Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, and Music: Listening as a Productive Mode of Social Interaction

College Literature, Summer 2005 by Clements, Elicia

Lucy Swithin hears the most important and ineffable sound in the novel, "the agony of the particular sheep, cow, or human being" (Woolf 1998a, 157), and provides a poignantly aural metaphor for this sound: the ear. This ear-a figurative representation of listening-is the metaphor for a nameless entity that can comprehend the paradoxically discordant harmony of "sheep, cows, grass, tree, ourselves" (157). Lucy Swithin also makes the significant conclusion that it is a lack of hearing that has produced the social conditions of a country on the verge of war when she suggests that "all is harmony, could we hear it" (157). Between the Acts is highly innovative because it destabilizes the notions of singular subjectivity and unified community and insists instead on incongruous inseparability.

Furthermore, Between the Acts reveals how important audition is to social interaction. Traversing the many minds of the audience members, the narrative poignantly represents the gramophone that repeats its phrase of separation, "Oispersed are we," yet insists, "let us retain whatever made that harmony" (Woolf 1998a, 176,77). Each time the pageant breaks for an Interval, the narrative reports multiple, various snippets of dialogue from the audience unassigned to any particular body. The voices also recount the play from diverse, undesignated points of view so that they are both making elusive sounds and attempting to process their listening experiences. The variety of perceptions are encapsulated in a question when an anonymous voice asks, '"Did you understand the meaning?'" (177).The text encourages its reader/listener to ask him or herself a similar question by dislodging the identity of the speaker and slipping into the second person, implying that meaning is not fixed and one's perception of it should be examined. This interrogative also intimates that the comprehension unavailable to the individual members of the fictional audience might be accessible to the apperceptive listener of the novel who hears differently because he or she listens to all of the voices in the text.

If music functions figuratively in Between the Acts to destabilize meaning yet maintain connections between subjectivities, then it does so in both the outer world and the inner: "The audience was assembling. The music was summoning them. [...] Voices chattered.The inner voice, the other voice was saying: How can we deny that this brave music, wafted from the bushes, is expressive of some inner harmony?" (Woolf 1998a, 107). In contrast to the potential for some sort of subjective peace, the outer world imposes a constricting order that forces the subject into servitude, recalling the cityscape wasteland of T. S. Eliot:

"When we wake" (some were thinking) "the day breaks us with its hard mallet blows." "The office" (some were thinking) "compels disparity." [...] So we answer to the infernal, agelong and eternal order issued from on high. And obey. "Working, serving, pushing, striving, earning wages-to be spent-here?" (Woolf 1998a, 107)