Résumé
“He – for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters”. Thus begins Orlando. Who is this Moor? The second sentence seems to connect him vaguely with “the barbarian fields of Africa” and the brutality of colonisation.However, Moor also sounds like Moore. This chapter would like to suggest that Orlando is, amongst other things, a poetic disquisition on ethics and aesthetics, and a silent dialogue with George Edward Moore, the philosopher and close friend of the Bloomsbury group, and his ethical principles as expounded in Principia Ethica (1903). In this humorous dialogue, Woolf is virtually “slicing at the head” of the Moore while adopting some tenets of his philosophy, which finally helps the reader assess Orlando’s aesthetic as well as conceptual reach.