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Similes
Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—"Present" Time:
Throughout Orlando, Woolf approaches the concept of time in an experimental, subjective, and ironic manner. Although Woolf's narrator references historical figures and events along a predominantly linear timeline as Orlando ages, Orlando herself appears to have a simultaneous attachment and detachment to time. This unique relationship with time often produces situational irony, like when Orlando finally finishes writing her poem "The Oak Tree":
Orlando leapt as if she had been violently struck on the head. Ten times she was struck. In fact it was ten o’clock in the morning. It was the eleventh of October. It was 1928. It was the present moment. [...] For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment? That we survive the shock at all is only possible because the past shelters us on one side, the future on another.
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Explanation and Analysis—The Victorian Conclusion :
When Orlando arrives in London at the height of the Victorian Era, she encounters Nicholas Greene, who praises "The Oak Tree" and rushes to publish it. However, when she learns that Victorian literature expects authors to "always write like someone else," she attempts to come to a conclusion regarding her discovery. The narrator then interjects with an ironic comment regarding Victorian literature:
Unlock with LitCharts A+And now it is clear that 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 [...] 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.
Related Themes:
