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

This terminology is most noticeable in her description of the fire curtains that were required on English homes during bombing raids. At first she merely records having spent two hours sewing black-out curtains, or that she "papered my windows" after airplanes flew overhead with shafts of light following (Diary 293). The curtains also reinforce the animalistic dimension of warlife: "I've just pulled down the black blinds--rats in caves live as we do" (Letters 364). But after awhile they function not only as a safety precaution, but also as a mental shield against the war, "By shutting down the fire curtain, though, I find I can live in the moment; which is good" (Diary 346); or "I try to let down a fireproof curtain and go on reading, writing, and cooking" (Letters 432). Eventually they take on a metaphorical quality, so that "[l]eaving London was rather like drawing the curtains and finding it a fine day" (Letters 366). Finally what began as a useful device to safeguard life becomes an image of shutting out the reality of the war and of a final curtain on life as if it were a play. "Yes, I'm sure the safety curtain--a heavy iron drop over ones own scene--is the only preservative. But I admit it dont always work" (Letters 433). While her early impressions of the war tend to be of a play with scenes to be observed, the later writings cast her own life behind the fire curtains into the acts of a play with the last scene in view. One of her means of self preservation at a time when she perceives that her civilization is threatened is to cherish that which seems vulnerable, in her case, "reading the whole of English literature through. . . . By the time I've reached Shakespeare the bombs will be falling. So I've arranged a very nice last scene: reading Shakespeare, having forgotten my gas mask, I shall fade far away, and quite forget. . ." (Letters 466).

The two major strains in her record of the war, therefore, are cognitive disorientation and reverse evolution. Her tendency is to describe the war as a play, at times with herself in the role of audience and at other times in the role of performer. At the same time, the war seems to have the effect of stripping humanity to some primal state so that the end of civilization is a return to its beginning. Her impressions of the war, then, were influenced by Darwinian constructs that shaped so much of the literary and cultural discourse of her time (constructions that were not necessarily true to Darwin's own theories) as well as aesthetic discourse of the "theater of war" that was part of the lexicon about the Great War. It is not surprising to find that immediate impressions are themselves mediated through cultural assumptions and reigning metaphors. But when she turns to the composition of her novel, both of these conventions are questioned at the same time that they are reinforced by their being put to use in fiction. She may be susceptible to the prevailing discourse about war, but she cannot use it without exploding these conventions as well. Between the Acts aims for a literary text that can come as close as possible to incorporating that X, the very second that the bomb fell and was already a mark on a page.