Movie Screening:" Vita and Virginia" by Chanya Button.
Here is a blog based on Virginia Woolf’s life, an incident that turns out to be a novel of hers “Orlando: A Biography”, an understanding of Sex/Gender/Orientation and a movie based on Virginia Woolf and a female lover.
Vita & Virginia is a 2018 biographical romantic drama film directed by Chanya Button. The screenplay, written by Button and Eileen Atkins, is adapted from the 1992 play Vita & Virginia by Atkins. The film stars Gemma Arterton, Elizabeth Debicki, and Isabella Rossellini. Set in the 1920s, Vita & Virginia tells the story of the love affair between Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf.
The film had its world premiere as a Special Presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival on 11 September 2018. It was released in the United Kingdom on 5 July 2019, and in the United States on 23 August 2019.
1, How far do you feel that Orlando is influenced by Vita and Virginia’s love affair? Does it talk only about that or do you find anything else too?
“I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia…It is incredible how essential to me you have become,” wrote Vita Sackville-West to the novelist Virginia Woolf in 1926. A popular writer herself, Sackville-West was proclaiming her love for Woolf during the most intense years of their romantic relationship in the 1920s. Although both were married to men, the two women penned hundreds of poetic letters to each other, and their relationship would inspire one of Woolf’s most celebrated works, the 1928 novel Orlando.
Orlando is not the first piece of fiction about a sex change. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a playful and serious treatise on the shiftability of form – especially human form, as humans turn into trees or animals, or the gods embody themselves as human to pursue their love interests. In The Arabian Nights, there are both gender switching plots and cross-dressing. Shakespeare loved gender disguises – a girl who’s a boy who’s a boy who’s a girl – and of course as women were not allowed on the London stage in Shakespeare’s day, every female role was cross-gender. Every romance is a bromance.
Woolf’s Orlando begins his journey as a young man living at Knole, the great house in Kent that Sackville-West could not inherit because she was female. The novel starts in an attic, as the young Orlando slices at the preserved head of a Moor. It also begins with a famously disingenuous sentence: “He, for there could be no doubt about his sex … ” and then we spend the rest of the novel doubting exactly that.
Orlando manages his transition with grace and a profound truth. On seeing himself as a herself for the first time in the mirror, she remarks: “Different sex. Same person.”
The relationship was clearly a source of inspiration for both women, but it was Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando that would cement her status as an established writer and her legacy as a master of modernism. Spanning over 300 years, the novel features a protagonist who switches gender in a fantastical exploration of the self and the other. The book was described as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” by Vita’s son Nigel Nicholson, and others have called it “the first trans novel in the English language.”
In a 1927 diary entry, Woolf wrote that she was writing Orlando “half in mock style very clear and plain, so that people will understand every word. But the balance between truth and fantasy must be careful. It is based on Vita.” The work was so personal that Woolf wrote to Sackville-West asking for her permission. Vita replied, “My God Virginia, if ever I was thrilled and terrified it is at the prospect of being projected into the shape of Orlando.”
The unexpected result of Vita’s lapses in fidelity, drawn out over a period of several months, was one of the most personal “biographies” in literary history: the fictional account of Vita’s life that was Orlando.
Vita readily agreed. as the writing flowed, Orlando became a version of Vita that, while completely recognizable to anyone who knew her, was also purely Virginia’s; a creation that could not be taken from her, who was safe beyond the lure of other women.It also posed some interesting questions for Virginia as she withdrew, busy writing the fictional Orlando / Vita into existence while the real Vita was continuing to see Mary Campbell. She often wondered in her diary which was the more real.
Their son Nigel would later refer to the book as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.” Only Vita’s mother disliked it, writing to Virginia, “… probably you do not realise how cruel you have been.”
With Orlando, though, Vita felt as if Virginia truly had “found her out.” All aspects of her character, including those she usually kept hidden even from herself, had been laid bare. She felt as if there was nothing that could now be kept from Virginia.
Reviewers and the reading public were aware that Orlando was based on Sackville-West, and that the book’s gender-switching plot alluded to her bisexual relationships. “People knew it was Vita, and they thought it was fun and playful; that’s why people bought it,” says Smith. Not everyone agreed — as depicted in Vita & Virginia by Isabella Rossellini, Vita’s mother Baroness Sackville was horrified by Orlando, writing that she loathed Woolf for “having changed my Vita and taken her away from me.”
Smith has been teaching Orlando to students for more than two decades, and she says that even though the book was written in the 1920s, it speaks to relevant themes about gender and sexuality now. “It forces students to consider ideas about gender that they hadn’t really considered before,” she says. “Queer theory, being queer and that way of thinking of one’s self have changed pretty radically; it’s part of the discourse of everyday lives in a way that they weren’t 25 years ago. Woolf is just such a marvelous writer, and the way she talks about time and the issues of the self in Orlando are pertinent still.”
2, Who do you think is confused about their identity Vita or Virginia? Explain with illustrations
Who were Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West?
Virginia Woolf
Born in London in 1882, Adeline Virginia Stephen, or “Ginia” as she was affectionately known, had a love for arts and literature running through her family. Her sister Vanessa was an artist, and when they reached adulthood, the two sisters became the heart of an influential intellectual circle known as the Bloomsbury Group, a collective of radical artists, writers and thinkers during the early 20th century. In 1912, Virginia married Leonard Woolf, a politically active left-wing writer and university friend of her brother’s. While Virginia Woolf’s earlier novels, which included Night and Day (1919), Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), were not hugely commercially or critically successful during her time, she is today respected as one of the most important writers of the 20th century and a pioneer of “stream of consciousness” writing.
Vita Sackville
The glamorous writer Vita Sackville-West was 10 years younger than Woolf and came from an aristocratic family. The Sackvilles’ ancestral home was Knole, a sprawling estate in southern England, and Sackville-West was always frustrated that she would never be able to inherit Knole due to her gender, as English aristocratic custom forbid it. (This was a point that Woolf highlighted in perhaps her most openly political and feminist work, the 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own, in which she advocated for women to be financially independent.) Sackville-West married diplomat Harold Nicholson in 1913, who would, like his wife, also come to have same-sex affairs outside of their marriage. In 1917, Sackville-West caused scandal in high society when she eloped with her lover Violet Trefusis to Europe; the pair spent two years on-and-off running away together and being brought back to England by disgruntled family members.
“They came from pretty different places,” says Victoria L. Smith, a professor of English at Texas State University. “That might have provided some of the attraction to Virginia for Vita, certainly. Vita was very attracted to Virginia’s genius.”
I think Virginia is confused about their identity because As depicted in the film, after meeting Woolf, Sackville-West decided to publish her books with Hogarth Press, which was the Woolfs’ own small independent publishing house. Sackville-West’s books were commercially and critically the more successful during her and Woolf’s lifetimes, although today Woolf’s work is more highly regarded. In 1924, Sackville-West published her short story Seducers in Ecuador with Hogarth Press to help with the Woolfs’ mounting debts, and she followed it six years later with novel The Edwardians, which was a financial success. “Vita sold all these books, but people just didn’t really understand Virginia Woolf’s writing,” says Smith. But Sackville-West recognized that Woolf was the better writer, writing to her in 1925 that “I contrast my illiterate writing with your scholarly one, and am ashamed.”
“I think that Virginia Woolf recognized that she was quite a bit of a better writer than Vita ever could be,” Smith says. “I don’t think Woolf was jealous of Sackville-West’s writing, but she was jealous of her ability to be all these other things: to be a mother, to be beautiful, to have this sense of confidence that Woolf lacked at times about her being in the world, versus her writing.”
3, What is society’s thought about women and identity? Do you agree with them? If Yes then why? If no then why?
Yes, I not agree with them because,“Their relationship was very passionate and very sexual, even though initially their sexual relationship was downplayed and even ignored,” says Smith. And while the two women were open about their relationship, it was also during a time when British society was more socially conservative. While male homosexuality in the U.K. was still a criminal offense at the time, there was no equivalent legislation that targeted gay women. However, in 1921, some lawmakers voted to criminalize “sexual acts of gross indecency” between women, although the law was never passed because politicians feared it would encourage women to explore homosexuality.
Smith says their relationship was hugely significant on Woolf, as Sackville-West made her feel appreciated and adored: “Virginia deeply loved Vita, and she was so happy to recognize in Vita that Vita loved and celebrated women.” In the film, Woolf is depicted as finding it initially difficult to be sexually intimate with Sackville-West; some scholars have suggested this hesitation in real life was because Woolf was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse perpetrated by male members of her family. And while Virginia still loved her husband Leonard, he too saw that Vita had a profound impact on his wife’s life, and her work, and he did not object to their relationship.
A new study exploring the attitudes toward nonheterosexual men and women in 23 Western and non-Western countries found lesbians are more accepted than gay men around the world.
“We found that gay men are disliked more than lesbian women in every country we tested,” according to the study, which was conducted by three New York University psychologists and published in the December issue of the journal Social Psychology and Personality Science.world.Sexual minorities face pervasive discrimination and hostility globally, with same-sex sexual activity still illegal in approximately 70 countries.
4, What are your views on Gender Identity? Will you like to give any message to society?
Gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender.Gender identity can correlate with a person's assigned sex or can differ from it. In most individuals, the various biological determinants of sex are congruent, and consistent with the individual's gender identity.Gender expression typically reflects a person's gender identity, but this is not always the case.While a person may express behaviors, attitudes, and appearances consistent with a particular gender role, such expression may not necessarily reflect their gender identity. The term gender identity was coined by Robert J. Stoller in 1964 and popularized by John Money.
Gender identity is defined as a personal conception of oneself as male or female (or rarely, both or neither). This concept is intimately related to the concept of gender role, which is defined as the outward manifestations of personality that reflect the gender identity. Gender identity, in nearly all instances, is self-identified, as a result of a combination of inherent and extrinsic or environmental factors; gender role, on the other hand, is manifested within society by observable factors such as behavior and appearance. For example, if a person considers himself a male and is most comfortable referring to his personal gender in masculine terms, then his gender identity is male. However, his gender role is male only if he demonstrates typically male characteristics in behavior, dress, and/or mannerism.
Gender identity is usually formed by age three.After age three, it is extremely difficult to change gender identity.Both biological and social factors have been suggested to influence its formation.
5,Write a note on the direction of the movie. Which symbols and space caught your attention while watching the moive?
Vita & Virginia” wastes the talents of four people—its two subjects and the two women that play them. It is a deeply frustrating movie, a film that not only can’t find the right tone from scene to scene but feels disjointed in individual moments too. It is a bit of a chamber piece, a bit of a romance, a bit of a commentary on creativity, a bit of social commentary, even a bit of magical realism. At a certain point, I started to wonder if the disjointed nature of “Vita & Virginia” was designed purposefully to replicate the structure and themes of Woolf’s Orlando, but decided I was giving a messy movie too much credit. Sometimes a mess is just a mess.
I loved Virginia's character, she was able to act out even the slightest detail in every emotion which made it so easy for me to empathize with her character. The storyline was incredible yet somewhat tragic, and I love how this was based off of real letters between Vita and Virginia.
6, Vita and Virginia" had to be made into Bollywood Adaptation, who do you think would be fit for the role of Vita and Virginia?
If Vita and Virginia would be a Bollywood adaptation, I would select:
Deepika Padukone in the role of Virginia Woolf and
Katrina kaif in the role of Vita Sackville.
Everyone shall share their blog link with any one of your favourite quotes by Virginia Woolf on Social Media with the hashtag #virginiaandme.
# Virginiaandme
Thank you
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