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

Moreover, a third motif from the war records also has its literary counterpart, that of the disembodied voice that would bring messages of doom, either through the loudspeakers in London "telling one to go and be fitted for gas masks" or through the radio, whether it be the English leaders announcing policies, Hitler's demagogic speeches, or the anonymous voices of newscasters informing listeners of attacks and casualties. This eerie sense of a disembodied voice invading the quiet domestic scene with words of doom or calls for courage is linked with a general sense of always being on the edge, always waiting: "I can't help wishing the invasion would come. It's this standing about in a dentist's waiting room that I hate" (Letters 483).

Finally, Woolf's fear that this war would mean the end of her civilization, her determination to continue to live a normal life, and her feeling of powerlessness are all evident in one of her earliest diary entries on the war in 1938. "Hitler has his million men now under arms. Is it only summer maneuvers or--? . . . That is the complete ruin not only of civilization, in Europe, but of our last lap. . . . One ceases to think about it--that's all. What else can a gnat on a blade of grass do?" (Diary 162). Two years later, with her London houses destroyed by German bombing attacks and her recognition that Leonard's Jewishness would make them particularly vulnerable, she would seal her suicide pact with him should the Germans invade. Moreover, in the midst of writing Between the Acts, she was also conscious that there seemed to be no place left in her world for art, and without an audience for her writing, she already felt herself to be partly dead.

As sample of my present mood, I reflect: capitulation will mean All Jews to be given up. Concentration camps. So to our garage. . . . Last night aeroplanes (G.) over. . . . I papered my windows. I don't want to go to bed at midday: this refers to the garage. . . . It has struck me that one curious feeling is, that the writing "I" has vanished. No audience. No echo. That's part of one's death. (Diary 293)

The war threatened her life both as a vulnerable civilian in London and as an artist effaced by the urgency and primacy of survival. Between the Acts, therefore, which shares features with other of Woolf's novels, takes a turn that translates all of these war impressions into complex literary form.

WAR, FIGURE AND GROUND, FICTIONALITY

Historically, "between the acts" refers to the interval between the two world wars, thus designating the wars themselves as performances for which there are spectators (Fussell 190-230). Written from spring 1938 to 1941, Between the Acts takes place in June of 1939 with war imminent, in what Frank Kermode has called "a still moment of history." On the day of the novel, the Oliver family is hosting the village's annual pageant with the proceeds to provide for the illumination of the church. The performance itself takes place against a backdrop of military training for World War II as RAF planes fly overhead. Miss La Trobe, an unmarried female playwright, has created a pageant for her conservative village audience that offers a survey of English history in the form of pastiches of earlier literary periods and that ends with a scene of "The Present" that violates theatrical conventions by turning the audience into actors and nature into a part of the spectacle. By the time Woolf writes this novel, the theme of the dissolution of self, the presence of a quasi-successful artist, and the built-in self destruction of carefully conceived illusions is well established in her writing (Wirth-Nesher). Between the Acts is a continuation of Woolf's earlier formal experimentation, but the stylistic daring is shaped by her response to war as the cognitive disorientation recorded in her diaries becomes inscribed into the fictional world as well in the form of a figure and ground enigma.