Virginia Woolf's matriarchal family of origins in 'Between the Acts.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 1993 by Patricia Cramer

Like Woolf, Benedict responded to the Nazi crisis by criticizing the patterns of social injustice and violence in her own culture. For example, during the war Benedict lectured against biological theories of race inferiority, defending Jews and Blacks against negative stereotypes. Judith Modell's description of Benedict's unpublished essay "The Natural History of War" sounds very much like a description of the main thesis of Three Guineas and Between the Acts: "If men learn to wage war, men can learn to avoid war by contemplating the consequences and by establishing alternative modes of interaction. She [Benedict] called for a thorough revision of |the rules of the game'" (Modell 268). Like Woolf, Benedict concentrated on how the customs of western cultures foster warlike values. Benedict writes, "The whole course of life ... emphasizes rivalry and ownership," and "War in our own civilization is as good an illustration as one can take of the destructive lengths to which the development of a culturally selected trait may go. If we justify war, it is because all peoples always justify the traits of which they find themselves possessed, not because war will bear an objective examination of its merits" (245, 32).

Benedict also formulated a view of "outsiders" and "insiders" similar to the patriarchal and matriarchal groups demarcated in Between the Acts, and they both singled out fathers as the epitome of the cruel egotism fostered by a culture geared toward competition, individualism, and war. Benedict writes, "Society selects some segment of the arc of possible human behavior, and in so far as it achieves integration its institutions tend to further the expression of its selected segment and to inhibit opposite expression" (254). Challenging the supposed superiority of the "insiders" of her culture, Benedict suggests that when a society selects rivalry, egotism, and aggression from the "great arc of potential human purposes and motivations" (237), the outsiders are more likely to embody qualities superior to those who more successfully adapt to dominant norms. She names the Puritans and the witches as examples of this paradox, calling the Puritans' behavior pathological and the witches their moral superiors. Like Woolf, she identifies homosexuals as a sub-group whose alleged abnormality was merely the product of particular cultural prejudices, and she identified "fathering" in the private and public spheres as the major source of social cruelties and inequalities in contemporary society.(4) The following passage from Patterns of Culture sounds much like a passage from Three Guineas:

In our own generation extreme forms of ego-gratification are

culturally supported. in a similar fashion [as the Puritans'].

Arrogance and unbridled egotists as family men, as officers of

the law, and in business, have been again and again portrayed by

novelists and dramatists, and they are familiar in every

community. Like the behaviour of Puritan divines, their courses

of action are often more asocial than those of the inmates of