In her final novel, Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf placed the self within a national, historical narrative. The novel is rich with the anti-fascist agenda of Three Guineas, told through the lens of ...women's stories and, significantly, their historical clothing. Specifically, Woolf used Elizabethan costume to reflect on the role of dress in women's lives. This article considers why Virginia Woolf selected the Elizabethan era as a sartorial and psychological alternative to her present. In a study of both sixteenth- and twentieth-century dress, this article explores how the Renaissance may have posed a more malleable, self-assertive antidote to the pressures of modern fashion-and the systems it upheld.
Drawing on Karen Barad’s notions of diffraction and entanglement, this paper aims to explore how the characters in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) communicate information and live a daily ...life in diffractive ways, making the real world come into being through relationality, which is consonant with Barad’s suggestion that we should shift our thinking from reflection and mimetic representation to a diffractive methodology. As the Victorian had already created the telegraph as global communications network deemed the Victorian Internet, Between the Acts describes the world in which many telecommunication technologies including telephone and radio as well as telegraph allow people to actively communicate with each other, though spatially separated. In particular, this novel focuses on the dynamic process of transmitting information and the complexity of communicating via medium. Woolf displays how diffractively and contingently the meaning is produced by the active interplay of various agents including human and nonhuman, Nature and machines, and matter and discourse, while a message sent by a transmitter is transferring to a receiver. Woolf, aware that technological apparatuses are not neutral but ideological, emphasizes the responsibility and ethics of the operator who uses the media. All beings such as idiot, wind, animal, tree, and gramophone in this novel, constantly interfere and participate in creating the meaning in diffractive ways, which implies that every meeting matters and a new democratic community emerges, resisting to fascism.
In Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf exposes a bleak and chilling vision of the police. Bulge, an actor disguised as a policeman, presents his work as a 'whole-time, white man's job' supervising the ...toil and suffering of the oppressed. The violence of this statement begs the question: what was Woolf's own attitude towards the police? In this respect, it is possible to find a certain continuity in her fiction. Although they mainly appear as banal, sometimes reassuring, background presences, policemen are also keepers of the social order. Their actions are shown to buttress ideological forces, especially those of patriarchy and Empire. However, this paper argues that Woolf's understanding of the role of the police in relation with these powers evolved throughout her works - from a mere analogy in Jacob's Room, to a much more concrete system of rituals and interpellations, resembling those theorised by Louis Althusser and Jean-Jacques Lecercle. Furthermore, this change in style accompanied a change in stance: as she realised the extent of ideological power on individuals, Woolf's notion of resistance also shifted, from a focus on wandering and personal evasion to a more communal and political approach, which crystallised in a form of artistic 'counter-interpellation'.
After briefly looking at the notion of exposure in the thought of Giorgio Agamben—and arguing that a ‘positive’ as well as a ‘negative’ exposure is to be found in it—this paper turns to Virginia ...Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts, in order to suggest that Woolf chiefly equates exposure not with dispossession, but with repossession. Indeed, just like Agamben’s philosophy, Woolf’s fiction posits a necessary exposure of man’s humanity: in order to become human, we need to be exposed as such. Where the writer differs from the philosopher, however, is in the type of experience she makes exposure conducive to: in Between the Acts, humanity is thought of as a communal and intersubjective mode of being, quite different from the Heideggerian vision of humanity as a personal realisation or revelation Agamben describes in The Open: Man and Animal. In this respect, the collective reality whose exposure Woolf represents in her novel can be conceived of as closer to another philosopher’s idea of existence and humanity, namely, Edmund Husserl’s concept of the ‘lifeworld’.
After the Modernist literary experiments of her earlier work, Virginia Woolf became increasingly concerned with overt social and political commentary in her later writings, which are preoccupied with ...dissecting the links between patriarchy, patriotism, imperialism and war. This book unravels the complex textual histories of The Years (1937), Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts (1941) to expose the genesis and evolution of Virginia Woolf's late cultural criticism. Fusing a feminist-historicist approach with the practices and principles of genetic criticism, this innovative study scrutinizes a range of holograph, typescript and proof documents within their historical context to uncover the writing and thinking processes that produced Woolf's cultural analysis during 1931-1941. By demonstrating that Woolf's late cultural criticism developed through her literary experimentalism as well as in response to contemporary social, political and economic upheavals, this book offers a fresh perspective on her emergence as a cultural commentator in her final decade and paves the way for further genetic enquiries in the field.
Virginia Woolf 's final novel, Between the Acts (1941 2008. New York: Harcourt.), is precariously situated in both literary and temporal terms. Written during modernism's eclipse and at the outset of ...World War II, the first conflict that threatened to annihilate humanity through the deployment of atomic weaponry,Woolf 's text seems to anticipate what would later be recognized in terms of postmodern preoccupation with metanarrative. The contingent nature of life is encapsulated in the novel's fragmentary language, and through addressing multiple genres simultaneously, the text probes the past in an attempt to comprehend a terrifying present, and to prognosticate about humanity's capacity to endure in an uncertain future. Scientific developments from Charles Darwin onwards invite particular scrutiny in Woolf 's text, which suggests that art may imbue humans with values that foster compassion for others, supplanting organized religions that seem to have failed in this respect. The fact that it is a female playwright who directs the subversive pageant of English history interpolated in the novel is significant, with Woolf anticipating that the matrilineal aesthetics, which would subsequently be conceptualized by feminist theorists including Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray, might effectively mitigate violent tendencies underlying patriarchal aesthetics that had thus far induced conflict among humans. Readers of the novel, and spectators of the play around which the novel is structured, are similarly enjoined to move from observational to creative roles by recognizing their stake in engendering a counter-narrative to the one that, in Woolf 's time, seemed unambiguously apocalyptic.
This article explores Virginia Woolf's figure of the artist 'between the trees' and 'out of doors' in two late works, Between the Acts and the late variant manuscript, 'Anon'. The two works are ...closely linked in many ways, so much so that a fuller understanding of Between the Acts is enabled by its contemporary unfinished essay. Woolf's suggestion in 'Anon' is that writing (Caxton's press) not only instigates individual authorship but also takes the author and the artefact indoors; in Between the Acts, the peripatetic playwright Miss la Trobe with her outdoor pageant is a return, in part. Further, the article explores Woolf's memoir 'A Sketch of the Past' and in it, her choice of a plant (unspecified and metonymic) as both co-creator and emblem of 'the whole', in ways that anticipate 'eco' and 'biosemiotic' approaches. At a time of war and crisis and pushing her experimentation further, 'the perpetual crumbling and renewal of the plant' has a particular meaning for Woolf and for her poetics, from the 'androgynous mind' of her early work to the 'common voice singing out of doors' of her last.
In Between the Acts, remembering includes fleeting memories of poetic fragments ranging from romantic poems to nursery rhymes which are re-membered by the chorus of the pageant and Miss La Trobe. ...Characters for whom the signified prevails over the signifier and the symbolic over the semiotic use fragments of poems in an alienating manner. However, other characters use poetic quotations to build a relationship based on empathy and identification. For Isa Oliver and William Dodge, two marginal figures whose voices are silenced by dominant discourses, quoting fragments of Keat’s « Ode to the Nightingale » contributes to expressing their own distress and their resistance against the normative discourse of patriarchy. Conjuring up poetic fragments (from Romantic poets or Shakespeare) is part and parcel of a process towards impersonality, a notion which encapsulates the paradoxical nature of lyricism : the expression of a suffering « I » paves the way for the expression of an omnipersonal self. Anon, the anonymous and androgynous poet whom Woolf celebrated in her eponymous essay, the minstrel who lets the audience join in and sing the chorus, is resuscitated during Miss La Trobe’s pageant and contributes to the experience of being together in spite of being « scraps, orts and fragments ». It will also be shown that remembering poetic fragments create a « choral space », a space which dissolves boundaries between self and other. It is in this temporary ethos or habitat that the project of a universalist ethics is formulated.
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