Robert Mayo Prize for best English 300 Paper
An excerpt from “The Boy Who Cried Woolf: Humor, Satire, and Feminism in Orlando“
In Orlando’s relationship with Shelmerdine, Woolf continues to emphasize that communication is the most important part of a relationship. However, she also satirizes the idea of love at first sight to poke fun at shared aspects of Orlando’s relationships with Sasha and Shelmerdine. Orlando and Shelmerdine’s first encounter, for example, is a comical version of a scene from Austen’s Sense and Sensibility: Orlando breaks her ankle, Shelmerdine heroically leaps from his horse to help her, and “a few minutes later, they became engaged” (250). This clichéd first meeting is intentionally absurd in order to poke fun at the trope of love at first sight—Shelmerdine and Orlando’s rapid bond recalls Orlando’s instant connection to Sasha, but this time Woolf treats it humorously to indicate an awareness that love at first sight does not always end well. Woolf also pokes fun at the idea that lovers can know everything of consequence about each other from the start: “Though their acquaintance had been so short, they had guessed, as always happens between lovers, everything of any importance about each other in two seconds at the utmost, and it now remained only to fill in such unimportant details as what they were called; where they lived; and whether they were beggars or people of substance” (251). The idea that two people could know each other so well at first sight is of course impossible, and Woolf uses its absurdity—for instance, the description of someone’s name as an “unimportant detail”—to poke fun at this trope. Through her use of humor, Woolf uses this trope to advance Shelmerdine and Orlando’s relationship while simultaneously acknowledging that love at first sight is not realistic.