Abstract
It has been forcefully asserted that in ‘none of her other novels is Woolf as conscious of and responsive to contemporary events as in Between the Acts’, her last novel.2 The increasing menace of war filled Woolf’s diary with anxious remarks at the time she was writing Between the Acts3 and fostered a sense of danger which underwrites the novel. While looking at the ancient view from his countryside home, which would be nor-mally expected to survive the beholders, Giles Oliver, the young city professional, thinks apprehensively:
Only the ineffective word ‘hedgehog’ illustrated his vision of Europe, bristling with guns, poised with planes. At any moment guns would rake that land into furrows; planes splinter Bolney Minster into smithereens and blast the Folly.4
As we have seen in the previous chapter, the interbellum period marked an increasing interest in political thought and a demand for action on the part of artists and intellectuals.5 However, in contrast to the brisk activism shown by her contemporaries and other members of the Bloomsbury group, for example, her own husband, her friend Forster, as well as the ‘Auden generation’ poets Woolf had mocked in her ‘Letter to a Young Poet’ and ‘The Leaning Tower’, it was her writing that best accommodated her politics. Signing petitions and attending conferences did not, she thought, suffice to prevent fascism and war.6
[…] memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.
(W. Benjamin)1
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Notes
See Zwerdling, Virginia Woolf and the Real World, p. 302. Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts was published posthumously in 1941 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1947).
Judith Johnston in ‘The Remedial Flaw: Revisioning Cultural History in Between the Acts’, in *Jane Marcus (ed.), Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987), pp. 256–7,* usefully puts Woolf’s response to the war climate and expanding fascism in the con-text of her male and female contemporaries and friends. Most critical works devoted to this novel refer to the issue and the historical reality of war, especially the Spanish War and the Second World War, as the context and subtext of Between the Acts, with due references to the anti-fascist polemic effected in Three Guineas, published only three years before her death in 1938. There are not many articles that exclusively focus on the war, however. A major exception is Zwerdling’s chapter on ‘Between the Acts and the Coming of War’, in Virginia Woolf and The Real World, pp. 302–23, and more recently, Patricia Lawrence’s contribution, ‘The Facts and Fugue of War: From Three Guineas to Between the Acts’, in Hussey (ed.), Virginia Woolf and War, pp. 225–45. Woolf’s responses to fascism more generally are investigated in the collective volumes edited by Maroula Joannou and by Merry Pawlowski respectively.
Cf. Woolf, Three Guineas, in A Room, 1992 edn, pp. 165–6.
See Barrett, ‘Introduction to A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas’, p. 374. Interestingly, in his book on contemporary politics Barbarians at the Gate published in 1939, Leonard Woolf argued that the capitalists concurred with the militarists and he implicitly compared Edouard Daladier, then Prime Minister of France, who had contracted the shameful Munich Agreement with Hitler, to dictators using ‘not strength’, but the force of capitalism appealing to tolerance and supposed libertarian values; mentioned by Mitchell Leaska, in Virginia Woolf, Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts, ed. Mitchell Leaska (New York: University Publications, 1983), p. 199.
See Virginia Woolf, ‘Anon’ (1940), ed. Brenda R. Silver, Twentieth Century Literature 25, 3/4 (1979), pp. 401–2 n.l. In fact, Woolf copied several passages of Trevelyan’s book that found their way into both Mrs Swithin’s evocations of prehistoric scenery in Between the Acts and one of her last essays, ‘Anon’, to be discussed in the next chapter. This history book was also mentioned as a source for proving the oppressed conditions of women’s lives in England, and their sparse appearance in letters after the eighteenth century, much earlier, namely, in A Room, p. 54, as we saw in Chapter 2. Moreover, Woolf had been reading Michelet at the time, as her diary reveals. See Woolf, Diary V, p. 323.
Woolf, Three Guineas, in A Room, 1992 edn, pp. 180, 199.
Homi Bhabha, ‘How Newness Enters the World’, in The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 219.
Cf. Brenda R. Silver, “Anon” and “The Reader”: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays’, Twentieth Century Literature 25, 3/4 (1979), p. 358.
John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 23.
‘Karl Kraus’ (1931), in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings 2, p. 454.
See Martin Jay, ‘Experience without a Subject: Benjamin and the Novel’, in Laura Marcus and Lynda Nead (eds), The Actuality of Walter Benjamin, pp. 195–6. The ‘inner lived’ or ‘intuitive’ subjective experience, defined as Erlebnis, is contrasted with and privileged over the subsequent ‘outer sensory experience’ or constructed abstraction that Erfahrung is taken to mean, not least by Dilthey, Husserl, and Jünger, before Benjamin. What is significant is that in his later, Marxist phase, Benjamin inverts the values of these terms by historicizing the concept of experience to denote a dialectical process that culminates in collective wisdom, of epic truth that can be ‘told’. This epic, communicable wisdom he calls Erfarhung, which he contrasts to the isolated individual perceptions, the Erlebnis of capitalist, mechanized modernity. Also see Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1981), p. 60; and cf. Richard Wolin’s thorough study, An Aesthetics of Redemption (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), especially, pp. 213–50.
Lloyd Spencer, ‘Allegory in the World of the Commodity: The Importance of Central Park’, New German Critique 34 (Winter, 1985), p. 73.
Sigmund Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920), in The Essentials of Psychoanalysis, ed. Anna Freud, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 234–5. Also cf. Benjamin ‘Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Baudelaire, p. 117.
Sandra Shattuck explores aspects of the play with reference to ancient Greek drama and ritual, as mediated and elaborated on by Jane Harrison’s pioneering work on the classics, especially her Ancient Art and Ritual, which Woolf was familiar with. See Sandra Shattuck, ‘The Stage of Scholarship: Crossing the Bridge from Harrison to Woolf’, in Jane Marcus, Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury, pp. 278–98. Moreover, Patricia Maika offers an extended discussion of the influence of both Greek drama and Harrison’s work evident in the formal structure and uses of the novel’s play as well as in the characters’ names and characterizations, in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and Jane Harrison’s Con/spiracy (Ann Arbor and London: UMI Research Press, 1987). Besides ancient Greek theatre, many critics have traced the pageant’s affinity with medieval and early English theatre, most notably Silver, “Anon” and “The Reader”: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays’; Sallie Sears, ‘Theater of War: Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts’, in Jane Marcus (ed.), Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), pp. 212–35; and Johnston, ‘The Remedial Flaw’. David McWhirter also traces the play’s generic mix and allusions in ‘The Novel, The Play, and The Book: Between The Acts and the Tragicomedy of History’, ELH 60.3 (Fall, 1993), pp. 787–812.
‘The fractions of her faith, orts of her love, / The fragments, scraps, the bits, and greasy relics / Of her o’er-eaten faith’, William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act V, Scene ii, 11. 158–60, The Complete Works (London and Glasgow: Collins,1992), p. 821.
Virginia Woolf, ‘Notes for Reading at Random’ (1940), ed. Brenda Silver, Twentieth Century Literature 25. 3/4 (1979), p. 374.
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© 2010 Angeliki Spiropoulou
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Spiropoulou, A. (2010). This Stage of History: Between the Acts and the Destruction of Tradition. In: Virginia Woolf, Modernity and History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230250444_8
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