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
16 - Orlando and the Politics of (In)Conclusiveness
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
Orlando then came to the conclusion (opening half-a-dozen books) that it was very odd that there was not a single dedication to a nobleman among them; next (turning over a vast pile of memoirs) that several of these writers had family trees half as high as her own; next, that it would be impolitic in the extreme to wrap a ten-pound note round the sugar tongs when Miss Christina Rossetti came to tea; next (here were half-a-dozen invitations to celebrate centenaries by dining) that literature since it ate all these dinners must be growing very corpulent; next (she was invited to a score of lectures upon the Influence of this upon that; the Classical revival; the Romantic survival, and other titles of the same engaging kind) that literature since it listened to all these lectures must be growing very dry; next (here she attended a reception given by a peeress) that literature since it wore all these fur tippets must be growing very respectable; next (here she visited Carlyle's sound-proof room at Chelsea) that genius since it needed all this coddling must be growing very delicate; and so at last she reached her final conclusion, which was of the highest importance but which, as we have already much overpassed our limit of six lines, we must omit.
Readers encounter this lengthy and complex sentence about twenty-five pages from the end of the last chapter of Orlando. It depicts Orlando's attempt to come to a final conclusion about nothing less than ‘the whole of Victorian literature’ (O 189). ‘Accustomed to the little literatures of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries’, Orlando has now crammed her house with ‘innumerable volumes’ from a nineteenthcentury London bookshop, and is ‘appalled by the consequences of her order’ (O 189–90). In addition to reading these books, she must comply with the binary constraints set out by the narrator:
there are only two ways of coming to a conclusion upon Victorian literature – one is to write it out in sixty volumes octavo, the other is to squeeze it into six lines of the length of this one. Of the two courses, economy, since time runs short, leads us to choose the second; and so we proceed. (O 189–90)
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Sentencing OrlandoVirginia Woolf and the Morphology of the Modernist Sentence, pp. 198 - 209Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018