Between the Acts

by Emily Cersonsky and Anne Aufhauser

Overview

by Emily Cersonsky


Conceived in 1938, finished in 1940, yet never published within her lifetime, Virginia Woolf’s final novel, Between the Acts, takes on the images inherent to these first, terrifying days of the Blitzkrieg and sets them in a Woolfian stream-of-consciousness idiom which is recognizable enough for the initiated reader to see that it is unhinged, off-center, broken. The story of a 1939 village pageant and the family who hosts it, Between the Acts is a novel which ends in agoraphobic exposure: a curtain raised, an ancestral house which has “lost its shelter.”[1]. As James Naremore writes, it is the first (and last) Woolf novel “without the correlated sense of retreat from being and doing, of immersion in water with only muffled sounds audible from above."[2] Instead, it is a work that remains ever conscious of the threat of aerial attack, and, as Paul Saint-Amour has outlined, bears the burden of an atmosphere in which “every bird look[s] like the next bomber," in which the entire sky weighs down on the brain with the threat of physical and mental disruption and destruction.[3]


The house, the Oliver family’s Pointz Hall, comprises the center of this breakage as well as Woolf’s original title for the novel. It is notable, given her preoccupation with buildings and interiors, that this is the only novel Woolf ever entitled with a place-name. Her initial choice emphasizes the book’s setting in an inherited domestic space, yet creates this age-old site only to perform its deconstruction. The reader is told most about the house from the outside looking in; though a significant portion of the novel is spent within the house, the heart of the text passes outside of it, at the pageant, from which the house is either gestured at ironically as a Victorian throwback or altogether “obliterated” from sight (172, 204). From afar, all that can be perceived are Pointz Hall’s unfinished wall (52), its abandoned rooms that echo “like a ship deserted”: “Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent” (71, 36). Our readerly experience of the house’s interiors is less inhabitation than tourism, shown mostly through the visiting eyes of William Dodge and the anecdotes of his tour-guides, Lucy Swithin and Isa Oliver. But even when they step inside, the house’s inhabitants maintain a permeability with the exterior world: the novel begins with the “windows open to the garden” and closes with the reminder that its residents “never pulled the curtains till it was too dark to see, nor shut the windows till it was too cold” (3, 214). Pointz Hall is at once an already-opened space and a relic of the Victorian sanctuary which, in 1939, no longer exists as such.


Though no bombs fall and no physical harm comes to Pointz Hall in Between the Acts, Woolf’s attitude toward the violability of this space coincides with her witness to very real destruction during the Blitz: the bombing of her residences at 52 Tavistock and 37 Mecklenburgh Square,[4] the death of her London neighbors during a raid,[5] the planes flying and falling around her country home in Sussex,[6] the strange experience “of talking [on the phone] to someone who might be killed any moment."[7] These images of the rupture of physical shelter provide the template for Woolf’s discussion of a destruction that may be even more troubling to the novelist: the threat to mental space. As she writes in June 1940,

the war – our waiting while the knives sharpen for the operation – has taken away the outer wall of security. No echo comes back. I have no surroundings. […] There’s no standard to write for: no public to echo back: even the ‘tradition’ has become transparent. Hence a certain energy & recklessness – part good – part bad I daresay. But it’s the only line to take. And perhaps the walls, if violently beaten against, will finally contain me.[8]

The despair of finding coherence in enclosure shapes Between the Acts. Unlike the novel’s pageant-director Miss La Trobe – who tries to construct an outdoor stage only to have her audience’s inattention destroy this space (76, 180) – Woolf discards her pre-war notion of making Pointz Hall a play, recognizing that there can be no unified audience for such a spectacle, just as she throws out the idea of a “long book” in the face of the impossibility of sustained authorial thought.[9] Instead, she incorporates the disruption of the Blitz into her novel, as in her wartime letters she employs a siren’s intervals as rhetorical refrain,[10] or textualizes the errant mark where a bomb has caused her pen to jump, by adding another line to form an “X."[11] Such penetration and incorporation of the aerial threat into the text finds its most overt thematization in Between the Acts, when the village reverend’s pedantic moralizing on the pageant’s theme (“all liberated; made whole”; 182-3) is interrupted by a flight of fighter planes:
Mr. Streatfield paused. He listened. Did he hear some distant music? […] The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music. The audience gaped; the audience gazed. Then zoom became drone. The planes had passed. (193)
Though the planes are included even in the March 1939 draft of the novel, this later, published version accentuates their violence – the word that was in the first draft “cut short” is now “cut in two” – and in contrast to all earlier drafts, only the final version places emphasis on the audience’s “gap[ing]” distraction.[12] It is this distraction which signals the breakdown of the pageant (and literature’s) unifying theme: the audience’s multiple, cacophonous voice asks, “if one spirit animates the whole, what about the aeroplanes?” (Acts, 197).


Through this protean audience as well as its lack of a clear protagonist, the text endlessly reminds us of the fractured perspective that prevents unification and makes war (“the aeroplanes”) possible: “What she saw he didn’t; what he saw she didn’t – and so on, ad infinitum” (26). In writing a book without a hero (no Rachel Vinrace, Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs. Ramsay), Woolf produces perhaps her most compelling and complex cast: Giles Oliver, the only figure with a clear vision of the impending war, yet an abominable patriarch; Lucy Swithin, the elderly Dalloway-like unifier, yet too scatterbrained and ineffectual to ease her household’s latent malice; Miss La Trobe, the Woolfian outsider-artist, yet thwarted by her own anger and dejection; and finally Isa Oliver, the poet-mother and most likely protagonist, yet too withdrawn into her own mental vision to recognize the needs of others.


The internal divisions between the novel’s characters are manifested by an outward fluidity of labels: in the pageant, village-life, and family, each figure takes on multiple nicknames and roles which are never completely reconciled into a single personage. Like Isa’s own name – the copula “is a” – identity resides in the “between,” or what Woolf originally envisioned as the “‘I’ rejected; ‘We’ substituted […] ‘We’…composed of many different things."[13] Yet such division, as well as the artificiality and violence of disparate characters’ juxtaposition, results not in a utopia of difference, but instead incoherence, war, and monstrosity. This outcome is mirrored in the novel’s apocalyptical animal forms: the Ourobouros-like snake choking on a frog so that neither can die (99), the beaked man and wolf-like dog (11-13), Burridan’s ass, “The donkey who couldn’t choose between hay and turnips and so starved” (59, 171). These hybrids, like the main characters’ multiple personalities and unresolved conflicts, represent the fractured choices and perspectives which do not come together to create a whole, pulling back and forth against each other in perpetual uncertainty and discomfort. They are, as Susan Squier points out, the image of the family in wartime, stretched by the connection between love for one’s home, nationalism, and the perpetuity of warfare (155-56).


The text’s observation of these characters and images implies a misleading locus of coherence and omniscience: the author’s voice. In order to make, or rather, allow the text to reveal its own abjection beneath the threat of war and interpersonal disconnection, Woolf’s narratorial words must themselves break down into a dissonance too elemental to form a cohesive theme or statement. Such attempts at a textual deconstruction can be seen in choppy, self-questioning syntax, like the circumlocutive “when the entire continent, not then, she understood, divided by a channel, was all one” (8) or the Waste Land-like rhythm of the novel’s last paragraphs (219). It also occurs in moments when the rhythm becomes too regulated, slips into a too-obvious artistry, as in Isa’s occasional poetry or accidental rhymes, “bold and blatant, firm elatant” (110), “this glamour – this sham lure” (97). Like a bombed-out building, these transparent rhymes expose the text’s scaffolding rhetoric; so, too, do clumsy revelations of the authorial hand, such as the editorial declaration that intrudes in the midst of Reverend Streatfield’s perorations, “(‘but’ marked a new paragraph)” (192).


Once such egregious (perhaps intentional) impositions are recognized in the text, they call into question all artifice, all metaphor and correlation. Just as we find it difficult entirely to palate Reverend Streatfield’s moralizing, overbearing explanation of the pageant even though it may, in essence, be true, Between the Acts’ self-initiated hermeneutic of suspicion leads us to question the sincerity of neat mirrorings which in another context might be accepted simply as ‘literary language.’ One of the most important examples is the paired description of words and war: “Words cease to lie flat in the sentence” (59), “Europe – over there – […] bristling with guns, poised with planes” (53). Coming from an author of Woolf’s quality, the over-obviousness of the connection suggests, paradoxically, that communication-through-language and communication-through-violence can never be made identical. If war or the threat of war severs words, there can be no reconstruction, protection, or retaliation through metaphor and art, and the impulse to turn war into artistry is only a false complacency toward the real-life threat as it moves on to kill someone else (Letters 6:414). The singular terror of the warplane is that it is not a wasp or a bird; the terror of the bomb is that it will never be a rain shower.


With the threat of death hanging overhead, all other problems, and even death itself, are diminished – they hold no resemblance. Will Lucy live at Kensington or Kew (24)? Will the Olivers overcome their marital troubles (39)? Will the village idiot, Albert, do “something dreadful” (87)? Will the wind disrupt the pageant and the villagers forget their lines (125)? Will it be wet or fine (22)? Such questions, the matter of earlier novels like Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse, are revealed in Between the Acts to be easily answerable, reassuring pieces of the tradition and quotidian. As such, they are also subsumed by the possibility that the everyday will be obliterated by war and annihilation. Even death is strangely remote and unremarkable in Between the Acts, the only real demise being Giles’ squashing of the snake-frog monstrosity. While this absence of direct encounter with mortality may seem singular among Woolf’s novels, it might also lead us to reread her oeuvre anew, recognizing that death itself is usually instantaneous, and it is the “doom of sudden death hanging over us” (Acts 114), the context of mortality, which lingers, invading everyday thoughts, interactions, and artistry. For a predominantly inter-war writer, marked by the ever-present memory and threat of international conflagration, perhaps this was the greater theme all along.


"Cold Pastoral:" Virginia Woolf's Reevaluation of the Late Modernist Aesthetic in Between the Acts

By Anne Aufhauser


Virginia Woolf opens her last novel, Between the Acts, with a summer night’s discussion about a cesspool and an offhand remark suggesting a new attitude that locates art in the everyday. Mrs. Haines, a guest at a country house that is to host a pageant the next day, hears a bird and asks if it is a nightingale, a bird associated with the lyric poetic voice.[14] “No,” the narrator replies, “It was a daylight bird, chuckling over the substance and succulence of the day, over worms, snails, grit.[15]

From the outset of Between the Acts, Woolf challenges the ability of modernist literature as it stands to include the “chuckling…substance and succulence” of the quotidian. Using John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” as a framework to examine the limitations of modern art, especially in its written form, Woolf suggests in Between the Acts that modernism fails to affirm “breathing human passion.”[16] While using Keats to comment on the state of modernism may seem a stretch, as Keats wrote “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in 1819, Woolf’s exploration of Keats’ themes draws on the modernist tradition of entering “into a sort of conversation with the art of the past,” and places Between the Acts within the modernist tradition that built itself upon the reinterpretation of traditionally revered authors, such as Keats.[17] In a world again on the brink of war, the silent and lifeless quality of modernist art seems to be stretched to its limits, and Woolf explores ways to reinvent it for the loud and the living. Woolf locates the limitations of modernism within an older generation and its allusively unoriginal and barrenly silent forms of communication, suggesting that art can only retain significance by directly involving audible expression. Woolf critiques modernism, arguing that the revolutions of form and content of the high modernist age demand reevaluation for a new generation and a new epoch.

Woolf employs modernist techniques in her exploration of how they fall short, seeking to reinvent, rather than reject, modernism. Pericles Lewis describes the modernist movement as a “crisis of representation,” in which modernists began to question “their ability to represent reality” in “historically new types of experience,” including “modern technology and mass culture; a new scale of warfare; changing gender roles and attitudes to sexuality; the questioning of empire,” themes that Woolf explores in Between the Acts.[18] To some extent, Between the Acts, began in 1937 and published posthumously in 1941, is “anticipated by all Woolf’s work.”[19] From shifts in perspective, form, and narrative structure—Woolf advises her readers against puzzling “out the plot”—Woolf still operates within a modern framework.[20] Her relative success and failure within the contained world of the novel, however, suggests a dissatisfaction with the fruits of over twenty years of literary modernist experimentation.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn"

Woolf references Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in the beginning and the end of Between the Acts, establishing a framework through which to challenge current conceptions of art the role of the artist. Before the pageant begins, the narrator describes Isabella’s dining room:

Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence.[21]
Woolf’s description of the vase echoes Keats’ description of the urn, especially in its focus on silence and emptiness: “Thou, silent form! Dost tease us out of though/As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!”[22] “Cold Pastoral” seems an apt term to apply to Between the Acts; Woolf focuses on the vase’s smooth, “cold” quality within the setting of the English countryside, a departure from her more metropolitan novels such as Mrs. Dalloway. Mark Hussey sees the “empty, empty, empty” passage as especially noteworthy as a replacement of a passage Woolf had labeled “Silence” in an early typescript:
Who observed the dining room? Who noted the silence, the emptiness? What name is to be given to that which notes a room is empty? This presence certainly requires a name, for without a name what can exist? And how can silence or emptiness be noted by that which has no existence?...Does it not by this means create immortality? And yet we who have named other presences equally impalpable—called them God, for instance, or again the Holy Ghost—have no name but novelist, or poet, or sculptor, or musician, for this greatest of all preservers and creators…Nameless it is yet partakes of all things named; it is rhyme and rhythm; it is dressing and eating and drinking; is procreation and sensation; is love and hate and passion and adventure.[23]
Woolf initially envisions the artist as able to combine life, from “rhyme and rhythm” to “love and hate,” with a detached artistic silence. In contrast, Keats’ poem, alluded to only in the later version of the passage, examines the art itself rather than the artist. By removing the artist from the equation, Woolf asks if an essentially lifelike quality of the room disappears. Her replacement of the artist with a stark image of the artistic object hints at an evolving attitude towards modernist techniques. Maria DiBattista writes that the removal of the author from the typescript was a rejection of “‘the damned egotistical self’ she discerned and disliked in the writing of Joyce and Dorothy Richardson, two pioneers in the ‘stream-of-consciousness technique.’”[24] By changing the focus of the novel from the artist’s role to the participant’s, Woolf examines modern art’s dependence on the insertion of the author’s own lifelike force into it, testing modernism’s claims of immortality.

The Modernist Aesthetic for Older Generations

Woolf addresses the question of mortality and spoken communication, an issue at the forefront of her mind as she wrote Between the Acts from 1937-1941, by examining generational differences in the Giles/Swithin household. Hermione Lee, Woolf’s biographer, writes that aging and mortality began to preoccupy Woolf from 1932 onward, and she ties these thoughts to Woolf’s feelings about silence and the relative power of words. Lytton Strachey’s death in 1932 left Woolf with “the greatest silence. It was a closing-down of the past; it made her feel (as she always in any case tended to feel) older, more mortal, part of an age that was past.”[25] Two years later, Roger Fry would die, and Woolf was saddled with the task of writing his biography, a project that occupied her through its publication in 1940. After attending his funeral, which featured musical rather than spoken eulogies, Woolf wrote, “I liked the wordlessness.” She also felt “suddenly and powerfully, a fear of her own death.”[26] While associating spoken words with mortality, Woolf does not denigrate their impact, writing “we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”[27] Woolf’s bittersweet approach to silence in Between the Acts is an outgrowth both of her musings mortality and of an appreciation for the artistic forces that shaped her generation.

Woolf’s sense of impending death and its wordlessness is reflected in the older generation’s peaceful silence in Between the Acts. Lucy and Bartholomew, elderly siblings, seem able to achieve an admirable artistic goal through their silent communication. During the pageant’s intermission, for example, Lucy responds to a cue from Bartholomew “as if he had said [it] aloud.”[28] The silent communion between Lucy and Bart accomplishes the transcendent and timeless connection that Woolf described in her typescript: “Flesh and blood was not a barrier, but a mist. Nothing changed their affection; no argument; no fact; no truth. What she saw he didn’t; what he saw she didn’t—and so on, ad infinitum.”[29] Lucy and Bart deny a universal perspective, each retaining his or her individual world view, yet nevertheless find “a common element in which the perishable is preserved, and the separate become one.”[30] DiBattista writes that the silent communication between Lucy and Bart, while comical in a Bergsonian sense, develops “that concord in discord and unity in dispersity by which society paradoxically renews itself—ad infinitum.”[31]

While DiBattista celebrates the seemingly immortal continuity in Lucy and Bart’s silent communication as signifying a social renewal, a discussion of their mortality calls DiBattista’s optimistic reading into question:

Tick, tick, tick the machine continued.
“Marking time,” said old Oliver beneath his breath.
“Which doesn’t exist for us,” Lucy murmured. “We’ve only the present.”[32]
While partially justified in evaluating the effectiveness and beauty of their unspoken connection, DiBattista describes a connection that is limited to the present, especially when interrupted by the industrial and bellicose tick of the machine. While Woolf acknowledges power and value of Bartholomew and Lucy’s connection, she does envision its impending end. Jed Esty notes that the technological advances of the late 1930s fed a sense of English imperial contraction. This sense, he argues, prophesied an end to “what Keynes called the ‘international but individualistic’ era of European culture,” or to the historical, cultural, and economic forces that had first given rise to modernism.[33] John Maynard Keynes, a close friend and Bloomsbury contemporary of Woolf’s, wrote of European capitalism in the post-World War I period: “It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous…In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it.”[34] By the late 1930s, Woolf, while not engaging in the same scathing rejection of modern forces as Keynes, still predicts the end of these forces with the “tick, tick, tick” towards war and a new epoch.

The Limitations of Literary Modernism for a New Generation

In a further comment on the future constraints on the modernist aesthetic, the younger generation’s attempts at silent communication seem unproductive, lacking the artistic unity achieved by Lucy and Bart. When Lucy declares “We’ve only the present,” Isabella disagrees:

“Isn’t that enough? William asked himself. Beauty—isn’t that enough? But here Isa fidgeted. Her bare brown arms went nervously to her head. She half turned in her seat. “No, not for us, who’ve the future,” she seemed to say. The future disturbing our present.[35]
Keats, posits that beauty is, in fact, enough: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”[36] Isabella’s unspoken disagreement and her fidgeting in relaying it, however, hints at a discomfort with static beauty. Her worries about the future of art disturbs the present, suggesting that even though the cataclysm of war has yet to arrive, the feeling that it cannot be regenerated has already marred its quality.

The question of beauty without a future continues to trouble Isabella, especially regarding procreation and her relationship with her husband and children. Keats calls the urn a “foster child of Silence,” a statement both about artistic silence and, in the context of Between the Acts, about an unnatural approach to the future and reproduction.[37] Isabella’s immersion in clichéd literary tropes, for instance, isolates her from her children. Musing on a crush she has for “the ravaged, the silent, the romantic gentleman farmer,” Isabella thinks of her “other love; love for husband, the stockbroker—“The father of my children,” she added, slipping into the cliché conveniently provided by fiction.”[38] Isabella notices her children in the garden. Attempting to make them notice her, she “tapped on the window with her embossed hairbrush. They were too far off to hear. The drone of the trees was in their ears; the chirp of birds; other incidents of garden life, inaudible, invisible to her in the bedroom, absorbed them.”[39] Distracted by two clichéd literary images, both silent throughout the novel, Isabella becomes unnaturally isolated from her children and their participation in the “incidents of garden life.” Isabella’s isolation from her children differentiates them from Keats’ foster children of Silence, for, although separated from their mother, they participate in a linguistic world that focuses on sound rather than meaning. Their nurses speak with “rolling words, like sweets on their tongues; which, as they thinned to transparency, gave off pink, green, and sweetness.”[40] The nurses, imparting a modernist aesthetic to the children, do so in the absence of a creative, nurturing maternal presence, perhaps hinting at Woolf’s worries about modernism after her death. The nurses’ spoken contact with the children makes them, rather than Isabella, the “conservators and curators” of modernism’s next generation.[41] Isabella’s fixation on literary cliché prevents her from participating in the genesis of a new linguistic understanding.

Isabella’s efforts to break free of her isolation through silent communication offer little hope for the continuity, represented through reproduction, of a silent modernist aesthetic. Isabella’s only moments of silent connection block the possibility for creation or regeneration by inviting William Dodge, a homosexual artist whose “child’s not my child,” into her relationship with Giles, her husband.[42] During the pageant, the three share a brief moment of silent connection:

He said (without words), “I’m damnably unhappy.”
“So am I,” Dodge echoes.
“And I too,” Isa thought.
They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle. Nothing happened. The tick of the machine was maddening.[43]
Isabella and Dodge’s relationship, in inhibiting her communication with Giles, alludes to T.S. Eliot’s “Burial of the Dead” from The Waste Land: “There was Dodge, the lip reader, her semblable, her conspirator, a seeker like her after hidden faces.”[44] In “Burial of the Dead,” the speaker wades among the dead, finally finding a friend and paraphrasing Charles Baudelaire: “'You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!'”[45] Woolf’s places Isabella in Eliot’s world of the dead while conflating reading and Dodge’s unproductive artistic sensibility, making him both a “Hypocrite Reader” and her “likeness.”[46] The refraction and repetition of allusion suggests not a modernist regeneration but rather a prolonged and self-perpetuating pessimism regarding the future of literary art.

Reinventing Late Modernism

In the face of the limitations and the sense of an impending end for literary modernism, Woolf attempts to breathe life into the static and unmoving. While Keats envies art’s separation from life, writing, “More happy love!...All breathing human passion far above,/That leaves a heart high-sorrowful,” Woolf argues that art should incorporate human passion.[47] . In “Silence,” Woolf discusses not only the role of artist as a preserver, but also as a participant in human feeling: “it is rhyme and rhythm; it is dressing and eating and drinking; is procreation and sensation; is love and hate and passion and adventure.”[48] Art should, Woolf argues, incorporate the pain of reality and human passion, the “burning forehead, and a parching tongue” that Keats seeks to escape.[49]

Lucy and Bart’s silence, compared with Isabella and Giles’, hint at the inability of art to carry a sense of human passion and sensation into the future, an inability Woolf confronts by approaching art not as an end in itself but as a framework within which to understand and advance everyday human life. Woolf approaches art not as an imitation of life but vice versa, a perspective that frees art from its stasis, making it relevant to the future. In what critic Melba Cuddy-Keane deems “an extraordinary life-art intersection,” Woolf attended a village play in August 1940 that is interrupted by the sounds of an air raid, a case of life mirroring the Reverend Streatfield’s interruption by “twelve aeroplances in perfect formation” that Woolf had already written into Between the Acts.[50] While the real-life interruption of the village pageant should not be interpreted as anything beyond coincidental, Woolf seems to have been anticipating the future in her writing.

In a more deliberate example of Woolf’s bringing art alive, she animates Keat’s “heifer lowing at the skies” that leads it.[51] The cows bring a moment of transcendence in the face of art’s failure:

Miss La Trobe leant against the tree. Her power had left her. Beads of perspiration broke on her forehead. Illusion had failed. “This is death,” she murmured, “death.”
Then suddenly, as the illusion petered out, the cows took up the burden. One had lost her calf. In the very nick of time she lifted her great moon-eyes head and bellowed. All the great moon-eyes heads laid themselves back. From cow after cow the same yearning bellow. The whole world was filled with dumb yearning. It was the primeval voice sounding loud in the ear of the present moment…The cows annihilated the gap; bridged the distance; filled the emptiness and continued the emotion.[52]
A new kind of expression, one more natural and coming from Nature’s, rather than the artists’, hand “takes up the burden.” The insertion of nature as the artist resolves the problem of the artist’s inevitable mortality; Nature, Mrs. Manresa notes, will “be there…when we’re not.”[53] As the director of the pageant, Miss La Trobe feels she has failed as an artist. “This is death,” she says, reinforcing the sense that deliberately contrived art in Between the Acts is lifeless. The cows, however, refer back to Keats’ sacrificial heifer, both bemoaning the effect of art (the calf has been lost) and, in their pain, giving the image of the sacrificed calf emotional meaning in the present. The cows wordlessly “filled the emptiness,” filling Keats’ empty vase not with formal beauty but a temporal and real emotion, one that prevents Miss La Trobe’s illusion from petering out, and suggesting a solution for bridging the gap between modernism and a new age that demands the injection of a lifelike force.

Miss La Trobe reflects that the pageant is “a failure,” but her despair is interrupted by a flock of birds “sylablling discordantly life, life, life, without measure.”[54] Miss La Trobe looks for the source of the interruption, finally settling on “old Mrs. Chalmers, creeping through the grass with a bunch of flowers—pinks apparently—to fill the vase that stood on her husband’s grave.”[55] At the end of the novel, in the midst of challenging and rethinking the modernist tradition, Woolf returns to the image of the empty vase associated with death. Mrs. Chalmer’s action in filling the vase, however, spurs a life-affirming cacophony. Between the Acts does not reject the modernist tradition it builds upon, but nevertheless challenges future modernists to enliven the movement.

The pageant structure within the novel and the novel’s ending argue that a reinvented form of modernism, perhaps spoken and acted rather than written, can carry modernism forward. Isabella and Giles finally face one another, and the silent enmity of modernism’s forms creates the possibility for generation and creativity:

Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought. They would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born…Then the curtain rose. They spoke.[56]




  1. ↑Woolf, Between the Acts (1941), ed. Leonard Woolf (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1969), p. 219. All subsequent references to this volume are cited parenthetically.
  2. ↑Naremore, “The ‘Orts and Fragments’ in Between the Acts," in Critical Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Morris Beja (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1985), p. 87.
  3. ↑Saint-Amour, “Air War Prophecy and Interwar Modernism," Comparative Literature Studies 42.2 (2005), p. 139.
  4. ↑Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Vintage, 1999), p. 730.
  5. ↑See Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf,6 vols., eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 6:429; also, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London: Hogarth, 1984), 5:316.
  6. ↑Woolf, Diary 5:300.
  7. ↑Woolf, Diary 5:313-14.
  8. ↑Woolf, Diary 5:299, 304.
  9. ↑Woolf, Diary 5:135, 139, 289.
  10. ↑Woolf, Letters, 6:413.
  11. ↑Woolf, Letters, 6:435.
  12. ↑Woolf, Pointz Hall Manuscript: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts, ed. Mitchell A. Leaska (New York: University Publications, 1983), pp. 166, 412-13.
  13. ↑Woolf, Diary, 5:135.
  14. ↑Melba Cuddy Keane, “Notes,” in Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (Orlando: Harcourt Inc, 2008), 152.
  15. ↑Virginia Woolf, Between the Acts (Orlando: Harcourt Inc, 2008), 3.
  16. ↑John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250-1900 ed. Arthur Quiller-Couch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1919, [c1901]), 28; available at www.bartleby.com/101/. [accessed 8 November 2009].
  17. ↑Pericles Lewis, The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 26-27.
  18. ↑Ibid., 2, 28.
  19. ↑Mark Hussey, The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1986), 130.
  20. ↑Woolf, Between the Acts, 63.
  21. ↑Ibid., 26.
  22. ↑Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 44-45.
  23. ↑Virginia Woolf, “Silence,” Typescript for Between the Acts, quoted in Hussey, The Singing of the Real World, 152-153.
  24. ↑Maria DiBattista, “Virginia Woolf and the Language of Authorship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, ed. Sue Roe and Susan Sellers (Cambridge: The Cambridge University Press, 2000), 130.
  25. ↑Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), 630.
  26. ↑Ibid., 656.
  27. ↑Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” quoted in Hussey, The Singing of the Real World, 2.
  28. ↑Woolf, Between the Acts, 82.
  29. ↑Ibid., 18.
  30. ↑Woolf, “Silence,” quoted in Hussey, The Singing of the Real World, 152-153.
  31. ↑Maria DiBattista, Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 202.
  32. ↑Woolf, Between the Acts, 57.
  33. ↑Jed Esty, A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 7-8.
  34. ↑John Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency,” The Yale Review, Vol. 22, no. 4 (June 1933), 755-769.
  35. ↑Woolf, Between the Acts, 57.
  36. ↑Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 49-50.
  37. ↑Ibid., 2.
  38. ↑Woolf, Between the Acts, 10.
  39. ↑Ibid.
  40. ↑Ibid., 8.
  41. ↑DiBattista, Virginia Woolf and the Language of Authorship, 130.
  42. ↑Woolf, Between the Acts, 51.
  43. ↑Ibid., 119-120.
  44. ↑Ibid., 141.
  45. ↑Baudelaire’s line is translated as “Hypocrite reader,--my likeness,--my brother!” fckLRCharles Baudelaire, “Flowers of Evil,” tr. Eli Siegel, Hail, American Development (New York: Definition Press, 1968); available at Link . [accessed 8 November 2008]. fckLRT.S. Eliot, The Waste Land, (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 76; available at www.bartleby.com/201/. [accessed 8 November 2009].
  46. ↑Mrs. Manresa calls William Dodge “an artist,” although he corrects her “I’m a clerk in an office.” The sense that he is an artist persists, however, and Isabella silently asks “what did he do with his hands, the white, the fine, the shapely?,” hinting at a wasted artistic talent. fckLRWoolf, Between the Acts, 27, 36.
  47. ↑Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 25, 29.
  48. ↑Woolf, “Silence,” quoted in Hussey, The Singing of the Real World, 152-153.
  49. ↑Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 30.
  50. ↑Melba Cuddy-Keane, “Introduction,” in Woolf, Between the Acts, xxviii. fckLRWoolf, Between the Acts, 131.
  51. ↑Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” 32-33.
  52. ↑Woolf, Between the Acts, 96.
  53. ↑Ibid., 37.
  54. ↑Ibid., 142.
  55. ↑Ibid.
  56. ↑Ibid., 148-149

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