Unveiling " the dialectic of culture and barbarism" in British pageantry: Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 1998 by Miller, Marlowe A

By 1938 when she began writing her final novel, Woolf was not only sensitive to the complicity of intellectual culture with tyranny, she had traced it throughout British history. Thus, rather than reflecting a return to Elizabethan drama, Woolf's use of the pageant genre in Between the Acts reflects her effort to trace a history of that complicity of culture and fascism from at least the time of the Roman occupation to the present.5 In her history of the genre as it is inscribed in La Trobe's pageant, the Renaissance figures prominently because it was during the reign of Elizabeth I that drama was perfected as a political tool. Woolf's description of the flaws of Elizabethan drama warns of a parallel between the tyranny of plot and the danger that she witnessed in the world as she wrote Between the Acts: actors, characters, and emotions are obliterated by plot in Elizabethan drama just as individuals, beliefs, and perspectives were flattened in 1930's Europe, the stage for Woolf's final drama.

As the modern world became increasingly bellicose and dogmatic, Woolf embraced subtlety and complexity; she refused to succumb to dualistic thinking and sought a fictional form which might reflect complexity and multiplicity. Between the Acts is an attempt to create fiction which resists closure and embodies diverse perspectives and emotions. If there is any literary precursor to her experiment in Between the Acts, it would be Chaucer's writing as Woolf appraises it in her essay, "The Pastons and Chaucer." Woolf tells us that Chaucer does not moralize or preach; and yet, "as we read him we are absorbing morality at every pore." She elaborates: "For among writers there are two kinds: there are the priests who take you by the hand and lead you straight up to the mystery; there are the laymen who imbed their doctrines in flesh and blood and make a complete model of the world without excluding the bad or laying stress upon the good" (17). In this construction, the Elizabethan dramatists would have to be the priests. In contrast, Chaucer's writing seems to offer Woolf an example of non-didactic prose. For, as she says, in his writing, ". . . all actions and passions are represented, and instead of being solemnly exhorted we are left to stray and stare and make out a meaning for ourselves" (18). Chaucer's writing does not obliterate characters, elide contradictions, or erase emotions in the service of plot, according to Woolf. Similarly, Woolf's final novel leaves us to "make out a meaning for ourselves." Her form does not preach but requires the "most careful investigation, the most delicate analysis" of complexities which the Elizabethan plots would have "clean sponged off the slate."

"MIRRORS FOR MAGISTRATES" AND MINISTERS: A HISTORY OF THE PAGEANT IN BRITAIN

In the late 1930's, as she conceived of the idea for this novel and wrote it, Woolf was well aware of the increasing passivity of the masses who encountered fascism. Yet, rather than turning to examples of a German or Italian character type to find the "individual who, in a bureaucratic society, surrenders individuality and thereby the ability to think, to make moral decisions, and to recognize the humanity of other individuals," Woolf looks for the "native origins" of that same character (Berman xvii). In the pageant genre she finds a cultural mechanism designed to create and sustain this docile character. There she also finds a genre with a history of implicit social and political critique.