Abstract
The conclusion takes as its focus Woolf’s last, incomplete work Between the Acts, not as the object of in-depth analysis but as a means to recapitulate the central claims of the book. Set in the grounds of an English country house, the novel’s pageant deconstructs its narrative of history through spatio-temporal layering, suggestive of the contemporary crisis of signification as well as the instability of reality, history and artistic vision. Woolf’s unfinished novel constitutes a perfect example of her complex engagement with space, as seen in the constantly juxtaposed spatial and temporal planes underlying the novel’s dramatization of English history, as well as in the multiple meanings of rooms as material, psychic and textual space.
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- 1.
I am aware of Mark Hussey’s observation that “last novel” is a somewhat improper term to use, since “there is no work that Woolf saw into print as her ‘last novel.’ Between the Acts remains in process, permanently deferred” (lxi, emphasis in the original).
- 2.
Gillian Beer links her observation that “[s]ignifying is a limited activity” to the novel’s emphasis on emptiness (“Introduction” xxvii).
- 3.
In an early scene, the shell image is explicitly linked to the notion of emptiness: “Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was” (BA 24). The shell image reoccurs twice in the last scene of the novel in conjunction with nightfall and the figurative return to prehistoric darkness.
- 4.
In using the term “objective,” I am also alluding to Woolf’s attention to objects as material things whose existence independent of human consciousness she thematises in her writing, for instance in the description of the Ramsays’ house in To the Lighthouse or that of Jacob’s room, often as a poignant signifier for human absence. An examination of such objects—as in my discussion of the mother’s portrait in The Years—is potentially fruitful for the recent “return to the object” in modernist studies.
Bibliography
Beer, Gillian. Introduction. Between the Acts. By Virginia Woolf. Ed. Stella McNichol and Gillian Beer. London: Penguin, 1992. ix–xxxv. Print.
Hussey, Mark. Introduction. Between the Acts. By Virginia Woolf. Ed. Hussey. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. xxxix–lxxiii. Print. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Virginia Woolf.
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. Ed. Stella McNichol and Gillian Beer. London: Penguin, 1992. Print.
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Zink, S. (2018). Conclusion. In: Virginia Woolf's Rooms and the Spaces of Modernity. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71909-2_9
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