Woolf, but rather explore how different pantomimic devices and practices are transferred into Woolf’s fiction. In my analyses, I deal with the modes of intersemiotic translation from drama (mimesis) to narrative (diegesis) within the context of modernist culture.