What does this moment reveal about 1) Elizabethan culture 2) Orlando's character?

• Elizabethan culture is class based: Woolf refers to the commoner in terms of what they do, more so than who they are.
• Commoners are objects of curiosity or idle observation
• Woolf represents the royalty with derisiveness--they stink, as Sasha notes.
• Discourses of filth: Who is dirty? Who is pure?
• Orlando: introduced as "He"--this will change
• Falls in love with Sasha, but falls prey to Melancholy
• Dramatic behavior accompanied with weeping and despair
• Dwells on death
• Perceives Sasha as ideal--she skates like a man, but has the beauty of a woman; she is like an animal--a fox, perhaps. She is distant yet available to him.  She's also dangerous and she is foreign.
• He is a nobleman, but he ditches his intended.

Orlando has common blood himself, from one of his grandmothers.  And later, he will accuse Sasha of being too common.

If you are new to the class, use this time to review the syllabus and to write a self introduction.  Tell me about what English classes you have taken or about your course of study.

J.J. Wilson writes in the Dictionary of Literary Biography:
                   Virginia Stephen was the third of four children of Leslie and Julia Stephen--Vanessa, Thoby, Virginia, and Adrian; there were three other children from Julia Stephen's first marriage living in the house--George, Stella, and Gerald Duckworth--and, in the early days, Laura Stephen, the mentally deficient daughter of Leslie Stephen's first marriage, to Minnie Thackeray, who had died in 1875. The lives of this large family at Hyde Park Gate were filled with the usual Victorian comforts and discomforts.

                  From the turn of the century until World War II the members of Bloomsbury, as individuals and in various groupings, were grappling with many of the questions which still preoccupy us--for example: they sought to understand the complex relationships between freedom and form, between the object and its abstraction, between gender and sexual preference, between friendship and love; they studied the costs of imperialism, alternatives to war, the possibilities of socialism, the imperatives of feminism; they practiced, most of them, pacifism, and they mistrusted nationalism, patriotism, religionism, fanaticism of all kinds; they were proindividualism and prized personal relations above all other allegiances. Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Roger Fry, and Clive Bell were active in the art world and in an artists' collective called the Omega Workshop. John Maynard Keynes was influential in the world of international politics and finance. Lytton Strachey applied Freud in his Eminent Victorians (1918), thereby revolutionizing the art of biography.
                  These and other "members" of that elusive entity called the Bloomsbury Group were in the forefront of the progressive political and aesthetic thought of the time, and part of their importance was that they helped to provide Virginia Woolf the stimulating ambiance of candid exchange and support so valuable to an emerging writer.
                  [In 1917, the Woolfs] bought a small handpress, with a booklet of instructions, and set up shop on the dining-room table in Hogarth House, their lodgings in Richmond. They planned to print only some of their own writings and that of their talented friends. Leonard Woolf hoped the manual work would provide a relaxing diversion from the stress of writing for Virginia Woolf. Had either of them known then what this hobby was to turn into, probably even their courage would have failed them. It is a tribute to their combined business acumen and critical judgment that this small independent venture became, as MaryGaither recounts, "a self-supporting business and a significant publishing voice in England between the wars." Lelia Luedeking adds: "Through the medium of the Hogarth Press she and Leonard made works available to the public in subjects highly controversial at the time. They published many writers whose works otherwise would have had difficulty seeing the light of day--Russians, socialists, labor organizers,women, experimental poets, psychoanalysts, and anti-imperialists." And, aside from publishing the works of Sigmund Freud, John Maynard Keynes, Harold Laski, Roger Fry, Robert Graves, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield and many others, the "dear old Press" (no longer small enough to sit on the dining-room table, but still housed with the Woolfs) published Virginia Woolf's own work and the reputations of her work and the publishing house enhanced one another. When we consider the effects of being a co-owner of the Hogarth Press, combined with the literary tea parties at Hyde Park Gate and the Thursday evenings at Bloomsbury, along with the sustaining influence of her husband/publisher/agent/nurse, we can begin to understand the special circumstances that made Virginia Woolf such a prolific and experimental writer.
                  . . . Also, being both a publisher and a publishing author meant that she
                  could follow her books through all their stages, from the first ecstatic making them up in her head on long walks, to the actual tying them up in mailing packages. Reading piles of manuscript submitted for publication, though it took a great deal of her time, did help to keep her in touch with different intellectual and literary trends. (online)