Orlando as “Imaginary Portrait”

Abstract

Princess Löwenstein-Wertheim flew as a passenger on the first attempted westbound transatlantic flight (accomplished by a German crew in April 1928 and by Beryl Markham as the first woman in 1936) that took off from Salisbury for Ottawa in a Fokker monoplane, sighted the same evening 800 miles off the coast of Ireland, and then never again. Woolf imagines the final scene of an unsuccessful transatlantic flight as a theatrical one, in which each person plays a part—complete with costume—but no one hears the words. Woolf s role is that of author, who because she isn’t there, imagines a sequence of events. Because there are no witnesses, she invents what people say. By putting into words the end of someone else’s life, she lays to rest a phantom, a public rather than a private memory. For the author, it is not the life but the death of the aviator, that can only be made to “die out” by making it up as a scene. The problem is not that the airplane crash is a new form of death where the body leaves no trace, but that even when the body has disappeared, the mind cannot be laid to rest. What is shocking is not that it happens, but that while it happens one is asleep or dining with friends.

i. “The description of the lover’s discourse has been replaced by its simulation, and to that discourse has been restored its fundamental person, the I, in order to stage an utterance, not an analysis. What is proposed, then, is a portrait—but not a psychological portrait; instead, a structural one which offers the reader a discursive site: the site of someone speaking within himself, amorously, confronting the other (the loved object), who does not speak.” (Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, 3)

ii. “The Flying Princess, I forget her name, has been drowned in her purple leather breeches. I suppose so at least. Their petrol gave out about midnight on Thursday, when the aeroplane must have come gently down upon the long slow Atlantic waves. I suppose they burnt a light which showed streaky on the water for a time. There they rested a moment or two. The pilots, I think, looked back at the broad cheeked desperate eyed vulgar princess in her purple breeches & I suppose made some desperate dry statement—how the game was up: sorry; fortune against them; & she just glared; & then a wave broke over the wing; & the machine tipped. And she said something theatrical I daresay; nobody was sincere; all acted a part; nobody shrieked; Luck against us—something of that kind, they said & then So long, & first one man was washed off & went under & then a great wave came & the Princess threw up her arms & went down; & the third man sat saved for a second looking at the rolling waves, so patient so implacable & the moon gravely regarding; & then with a dry snorting sound he too was tumbled off & rolled over, & the aeroplane rocked & rolled—miles from anywhere, off Newfoundland, while I slept at Rodmell, & Leonard was dining with the Craniums in London.” (Virginia Woolf, Diary, Sunday, 4 September 1927)

“Having solidified the visions of the flying Princess into words, I have, strangely enough, laid a phantom which has been very prominent before my eyes. Why should this be? Some dissatisfaction seems laid to rest. So, gradually, the urgency of the memory dies out too, as in one’s own life; in about 48 or 96 hours all trace of the death of the Princess in her purple breeches is smoothed over.” (Woolf, Diary, Monday, 5 September 1927)