Final curtain on the war: figure and ground in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts - World War II

Style, Summer, 1994 by Hana Wirth-Nesher

Many of her observations tend to fall into two categories, regression to a primal, barbaric era and the theatricality of war for the civilian.(5) Her notes on the bomb strikes center around their effect, as if each bomb is a jolt propelling humanity back to a prehistoric time. On the first day of the war she records the sensation of time reversing direction, as London appears to have reverted "to the middle ages with all the space and the silence of the country set in this forest of black houses." She notes that there are

[v]ery few buses. Tubes closed. No children. No loitering. Everyone humped with a gas mask. Strain and grimness. At night its so verdurous and gloomy that one expects a badger or a fox to prowl along the pavement. . . . People grope their way to each others lairs. . . . Great caterpillars dug up the square. (Diary 243)

The language of beasts continually invades the London cityscape in scenes of progressive degeneration.(6) London appears as a "great dumb ox" (Diary 267) and a raid "like a sheep dog, chasing a fox out of the fold--you see them yapping and biting and then the marauder, dropping a bone, a bomb towards Newhaven, flies" (Diary 1940). At about this time, Woolf was also reading psychology and anthropology, which made her particularly sensitive to the dangers of patriotism as a symptom of a herd impulse: "And as we're all in the dark . . . we are beginning to feel the herd impulse" (Diary 166). She is prone to discuss Hitler as a beast and quotes one of her guests describing him as "bawling" with the "the crowds howling like beasts" (Letters 276). This tendency to envision a primeval and prehistoric origin for the human race is shared by other twentieth-century writers such as Conrad and Eliot as they construct a past in keeping with their understanding of evolution. As Gillian Beer has observed, Virginia Woolf's response to her age's need to discover origins was marked by her awareness of the survival of prehistory in the present, of the simultaneity of the prehistoric in our present moment ("Virginia Woolf and Prehistory" 171).

In seeming contrast to this proliferation of animal analogies, Woolf's correspondence and diary entries also underscore the experience of war aesthetically as a spectator observing an unreal scene through a window or beyond a curtain. She writes "If it [the war] were real, one could make something of it. But as it is it grumbles, in an inarticulate way, behind reality" (Diary 166). While she clearly wants to believe that "any idea is more real than any amount of war misery" (Diary 235), she also tries "to imagine how one's killed by a bomb," aware that death, "the crushing of my bone shade in on my very active eye and brain: the process of putting out the light," is the experience that "[I] shant, for once, be able to describe" (Diary 327). Things become real to her only as she has the ability to write about them, but in her transforming the experiences into language, they exist at an aesthetic distance as if they were the scenes of a play. As one of the organizing principles of her last novel is the indeterminacy of what is drama and what is "real" life, it is interesting to observe these same terms in her record of the war itself.