Orlando: Chapter 3 Summary & Analysis

“It is, indeed, highly unfortunate, and much to be regretted that at this stage of Orlando’s career,” the narrator writes, “we have least information to go upon.” It is known that Orlando fulfilled his duties as Ambassador with “admiration,” and he was involved in highly important matters of state. However, a revolution broke out during this time, and a massive fire destroyed many of the papers of record. “We have done our best to piece out a meagre summary from the charred fragments that remain,” the biographer says, “but often it has been necessary to speculate, to surmise, and even to make use of the imagination.”

During his time in Constantinople, Orlando spends most of his days engrossed in “papers of the highest importance” and is “kept busy, what with his wax and seals.” Yet Orlando is “often depressed to such a pit of gloom” that he prefers to remain alone with his dogs. Despite this, rumors exist to this day of Orlando’s life and the many men and women who “adored” him. He is so cherished in his post, in fact, he is awarded a Dukedom.

“Here we must pause,” the narrator writes, “for we have reached a moment of great significance in [Orlando’s] career.” On the day Sir Adrian Scrope arrives with Orlando’s patent of nobility, Orlando throws an ornate celebration but “again, details are lacking.” From the personal diary of an English naval officer named Lieutenant Brigge, it is known that “people of all nationalities” gathered at Orlando’s mansion for the celebration, and rumor had it that “some kind of miracle was to be performed.”

Penelope Hartopp, the daughter of a general, reports that the celebration was “ravishing,” and “utterly beyond description.” Orlando, she said, was “at least” six feet tall, and he had such legs! The local paper claims that at twelve o’clock precisely, Orlando appeared on the center balcony, lit by great torches, and addressed the crowed fluently in Turkish. Sir Adrian Scrope presented Orlando with “the Most Noble Order of the Bath” and pinned a star on his chest. Orlando placed the “golden circle of strawberry leaves” upon his head, and “the first disturbance began.”

The people, expecting a miracle, begin to riot and attack, and Sir Adrian Scrope and a “squad of British bluejackets” have to calm them down. According to the Embassy, the celebration is over by 2 a.m., but a servant recalls seeing a figure “wrapped in a cloak or dressing gown” emerge on a balcony during the night and “passionately” embrace a woman of the “the peasant class.”

“The next morning, the Duke, as we must now call him,” the narrator writes, cannot be woken. When Orlando’s sleep extends into the afternoon, a doctor is called. Papers are strewn about the “disordered” room, and many contain lines of poetry and mention of “an oak tree.” Among the papers is also a marriage deed between Orlando and Rosina Pepita, a known “gipsy” dancer.

It perhaps would be easier, the narrator admits, to simply say “Orlando died and was buried.” But the biographer cries, “No!” The biographer will have “the Truth and nothing but the Truth! […] THE TRUTH!” In this case, the Truth is that as Orlando wakes on this day, the morning of Thursday, May 10th, he is “a woman.”

Orlando’s new form is one of “the strength of a man and woman’s grace,” and as he walks to his bath, he does not display “any signs of discomposure.” While it is true that Orlando has changed genders, he remains, the narrator declares, “precisely as he had been. The change of sex, though it altered their future, did nothing whatever to alter their identity.” He looks the same and has the same memories but “for convention’s sake,” the biographer notes, we must now “say ‘her’ for ‘his,’ and ‘she’ for ‘he.’”

Orlando’s transformation has “been accomplished painlessly and completely and in such as way that Orlando herself shows no surprise at it.” Many would like to prove that Orlando has “always been a woman,” or that she is not now a man, but the fact remains: “Orlando was a man till the age of thirty” and is now a woman and will remain that way. To this Orlando shows no “signs of perturbation,” and she calls to her Seleuchi hound (the dog never left Orlando’s side, even as she slept) and climbs on her horse. “Thus,” the narrator writes, “the Ambassador of Great Britain at the Court of the Sultan left Constantinople.”

Orlando rides for many days and nights until she arrives in the land of a “gipsy” tribe to which she had previously “allied herself.” They happily accept her into their fold, and Orlando takes pleasure in “having no documents to seal, or sign, no flourishes to make, [and] no calls to pay.” She helps the people milk their cows and herd their cattle. They look at Orlando as if she is one of their own, and her dark complexion and hair suggest that she could be. They even consider allowing her to marry, which would officially make her one of them.

One day, while staring at the sunset, Orlando cries: “How good to eat!” The narrator interjects parenthetically that “The gipsies have no word for ‘beautiful.’ This is the nearest.” The Romani people laugh and don’t understand why Orlando sits for hours staring at nature. They believe she is afflicted with “the English disease, a love of Nature,” and that it affects her more than most. Rustum el Sadi, one of the members of the communtiy, suspects that Orlando’s “God is nature,” and he says as much. He shows her his hands mangled by cold and frostbite. “This,” his says, “is what [your] God does to men.” 

“But so beautiful,” Orlando says to Rustum el Sadi, and he knows immediately that Orlando does not believe as the Romani people do. Rustum’s opinion thrusts Orlando into deep thoughts about nature and whether it is “beautiful or cruel,” and it makes “her long, as she has never longed before, for pen and ink.” So, Orlando makes ink from berries and takes to writing in the small margins of “The Oak Tree.” As she writes, the Romani people become increasingly “suspicious” of her. When she is near, they “cut their fingers” and “break their withys,” and a “great rage” forms within them.

Orlando begins to think that she shouldn’t marry and settle down with the Romani people. One day, she tells them all about her family’s estate and its 365 bedrooms that have been in her family “for four or five hundred years.” The Romani people are pleasant but regard her as “a stranger” of “low birth or poverty.” Rustum explains that his own family extends back some “two or three thousand years.” They “had built the pyramids,” and they weren’t impressed by “the genealogy of Howards and Plantagenets,” which to them is “no better and no worse than that of the Smiths and the Joneses.” 

The Romani people think of Orlando as little more than “a vulgar upstart, an adventurer, a nouveau riche,” and Orlando knows for sure that she can’t stay with them. To be “once more an Ambassador seemed to her intolerable,” but there is no ink or paper with the Romani community, neither is there “reverence for the Talbots, nor respect for a multiplicity of bedrooms,” and that Orlando can’t abide. She tells the Romani people that she will leave for England at once, and they are pleased since they have begun to “plot her death. Honour,” they say, demands it since she does “not think as they do,” but they “would have been sorry to cut her throat.”