Introduction: Teaching Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom

Abstract

In her final novel, Between the Acts (1941), Virginia Woolf ventures a hopeful resistance against hegemonic history, even if only for fleeting moments. The narrative follows a rural English community as the director of the annual pastoral pageant about British history, Miss LaTrobe, attempts to give her audience a transformative, personalized performance instead of one that insists on a singular, authoritative view. Everyone participates in mutual meaning-making as the text of the play comes alive through the collaborative performance of artist and spectator. As onlooker Lucy murmurs, “We’ve only the present” (82), specifically a June day in 1939, with which to restore unity. Further, the multifaceted view created by reflective shards of glass, which the players hold up to the audience at the end of the production, encourages them to advance the plurality they witness: “And the audience saw themselves, not whole by any means…. It was now. Ourselves” (185–6). They begin to realize that Great Britain—“the great wall, which we … miscall … civilization” must be rebuilt by “orts, scraps, and fragments like ourselves” (188). Miss LaTrobe cannot control the play or the reactions of the audience, but her efforts do occasionally create seized moments of time that might make the collective stop to think: “Hadn’t she … made them see? A vision imparted was relief from agony …for one moment” (98).