The Lily Pool, the Mirrors, and the Outsiders: Envisioning Home and England in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts

Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 38.1 March 2012: 249-275 The Lily Pool, the Mirrors, and the Outsiders: Envisioning Home and England in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts Ching-fang Tseng Department of English National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan Abstract Written against the historical context of the threats of fascism and World War II, Between the Acts’s portrayal of rural England that highlights its traditional way of life, the everlasting rural landscape, and the pageant then in vogue seemingly echoes the prevailing national imagination during the war-crisis years. Rather than replicating the nostalgic ruralist vision of England on the verge of war, the novel not only furthers Woolf’s critique of the dictators in England in Three Guineas, but also enacts the essay’s visionary idea of the “Outsiders’ Society” in the setting of the English country. A prominent figure in Between the Acts is the cultivated observer in rural England, who is there to apprehend landscape as well as the universal evolutionary order. Encapsulating the ocularized social power of the ruling landowning class, he embodies Englishness and “civilization” as the apex of the developmental progress of humankind. Woolf responds to such Englishness by positing episodes in the novel involving La Trobe’s village pageant. The pageant invokes an “Outsiders’ Society” composed of heterogeneous, anonymous private spectators in resistance to the hegemonic perception of the gentry-audience, thus making the latter think home landscape, “Ourselves,” and civilization in a different light. At the same time, the “Outsiders’ Society” is also enacted through Between the Acts’s multi-layered, open-ended, and self-reflexive form, which disallows closure and totality of meaning and predominance of the authorial vision. Keywords Between the Acts, Three Guineas, rural England, landscape, the cultivated observer, Englishness, the “Outsiders’ Society,” the Outsider-artist I express my sincere gratitude to the anonymous readers of an earlier version of the essay, whose constructive comments help me improve the argument and organization of the essay. 250 Concentric 38.1 March 2012 Published posthumously in 1941, Virginia Woolf’s last novel Between the Acts is noted for its thematization of England and Englishness, and its hybrid, interrupted form that contains the playwright La Trobe’s village pageant and the cacophonic, fragmentary voices its performance effects. Written against the historical context of the threats of fascism and World War II, the novel’s portrayal of rural England highlighting its traditional way of life, the everlasting rural landscape, and the pageant then in vogue seemingly echoes the prevailing national imagination during the war-crisis years, which nostalgically yearns for the placid, eternal home as embodied by the idyllic English countryside. In correlating social community with the audience of the pageant or art, the novel’s exploration of how to ensure the survival of community as the nation faces the threat of obliteration continues and complicates Woolf’s historical reflection on war and dictatorship in Three Guineas. As Patricia Klindiens Joplin points out, Woolf in Between the Acts “seizes hold of the gap, the distance, the interval, and the interrupted structure not as a terrible defeat of the will to continuity or aesthetic unity [but] . elevates [them] to a positive formal and metaphysical principle” (89). Likewise, Pamela Caughie argues that the novel “gives [contingencies and interruptions] preference, and those numerous breaks many critics see as a sign of discontinuity and a faulting of structure actually enable the acts [of art] to be continually renewed” (53). While some critics pay attention to Between the Acts’s unconventional presentation of the form and audience of art and the artist’s role that diverge sharply from Woolf’s previous visions of such, still others focus on Between the Acts’s anti-fascist meditation on the communal mode as experimentally pluralistic or alternatively unified by creative art. While Brenda Silver suggests that the pageant in the novel recreates the Elizabethan playhouse and “provide[s] a form of community that will survive the coming war” (296), Michele Pridmore-Brown maintains that the community that takes form among the audience of La Trobe’s pageant “emphasizes the particularities of the auditor or receiver” and by means of the “noise of gramophone” “subverts the political message propelling civilization into World War II” (416, 419). Similarly, Christine Froula asserts that “the pageant’s freedom from fixed, ascertainable meaning” gives rise to a community of diverse, discordant free spectators “against the totalitarian threat across the Channel” (322, 320). Yet despite that the novel’s radically experimental vision of community represents the Outsider-artist’s independence and creativity in defiance of dictatorial control as has been discussed in Three Guineas, Between the Acts presents a portrayal of communal life that is culturally and socially specific as it ponders the ideas of England and Englishness in a precarious, ominous moment when the nation faces Ching-fang Tseng 251 war. As Alex Zwerdling writes, the novel displays an “acute longing for an earlier, more civilized phase of English culture” while harboring an apocalyptic view of the community’s degeneration and decay as “a prehistory of the present” (308, 317). Jed Esty perceives the novel’s nostalgic “nativist turn,” its interest in traditional, pastoral English culture, as being used as “a bulwark against . continental fascism and British imperialism” (93, 96). Gillian Beer also argues that the community depicted in Between the Acts “typifies the attitudes that have brought the country to the brink of war and of fascism,” and that significantly the novel “sought to produce another idea of England” (129-30, 147). Around the time of completing Three Guineas, Woolf had already outlined a tentative scheme for her next novel in her journal on April 26, 1938: . why not Poyntzet Hall: a centre: all lit. discussed in connection with real little incongruous living humor; & anything that comes into my head; but ‘I’ rejected: ‘We’ substituted: to whom at the end there shall be an invocation? ‘We’ . composed of many different things . we all life, all art, all waifs & strays—a rambling capricious but somehow unified whole—the present state of my mind? And English country; & a scenic old house—& a terrace where nursemaids walk? & people passing—& a perpetual variety & change from intensity to prose & facts. (135) The passage clearly reveals, after denouncing dictators and militarism and deliberately adopting the Outsider role with the resolve to have no allegiance to country in Three Guineas, that Woolf’s new novel will feature the traditional life and culture in rural England which represent a mythologized notion of Englishness. And yet the seeming discontinuity or contradistinction of Three Guineas and Between the Acts is actually illusory. For just as she decides to have “‘I’ rejected” and “‘We’ substituted” envisioning a “unified whole” that is nonetheless “rambling capricious,” the novel furthers her critique of dictatorship not only on the continent but also in England, and moreover enacts the essay’s visionary idea of the “Outsiders’ Society” in the setting of the English country as it meditates on communal constitution and survival, as well as the renewal of notions of Englishness and civilization. Rather than finding solace or escape in the nostalgic ruralist vision of England on the verge of war, Between the Acts exposes the hereditary and masculinist class power embodied by the dictatorial, privileged “I” in the traditional rural locality, who represents too the universalist “perfect type” of 252 Concentric 38.1 March 2012 “Man” delineated in Three Guineas. Governing rural England and also the masculine public world, the elite ruler exemplifies what Woolf in her October 26, 1940 journal entry describes as “the complete Insider” who personifies the “glory of the nineteenth century” and does “a service like Roman roads” (Diary 333). He is the eminent public man who has made the mainstay of the society; he has the honor to chronicle the history of the imperial nation whose master narrative nonetheless is indifferent to “the forests & the will o the wisps” (Diary 333). Epitomic of “the complete Insider,” the gentleman squire in Between the Acts manifestly acts the role of the hegemonic cultivated observer. As his cultivated gaze apprehends landscape as well as the universal evolutionary order, he not only encapsulates the ocularized social power of the ruling landowning class in rural England, but also embodies simultaneously Englishness and civilization signifying the apex of the developmental progress of humankind. Yet in place of the stratified social order paternalistically ruled by the cultivated observer and naturalistically mirrored by the rural landscape, Woolf envisions in Between the Acts an unbounded, dynamic, and yet unified “We.” The Outsider-artist’s creative, experimental vision of community does not merely defy and challenge the thriving fascism on the continent. It determinedly and profoundly contests the aestheticized social order rooted in England while endeavoring to transcend both social and national boundaries. Making the gentry-audience perceive home landscape, “Ourselves,” and civilization in an alternative way, La Trobe’s village pageant triggers the “Outsiders’ Society” composed of heterogeneous, anonymous

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