‘The Innocent Island’: A Language of Violence in Woolf and Bowen

Abstract

Set in 1939, Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts is framed nevertheless pastorally, while Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September similarly depicts a longstanding pastoral seclusion disrupted by external violence. Though set in Ireland and focused on the Anglo–Irish conflict, Bowen’s text offers an important contemporary contrast to Woolf’s reading of English pastorality. This chapter argues that what Woolf and Bowen ultimately signal through a language of violence is rendered not in terms like those offered by Raymond Williams, of a counter-pastoral, or the rejection of rural life in favor of modernity. Instead, for both authors these realms are mutually exclusive. Equally, these authors reveal that the extremes between violent and pastoral realms vacillate. That which is destroyed will, in time, regrow.

Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy;

bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. ¹