Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Sentencing Orlando
- 1 ‘The Queen had come’: Orgasm and Arrival
- 2 ‘Something intricate and many-chambered’: Sexuality and the Embodied Sentence
- 3 Woolf, De Quincey and the Legacy of ‘Impassioned Prose’
- 4 Rhythms of Revision and Revisiting: Unpicking the Past in Orlando
- 5 ‘Let us go, then, exploring’: Intertextual Conversations on the Meaning of Life
- 6 ‘. . . and nothing whatever happened’: Orlando’s Continuous Eruptive Form
- 7 Orlando, Greece and the Impossible Landscape
- 8 Orlando Famoso: Obscurity, Fame and History in Orlando
- 9 Bibliographic Parturition in Orlando: Books, Babies, Freedom and Fame
- 10 The Day of Orlando
- 11 Satzdenken, Indeterminacy and the Polyvalent Audience
- 12 In Amorous Dedication: The Phrase, the Figure and the Lover’s Discourse
- 13 A Spirit in Flux: Aestheticism, Evolution and Religion
- 14 Sir Thomas Browne and the Reading of Remains in Orlando
- 15 The Negress and the Bishop: On Marriage, Colonialism and the Problem of Knowledge
- 16 Orlando and the Politics of (In)Conclusiveness
- Aftersentence
- Index
9 - Bibliographic Parturition in Orlando: Books, Babies, Freedom and Fame
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Abbreviations
- Introduction: Sentencing Orlando
- 1 ‘The Queen had come’: Orgasm and Arrival
- 2 ‘Something intricate and many-chambered’: Sexuality and the Embodied Sentence
- 3 Woolf, De Quincey and the Legacy of ‘Impassioned Prose’
- 4 Rhythms of Revision and Revisiting: Unpicking the Past in Orlando
- 5 ‘Let us go, then, exploring’: Intertextual Conversations on the Meaning of Life
- 6 ‘. . . and nothing whatever happened’: Orlando’s Continuous Eruptive Form
- 7 Orlando, Greece and the Impossible Landscape
- 8 Orlando Famoso: Obscurity, Fame and History in Orlando
- 9 Bibliographic Parturition in Orlando: Books, Babies, Freedom and Fame
- 10 The Day of Orlando
- 11 Satzdenken, Indeterminacy and the Polyvalent Audience
- 12 In Amorous Dedication: The Phrase, the Figure and the Lover’s Discourse
- 13 A Spirit in Flux: Aestheticism, Evolution and Religion
- 14 Sir Thomas Browne and the Reading of Remains in Orlando
- 15 The Negress and the Bishop: On Marriage, Colonialism and the Problem of Knowledge
- 16 Orlando and the Politics of (In)Conclusiveness
- Aftersentence
- Index
Summary
So here then we are at Kew, and I will show you to-day (the second of March) under the plum tree, a grape hyacinth, and a crocus, and a bud, too, on the almond tree; so that to walk there is to be thinking of bulbs, hairy and red, thrust into the earth in October; flowering now; and to be dreaming of more than can rightly be said, and to be taking from its case a cigarette or cigar even, and to be flinging a cloak under (as the rhyme requires) an oak, and there to sit, waiting the kingfisher, which, it is said, was seen once to cross in the evening from bank to bank.
Situated in the culminating pages of Orlando, this sentence, bursting with biographical evasion, coy euphemism, faux calm and literal legerdemain depicts the risky, high-stakes ventures of women who labour. The biographer's hand, like a doctor screening a woman's erogenous and procreative zone, conjures the cloak to obscure from view the birth of Orlando's son. Distraction is privileged over attraction. ‘Look! Look!’ the narrator-biographer seems to urge the reader; take in the view of Kew – ‘Kew will do’ – at whose entry gates two lions, we learn just before this sentence, stand ‘couchant’ (O 215) as if to avert attention from the crowning head. Topographical entrances (the gates of Kew) and morphological exits (the birth canal) exchange furtive glances just before the cloak is, gauntlet-like, flung under the oak tree in flamboyant obscurantism. The rhyming play (kew/do; cloak/oak) conjures delay and delight; it soothes and lulls like a nursery rhyme while the kingfisher's flickage from ‘bank to bank’ rhythms uterine pulsations. Yet, on a deeper, more chthonic level, the playful language engages with what Gillian Beer calls the ‘anarchic neatness of rhyme [that] pins together the unlike’: in this instance, the uneasy, metaphorically commonplace, but, for the woman writer, paradoxical pairing of book and baby. Orlando's poem, ‘The Oak Tree’, and her son here have simultaneous, analogous births. The controlled anarchy of their doubling interrogates the tensile interrelationships between life and art for a transhistorical, transgendered woman who dares to joyously have it all.
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- Information
- Sentencing OrlandoVirginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence, pp. 116 - 127Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018