‘Something intricate and many-chambered’: Sexuality and the Embodied Sentence
‘Something intricate and many-chambered’: Sexuality and the Embodied Sentence
In this chapter, Anna Frøsig addresses the Woolfian double entendre and the wildness underlying the supposedly plain style of Orlando. Engaging the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frøsig reads the sentences constructing the novel’s simultaneously sexual and ethical spaces in terms of the female body. In Woolf’s hands, Frøsig suggests, literary form becomes ‘something intricate and many-chambered, which one must take a torch to explore, in prose not verse’ (O 124), and such exploration turns out to be at once intimate and bound up with an ethics of alterity.
Keywords: alterity, embodiment, ethics, form, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, sexuality, space
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