‘The Queen had come’: Orgasm and Arrival
‘The Queen had come’: Orgasm and Arrival
In this chapter, Jane Goldman focuses on one of the novel’s most direct sentences: ‘The Queen had come’. While this sentence reports the arrival of a Queen, presumably Elizabeth I, it is also an equally direct report of a woman’s orgasm as a fait accompli: ‘vulgar, bawdy, openly celebrating female autoeroticism’, yet ‘coded, cryptic, somehow hidden in plain sight’. Taking the multiple queen figures evoked in this ‘orgasmic feminist Sapphic coup’ as her starting point, Goldman pursues Orlando’s queer and queenly genealogy from Mary, Queen of Scots, via Oscar Wilde and Gertrude Stein to Woolf’s and Vita Sackville-West’s erotic intimacy.
Keywords: ancestry, gender, Gertrude Stein, Mary, Queen of Scots, Oscar Wilde, Queen Elizabeth I, Queer, sexuality, textual variants, Vita Sackville-West
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