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

Caught up in the spectacle and unobservant of such subtle subversions, the audience continues to be pleased when the next symbol, Queen Elizabeth, takes her place on the stage. Her first words cannot be heard over the loud applause and cheers. The Queen is followed in subsequent scenes by such symbols as Lady Reason and the Victorian constable. By evoking these symbolic figures, the pageant continues to tug on the common sentiment of pride as it traces a history of Britain: "pride of nationality in the first place; also of religious pride, college pride, school pride, family pride, sex pride and those unreal loyalties that spring from them" (Woolf, Three Guineas 80). However, Woolf would not have us rest comfortably with this pride and the unexamined loyalties it leads us to embrace. Setting up the traditional symbols to knock them down, evoking the emotions but refusing, in the end, to offer a community of "the saved," La Trobe disrupts her symbols subtly by highlighting the individuals behind them, by turning the violences back into characters.

Thus, for example, we find that Queen Elizabeth is played by "Eliza Clark, licensed to sell tobacco." In traditional civic pageantry there is the element of detection involved in deciphering the characters designated to act in the drama; that act of detection aids to sustain the emotion of the spectacle, to help each member of the audience feel involved in the communal celebration of known values and truths. But in La Trobe's pageant, the characters are not only detected behind their cheap costumes, they upstage the symbols they portray, so to speak. Thus, Eliza, done up in "swabs used to scour saucepans," forgets her lines; her ruff comes unpinned; her head dress is askew; and Albert the village idiot interrupts her scene. "He skipped along the front row of the audience, leering at each in turn. Now he was picking and plucking at great Eliza's skirts. She cuffed him one on the ear. He tweaked her back" (86) ?Albert's antics help to unveil the sacred symbol of Queen Elizabeth: behind the elaborate costume we find Eliza Clark, who "could reach a flitch of bacon or haul a tub of oil with one sweep of her arm" (83). Shifting focus away from the symbol of Queen Elizabeth, La Trobe's pageant turns the violence of symbol and theme back into a character, an individual. Her audience cannot settle into celebrating familiar symbols like the "Virgin Queen" or "Merry England" because the pageant reveals instead the labor and the lives that sustain these symbols, both literally and figuratively. In this way, La Trobe's pageant performs the same act for which Woolf praises Chaucer: both Chaucer's prose and La Trobe's pageant 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" ("The Pastons" 15). We do not have a simple symbol in Eliza/Elizabeth, but a message in "flesh and blood."

The Victorian constable, played by Budge the publican, also disturbs the audience's expectations of a clear symbol. At first the audience is delighted when it discerns the identity of the actor playing the "huge symbolical figure," so well disguised "that even cronies who drank with him nightly failed to recognize him" ( 160) . He was a "fine figure of a man," wanting only the real scene of London to "transport them to a foggy afternoon. . . at the very height of Victorian prosperity" (163) . Giles, for one, consumes the symbol as the genuine article. When Budge's truncheon points at the spinsterish Aunt Lucy, to Giles he represents the "just rage of authority." "Got her, Giles thought, taking sides with authority against his aunt" (161). Just as the Mayhews are moved by the Nationalist-Militarist theme, the Reverend Streatfield by the theme of a Church Community, Giles is moved by the theme of Authority, even by Machismo. Umberto Eco's observation that the fascist (or Ur-fascist) "transfers his will to power to sexual matters" depicts Giles precisely. The machismo which Giles exhibits, the mark of the fascist male, "implies both disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality" (59). Appropriately, in an oft-analyzed passage from the novel, Giles acts out his fascist disdain for "monstrous inversions" when he crushes a snake which is stuck trying to swallow a toad, a symbol of "birth the wrong way round" (99) . With blood on his sneakers, Giles kicks a stone across the field and rants at sexual inversions around him: the homosexuality of Dodge and the lusts of Mrs. Manresa. What Giles would have us embrace is the "just rage of authority" leveled against inversions, perhaps including Jews in Europe.