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Woolf Essay

“The pageant-as perplexing and as little understood as life, some- thing to be lived through and speculated upon, interpreted (though who knows the right interpretation?), riddled with unplanned for and irritating interruptions-recounts a kind of history.” (Blogdett 27).

g it: “They all looked at the play…. Each of course saw something different. In another moment it would be beneath the horizon, gone to join the other plays” (BA, 213)

t only explicitly states her belief in an undifferentiated (Jungian) universal energy of which all things partake-mind and matter alike-but also conveys her sense of the need to fight death. The moth she observes here is “a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other human beings … a tiny bead of pure life.”6 This moth-soul valiantly refuses to give up the struggle against death. Even so the artist defies it in Between the Acts, which celebrates the life-force rather than accepting the death which impends inevitably or historically. (Blogdett 28).

Comprehending the impulse towards pathetic fallacies, Woolf allows them to her charac- ters, although she herself remains conscious of “the insensibility of nature,” as To the Lighthouse tersely puts it (TL, 207). In Between the Acts, the human being “is an irrelevant forked stake in the flow and majesty of the summer silent world” (BA, 191), whom the phenomenal world actually ignores. Nature may chance to help out the pageant with a fortuitous shower, but it also blows away the words of the actors. Yet, like the lapses in the pageant-and like Antaeus (BA, 24) of whom we are reminded, who drew strength from his mother Ge, the earth-we need impersonal nature. It also sustains us with what is not an illusion. For Woolf, some greater, expansive “reality” inheres in the physi- (Blogdett 28).

 

ent from outdoors to in, furnishes an illuminating preface to the novel.7 Outside in the twilight, she realizes “that we are spectators and also passive participants in a pageant. And as nothing can interfere with the order, we have nothing to do but accept and watch.” The “pageant” here is life directed in accordance with the rhythms of nature, for it is lamp- lighting time when, in response to the oncoming dark, lights come on over the countryside. The human observers are a “knot of consciousness … not subject to the law of the sun” but burdened with fragmenting intellects. Sh (Blogdett 30).

The finale acknowledges openly what the novel has already shown; that a psychic layer of drives and responses (sexual and spiritual) of immemorial antiquity is part of the present-day personality too.8 Thus the pageant audience is given a pointed recognition that ‘there’s a sense in which we all… are savages still. Those women with red nails. And dressing up-what’s that? the old savage, I suppose’ (BA, 1

(Blogdett 31).

d, ‘We all act. Yes, but whose play?’ (BA, 199). The collective mind of the audience is troubled about “whom to thank? Every sound in nature was painfully audible; the swish of the trees; the gulp of a cow; even the skim of the swallows…. But no one spoke. Whom could they make responsible? Whom could they thank… ?” (BA, 194-5). The needle of the machine promptly finds its “rut” and proposes “God… Save the King.” Lucy, consistent with her theism, wants to thank the one Miss La Trobe, while Bart suggests rather the actors and spectators. Actually, however, an answer to “Whom to thank?” is embedded in the audience’s query, where the voice of nature sounds. If there must be thanksgiving, Woolf chooses to thank nature as the life force itself, whose one ‘spirit… inspires, pervades… animates’ (BA, 192, 197) (Blogdett 34).

 

 

on: “It was unlikely… that the birds were the same” (BA, 101-02). The villagers sing, “for the earth is always the same; we pass…. All passes but we, all changes… but we remain forever the same” (BA, 125,139): (Blogdett 29).

 

Also characteristic of her perceptive keenness, Wood contrasts Woolf’s inclusion of several photographs of “continental dictatorial figures” in her scrapbook with her eventual incorporation of photographs of “British patriarchal figures” in Three Guineas, suggesting that Woolf was both familiar with European politics and concerned with the “need to recognize and attack the dictator at home in order to defend against fascism” (78). (Zhang 54)

 

Wood draws attention to how Woolf’s late works shift toward an accentuation of social and political commentary and increased engagement with current and international affairs, which is eloquently evidenced by Woolf’s composition of The Years, Three Guineas, and Between the Acts. Such a shift, however, seems to represent “a linear progression” from Woolf’s earlier journalistic practices, aesthetic innovations, and feminist-pacifist politics (53). Woolf never ceased to experiment with form, as she engaged with popular literary modes such as the epistolary and the pageant to depict British culture and national life in her late works. Nor is Woolf’s aesthetic experimentation ever politically disengaged. The genesis of her late cultural criticism, in the final analysis, bridges rather than splits Woolf’s thinking and writing before and beyond the 1930s. (Zhang 55).

 

3). That reference initiates what amounts to an anatomy of laughter in the novel, and it also initiates the bird imagery that is so clearly connected, in its “many-tongued syllabling,” with the novel’s comic and polyphonic mingling of many voices. Between the Acts represents the culmination of Woolf’s career-long exploration of contemporary festiv- ity-the “party consciousness” (Diary 3: 12) (Ames 394).

 

The fullest treatment of Between the Acts as a comic novel appears in an article by Melba Cuddy-Keane, who relates Woolfs use of a chorus in the pageant to the use of the chorus in ancient Greek comedy. She argues that this comic mode is central to the questioning of authority in the novel as a whole (Ames 395).

 

forms. Woolf’s mingling of genres, aspiration toward a plural narrator, and detailed attention to forms of laugh- ter occur, significantly, in a novel about a village pageant, a survival of a folk carnival form. Woolfs search for plural and anonymous narrators, in this novel and the uncompleted “Anon,” represents a departure from the mod- ernist emphasis on individual consciousness, which is characteristic of the genre’s move away from folk carnival sources” (Ames 395).

d gentry. Woolf exploits the comic potential of a simi- lar mingling of high and low. The “child new born” who represents England forgets her lines-to Miss La Trobe’s curses and the audience’s cheers (77). Eliza Clark is “splendidly made up” with “sixpenny brooches” and a royal cape made of “swabs used to scour saucepans” (83). The audience is amused to note that “Mrs. Otter of The End House” plays the aged crone in the Elizabethan playlet. Albert, the so-called “village idiot,” plays many roles, “energetically representing . . . the sound of horse’s hooves . . . with a wooden spoon” (142) and later undertaking the more demanding coop- erative role of the hindquarters of a donkey. Woolf’s use of the troubling anachronism, “village idiot,” suggests both the harshness of stereotyped so- cial roles and the festive inclusiveness that allows, albeit temporarily, for the transformation of such roles. When Mrs. Parker deplores Albert’s presence, William Dodge (acutely aware of social marginality himself) responds, “The idiot . . . He’s in the tradition” (111). The play of carnival pageantry, as Bakhtin explains it, creates a comic double focus that temporarily exalts the lowly and lowers the exalted. But the inversion is not a one-sided attack on authority or power; the carnival spirit is richly inclusive. Rather than undermining tradition, it seeks to include all within it: from the resistant and moody Giles, to the pompous Reverend Streatfield, to Albert the idiot, firmly ensconced in “the trad” (Ames 396).

 

“firmly ensconced in “the tradition.”‘ The familiar double focus of the stage calls attention to the incongru- ities attending all social performances: the pageant is hardly the only stage for role-playing, as the book’s title and closing theatrical metaphor suggest. The recurrent Woolfian theme of multiple selves emerges early in the novel when we are privy to Isa Oliver gazing into a three-way mirror, “so that she could see three separate versions of her rather heavy, yet handsome, face” (14). The multiplication of mirror images over the “pointed; dartlike; defi- nite” reflection that Mrs. Dalloway sees in her mirror (Mrs. Dalloway 55) alerts us to the theme of the fragmented self-a theme that culminates in Between the Acts with the actors accosting the audience with multiple mirrors to conclude the pageant. Given the complexity of the fragmented self, it behooves one to adopt a role. Thus Mrs. Manresa becomes “a wild child of nature” (41) and the Queen of the Festival (93); Giles Oliver with his blood- stained shoes serves as “the surly hero” (93) but also, as Isa often reminds herself, as “the father of my children.” Lucy Swithin is “Old Flimsy” (as well as “sister swallow” to Bart); Miss La Trobe is dubbed “Bossy” (63). William Dodge’s homosexuality becomes as much of a stereotypical role in the minds of Isa, Lucy, and Giles-even though they dare not speak its name. Woolf’s attention to these roles, often comically exaggerated into mock titles, works both to remind us that these are characters in a novel, just as Reason and 396 This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 09 May 2021 15:23:40 UTC All use subject to ht BETWEEN THE ACTS England are characters in the pageant, and to remind us of the applicabil- ity of the stage metaphor outside of fiction” (Ames 396-397).

eading” of English literary history.2 Between the Acts is insistently located in the present time, a setting rein- forced by its duration of a single day.3 The framed pageant offers by con- trast an entire condensed history of English literature. Thus Woolf high- lights the double focus of historical consciousness-how we read our present time into our view of history (Ames 397).

 

g literary history in a multigenre present moment. The program’s summary of the Elizabethan playlet is a good example of the parodic nature of the pageant: About a false Duke; and a Princess disguised as a boy; then the long lost heir turns out to be the beggar, because of a mole on his cheek; and Ferdinando and Carinthia-that’s the Duke’s daughter, only 397 This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 09 May 2021 15:23:40 UTC All use subject to ht TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE she’s been lost in a cave-falls in love with Ferdinando who had been put into a basket as a baby by an aged crone. And they marry. (88) This description mocks the grotesque patternings and coincidences of Eliza- bethan drama; by reducing much of the drama to a plot summary, the program’s description elides the poetry and highlights the ridiculous side of the period’s plays. The passage recalls some of Woolf’s most fanciful cari- catures in her essay, “Notes on an Elizabethan Play”: the land of the unicorn and the jeweller among dukes and gran- dees, Gonzaloes and Bellimperias, who spend their lives in murder and intrigue, dress up as men if they are women, as women if they are men, see ghosts, run mad, and die in the greatest profusion on the slightest provocation, uttering as they fall imprecations of su- perb vigour or elegies of the wildest despair. (55) That essay offers not only examples of similar humor, but a key to under- standing the sort of comedy Woolf’s humor serves in Between the Acts and its pageant. In “Notes on an Elizabethan Play,” Woolf wrestles with the qualita- tive differences between Elizabethan drama and the novel, and more largely, between poetry and prose. (Ames 397-398).

nd natural creativity” (211). The spirit of the pageant poses “the will to comedy and conciliation” as an alternative to “the will to power and domi- nation” (207). By representing English literary history as a succession of comedies in which youth triumphs over age-and thus implicitly one his- torical era over the preceding-Woolf and La Trobe create a pageant wholly within the carnival celebration of time: “Carnival is the festival of all-annihi- lating and all-renewing time…. Carnival celebrates … the very process of replaceability” (Bakhtin, Dostoevsky 124, 12) (Ames 399).

 

placeability” (Bakhtin, Dostoevsky 124, 125). The most stinging parody is reserved for the Victorian age-precisely because that era is still associated with the parents of the audience and thus with that official seriousness that the carnival spirit lampoons. All the Victo- rian pieties suffer comic assault. Woolf mocks missionary self-righteousness: “I too have longed to convert the heathen” (166). She lampoons the hob- bies of the Victorian gentleman: “Though they do gather dust-those skulls and things” (168). She exposes the shaky Victorian religious faith as Mr. Hardcastle intones grace over an enormous picnic lunch while “fumbl [ing] with his fossil” (171). The appetite for constructing and improving comes under assault: “Then out with the bricks. Let’s build: A conservatory? A labo- ratory? A mechanic’s institute?” (173). And even the pieties of the home are assailed: “For its ‘Ome, ladies, ‘Ome, gentlemen. Be it never so humble, there’s no place like ‘Ome” (173). The parody is certainly effective: “cheap and nasty, I call it” snaps Etty Springett. Miss La Trobe manages to offend some of the audience, perhaps most daringly in the carnivalesque blas- phemy of Albert playing the “hindquarters of the donkey” and “becoming active” during Mr. Hardcastle’s prayer, an activity that unites the lower so- cial level with what Bakhtin would deem the “bodily lower stratum” (Rabelais 20 and passim) (Ames 399).

s comically point up the aspects of ages past that appear anachronis- tic today, the chorus stresses what is timeless and enduring. Cuddy-Keane, in discussing the chorus as the central communal and ritual presence of the novel, notes that “Because Woolfs choric voice signifies the integration of society, Between the Acts lies primarily within the comic genre” (275). Cuddy-Keane argues that the concept of chorus-a group that speaks with- out a leader or individualized voice-serves as the most successful way in which Woolf questions and undermines traditional authority and concepts of social leadership in the (Ames 401).

 

cs following him, have perceived in writers as diverse as Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Joyce, and Beckett.7 The ambivalent politics of carnival shapes the ideological charge of Woolf s complexly political work. As varying critical responses to the novel demonstrate, Woolf is neither uncritically celebrating an English tradition nor dogmatically discarding the island’s glorious past as patriarchal domi- nation culminating in war (Ames 405).

 

This spirit is epitomized in a fascinating passage that analyzes the pageant’s conclusion using the language of rhyme, onomatopoeia, and al- literation. The cacophony of La Trobe’s fragmented ending and of Woolf’s novel as a whole is reflected in the rhyming of abrupt, corrupt, and disrupt; of plain, same, and game; of pry and spry, make and break; of cackle, rattle, and yaffle. It is an astonishing passage to find in a high-art novel of modern- ism-and it may remind us that Between the Acts is contemporary with Finnegans Wake: What ajangle and ajingle! Well, with the means at her disposal, you can’t ask too much. What a cackle, a cacophony! Nothing ended. So abrupt. And corrupt. Such an outrage; such an insult. And not plain. Very up to date, all the same. What is her game? To disrupt? Jog and trot? Jerk and smirk? Put the finger to the nose? Squint and pry? Peak and spy? O the irreverence of the generation which is only momentarily-thanks be-‘the young.’ The young, who can’t make, but only break; shiver into splinters the old vision; smash to atoms what was whole. What a cackle, what a rattle, what a yaffle-as they call the woodpecker, the laughing bird that flits from tree to tree. (183) The book’s central tension between wholeness and fragmentation resolves here, through the play of language, into a laughing bird. The flitting bird unites laughter and music and echoes the slyly chuckling bird of the first page. It is a fitting image for Woolf’s too often neglected comic sensibility (Ames 407).

 

ploring his subjectivity.2 This process of attempting to access minds that are never fully knowable appears again and again at the level of form or theme in nearly all of Woolf’s novels. We might think of Clarissa Dalloway protecting the “privacy of the soul” from the invasive Peter Walsh (124); Lily Briscoe fantasizing about an “art” by which she might enter “into those secret chambers” of Mrs. Ramsay’s heart (54); or Percival’s inaccessible subjectivity, around which The Waves coheres. In each of these texts, the boundaries of others’ minds can never be fully traversed, but attempting and imagining such traversals emerge as the main objects of language. I will examine how Woolf’s aesthetic fascination with others’ minds breaks down in the case of intellectual disability—or, to use her term, “idiocy.” I argue that in Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts, idiocy represents an unreadable form of mental privacy that resists incorporation into social systems of meaning. Through the figure of the idiot, Between the Acts registers a degree of exhaustion with what arguably is Woolf’s, and also the modernist novel’s, primary aesthetic catalyst: the minds of others. When idiocy is imagined as a form of peculiarly absent or inaccessible cognition, it halts exploration of the mind and registers private thoughts as potentially isolating rather than narratively instigating. Idiocy, as an aficionado of Greek literature and culture like Woolf would have (Pulsifer 95)

The novel’s constant pull between “I” and “We”—or individuality and collectivity—is represented at the level of form. The text shifts from rich description of individual characters to direct discourse spoken both by audience members and pageant performers. It gradually moves, in other words, from the novelistic to the dramatic.4 Although it reports many characters’ impressions and thoughts, by the end, Between the Acts settles on the exterior view of a community that is most easily captured through the dramatic mode. (Pulsifer 96).

Cripistemology, in other words, is concerned with standing before the unknowable instead of knowing or even knowing otherwise. It seeks to preserve the borders of objects of knowledge by admitting constraints, questions the profits of knowledge production as an end in itself, and rejects the notion that knowledge is the ultimate aim of engaging with others. At stake in the concept of This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 09 May 2021 15:24:20 UTC All use subject to ht 100 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 42, Number 2 cripistemology is the acknowledgement that processes of gathering knowledge are always partial and incomplete. Between the Acts presents a cripistemology through its gradual withdrawal from narrative, or the territory of private thoughts, and toward the dramatic, or the territory of external presentation. In doing so, it questions the modernist novel’s narrative interest in the pursuit of knowledge about others’ interiority. This cripistemological approach t (Pulsifer 99)

134. Later, at the end of the play, a similar collective consciousness wonders in response to the faltering gramophone, “Was that voice ourselves? Scraps, orts and fragments, are we, also, that?” (189). The novel shows drama’s capacity to conjure up an audience’s shared mind; the narrative then portrays dips into this mind, giving language to thoughts that traverse the audience’s collective consciousness. When Between the Acts does register individuation in the audience members, it often does so in the style of drama. For example, after witnessing a This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 09 May 2021 15:24:20 UTC All use subject to ht 98 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 42, Number 2 dance in the pageant, Mrs. Manresa “applauded loudly. Somehow she was the Queen; and he (Giles) was the surly hero. ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ she cried, and her enthusiasm made the surly hero squirm on his seat” (93). (Pulsifer 97-98)
135. The Deleuzean idiot does not possess discursive or communal knowledge, but this fact is socially productive rather than tragic; his status as an outsider disrupts accepted truths and puts pressure on conventional modes of knowing. (Pulsifer 100).

 

Through these actions, Albert embodies and inaugurates one of the gramophone’s weary pronouncements, “Dispersed are we,” which echoes throughout the text. It is important to note that for Woolf, this dispersal is not necessarily negative. While she advocated for a collective response to the threat of fascism in other writings, she also feared that a tightly unified community might replicate fascism’s oppressive totalitarianism. If La Trobe “unites” the audience both physically and affectively through her staging of the pageant, Albert “disperses” the effects of this union, reasserting the distance between minds that Woolf explores in her earlier fiction. Albert first appears before the pageant begins, as Mr (Pulsifer 102).

 

(he made as if chasing it through the grass) Now the clock strikes! (he stood erect, puffing out his cheeks as if he were blowing a dandelion clock) One, two, three, four … (85–86) Unlike the other characters in the pageant, who transform into figures from history through colorful costumes that attract the attention of butterflies (62), Albert plays himself during his monologue. “There was no need to dress him up,” the narrative voice notes. “There he came, acting his part to perfection” (86). The statement that he is not dressed up, suggesting that he is an accidental performer in the pageant, contradicts the statement that he is “acting his part to perfection.” This contradiction indicates that he is paradoxically performing and not performing, which points to Albert’s inscrutability for the audience. (Pulsifer 103).

 

Albert is also associated with dispersion insofar as he disconnects others from language at crucial points of communal meaning-making. At the end of the performance, The Reverend Streatfield stands before the bewildered audience to hesitantly offer his perspective on the pageant’s meaning: “‘I have been asking myself,’” he says, “‘what meaning, or message, this pageant was meant to convey?’” (191). His question seems a grasp at the authority of summative power, but instead of explaining the pageant, he asks a series of questions that culminate in a tepid call to action: “We act different parts; but are the same. That I leave to you. Then again, as the play or pageant proceeded, my attention was distracted. Perhaps that too was part of the producer’s intention? I thought I perceived that nature takes her part. Dare we, I asked myself, limit life to ourselves? May we not hold that there is a spirit that inspires, pervades. ..” (The swallows were sweeping round him. They seemed cognizant of his meaning. Then they swept out of sight.) “I leave that to you. I am not here to explain. That role has not been assigned me. I speak only as one of the audience, one of ourselves. I caught myself too reflected, as it happened in my own mirror…” (Laugher) “Scraps, orts and fragments! Surely, we should unite?’” (192) The surrounding environment contributes to Streatfield’s tentativeness: the breeze interrupts him, and, later, the ominous overhead tones of “Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation” (193)—signaling military action—cause him to hesitate. And his speech itself glitches, recapitulating, at the end, phrases Streatfield heard during the pageant. The explicative process in which he engages drifts into a rich sound collage, collectively produced by both human and non-human actors. Yet catching sight of Albert, who appears to pass around the collection box, halts these ruminations. Streatfield falls silent: Contemplating the idiot, Mr. Streatfield had lost the thread of his discourse. His command over words seemed gone. He twiddled the cross on his watchchain. Then his hand sought his trouser pocket. Surreptitiously he extracted a small silver box. It was plain to all that the natural desire of the natural man was overcoming him. He had no further use for words. (194) Seeing Albert temporarily disintegrates the sonic tapestry in which Streatfield participated. Streatfield, with whom words rarely sit well anyway, does not seem to miss language: he has “no further use” for it. This passage questions the ability of language (Pulsifer 105)

As a symbol of dispersion as well as of language that does not signify to others, Albert appears as the conceptual antithesis of La Trobe. As director, La Trobe desires collective participation in and reception of the pageant. La Trobe shapes her pageant so that the members of the audience learn to recognize themselves as a community with a collective history. She also attempts This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 09 May 2021 15:24:20 UTC All use subject to ht “Contemplating the idiot” in Woolf’s Between the Acts 107 to create aesthetic situations that prompt a collective response. For example, as the national history of the pageant unfolds into “‘Present time. Ourselves’” (177), La Trobe imagines the audience as “them,” a single entity that she might transfix through her art: “She wanted to expose them, as it were, to douche them, with present-time reality” (179). La Trobe’s mirror, despite its cracks, seeks to transform the audience into a transpersonal whole that receives and then ironically rejects this shared vision through a fragmented collective consciousness: “Here a nose . . . There a skirt . . . Then trousers only . . . Now perhaps a face . . . Ourselves? But that’s cruel. To snap us as we are, before we’ve had to time assume. . .” (84). The audience, uniting in its assessment of La Trobe’s disconcerting scene, participates in a shared body that is recognizable via the distorted perspective offered by the mirror. Even if La Trobe dubs the pageant a “failure” (209), the mirror represents the cohesion of understanding that she seeks, even if it is temporary and imprecise. Several critics have argued that Between the Acts remains ambivalent about La Trobe’s attempts to orchestra a cohesive community, something Woolf grew increasingly skeptical of during fascism’s rise in Europe.19 At the same time, by imagining a cohesive and vulnerable national community, Between the Acts responds ironically to fascist ideology. As an agent of dispersion, Albert balances La Trobe’s desire for control over her aesthetic production by dissolving Streatfield’s and Giles’s acts of interpretation. In this sense, Albert functions as a positive force by interrupting the possibility that the pageant might be collectively and uniformly comprehended. It is difficult to read this continual dist (pulsifer 106-107)

 

Virginia Woolf is seldom seen as a political writer, least of all as a successful or influential political writer, and almost never as a the- orist with a comprehensive and penetrating grasp of the social and political fabric of the society we inhabit. For the most part, the political content of her writings goes completely unnoticed. Essay upon essay, book after book, deals with the aesthetic qualities of her art, the “lyric mode” of her novels, the techniques of interior monologue, the form and style and symbolism of her writing, her success or failure in creating “character,” and the allegedly internal (or even “egoistic”) focus of her work.2 Leonard Woolf, her hus- band, wrote that she was “the least political animal that has lived since Aristotle invented the definition.”3 Quentin Bell, her nephew and biographer, devoted scarcely a handful of pages to her political awareness in the first 400 pages of his two-volume biography, and remarked of her in the year 1934 (when she was fifty-two years old) that “as yet Virginia was not really worried about politics.”4 Even Herbert Marder, in Feminism and Art, the fullest treatment of Woolf’s feminist ideas, focused primarily on their relationship to her art as a novelist and concluded that as a political writer, Woolf was a failure. When she ceased to place art before politics, he argued, she became merely an unsuccessful propagandist.5 Undoubtedly Woolf herself was responsible for this perspective on her work, held even-or most particularly-by her closest inti- mates. That she rejected conventional party politics and politicians as boring or worse was clear at an early date. In May 1908 she 99 This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 09 May 2021 17:59:39 UTC All use subject to ht 100 Berenice A. Carroll wrote: “I think politicians and journalists must be the lowest of God’s creatures” (Letters, I, p. 332). Her novels return again and again to the refrain that politics is a bore. “He bored me consider- ably,” says Helen Ambrose of Richard Dalloway in The Voyage Out, Woolf’s first novel, in which Dalloway is “the politician” and Helen Ambrose the mature woman who often represents Virginia Woolf’s own views (VO, p. 81). In her late novel, The Years, the sympathetic character North goes about complaining that all peo- ple talk about in England is “money and politics.”6 Moreover, Woolfs published letters and diary appear to deal overwhelmingly with private and literary matters, or descriptions of nature and people; they offer only rare flashes of insight into her political and social perspective.7 Nevertheless, these flashes are sometimes highly illuminating. Thus in several letters of April 1908, Woolf expressed her sharp discontent with an obligation she had undertaken to review The Life and Letters of John Thaddeus Delane: “I find it is all politics.” Delane, who was editor of the London Times for over three decades in the mid-nineteenth century, she found “infinitely depressing, because he managed to live a substantial life without disarranging anything. I can’t get at him at all. Imagine a gigantic George [Duckworth?] with all George’s palpable illusions, as to the value of coronets, and the authority of white waistcoats come true. For I cant [sic] believe in wars and politics…. How people can live that life, and why they should write about it, or why in the last instance I should spend one moment or one drop of ink over it- is all a chain of rusty iron to me. I am a slave at the end” (Letters, I, pp. 324-26). This reflects neither apathy, unconcern, nor in fact “boredom,” but rather an intense revulsion against the world of “politics as usual,” and a rejection of the view that such a world deserves our attention and energies. This was a position Woolf later adopted as a deliberate policy. “Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflect- ing the figure of man at twice its natural size,” she wrote some twenty years later in A Room of One’s Own. “Without that power … [t] he glories of all our wars would be unknown…. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn their crowns or lost them.” But if a woman “begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking- glass shrinks…. How is he to go on giving judgment, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is?” (A Room, pp. 35-36). Woolf developed this position further in Three Guineas, to which we reThis content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 09 May 2021 17:59:39 UTC All use subject to ht The Political Thought of Virginia Woolf 101 turn below; suffice it to say for the present that it is by no means a position to be described as apolitical (Caroll 99-101)

 

of courage, but no feather at all” (TG, pp. 107, 109). However, there was still another reason why Woolf looked else- where when she sought to portray “empires and governments” in action. It was because she wished to show what was harder to see than the stockbroker himself and the battleships and poison gas: namely, the intricate ways in which all of the privileged class of “the educated men” (and many of their daughters) served to main- tain Empire and government and participated in their crimes. In this sense, indeed, her work was addressed to those of her own class, even to her most intimate associate (Caroll 108).

 

theless they express Woolf’s pro- found conviction that there were no significant differences between the political parties: Liberal, Labour or Conservative, government or opposition, all were bound into the system that crushed people’s lives and buried truth and vision beneath a mountain of lies, cruelty, and domination. It must be said that Virginia Woolf often engaged in deliberate concealment of her political vi (Caroll 101)

Works Cited

Ames, Christopher. “Carnivalesque Comedy in Between the Acts.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol.

44, no. 4, 1998, pp. 394–408. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/441590. Accessed 9 May 2021.

Barrett, Eileen. “Matriarchal Myth on a Patriarchal Stage: Virginia Woolf’s between the Acts

(Cowinner of the 1987 TCL Prize in Literary Criticism).” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 33, no. 1, 1987, pp. 18–37. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/441330. Accessed 9 May 2021.

Benziman, Galia. “‘Dispersed Are We’: Mirroring and National Identity in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Between

the Acts.’” Journal of Narrative Theory, vol. 36, no. 1, 2006, pp. 53–71. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30224638. Accessed 9 May 2021.

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