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The Politics of Allusion in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts ALPHA NOT OMEGA: THE POLITICS OF ALLUSION IN VIRGINIA WOOLF'S BETWEEN THE ACTS by PATRICIA MARY MAIKA B.A., Simon Fraser University, 1977 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in the Department of English Patricia Mary Maika 1984 SIMON ERASER UNIVERSITY April 1984 All rights reserved. This work may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or other means, without permission of the author. APPROVAL NAME : MAIKA, Patricia DEGREE: Master of Arts (English) TITLE OF THESIS: "Alpha not Omega": The Politics of Allusion in Virginia Wool f ' s Between the Acts EXAMINING COMMITTEE: Chairperson: Professor Michael Steig Professor David Stouck Senior Supervisor Associate Professor of English, SFU Professor Andrea ~cbowitz Lecturer of English, SFU Professor Anita Fellman External Examiner Assistant Professor (Visiting) , Women's Studies, SFU Date Approved: 13 April 1984 PARTIAL COPYRIGHT LICENSE I hereby grant to Simon Fraser University the right to lend my thesis, project or extended essay (the title of which is shown below) to users of the Simon Fraser University Library, and to make partial or single copies only for such users or in response to a request from the library of any other university, or other educational institution, on its own behalf or for one of its users. I further agree that permission for multiple copying of this work for scholarly purposes may be granted by me or the Dean of Graduate Studies. It is understood that copying or publication of this work for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. esis/Project/Extended Essay "Alpha not Omega": The Politics of Allusion in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts Author: , (sqnature) Patricia Maika ( name 19 A~ril1984 (date) ABSTRACT Virginia Woolf wrote Between the Acts in a palimp- sestic style in which layers of meaning conceal the political significance of the text. This significance is clear after critical re/vision: Adrienne Rich's "act of survival." The key to survival for Woolf is language. She is primarily concerned with the development of new forms of language, forms which by incorporating the speech of all classes of people, the sounds of animals and the machinery of modern life, will contribute to communal perceptions of truth. The creator of the new language is the anonymous artist in whose mind and imagination all disparate elements unite in a vision of a world reborn. In Woolf's novel the artist is a formidable figure who personifies the primeval earth mother,. the age of reason or enlightenment, and the origin of language--metaphor. Woolf conveys her message that in unity and community are survival, in an economical prose style that itself returns to the origins of language. By reducing sex, class, race, species and ideologies to a syllable or a word, and uniting those syllables and words in the names of her characters, she offers clues to their roles and behaviour. The characters in the novel, and in the pageant within the novel, symbolise the entire period of English history and literature as well as the mythologies of many cultures, in particular primitive, pre-patriarchal Greece and ancient Egypt. The work of Jane Ellen Harrison the archeologist is an important source for Woolf's mythological allusions, and for the setting of the novel: on one level the Diony- siac theatre of ancient Athens and a repository of all things past. Between the Acts is the interval between the first act,the past, and the second act, the future; an interval for the actors, ourselves, to decide whether the words of Act 2, the future, will be spoken in the language of life or the language of death. Tell all the Truth but tell it slant Success in circuit lies Too bright for our inform Delight The Truth superb surprise As Lightening to the Children eased With Explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind. Emily Dickinson 1129 Ca 1868 An action like the action of the "Antigone" of Sophocles, which turns upon the conflict between the heroine's duty to her brother's corpse and that of the laws of her country, is no longer one in which it is possible that we should feel a deep interest. Matthew Arnold, Preface to Poems. 1853 We need new art forms. New forms are wanted, and if they aren't available, we might as well have nothing at all. Chekov, The Seagull. 1895 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT . iii QUOTATION . INTRODUCTION: THE FIRST ACT . CHAPTER ONE: THE THEATRE, THE AUTHOR, THE AUDIENCE CHAPTER TWO: BEFORE THE PAGEANT CHAPTER THREE: THE PAGEANT CHAPTER FOUR: AFTER THE PAGEANT AFTERWORD: ACT TWO . NOTES: INTRODUCTION . CHAPTER ONE . CHAPTER TWO . CHAPTER THREE CHAPTER FOUR . AFTERWORD BIBLIOGRAPHY INTRODUCTION THE FIRST ACT Critical attention paid to the novels and short stories of Virginia Woolf has until recently, focused more on the poetic, innovative and experimental style of the writing than on the complexities of the themes and the nature of the politics behind them. In writing A Room of One's Own (1929), her long discussion of the position of women in relation to writing and to formal education, Woolf showed her awareness of the expectations of the male critics and publishers who were the arbiters of literary taste and indirectly the sources of her income. In a 1933 letter to Dame Ethyl Smythe quoted by Adrienne Rich, Woolf wrote of "having kept her own personality out of A Room of One's Own lest she not be taken seriously: "'...how personal, so will they say, rubbing their hands with glee, women always 1 are: I even hear them as I write"' (emphasis Rich's). In the same letter she writes, "...I forced myself to keep my own figure fictitious; legendary. "L Three Guineas (1938), * the direct and challenging statement of her politics, received, as Woolf feared, more attention from the critics for its personal tone and style than for its pacifist, feminist and socialist stance. As late as 1968 Herbert Yarder writes of its shrill and neurotic tone and lack of humour. 3 Yet Woolfls fiction, poetic, stylistically innova- tive and experimental in form, was not easily or immediately '4 , understood, either due to what Yadeline Moore describes as . d,\I' \, ' ,l d-c'r -$$:' : "the myopia of the male reviewers," or because Woolf ' kbij:t I couched her opinions, criticisms and truths in words which * I.. - only those readers of remarkable perception' could under- < " .\ stand.l She employed a palimpsestic style similar in some ways to the many layered novels of the Brontes and the cryptic poetry of Emily Dickinson described by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in The Madwoman in the at ti^.^ And she spoke as she made Lily Briscoe the female artist in To the Lighthouse speak to her friend Mrs. Ramsey, "not in any language known to men. "6 Recent feminist criticism, that is criticism that requires an understanding of women's lives and history, has drawn attention to the many levels of meaning in Woolf's work. Berenice Carroll suggested in In interpreting Woolfls novels, it is neces- sary to recognize that particularly in the more mature works, there is hardly a word without significance, and that the signifi- cance is often a well concealed political message. 7 It seems now that Woolfls words about words, spoken in a BBC radio talk in 1937 have significance for the contemporary feminist critics who are scrutinizing and reviewing her worK: Words never make anything that is useful; and words are the only things that tell the truth and nothing but the truth... they have so often proved that they hate being useful, that it is their nature not to express one single statement but a thousand possibilities-- they have done this so often that at last, happily, we are beginning to face the fact... It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being them- selves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one eneration, plain as a pikestaff to the next. % If this generation is fortunate enough to understand Woolf's words plainly, we must also be aware of the task she left us of deciphering the hidden messages, the buried themes; of following the "serpentine" subtleties of the insinua- tions through the maze of artistic, stylistic and allusive technical brilliance in which many previous critics have 9 either become lost or have not dared to venture. The genius of Woolf's writing, the intricate tracery of allusion and symbolism in which every word expresses "a thousand possibilities" is nowhere better hidden and, strangely, nowhere more apparent than in the novel published after her death in 1941, Between the Acts. i r, .,. Written in the mature year's between fifty and sixty, it seems to be the culmination of her literary work, and I think requires a criticism informed by an understanding of her reasons for telling it "slant" and of her strategies for doing so, as well as a realisation that she, Virginia Woolf, the female artist, "fictitious; legendary" the detested "I,..large and ugly" removed, stands at the heart of the novel. 10 Between the Acts is a statement of her commitment to the development of a communal art: an art that will influence and change the course of history. Musically, visually and verbally art creates and controls the world. Woolf's perspective has shifted slightly from that of Three Guineas, a straightforward condemnation of capitalism under patriarchy.
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