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Orlando (3519 words) |
 | Orlando's mood swings constantly; "that was the way his mind worked now, in violent see-saws from life to death, stopping at nothing in between." Woolf attributes Orlando's tendency towards extremism to the Zeitgeist; he lives intensely and passionately because he is an Elizabethan. |
 | Orlando carries her love for literature with her in Constantinople, in the form of the manuscript of "The Oak Tree." Even after her sex change, when she flees the city and lives with the gypsies, she keeps it with her. |
 | Orlando had no problem being a single noblewoman in the eighteenth century, but the spirit of the nineteenth century requires her to find a husband before she can finish her poem, "The Oak Tree." She attempts to write, but her powers of personal expression are canceled; the spirit of the age takes over the pen. |