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

Then suddenly, as the illusion petered out, the cow took up the burden. One had lost her calf. In the very nick of time she lifted her great moon-eyed head and bellowed. All the great moon-eyed heads laid themselves back. From cow to cow the same yearning bellow. The whole world was filled with dumb yearning. It was the primeval voice sounding loud in the ear of the present moment. . . . (140)

Like an overgrown child and, by implication, in this novel like women and artists on the homefront, Albert threatens the conventions of the theatre and the ground rules of society. By not recognizing the boundary between on and off stage, he transforms the audience of theatregoers into onlookers. "There was no need to dress him up. There he came, acting his part to perfection. . . . 'Hope he don't have a fit,' Lucy murmured" (86). If the theatre of war does not remain on the other side of the fire curtain, then where exactly is the homefront? And if the drama of war is all-encompassing, is there any place left in the wings? It would appear that the only functions assigned to women during wartime, whether they be artists or not, are fertility (the rain), maternity (the cows), and disruptive and unselfconscious performance (the village idiot). Shaping her art outdoors and using village actors, Miss La Trobe is vulnerable to the random intrusions of nature in the form of weather, the biological cycle, and unsocialized human behavior, yet these intrusions are apt commentary and chorus on her art.

While work created by the female artist is interrupted by a maternal cry, male commentary on art--the clergyman's address--is interrupted by the instruments of war, associated with males. Although the pageant concludes with the pleas of an anonymous voice on a gramophone, the spectacle is not over for the audience awaits commentary on the female artist's creation from a male, the Reverend Streatfield. Folding their hands in the traditional manner "as if they were in church" (191), the audience is back in a situation in which they can comfortably assume familiar roles. Their deference to Mr. Streatfield's interpretation as he searches Miss La Trobe's text for "what meaning, or message, this pageant was meant to convey" (191) assumes that the ultimate authority for assigning meaning is the Church, represented by the pastor, and that the purpose of art, after all, is to serve religion, in this case to raise funds for the illumination of the church. But just as he reminds them that the church is still suffering from a "deficit," his performance is also interrupted, this time by the war: "Twelve airplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead" (193). By then, the church deficit, which is responsible for its lack of illumination, is linked to the war planes as they interrupt the clergyman's speech in language that further reinforces the danger of the war for all aspects of civilization: when they fly overhead "[t]he word was cut in two" (193).

Much critical attention has been given to La Trobe's final scene of the pageant, the staging of "The Present Time. Ourselves," for in defiance of any conventions of closure, she intentionally breaks out of the frame of traditional drama by turning the audience into actors.(9) Expecting a conventional interval, the audience interprets the minutes of silence, what Miss La Trobe intended as an immersion in the present, as a gap between performances. Squirming uncomfortably, the audience is unwilling to submit to the unstructured present as art nor to shift frames of reference that would place them on stage, an act that would turn their own ground into figure as well.