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.
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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
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