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

In the last scene of the book, both cognitive disorientation and reverse evolution reach dizzying heights as husband and wife are about to resolve their domestic quarrel, and in doing so they themselves become part of the artist's consciousness, the first scene of the next pageant. Isa and Giles exist both as part of the ground of social-fictional reality, the "real" characters outside La Trobe's play, and as part of the mind of the artist: both the artist within the fiction, La Trobe, and the artist Virginia Woolf herself, the "ground" for this entire fictional universe. At the book's end, Miss La Trobe retreats to the local pub to relax after her trying day and to begin to envision next year's performance and the family retreats to its home, with husband and wife facing each other and about to speak. Both of these final scenes are portrayed as preludes of creation, the first as the consciousness that precedes writing for the artist and the second as the sexuality that leads to procreation of the species for Isa, wife and mother. Even the artist's vision and language itself are described in terms of biological generation, the conception of a literary work identical with the dawn of a new world.

She raised her glass to her lips. And drank. And listened. Words of one syllable sank down into the mud. She drowsed; she nodded. The mud became fertile. Words rose above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud. Words without meaning--wonderful words.

There was the high ground at midnight; there the rock and two scarcely perceptible figures. Suddenly the tree was pelted with starlings. She sat down her glass. She heard the first words. (212)

In fact, the entire last scene is a journey backward in time, the reverse evolution that Woolf described in her letters during the war, as well as forward to a post-war world. As dusk turns to night, the family appears to evolve into earlier forms of life. Lucy Swithin returns to her Outline of History and picks up where she stopped: mammoths, mastodons, and prehistoric birds. Shadows creep over Bartholomew's high forehead and "as a dog shudders its skin, his skin shuddered" (218). And just as Lucy reaches the stage of prehistoric man, "half-human, half-ape," and tiptoes out of the room, Giles and Isa seem to be transformed into prehistoric man and woman, a vision of the return to some original human form or the dawn of a new age--a vision that is presented simultaneously as history, as fiction, and as prophecy.

Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born. But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night. (219)

Is this scene a return to gender archetypes that glorify the primal "reality" of wartime, the authenticity of "natural" man and woman, or is it resistance to this traditional wartime typology? Woolf's revisions of her typescripts are compelling testimony of her preoccupation with these questions.