As well as offering a broad analysis, this lecture suggests how Toril Moi’s insights in Chapter 1 of Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Methuen, 1985) can be applied to Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts (Worlds Classics Paperback. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). The title of Moi’s chapter, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” is taken from a play by Edward Albee. I hope that the following discussion will encourage you to approach Between the Acts with confidence, so that in the end we can answer Moi’s question by affirming that no one is afraid of Virginia Woolf. 

Background

Woolf began writing Between the Acts between 1939 and 1940 while she and her husband Leonard were dividing their time between their home in Mecklenburg Square, central London, and Monk’s House in Rodmell, East Sussex. After an air raid in October 1940 damaged the couple’s London residence, Woolf continued drafting her novel in her writing room in the garden of  Monk’s House. German bombers often flew overhead. In February 1941 Woolf revised her novel. Then, dreading a return of the mental illness that she had suffered from intermittently since childhood, took her life by drowning in the nearby River Ouse on 28 March 1941. The Virginia Woolf Blog <virginiawoolfblog.com> provides documents and discussions relating to this extraordinary and gifted woman.

Introduction

This lecture discusses characterisation in Between the Acts in the framework of Moi’s argument concerning androgyny, or (to translate the Greek coinage literally) male-femaleness. Moi states that in Woolf’s best-known novel, To the Lighthouse (1927), the portraits of Mr and Mrs Ramsay present androgyny as an ideal. She argues further that A Room of One’s Own (1929), a book based on lectures that Woolf delivered in September 1928 to women students at Cambridge University, deconstructs the binary opposition between the masculine and feminine. According to the French feminist theorist Hélène Cixous, this opposition, which assumes that the masculine side of the binary is naturally and inevitably superior to the feminine side, is the foundation and hidden determinant of patriarchal ideology, e.g. Activity/Passivity; Sun/Moon; Culture/Nurture; Father/Mother; Logic/Feeling, etc. (Moi 104). Between the Acts exposes the negative effects of this ideological construction of gender. Chief among these are the characters’ suppression of spontaneity, vitality and joy. They act roles that are socially approved and expected but usually unsuited to their personalities and talents. 

The lecture deals with such features as poetic language, symbols and metaphors (especially in relation to characters’ subconscious selves), and with themes of pre-history, history, time, artistic creation and personal fulfillment. Between the Acts observes the classical unities of time and place.

Seven Characters

Four of the seven main characters who gather at the Olivers’ country home of Pointz Hall (pp. 6-7 and 9-10) are related pairs: Isa Oliver and her husband Giles Oliver; and Lucy Swithin and her brother Bart (Bartholomew) Oliver–Giles’ father. Between the Acts explores both the inner experience and the outward effects of binary gendering through these two outwardly conformist feminine-masculine pairs. Isa and Giles are both unhappy in their gender-restricted roles, and each attempts brief and limited escapes, when they live as it were, “between the acts.” Where Isa’s escapes are mental and emotional, Giles’ involve physical. sometimes violent, action. Acting features as a metaphor in the characters’ performances for themselves, for each other and for their wider world. Acting takes a physical shape in the pageant (historical panorama) performed by the villagers. The title tells readers that acting is in fact the novel’s central metaphor. Note, however, that Kermode explains the title historically: “Not to see that the book is deliberately placed on the threshold between peace and war, between a known past and an unknown future, is to miss what used to be the most obvious thing about it” (xv). This reverberating suggestiveness, in this case in the title, is typical of Woolf as it is of other Modernist writers.

Later a third female-male pair erupts onto the scene. The unexpected arrival of Mrs Manresa and William Dodge temporarily upsets the country peace and order of Pointz Hall, whose inhabitants conform automatically though unhappily to their assigned places in the social and gender hierarchies. Although Mrs Manresa is externally a “feminine” woman, her friendship with William breaks the rules of gendering because it is no more than a friendship.

Miss La Trobe is the seventh major character to enter Between the Acts. Like William, she is an aspiring artist, but unlike William, who denies his gift, Miss La Trobe is active and productive–she writes and directs plays. Though probably not as talented as William, she is like him in being gay, and therefore likewise an outsider to society’s heterosexual assumptions. The people of the manor and the village accept the “gift” that Miss La Trobe makes through her art, but they do not accept her as the giver. The last chapter of Woolf’s long essay,  A Room of One’s Own, explicates her ideal of the androgynous artist. Miss La Trobe is a comic-pathetic, but also in some ways a respectful, version of such a figure. In Between the Acts she herself and her pageant provide the reader with a vantage point for observing the effects of gendering on individuals, on contemporary society and on English history.

In Between the Acts the narrative viewpoint shifts fluidly among these seven characters, the apparently neutral and non-judgmental narrator, and the words spoken by the performers and audience of Miss La Trobe’s pageant. Woolf’s method of characterisation is an original adaptation of James Joyce’s “stream of consciousness.” Characters’ thoughts are transcribed directly in a technique very like dramatic monologues (soliloquys) in plays, but we told only a few facts about each character’s appearance. Their internal thoughts and feelings demonstrate how different each character is from others, and how each is really alone and separate, even though they are usually in company, and sometimes in the midst of crowds.

Isa (“Mrs Giles Oliver”)

Isa clearly finds her gender-governed role as wife and mother unsatisfying. This is made explicit in the compelling metaphors and simile that describe her as “pegged down on a chair arm, like a captive balloon, by a myriad of hair-thin ties to domesticity” (p. 17); and by an outright statement of her feelings when provoked by her father-in-law Bartholomew: “And she loathed the domestic, the  possessive; the maternal” (p. 17). 

Isa escapes from her gender and family roles as wife, mother, daughter-in-law and domestic manager into reveries. These intermissions, or pauses  “between the acts” of the culturally determined parts that she acts out in the social world, assume different forms.

• Isa indulges in a romantic fantasy about Mr Haines, “the gentleman farmer,” which is humorously and somewhat bitterly dispersed by the revelation that her acquaintance with Mr Haines is very slight (p. 4). Isa’s fantasy assumes that a romance that escapes the conventions of marriage is, if not actual, at least possible. It releases some of the tension generated by her inner rebellion against her husband Giles’ socially-approved possession and command.
• Isa again escapes from her performance as”Mrs. Giles Oliver” when she contemplates her face in the bedroom looking glass. The reflection of her eyes in “the three-folded mirror” reveals her true feelings, which conflict with the implements arrayed on her dressing table–the material signs of her gendered, socially-approved roles (pp. 12-13).  Here as elsewhere in Between the Acts (and much other literature), mirrors, like ponds, are escape tunnels through which characters descend from the structured, only-too-visible social world, into the unstructured, chaotic, profound and subversive human reality. The “three separate versions” (p. 12) of Isa’s face in the mirror suggest the multiple selves–the inner disunity that is a frequent theme of Modernist fiction.
• Imagery of flight (from gender-constructed roles) recurs in Isa’s fantasies, i.e. her spells “between the acts,” throughout Woolf’s novel. An early example, closely linked to mirrors, is a continuation of Isa’s strong if temporary feeling of being “In love” with Mr Haines. She compares this feeling to her memory of “the infinitely quick vibrations” of an aeroplane propeller: “Faster, faster, faster it whizzed, whirred, buzzed, till all the flails became one flail and up soared the plane away and away…” (pp. 13-14). This leads her into the creation of poetry, which, like her love fantasy, is a subversive activity pursued “between the acts.” Isa suspends her poem before its last rhyming word–“air”–and her flight crashes to earth, as she slips seamlessly back into her acting role as “Mrs. Oliver” and orders the fish for dinner. 
• A few pages further on (18-19, 20), Isa reflects on the newspaper story of a girl who has been gang-raped in a barracks by soldiers. In her article, “Matriarchal Myth on a Patriarchal Stage: Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts” (Twentieth-Century Literature 33/1 (1987), pp. 19-20),  Eileen Barrett interprets Isa’s mental returns to the rape scene throughout her day. She reads these as a sub-text, “a feminist plot…hidden between the lines between the acts” (p. 18). It is, in fact, a downplayed feminist tragedy.

Even though poetry comes constantly to her mind, Isa conceals her creative talent. She writes her poems “in the book bound like an account book in case Giles suspected” (14). This book can be interpreted as a symbol for Isa’s life, restricted and functional on the outside, but with poetry, imagination and feeling hidden inside. For Isa, as for the narrator in Charlotte Perkins’ Gilman’s story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” for Jane Austen  (see Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own. Three Guineas. World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992, pp. 87-88), and for the three Bronte sisters in real life, writing creatively is a subversive act that challenges the claims of patriarchy. 

Above all, the portrait of Isa in Between the Acts suggests the real complexity and untapped powers of adult female subjectivity, which are restrained and denied expression by the rigidities of the feminine gender role, as old as patriarchy itself.  The climactic expression of these judgments is Isa’s reverie near the pear tree (pp. 138-140), where she sees herself as a little donkey, bearing the terrible burden of the past–with its pears “hard as stone”–and also that of the inflexible present: “On little donkey, patiently stumble. Hear not the frantic cries of leaders who in that they seek to lead desert us.” The latter refers obliquely to the failed efforts of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to contain Hitler’s expansionism by negotiation. In 1939, all significant political leaders were male. Isa seeks reassurance for her feelings of burden and confinement in the continuing lives of country folk, but her thoughts return yet again to the rape report, a brutal reminder of unrestricted male power. 

William Dodge

William is gay and an artist–a would-be painter. Mrs Manresa is interested in him because of his talent, but in this conservative community in the English countryside William is an outsider. He suffers from exclusion from the society to which he is unable by nature to conform. He makes social blunders, e.g. stops the conversation (pp. 41-42), and his creativity as an artist has so far been stifled. When the elderly Mrs Swithin, herself often on the fringes of the group, momentarily bridges the gulf between them–“she smiled a ravishing girl’s smile, as if the wind had warmed the wintry blue of her eyes to amber” (p. 67) William is overcome with gratitude. Later, again by repeating his name, “I’m William,” he makes a similar close connection with Isa: “‘I’m Isa,’ she answered. Then they talked as if they had known each other all their lives” (pp. 102-103). William longs to confide to Lucy the abuse he suffered at school because of his divergence from binary gendering, “but said nothing.” Earlier, his “unmanly” interest in paintings (“half-breeds” p. 45) and old china arouses the fury of the conventionally heterosexual Giles:

[William’s] expression, coming to this conclusion , gave Giles another peg on which to hang his rage as one hangs a coat on a peg, conveniently. A toady; a lickspittle; not a downright plain man of his senses; but a teaser and twitcher; a fingerer of sensations; picking and choosing; dillying and dallying; not a man to have straightforward love for a woman–his head was close to Isa’s head–but simply a–at this word, which he could not speak in public, he pursed his lips; and the signet-ring on his little finger looked redder, for the flesh next it whitened as he gripped the arm of his chair. (pp. 55-56)

Giles’ list of alliterating doublets (“teaser and twitcher”) that defer and finally allow him to sidestep articulating, even to himself, a word such as “queer,” testifies to the pervasive power of heterosexual discourse, as well as to the poetic devices that pervade the language of Between the Acts. The real source of Giles’ “rage” is his confinement to the heterosexual responsibilities and life pattern that William’s gay sexuality frees him from, even though unhappily. 

Giles Oliver

In Isa’s husband Giles, the masculine side of this gendered (and married) pair, the effects of binary oppositions are again plain. Giles feels most comfortable with the martial or violent side of the masculine construct. He is in tune with a Europe that is “bristling like…He had no command of metaphor. Only the ineffective word ‘hedgehog’ illustrated his vision of Europe, bristling with guns, poised with planes” (p. 49). Giles’ woeful simile is a comic deflation that suggests Woolf’s pacifist orientation, an aspect of her feminism and general non-conformity. Giles is unhappy in his career as a stockbroker and in his home life in the country, where he has to sit drinking coffee with “old fogies.” He accepts bellicosity as a masculine prerogative, but is discontented with the aspect of masculine gendering that has turned him into a worker and provider for his family.

Giles’ attraction to the aggressive side of the masculine construct is seen further in his antagonism towards his aunt Lucy, William Dodge, and (after his sexual interchange with her in the greenhouse) Mrs. Manresa. Giles’s subconscious reason for hating Lucy is that she evokes matriarchy: fed by her reading, her imagination dwells on eras that predate patriarchal societies, and in this way she unconsciously brings them into contention with present social arrangements.  As we have seen, Giles hates William because he sees him as a traitor to masculine norms. Thirdly, he hates Mrs. Manresa because his lust for her has tarnished his self-image as a respectable husband and responsible father. In fact, Giles hates everyone who challenges his belief in the “natural” superiority of men and masculinity.

The most enigmatic expression of Giles’ adherence to violence, claimed as as an aspect of the masculine construct, is his killing of the snake and the toad (p. 89). Locked together, these two creatures– “The frog was unable to swallow; the toad was unable to die”–are a shocking symbol of frustration, incompleteness, and of a world turned upside down by war: “It was birth the wrong way round–a monstrous inversion.” The animals’ plight gives visible shape to the undigested anger that governs Giles’ existence. Yet his relief when he stamps and kills them is short-lived. Mrs. Manresa, who superimposes the image of romantic hero over Giles’ Nordic good looks, responds to the blood on his shoes with “feminine” admiration, acting the part of the wife welcoming home her dragon-slaying husband, and using terms suggested by the pageant they have been watching: “Vaguely some sense that he had proved his valour for her admiration flattered her. If vague it was sweet. Taking him in tow, she felt: I am the Queen, he my hero, my sulky hero” (96). Yet killing the entwined animals is hardly a heroic or soldierly action of the kind Giles craves. Later, when Isa realises that Giles has once again been unfaithful to her, this time with Mrs. Manresa, she administers a comic deflation which reassesses his “heroism” at its true worth: “‘No, said Isa, as plainly as words could say it. ‘I don’t admire you,’ and looked, not at his face, but at his feet. ‘Silly little boy, with blood on his boots”’ (p. 100).

Unlike Isa with her intervals between the acts, Giles never takes a holiday from the “masculine” view of himself and the world constructed by social conditioning. His fling with Mrs Manresa is a physical relief of frustration and tension, similar to his murder of the frog and toad, rather than truly an interval “between the acts.” However even Giles sometimes feels oppressed, especially by his predominantly sedentary roles as husband, father and stockbroker. He sums up his discomfort in an interior monologue: “Given his choice, he would have chosen to farm. But he was not given his choice. So one thing led to another; and the conglomeration of things pressed you flat; held you fast, like a fish in water” (p. 43). The restrictions that gender imposes on subjectivity may have harmed Giles even more than they have harmed Isa.

Bartholomew (Bart) Oliver

Between the Acts presents three “generations of men” in Bart, Giles and Giles’ little son George. Like Giles, Bart conforms to the masculine gender construction. He shows comparable aggressive and dominating traits in his verbal attacks on Lucy (patriarchal reason versus “women’s intuition” and spirituality) and, less frequently, on Isa. Bart is also like his son in acting the part of romantic hero towards Mrs. Manresa. Both men want to live more active “masculine” lives. Bart’s daydreaming recreates his youth as a soldier in India.

Bart sees it as normal and right that he should initiate his grandson George into the “masculine” side of binary gendering. Apparently pre-verbal, George is enraptured by a flower–

The flower blazed between the angles of the roots. Membrane after membrane was torn. It blazed a soft yellow, a lambent light under a film of velvet; it filled the caverns behind the eyes with light. All that inner darkness became a hall, leaf smelling, earth smelling of yellow light. And the tree was beyond the flower; the grass, the flower and the tree were entire. Down on his knees grubbing he held the flower complete. (p. 10)

Here George is clearly “before the acts”–his infancy predates  his entry into the Law of the Father, the Symbolic Order ruled by language, in which binary oppositions (“this” not “that”) produce meaning. Instead of divisions and oppositions, George sees unity: all the elements of his vision, the flower, the grass, the light, the smells and the tree beyond them, make up oneness–he sees  the world “entire.” His “grubbing” in the soil, his tearing of “membrane after membrane” have opened a pathway into vision and filled his “inner darkness” with light.

But toddler George’s path out of a social reality that depends on linguistic antitheses is closed to all adults some of the time and to some adults all of the time. Bart, George’s grandfather,is an example. Possibly out of envy, Bart is bent on initiating his grandson into “manhood.” He startles George by turning his newspaper into a “snout” and disguising himself as “a terrible peaked eyeless monster moving on legs, brandishing arms” (p. 11)–perhaps a personification of the adult consciousness which will inevitably consume George. Then Bart bawls at his exuberant Afghan Hound, Sohrab, who cringes. A significant association is that in Persian myth, Sohrab is a son murdered by his father. George bursts into tears over what has suddenly become an authoritarian and joyless world. His response induces Bart to call him a “cry-baby” three times (p. 12), thereby beginning the little boy’s “masculine” construction, which will tend to exclude him from vision and “feminine” feeling. 

Immediately afterwards, however, Bart himself falls momentarily “between the acts” when he notices that the wind has made his newspaper into a frame for a landscape that he might have painted. Art once again produces an interval–a short contemplation of the “real”?– “between the acts.” But then the newspaper falls, shutting out this broader, non-verbal consciousness, as Bart starts reading the phallogocentric newspaper’s construction of reality (Moi, p. 105): “M. Deladier has been successful in pegging down the franc…” (p. 12). This is the world of patriarchal political and economic power, which most of the time “pegs down” Isa and other people “like captive balloons.”

Lucy Swithin

Lucy is associated with what Barrett regards as the feminist sub-text of Between the Acts. She likes to read prehistory–recreations of the time before writing and before the rule of Logos, the word. Lucy first enters Woolf’s narrative in the early morning. She is reading in bed about the “early morning” of planet earth, when nature governed human life. She mentally recreates “rhododendron forests in Piccadilly” (p. 8), and a time when the entire European continent was populated by “elephant-bodied, seal-necked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters” (p. 8). Grace’s arrival with the tea-tray brings Lucy’s  time “between the acts” to a sudden comic end.

We learn that from childhood Lucy has increased “the bounds of the moment by flights into past or future; sidelong down corridors and alleys” (8-9). The flight imagery links Lucy with Isa. Like Isa too, Lucy is held to an outward social role by those around her–when she was a child this was her mother, and now it is her brother. When making fun of her in an earlier play, the villagers gave her the name of “Old Flimsy” (p. 54). Woolf vividly describes Lucy as she acts her part in the social drama:

So she sat down to morning tea, like any other old lady with a high nose, thin cheeks, a ring on her finger and the usual trappings of rather shabby but gallant old age, which included in her case a cross gleaming gold on her breast. (p. 9)

Yet in practice Lucy’s age, which makes her less interesting to those around her, gives her freedom to spend more time “between the acts.” She escapes not only into earth’s prehistory, but also into her own past before most of the other characters were born, and into faraway places. When she leads William on their tour of Pointz Hall (pp. 63-66) she speaks of her birth in a room that is now empty, spare and tidy. In the nursery she links her infancy with the earth’s prehistory: ” ‘The nursery,’ said Mrs. Swithin. / Words raised themselves and became symbolical. ‘The cradle of our race.’ she seemed to say” (p. 66). Later in the barn Lucy imagines the migratory life of the swallows perching under the roof, in other words, distant places  (pp. 91-92). By contrast when Mrs Manresa likewise gazes towards the barn ceiling she notices the decorations left over from “the coronation” (i.e. of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth on 12 May 1937). Mrs Manresa’s interest is in the social construction and in public life; she looks around for someone to congratulate.

Lucy’s  association with a feminist sub-text in Between the Acts climaxes with her meditation beside the lily pond, the symbolism of which invites interpretation (pp. 184-85). First seen through the eyes of the scullery maid (pp. 39-40), the pond, in which Lady Ermyntrude drowned herself (p. 41), may suggest the sub-conscious, regarded by Freud as the source of an energy that predetermines human actions. Or, it may be a symbol of the female self existing in silent depths, beyond the reach of patriarchal social and linguistic structures. Barrett interprets the fish in the pond–the “fantail,” the “golden orfe,” and “the great carp himself” (p. 184)–as symbols of female mana, or spiritual power. Again, since water is an archetypal symbol for the female, the lily pond may suggest the primeval beginnings of humanity, before the imposition of structures under the Law of the Father: “Water, for hundreds of years, had silted down into the hollow, and lay there four or five feet deep over a black cushion of mud” (39).  The only certainty is that Lucy herself interprets the pond as supporting her faith-based understanding of life, in opposition to the destructive “reason” of her brother Bart. The variegated beauty of the fish provides a “vision” in which Lucy sees “beauty, power, and glory in ourselves” (p. 185). By contrast Bart’s “reason” insists that what Lucy sees in the fish is an animal equivalent for human greed and sexuality. Though silenced by his scorn, Lucy keeps on hoping. With difficulty she maintains her private vision, originating in Plato,  “of beauty which is goodness; the sea on which we float. Mostly impervious, but surely every boat sometimes leaks?” (185).

In another passage, Lucy imparts to William and Isa–a sympathetic though unconvinced audience–her vision of the oneness of time and space:

“You don’t believe in history, ” said William….Mrs Swithin caressed her cross. She gazed vaguely at the view. She was off, they guessed, on a circular tour of the imagination–one-making. Sheep, cows, grass, trees, ourselves–all are one. If discordant producing harmony, if not to us, to a gigantic ear attached to a gigantic head. And thus–she was smiling benignly–the agony of the particular sheep, cow or human being is necessary; and so–she was beaming seraphically at the gilt vane in the distance–we reach the conclusion that all is harmony could we hear it. And we shall. (pp. 156-157)

Lucy manages to be a monist, monotheist and Christian all at once. This is self-contradictory, though not entirely so–in logic these three belief systems partially overlap. Isa thinks that Lucy’s religion makes her “imperceptive….The fumes of that incense obscured the human heart. Skimming the surface, she ignored the battle in the mud.” However flimsy its foundation, Lucy’s “vision” makes her the happiest character in Between the Acts.

Mrs Manresa

While Lucy unwillingly acts out the “feminine” construct, i.e. the intuitive opposition to Bart’s “masculine” reason in that gendered sister-brother couple, Mrs Manresa eagerly performs the “feminine” binary to both  Giles and Bart, males who enjoy acting the “masculine” side of the gender construct. Sex, actual or imagined, is an undercurrent in Mrs Manresa’ relationships with both men, and she and Giles have a sexual encounter when they visit the greenhouse together (easy to miss, pp. 133, 143, 158, 182). In their interactions Mrs Manresa plays the “siren” figure and Giles and Bart respond by acting the “hero,” roles given lasting shape in Homer’s Odyssey, and later adapted through the pageant in Between the Acts to English history: “Somehow she (Mrs Manresa) was the Queen; and he (Giles) was the surly hero” (p. 84). Whereas Lucy is most real and alive between the acts, Mrs Manresa never takes a break from performing femininity. Barrett, whose interpretations of symbols aren’t always convincing, suggests that her name translates as “man thing” (Latin res means “thing” or “object). Mrs Manresa wields second-hand power by her ability and willingness to attract men sexually, a defensive-aggressive tactic as old as patriarchy itself.

Mrs Manresa’s energy flows freely into her social, “acted” self, which as a result, and in contrast with the introverts Isa and Lucy, is lively and complex. On the outside she is exaggeratedly “feminine”: “Or what are your rings for, and your nails, and that really adorable little straw hat? said Isa addressing Mrs Manresa silently….” (p. 36). When Mrs Manresa wants a corkscrew, she ogles the servant Candish, “as if he were a real man, not a stuffed man” (p. 37), and goes on to ogle Bart. Rumour has it that Mrs Manresa’s grandfather was sent to Tasmania as a convict, and that she herself was born there. Her jewels apparently came to her from an Australian lover, and her wealth increased when she married Ralph Manresa, a Jewish businessman.  There’s a hint of sexual scandal in her past, and more than a hint of earthy sexuality in her repeated claims of being “a wild child of nature” (pp. 38, 46, 51, 159, etc.) and a “ploughboy” (p. 47) . Her acceptance of herself, the body and nature allow Mrs Manresa to move confidently and vivaciously in the currents of society. Like a dolphin, she is happy to be vulgar and to breach decorum. She says things that other people are too conventional to say (p. 37). As a “wild child,” too, she has no qualms of conscience about seducing Giles. Mrs Manresa’s characterisation exempts her from moral condemnation, because in her version of the world ethics don’t matter. She feels no obligation of loyalty to other women, such as Isa; she regards them as nonentities or sexual rivals, not as friends.

Miss La Trobe

The seventh major character to enter the novel, Miss La Trobe takes up into herself, and to a degree transcends, the gendered pairs introduced earlier. As a tragi-comic exemplar of Woolf’s ideal of the androgynous artist, Miss La Trobe is an outsider to village life and to English society. The villagers’ nickname for her is “Bossy.” Like William, she is an alien because she is gay. Her origins are mysterious and probably foreign (p. 53). The village speculates that she was born in the Channel Islands or even in Russia. Her status as an outsider allows her to observe her English village at the emotional distance demanded by art–an idea that Woolf explores at length in A Room of One’s Own. Miss La Trobe’s art (the pageant that she has written and now directs) mirrors back to her audience the history that shaped their present world. Above all, Miss La Trobe’s pageant mirrors the audience to themselves.

Isa, William, Lucy and even Giles and Bart enjoy intervals “between the acts”–the gendered and class-ridden roles into which they are slotted by economics and ideology. During these intervals, however brief or even momentary, each is free to create his or her preferred reality. As far as time and circumstances permit, Isa and William use the intervals to create art. By contrast, Miss La Trobe’s entrenched separation from society frees her to express her creative imagination openly. Despite frustration and a constant fear of failure, Miss Latrobe experiences an ecstasy unknown to the others when she knows she has made her audience see.

Even as Miss La Trobe is stage managing the pageant in the present, events and scenes around her are sequentially inspiring a new play: “Miss La Trobe stopped her pacing and surveyed the scene. ‘It has the makings…’ she murmured. For another play always lay behind the play she had just written. Shading her eyes, she looked. The butterflies circling; the light changing; the children leaping; the mothers laughing–‘No, I don’t get it,’ she muttered and resumed her pacing” (p. 58). Notice the poetic features of rhyme and alliteration that the new but unfulfilled creation is already inspiring.

Finally, a sequence of events packed with vivid metaphors suggests that Miss La Trobe’s power to create, and thus give of herself to others, is enough to compensate her for a lonely life. In these pages (pp. 188-91) her feelings fluctuate between “glory”–because the audience accepted her “gift” of the pageant–and regret at the pageant’s inadequacies: “‘A failure,’ she groaned, and stooped to put away the records.” But suddenly starlings attack the tree behind which she had hidden while directing, and a wonderful onomatopoeic description follows. Essentially it says: artworks don’t always work; nothing in life is perfect; no answers are certain, but moments of inspiration are real and irresistible, and these make the rest worthwhile. Then, in a deflation typical of Modernist writing, “old Mrs Chalmers” frightens the starlings. Carrying dead flowers from her dead husband’s grave, Mrs Chalmers is an antithesis to the “birds syllabling discordantly life, life, life” (pp. 188-89). Yet later it seems that the starlings have succeeded in their work of inspiration, since, as Miss La Trobe views the darkening scene “something rose to the surface” (p. 189)–the setting for her new play’s first scene. For a page or so, during which she arrives at the pub, she returns to contemplating her loneliness.But as she raises her glass and listens, “Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning–wonderful words.” Entranced, Miss La Trobe begins to shape her new creation: “Suddenly the tree was pelted with starlings. She set down her glass. She heard the first words.” (p. 191).

These magnificent passages near the end of Between the Acts invite reading as the summit of Virginia Woolf’s creative achievement. When, so soon after completing them, she took her life, the thought that like Miss La Trobe she had given her best gift to her audience may well have consoled her.

The Pageant

The pageant in Between the Acts is rich in ideas about England, history and time, and about the processes and products of artistic creation. It poses questions about art and reality, and their relationship and interactions. Once again multiple interpretations are possible, and they oscillate between humour and tragedy. 

According to Barrett, the purpose of the pageant is to destroy the distinction, to break through the barrier of convention that separates audience and actors, to make the audience realise that they are actors (in the pageant of history?) and that they have unplayed parts. This is precisely the epiphany that comes to Lucy: “She gazed at Miss La Trobe with a cloudless old-fashioned stare. Their eyes met in a common effort to bring a common meaning to birth. They failed, and Mrs Swithin, laying hold desperately of a fraction of her meaning, said: ‘What a small part I’ve had to play! But you’ve made me feel I could have played…Cleopatra!'” (p. 137). And Miss La Trobe responds with delight at what her homely and imperfect artwork has achieved: “‘You’ve twitched the invisible strings,’ was what the old lady meant; and revealed–of all people–Cleopatra! Glory possessed her. Ah, but she was not merely a twitcher of individual strings; she was one who seethes wandering bodies and floating voices in a cauldron, and makes rise up from its amorphous mass a recreated world. Her moment was on her–her glory.” (p. 137).

Representing five periods of English history, the pageant brings Lucy’s contemplation of prehistory forward into the present time of war. The repeated “chuff, chuff, chuff,”  or”tick, tick, tick,” (p. 75), heard in the pauses between the acts before the gramophone succeeds in producing music, invites the audience to recognise the present moment as their participation in history’s long sequence. Yet it also measures, ominously, the passing of time

Middle Ages, Act One (pp. 70-74): “England,” personified first by the little girl Phyllis and then by the young woman Hilda, introduces the pageant. Weaving between the trees in the background, the village singers play the part of their ancestors, the first settlers of the land. Phyllis tells of the building of towns, of hunting and agriculture. Hilda presents a pastoral and Christian England in the time of Chaucer (1360-1400). The singers transform into the pilgrim-story-tellers of Chaucer’s best-known poem, The Canterbury Tales. 

Elizabethan Age, Act Two (pp. 76-85):  Aided by Albert “the village idiot,” Eliza Clark, shop-keeper and tobacconist, comically deflates the glories of the England’s expansionist era in her role as Queen Elizabeth.  One such glory is Shakespeare: “For me Shakespeare sang–/(a cow mooed. A bird twittered.)” (p. 77). In homage to Hamlet and other Elizabethan plays, Miss La Trobe provides a play-within-the-play. The protagonist is old Elsbeth, foster mother to the heir, the young Prince Ferdinando who finally marries his “sweet Carinthia,” the daughter of the usurping Duke. One inference to be drawn is that “the plot’s nothing” (82), i.e. that the events of a person’s life are predictable–the possibilities are limited and interchangeable. Feelings are limited to three–“Love. Hate. Peace” (83).

Interval (pp. 85-106): Phyllis and martial music encourage the audience to  disperse for tea (Dispersed are we). This is the longest time between the acts, when the narrative follows the thoughts and actions of pairs of leading characters–Lucy and Bart;  Giles and Mrs Manresa; Isa and William; and Lucy and Bart again. Bart does not understand Lucy’s spirituality and idealism, but recognises that they are opposites: “She was thinking, he supposed, God is peace. God is love. For she belonged to the unifiers; he to the separatists” (p. 106). The audience reassembles.

The Restoration Age, Act Three (pp. 111-33): Following Charles II’s restoration to the throne in 1660, the arts of painting, sculpture and drama flourished in England. The same year saw the founding of the Royal Society, dedicated to the discovery and promotion of scientific knowledge. It is therefore appropriate that the personification of Reason introduces this Act. The play, including the punning title (Where There’s a Will There’s a Way), the plot, dialogue, situations, characters, and their names (Lady Harpy Harraden, Sir Spaniel Lilyliver, Valentine, Flavinda…) burlesque comedies by Restoration dramatists such as William Wycherly and William Congreve (e.g. The Way of the World). Apart from pairs of young lovers, characters in Restoration comedy are motivated by social climbing, sex and money. These satiric comedies are explicit about the body, including sex, venereal diseases, and the decay caused by aging. Disgust at such human realities is never far away. Miss Latrobe parodies it in Sir S. L.’s response to Lady H. H.: “The old hag stinks like a red herring that’s been stood over head in a tar barrel!” (p. 115). Miss Latrobe is delighted when someone in the audience gets the point about Flavinda’s test of Valentine’s love while she waits for him and watches him from hiding–a parody of love as often portrayed in Restoration (and other?) comedies–“All that fuss about nothing!” (p. 124). The gap between the first two scenes of Miss Latrobe’s Restoration comedy evokes the passing of seasons, the passing of time, and human longing. Her portrayal is aided at the vital moment by the lowing of cows in the nearby field: “The whole world was filled with dumb yearning.” (p. 126)

The Victorian Age, Act Four (pp. 143-155): The giant, imposing figure of Constable Budge introduces and farewells Miss La Trobe’s dramatisation of the Victorian Age. He embodies the paternalist and authoritarian spirit of the British Empire in the nineteenth century, ensuring that all “obey the laws of God and Man” (p. 145). Budge enforces laws for every day of the week–“That’s the price of Empire; that’s the white man’s burden” (p. 146). This theme continues in the internal scenes, which satirise aspects of the Victorian Age. The scene between Elanor and Edgar make fun of the Age’s missionary idealism and idealism about love and marriage. Mrs Hardcastle riding her donkey, led by Sir John in a deer-stalker’s hat, seems to be a burlesque of Queen Victoria and her Scottish servant John Brown (see the postcard of the Queen, mounted on her horse, led by John Brown in Wikipedia). Mr Hardcastle in this scene is a student of ancient history who collects fossils–a not uncommon occupation of Victorian gentlemen. At the picnic, everyone overeats vast quantities of meat–another Victorian habit–while the pompous closing prayer is interrupted by the collapse of the donkey’s rear end. Finally, Budge’s farewell address satirises Victorian sentimentality about Home. 

Present Time, Act Five (pp. 157-170): Miss La Trobe connects the past ages depicted in earlier acts with the audience’s present reality by forcing them to contemplate that reality–by offering not a performance or a “show,” but ten minutes of nothing: “All their nerves were on edge. They sat exposed. The machine ticked. There was no music….” (p. 159). Miss La Trobe begins to fear that she is losing her audience during this hiatus, but a sudden shower breaks the tension and embodies the underlying mood of the whole pageant: “Down it poured like all the people in the world weeping. Tears. Tears. Tears.” (p. 162).

The next scene is the building of the wall of civilisation, the imposition of order. But the entrance soon after of the whole assembly of the actors, each one declaiming “some phrase or fragment from their parts” dissolves that order.

When, in the pageant’s final tableau, the actors hold up their mirrors so that the audience can see themselves as the latest participants in the sequence of English history just depicted, one effect is to destroy the audience’s complacency–they wanted the pageant to affirm established values, such as patriotism. Like most generations, they wanted to believe that the accomplishments of their era are an advance on everything that has gone before, in fact the culmination of civilisation. However the mirrors demonstrate that the present moment merely replicates all the other moments of historical time, and that people in the present are fragmentary reflections of their predecessors, who were equally fragmentary. The mirrors may also reveal fragments of each audience member’s inner truth, a truth that each wants to conceal, not only from their social world but also from themselves. The fragmented and fleeting reflections suggest each person’s lack of integration, their essential unreality and inevitable vanishing, like their predecessors, into history.

Woolf’s characters respond variously to the pageant. Once again Lucy gets the point, or at least part of it: “We’ve only the present.” William judges that this present moment, in which “the beauty of the visible world took his breath away,” is enough. Isa can’t help looking towards an idealised future, when she can “fly away” with her fantasy lover, “the man in grey.”  Mrs Manresa’s self-confidence as a social being at home with her sexuality explains her unique lack of concern  (pp. 165-67). For other members of Miss La Trobe’s audience the mirrors’ significance, like that of the novel’s other symbols, is unclear, and discussion continues as they set out for home. The mirrors have revealed that, like their predecessors on the stage of history, the present-day villagers are flawed, comical, sexually rapacious, pretentious, dishonest and egotistical. Like them, they will all fade away, or perhaps perish in the war which is an imminent if understated reality throughout Between the Acts: “The future shadowed their present, like the sun coming through the many-veined transparent vine leaf; a criss-cross of lines making no pattern” (103).

In his address afterwards, which ends with a call for donations, the Reverend Streatfield tentatively suggests that the pageant is a call for unity: “we are members one of another. Each is part of the whole…Scraps, orts and fragments! Surely, we should unite?” (pp. 172-173). However, this interpretation is undermined in advance by an anti-clerical warning: “What an intolerable constriction, contraction, and reduction to simplified absurdity he was to be sure!” (p. 170). In fact the pageant’s message seems to be the opposite of that proposed by Streatfield–that there is no unity, or any reliable progression of culture and history towards an agreed ideal. 

As a Modernist writer, Woolf poses some of the teasing philosophical puzzles thrown up by human experience in time. She may make suggestions, but I doubt that she provides answers. Posing the puzzles is the ultimate achievement of the pageant in Between the Acts.