Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury avant-garde : War, Civilization, Modernity

hen Woolf began Between the Acts (first titled Pointz Hall) in April 1938, the second civil war predicted by Keynes seemed imminent every day. Her wartime diary captures the impact of world events on private life during the novel’s composition. Hitler arms “his million men,” invades Austria, looks ready to “pounce again” (D 5:132, 162, 26 March, 17 August 1938). Stalin stages show trials; the Allies sacrifice Czechoslovakia; Hitler invades Poland; England declares war; Hitler seizes Paris. German bombs fall on London, destroying the Mecklenburgh Square house the Woolfs have just taken and the Tavistock Square house they have just vacated. Government-issue gas masks arrive. Living at Rodmell between London and the Channel, under skies crossed by British and German bombers, the Woolfs black out their windows (and are once upbraided by the village warden for a crack of light); put up friends, family, and Hogarth Press staff; stretch food rations with fruit and honey from the garden. Virginia sees a hospital train, “grieving & tender & heavy laden & private,” and hears bombs fall near Sissinghurst while talking on the telephone with Vita Sackville-West (D 5:289, 30 May 1940). She distrusts the “unity of hatred” bred by war but “instinctively” wishes luck to twelve Royal Air Force planes flying south in formation (D 5:213, 306, 11 April 1939, 26 July 1940). The Woolfs throw themselves to the ground during a sudden air raid—“a peaceful matter of fact death,” Virginia muses, “to be popped off on the terrace playing bowls this very fine cool sunny August evening” (D 5:313, 28 August 1940). They debate who would most mind losing the other, each wishing to die first; Virginia decides “2 birds had better be killed with one stone” and walks two steps closer to Leonard (D 5:327, 6 October 1940). The Woolfs do not know that their names number 115 and 116 on the Nazis’ secret arrest list for England, but they foresee “all Jews to be given up” and, sensing that “we are being led up garlanded to the altar,” stow petrol in the garage for suicide in case Hitler should invade.¹

Without abandoning their critique of violence, the Woolfs and their circle were anything but defeatist in this seemingly “necessary” war.² “It seems entirely meaningless—a perfunctory slaughter, like taking a jar in one hand, a hammer in the other. Why must this be smashed? Nobody knows,” Virginia writes, and: “What do I do to help?” (D 5:235, 260, 6 September 1939, 20 January 1940). She doesn’t want to die (or “go to bed at midday: this refers to the garage”); she imagines opening her diary in ten years to see “what was happening to the war” (D 5:293, 343, 9 June, 8 December 1940). Ethel Smyth says, “Oh of course we shall fight and win” (D 5:297 and n, 20 June 1940). Churchill rallies the British over the wireless after France falls and, during the Battle of Britain, evokes “Our majestic city—&c. which touches me,” Woolf adds, “for I feel London majestic. Our courage &c.” (D 5:317, 11 September 1940). In the Sussex countryside she feels “How England consoles & warms one” and reports that Keynes thinks “our victory certain” (D 5:346, 24 December 1940). Amid a din of “sinister sawing” planes, whistling, thudding bombs, flames, smoke, Hitler’s “violent rant” on the wireless, and English broadcasts in “the usual highflown tense voice,” she longs “for a speaking voice, once in a way”; she pictures “how one’s killed by a bomb” and repeats, “I dont want to die yet.”³ Their tenant Mr. Pritchard is “calm as a grig” in face of an unexploded bomb in Mecklenburgh Square: “‘They actually have the impertinence to say this will make us accept peace—!’ he said” (D 5:317, 10 September 1940). She visits the ruins “where I wrote so many books” and “we … gave so many parties” (D 5:331, 20 October 1940).

The diary captures the persistence of everyday life in face of the war’s horrors. “These are the moments … for living,” Woolf writes, “unless one’s to blow out; which I entirely refuse to do”; she longs for “10 years more, & to write my book” (D 5:260, 285, 20 January, 15 May 1940). Inverting Faust’s wager with the devil—“If ever I say to the passing moment,/Linger awhile, thou art so fair,/Then! that day—let it be my last”—she hopes her diary catches the fleeting moments that make her say to life, “Stop you are so fair,” and muses, “Well, all life is so fair, at my age” (D 5:352, 9 January 1941). As the “echo” of England’s war-distracted reading public fades (for a writer, “part of one’s death”) and the dark winter that would be her last descends, Woolf vows that “This trough of despair shall not … engulf me”; two weeks later she wonders, “why was I depressed?”⁴ Then her fighting strength ebbs, and the diary—“travellers notes which I offer myself shd I again be lost”—falls silent as she leaves it with fair life (D 5:260, 26 January 1940).

It is sometimes said that Between the Acts cannot be read apart from Woolf’s suicide, a claim any look at the criticism must find dubious.⁵ Even supposing that her suicide on 28 March 1941, a few weeks after delivering the manuscript to the Hogarth Press, is an important fact about the novel, this profoundly illegible event resists the readings we try to impose on it. In any case, Woolf’s last novel can no more be reduced to a “suicide note” than can the late diary, those traveler’s notes on fair life to help her keep her path amid the glooms of war. Like the diary, Between the Acts is an arena of fighting by thinking, the final voyage in Woolf’s long quest for new lands and civilizations, and her own last stand in the eternal battle of Eros and Thanatos. Fearing that Three Guineas would be like “a moth dancing over a bonfire—consumed in less than one second,” Woolf animates that book’s radical insight into the scapegoat psychology of the sex/ gender system, war, and fascism by mobilizing the outsider La Trobe to “attack Hitler in England” through an experiment in the public art of the theater (D 5:142, 24 May 1938). The narrative poses her daringly experimental play against the coming war to explore relations between the characters’ everyday lives and their festival roles as director, actors, audience, and hosts; “real” life and art; history and spectatorship; insular nationalism and Europe’s fate and future; embodied community and the collective violence of genocide and war. Answering its spectators’ longing for a “new plot” at the edge of an unknowable future, the pageant-within-a-novel conjures an intermittent we from disparate I’s (BA 215). Far from a pure English pastoral or a retreat from Bloomsbury internationalism to insular, war-enforced nationalism, pageant and novel dissolve national, formal, and experiential boundaries to “give to England first” what their outsider-artists desire “of peace and freedom for the whole world.”⁶

The pageant’s earliest seed already escapes the “chalk marks” scored on the earth to divide nations and creeds (TG 160). In the “1911” chapter of The Years Eleanor Pargiter visits her brother’s family at Wittering during the summer fête, when the villagers act Shakespeare in the garden to raise money for the church steeple. What could be more English? But it is Dante’s Purgatorio that Eleanor opens that evening to read: “For by so many more there are who say ‘ours’/So much the more of good doth each possess.”⁷ Woolf’s first idea of Pointz Hall echoes this idea:

Let it be random & tentative; … dont, I implore, lay down a scheme; call in all the cosmic immensities; & force my tired & diffident brain to embrace another whole. … But … why not Poyntzet Hall: a centre: all lit. discussed in connection with real little incongruous living humour; & anything that comes into my head; but “I” rejected: ‘We’ substituted: to whom at the end there shall be an invocation? “We” … composed of many different things … we all life, all art, all waifs & strays—a rambling capricious but somehow unified whole. … And English country; & a scenic old house—& a terrace where nursemaids walk? & people passing—& a perpetual variety & change from intensity to prose. & facts—& notes; &—but eno’. (D 5:135, 26 April 1938; last two ellipses Woolf’s)

Woolf envisions not “thick little egos” (in Clive Bell’s phrase) but a loose, inclusive “we” composed of “all life, all art, all waifs & strays” in a modern English pageant re-formed in the image of the outsider’s patriotism.⁸

In Between the Acts, the pageant’s author and director, with her exotic name, La Trobe, is not “presumably pure English. From the Channel islands perhaps?”; her “eyes and something about her” remind one village matron of “the Tartars” (BA 57–8). Her possible “Russian blood” aside, her Russian soul is suggested when she transfigures the Pointz Hall terrace into an “open-air cathedral,” its trees “columns … in a church without a roof … where swallows … danc[e], like the Russians, … to the unheard rhythm of their own wild hearts” (BA 64–65, 57–58). The narrator’s figure of the pageant as a “play … in the sky of the mind—moving, diminishing, but still there” affiliates the poetics of this quasi-Russian Englishwoman with what Woolf elsewhere calls “the Tchekov method”: “Everything is cloudy and vague, loosely trailing rather than tightly furled. The stories move slowly out of sight like clouds in the summer air, leaving a wake of meaning in our minds which gradually fades away.”⁹ This figure locates pageant and narrative at once in an English village and in the “whole world”—that open country of the mind, the unbounded regions of thought and feeling that are the outsider’s dwelling place—and gestures with Chekhovian tenderness and inconclusion toward the possible consequence of this art of seeming inconsequence for a world at war.¹⁰

Although Woolf professed to have “no country” as a woman, an artist, and a Bloomsbury internationalist, an abounding love of England suffused her outsider’s patriotism. “I expect I have it as strong in me as you,” she told Time and Tide’s outsider editor the Viscountess Rhondda, though differently from the “unfortunate young men who are shot through the sausage machine of Eton—Kings or Christchurch” (L 6:236–37, 10 June 1938). When Hitler refused to leave Poland and Britain declared war, Woolf wrote, “Lord this is the worst of all my life’s experiences. … Yes, it’s an empty meaningless world now. … I repeat—any idea is more real than any amount of war misery.” Wishing to use her “faculties patriotically,” she felt that thinking and writing were “the only contribution one can make—This little pitter patter of ideas is my whiff of shot in the cause of freedom” (D 5:234, 6 September 1939). Freedom’s cause was antithetical to propaganda and jingoism: “its all bombast, this war. One old lady pinning on her cap has more reality” than the “feelings war breeds: patriotism; communal &c, all sentimental & emotional parodies of our real feelings.”¹¹ Nine months into the war she noted,

We have now been hard at it hero-making. The laughing, heroic, Tommy—how can we be worthy of such men?—every paper, every BBC rises to that dreary false cheery hero-making strain. Will they be grinding organs in the street in 6 months? Its the emotional falsity; … not all false; yet inspired with some eye to the main chance. So the politicians mate guns & tanks. No. Its the myth making stage of the war we’re in. “Please, no letters” I read this twice in the Times Deaths column from parents of dead officers. (D 5:292, 3 June 1940)

“Please, no letters” intimates grief no dreary false cheery hero-making can console. Facing “suicide shd. Hitler win,” Woolf remarked “the odd incongruity of feeling intensely & at the same time knowing that there’s no importance in that feeling. Or is there, as I sometimes think, more importance than ever?” (D 5:284, 13 May 1940).

Between the Acts opposes no system or program to the scapegoating and false sentiment bred by war. A novel, Woolf wrote, is “an impression not an argument”; and after The Years she had vowed “to write quick, intense, short books, & never be tied down”; “to flout all preconceived theories—For more & more I doubt if enough is known to sketch even probable lines, all too emphatic & conventional” (L 5:91, 16 August 1932; D 5:214, 11 April 1939). The key to her book’s mise en scène is, rather, its attention to “random & tentative” moments. In the acts between the acts, and in the spectators’ thoughts and feelings, pageant and novel seek a “natural law” by which to build civilization’s broken “wall” (D 5:340, 18 November 1940). Erich Auerbach illuminates what is at stake in this poetics. A narrative procedure that treats small moments heretofore “hardly … sensed” as “determining factors in our real lives,” he observes, reveals “something new and elemental,” “nothing less than the wealth of reality and depth of life in every moment to which we surrender ourselves without prejudice.” “The random … moment passes unaffected” by

the controversial and unstable orders over which men fight and despair. … The more it is exploited, the more the elementary things which our lives have in common come to light. The more numerous, varied, and simple the people are who appear as subjects of such random moments, the more effectively must what they have in common shine forth. In this unprejudiced and exploratory type of representation we cannot but see to what an extent—below the surface conflicts—the differences between men’s ways of life and forms of thought have already lessened. The strata of societies and their different ways of life have become inextricably mingled. … A century ago … Corsicans or Spaniards were still exotic; today the term would be quite unsuitable for Pearl Buck’s Chinese peasants. Beneath the conflicts, and also through them, an economic and cultural leveling process is taking place. It is still a long way to a common life of mankind on earth, but the goal begins to be visible.¹²

Eyes on the sky of the mind above their warring nations, Woolf and Auerbach affirm the “reality” of everyday moments against the political orders over which men fight and despair.

In its wealth and depth of life, the “random & tentative” moment captures aggression and violence as well as “fair life” on the wing. For Woolf, such moments offer both respite from conflict and glimpses of private, everyday violence before it is harnessed by the state for political ends. The acts between the acts in this only seemingly remote English pastoral disclose Hitler in England and abroad, everyday barbarism beside everyday civility. Giles, who dresses for dinner, spurns one of his guests and stamps on a snake swallowing a toad. Mrs. Chalmers cuts La Trobe while carrying flowers to the grave of a husband who (in the Early Typescript) used to beat her. Lucy Swithin and the persecuted homosexual William exchange disembodied smiles in a mirror as she shows him the house. Some spectators cover their eyes lest Albert, the “village idiot,” do “something dreadful”; others talk of “common people” in Roman cafés who “hate Dictators,” of German-Jewish refugees (“People like ourselves”), of friends’ visits to Italy and Russia (BA 86–87, 121). Far from idealizing English or European civilization, Between the Acts fights Hitler in England by illuminating the interfused hate and love, aggression and peace in everyday moments in the desire to give to England first the peace and freedom—civilization’s sine qua non—its author wishes for “the whole world.”

In search of a “cure” for her “raging tooth,” Isa Oliver scans the shelves in the Pointz Hall library—“the nicest room of the house,” a guest once gushed (BA 19). The Faerie Queene, Kinglake’s Crimea, Keats, The Kreutzer Sonata, Shelley, Yeats, Donne, lives of Garibaldi and Lord Palmerston, The Antiquities of Durham, Eddington, Darwin, Jeans: “None of them stopped her toothache.” As shy of books (“What remedy was there for her at her age—the age of the century, thirty-nine—in books?”) as of guns, Isa picks up the London Times and chances on a report of a gang rape of a fourteen-year-old girl by soldiers in the heart of England’s public sphere, the Horse Guard barracks in the government offices in Whitehall.

“The guard at Whitehall … told her the horse had a green tail; but she found it was just an ordinary horse. And they dragged her up to the barrack room where she was thrown upon a bed. Then one of the troopers removed part of her clothing, and she screamed and hit him about the face. …”

That was real; so real that on the mahogany door panels she saw the Arch in Whitehall; through the Arch the barrack room; in the barrack room the bed, and on the bed the girl was screaming and hitting him about the face, when the door (for in fact it was a door) opened and in came Mrs. Swithin carrying a hammer. (BA 16–20)

As Stuart N. Clarke discovered, this gang rape is not only “real”—an actual event in Isa’s fictional world—but real, or historical.¹³ It occurred on 27 April 1938, and the three soldiers were tried at the Old Bailey on June 27, 28, and 29, the Times reported. One was convicted of attempted rape, another of rape, a third of aiding and abetting rape. The rape impregnated the girl, and a London surgeon openly performed an abortion, for which he was tried on 18–19 July (defended by a Mr. Oliver) and acquitted on the grounds that the pregnancy endangered the girl’s health.¹⁴ In A Room of One’s Own, Whitehall is the scene of an Englishwoman’s sudden recognition that she is not her civilization’s “natural inheritor” but “outside of it, alien and critical” (RO 97). Like the “real” swallows, rain, cows, and planes that traverse La Trobe’s pageant, this news item about a rape of an English girl by English soldiers tears through the novel’s illusion, linking Isa’s “toothache” with “real”—and real—violence against women at the core of so-called civilization.

“While composing Between the Acts, Woolf read Freud’s theory of family structure as civilization’s “germ-cell,” which contributed to her thinking on the lines of force linking private life with the public world.¹⁵ In Freud’s “scientific myth,” civilization originated with the marriage system after a horde of brothers murdered the primal father out of sexual jealousy. Then, since each, “like his father,” wanted “all the women for himself,” they instituted the incest taboo and exogamy to keep the peace: the brothers agreed to renounce the women (“their chief motive for dispatching their father”), and these objects of desire became objects of exchange between men in the marriage system.¹⁶ Noting Freud’s remark that “Sexual desires do not unite men but divide them,” Girard observes that “Sexual prohibitions, like all other prohibitions, are sacrificial,” and “all legitimate sexuality is sacrificial.”¹⁷ Marriage, in other words, does not banish violence but channels “the vicious and destructive cycle” of violence between men into the “generative violence” of the marriage system—a “sacrificial rite” that “protects the community” and “allows culture to flourish” (VS 93). The sacralized exchange of women forges bonds among men who might otherwise be at war, while the exogamous bride functions as a scapegoat whose expulsion from the community buys peace. Unlike such prohibitions as murder, to which all social subjects are in theory equal parties, the “brothers” ’ renunciation of sexual objects within the community makes women objects of ritual exchange in a marriage system that—because it keeps peace between men—is civilization’s cornerstone.

Freud’s comment that “woman finds herself forced into the background” by civilization’s claims and “adopts a hostile attitude towards it” does not contradict Woolf’s observation that “if one is a woman one is often surprised” to find oneself not civilization’s “natural inheritor” but “outside of it, alien and critical.”¹⁸ But whereas Freud identifies woman with the “nature” (“the family,” “sexual life,” unsublimated instinct) that civilization opposes, Woolf frames woman as civilization’s natural inheritor, an insider “surprised” to find herself forced outside. For Freud civilization is naturally masculine; for Woolf it is unnaturally masculine. For Freud (and Girard), civilization originates when violent sexual rivalries are channeled into “legitimate” forms, and it demands women’s sacrificial role. So, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—invoked, as we saw, in The Voyage Out, The Years, and again on Between the Acts’ last page—Marlow sees woman’s outsider position as both a given and a sentimentalized moral imperative, a “monster truth” that demands everyday tribute: women are “out of it—completely” and “should be out of it. We must help them to stay in that beautiful world of their own, lest ours gets worse.”¹⁹ Whereas Freud casts masculine domination as nature’s law, Marlow, as culture’s law, Woolf—speaking as “a woman” and as an Enlightenment subject (“one”)—looks beyond brute force to the reason and speech that distinguish the human species and lays claim to civilization.

“When Woolf read Freud’s theory in 1939, she was still pondering her 1931 project on the sexual life of women. By incorporating the real gang rape into her novel, she broaches the issue of civilization’s violence against women in a way that tears not only fiction’s veil but the boundary between (women’s) private and (men’s) public worlds; between Isa’s private “toothache” and the state military, legal, and medical institutions involved in the rape and its aftermath; between Isa’s silent thoughts and the girl’s public speech; between women as scapegoat-victims and women as desiring subjects, speakers, and creators between the acts of civilization’s masterplot.²⁰ The news report of the Whitehall gang rape animates the contradictions between Woolf’s assumption that woman is civilization’s “natural inheritor” and Freud’s and Conrad’s view that she is and must be kept “out of it—completely.” If the rape brutally demonstrates a woman’s structural position as an outsider within a society structured by male desire—and illustrates “Hitler in England”—the trials dramatize both her status as citizen and her public speech.²¹ The girl’s cries, shouts, screams, police witness, and trial testimony mobilize “her” civilization’s juridical and medical institutions; and the soldiers’ convictions and sentences, although they cannot right the wrong, publicly vindicate her speech acts.²²

That the real girl refused acquiescent victimhood and marshaled the powers of the law, medicine, and the state to fight both violence perpetrated by government military personnel and state control of her body sets up the conflict at the heart of Between the Acts.²³ Isa seeks a “cure” for her silent pain in the newspaper (her generation’s “book”), and the girl’s speech acts, reported in the late June news items, beckon her toward the “remedy” of speech. In the Olivers’ troubled marriage, which complicates Freud’s masterplot, Giles the father-hero is, in Isa’s unspoken slogans, “Our representative, our spokesman,” “The father of my children, whom I love and hate”; she, his complicit counterpart, seethes with suppressed desire for the gentleman farmer Haines and rage at her philandering husband, whose infidelity “made no difference … but hers did” (BA 215, 110). Isa practices a furtive, symptomatic speech, murmuring escapist, even suicidal, prose poems in lyric antiphony to her “strained” marriage and writing them in account books to hide their existence from Giles (BA 106). “Tor[n] asunder” by love and hate, she feels it is “time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes” (BA 215).

This year the girl’s screams pierce Isa’s habitual performance as the marriage system’s silent scapegoat. Isa breaks off reading at “she screamed and hit him about the face” when Lucy Swithin enters with a hammer. Like a Möbius strip the “real” rape twists and seamlessly joins Isa’s suppressed anger in her paraphrase moments later: “Every summer, for seven summers now, Isa had heard the same words … only this year beneath the chime she heard: ‘The girl screamed and hit him about the face with a hammer’” (BA 22). Like a Chekhovian gun that fires but misses its mark, this hammer only nails a placard announcing the pageant to the Barn. But as Isa’s fantasy embellishes the girl’s resistance, the Pointz Hall family becomes not just a microcosm of civilization’s “germ-cell” but a laboratory for small, everyday changes that may lead to greater ones. Echoing all day in Isa’s mind, the news story initiates her private struggle toward speech and, by extension, calls women’s desire and speech out from the crevices, the secret account books, of a civilization still mired in barbarism.

As in Chekhov, words strike with greater force than guns or hammers. In Three Guineas the mixed-sex company at the dinner table avert their gaze from the systemic violence of everyday heterosexual relations; but here Mrs. Swithin’s entrance does not change the subject. On this festival day of the pageant “Words raised themselves and became symbolical,” “ceased to lie flat in the sentence,” “rose, became menacing and shook their fists at you” (BA 59, 71). The news story shakes its fist at Isa’s paralysis, at fiction’s evasions of half-civilized barbarism, with a vehemence neither “fantastic” nor “romantic” but real (BA 20). During a decade of exploring the sexual life of women, Woolf had uncovered not just women’s scapegoat role but an opposing “force of tremendous power”: women’s desire and will, which had “forced open the doors of the private house,” “Bond Street and Piccadilly,” “cricket grounds and football grounds”; “shrivelled flounces and stays”; and made the world’s “oldest profession … unprofitable”; a fighting force for “the rights of all” under “the great principles of Justice and Equality and Liberty” (D 4:6, 20 January 1931, TG 210–11, 155). Between the Acts zooms in on the acts between the acts, those unnoticed random moments that shape our real lives, and makes Isa, aching for a new plot, a sort of test case for the challenge of women’s speech to civilization’s masterplot. The girl’s real screams not only foil Isa’s silence but hail her to speech.

Nature had provided a site for a house; man had built his house in a hollow.

—Woolf, Between the Acts

Ah, but she was not just a twitcher of individual strings; she was one who seethes wandering bodies and floating voices in a cauldron, and makes rise up from its amorphous mass a re-created world.

—Woolf, Between the Acts

We’re the oracles, if I’m not being irreverent—a foretaste of our own religion.

—Woolf, Between the Acts

In Between the Acts the outsider allies her art with “Nature” against manmade chalk marks, schemes, systems, theories, forms social, architectural, and aesthetic—in a word, history as error, burden, constraint. Nature—variously figured as a splendid but overlooked site for a house, a lily pond whose depths conceal a great carp, the muddy springs of thought and feeling beneath civilization’s “paving-stones,” the prehistoric island once rife with rhododendrons and mastodons where now run the Strand and Piccadilly, a symbolic “night before roads were made, or houses,” a rain shower that does not spoil but saves the pageant—is the heuristic ground for “a re-created world,” a new beginning conjured by art’s illusion (BA 153). Critics in search of a “matricentric” alternative to civilization’s masterplot often frame Between the Acts as a fall from feminist utopia to patriarchal realism, from Lily Briscoe’s empowering maternal garden to a world darkened and diminished in the mother’s absence.²⁴ But Woolf, as we saw, had felt years earlier that writing To the Lighthouse freed her from her parents’ ghosts; and Orlando and The Waves suggest not imaginative impoverishment but adventurous freedom and deepening vision.²⁵ In Woolf’s last self-portrait, too, the artist is no longer a daughter but a woman of the world. Often discounted as a failed artist, an ineffectual village eccentric, even a parody of the fascist group leader, the outsider artist La Trobe, self-created and self-named, thinks not back through her mothers but forward with her community toward the future.

La Trobe’s art has its wellsprings neither in a fantasy of the mother’s body (as in those sacred “tablets” and “treasures” Lily pictures in Mrs. Ramsay’s “mind and heart”) nor in the father’s culture but in the world, as it is and as it might be (TL 51). Early on Lucy Swithin traces the expression “Touch wood” to Antaeus, son of Terra (earth) and Neptune (water), who “touch[ed] earth” to replenish his strength (BA 24). So Woolf “touched ground” after the ordeal of The Years (“Whatever happens I dont think I can now be destroyed”); and after the pageant La Trobe voyages toward her next play on “green waters” rising from the “earth”—an elemental confluence that figures not fetishized mater, a psychohistorical extension of the mother’s body, but nature as ground, as reality.²⁶ If Lily/ Woolf draws inspiration from the maternally authored world that “spun so gaily in the centre” of that “great Cathedral space … childhood,” La Trobe’s experimental pageant reflects the spectators who inspire it, help create it, and see it floating in the sky of the mind (MB 81, 84).

For La Trobe rewriting history begins at home. In a biography left on the cutting-room floor, an ur-La Trobe overcomes painful origins by inventing a “past” (flying that red flag of doubt “she said”) that opens into a widening future. As pageant master, her biographer notes, she is “far more advanced than Miss Seers or Miss Gibbs and had more knowledge of life at first hand than the admirable Mr. Giddings.” The biographer then hints at the sources of her “knowledge”:

Her name was not La Trobe. It was Trob. And if her life had been written instead of being expunged from time to time from a natural desire to hide her father, who had fallen and been in prison, truth, the biographer’s Goddess, would have forced the biographer to say: At the age of eighteen, through no fault of her own, Lilian had a baby; At the age of twenty-five, she kept a hat shop; at the age of thirty, she became La Trobe and sold cakes in Winchester from a recipe bequeathed her by her mother a widow, she said. Her father, she said, had been a clergyman, when she sold cakes at Winchester, home-made, on tables covered with check clothes; there she changed her name and called herself La Trobe; at the age of thirty-five, she was breeding spaniels; and so successfully that at the age of forty, she had a cottage with kennels attached; took silver cups at shows; and was, according to the biographer’s choice of epithets, the mainspring, the live wire, the pivot of all village activities.²⁷

Triply “expunged”—by its subject, by a “biographer” “forced” to channel it direct from “Truth” who yet denies having “written” it, and by its author, who abandons it in the draft—La Trobe’s biography, like Mary Hamilton’s and Judith Shakespeare’s, begins in the vicissitudes of female sexuality. If “Lilian” with her virginal name had a baby at eighteen “through no fault of her own,” who was at fault?—an abandoning seducer? a rapist? that narratively proximate, possibly likely (since “fallen” connotes a sexual crime) suspect, her jailbird father, whose crimes she has “a natural desire to hide”? a society that is “a father,” whose law condemns and penalizes “fallen” women, unwed mothers, “illegitimate” children (TG 206)? A modern, entrepreneurial Judith Shakespeare, Lilian wrests fairytale successes from her fraught beginnings to elude her forebears’ fate, finessing her past, dodging the suicide’s grave, and spinning out her future as she goes. Experiencing something of women’s sacrificial position “at first hand,” she survives so-called illegitimate childbearing and makes her way outside the political economy of marriage, sharing her bed with an actress instead of a man and wielding public authority in the annual village pageants.

La Trobe’s “knowledge of life at first hand,” her resourceful survival and invention, her adventures outside marriage and family, and her unsettling of assumptions about law and propriety are key credentials for a pageant master who strives to “re-create the world” for an audience that longs for “a new plot.” Her lesbianism categorically removes her from the circuits of heterosexual desire and consolidates her outsider status. Mocked yet tolerated by the villagers, she walks the edge of transgression: “One of these days she would break—which of the village laws? Sobriety? Chastity? Or take something that did not properly belong to her?”²⁸ With her exotic name, stormy affair with the actress, and gender-bending style—“swarthy, sturdy and thick set [she] strode about the fields in a smock frock; sometimes with a cigarette in her mouth; often with a whip in her hand; and used rather strong language—perhaps, then, she wasn’t altogether a lady? At any rate, she had a passion for getting things up”—she at once parodies and transforms the group leader who, Freud argues, mirrors its members’ identity (BA 58). As a leader, she opens her “advanced” consciousness to her community by reflecting back not an exclusive ideal but a “we” composed of “all waifs & strays,” which the pageant gathers into “a rambling capricious but somehow unified whole.”²⁹

The ur-La Trobe who outdoes Miss Seers, Miss Gibbs, and “the admirable Mr. Giddings” also reminds us that in 1939 Woolf was negotiating between her philosophical and practical outsiderhood on the one hand, and her fierce ambition on the other, which surfaced in rivalries with such longtime friends as E. M. Forster and T. S. Eliot.³⁰ When Three Guineas’ reception seemed cool (“my own friends have sent me to Coventry”), she estimated Eliot’s and Forster’s reputations “higher than my own.” Yet she was, she affirmed, “fundamentally … an outsider”: “I’m kicking my heels with P. H. … And I feel so free of any criticism; own no authority”; “I do my best work & feel most braced with my back to the wall.”³¹ Forster, she noted, enjoyed “praise … from the young” and had been “saluted” as England’s “best living novelist.”³² Later she declined Forster’s offer to nominate her for the London Library Committee, still furious at his report of how they had invoked her father to authorize their horror of women members when her name came up in 1935 (D 5:337, 7 November 1940). The Woolfs missed Forster’s 1934 “Pageant of Trees” at Abinger and his 1938 pageant England’s Pleasant Land—both far less advanced than La Trobe’s.³³

La Trobe’s advantage over the admirable Mr. Giddings suggests Woolf’s rivalry with the admirable Mr. Eliot, whose plays she set out to surpass in her pageant-within-a-novel.³⁴ While first sketching Pointz Hall, she complained of having to “represent[] also T. S. Eliot at his absurd command” at Ottoline Morrell’s memorial service; afterward she teased him, “Yes, I murmured ‘I’m Mrs Woolf,’ at Ottolines funeral; then in a bold loud voice BUT I REPRESENT T. S. ELIOT—the proudest moment of my life; passing, alas, like spring flowers.”³⁵ Eliot, she felt, was all too evidently “on the side of authority,” even if his “humorous sardonic gift … mitigates his egotism” (D 5:193, 19 December 1938). A week after Three Guineas appeared, in fact, Cambridge University gave this august personage an honorary degree, conferred by its Chancellor, Lord Baldwin—who was simultaneously to be seen marching in ceremonial robes in the pages of Three Guineas to illustrate “A University Procession.” Woolf notes Eliot’s honor beside Three Guineas’ sales figures: “I think 10,000 will go off. And its hit the crest of the wave. Tom being given his degree at Cambridge: walking in procession with the other bigwigs: Trinity feast; Tattoo; honours List—if anyone reads it, the illustration is pat to hand” (D 5:149–50, 11 June 1938).

With Pointz Hall underway, Woolf felt “selfishly relieved” when Eliot’s play The Family Reunion flopped in 1939: “why? Had it been a success would it have somehow sealed—my ideas? does this failure confirm a new idea of mine—that I’m evolving in PH about the drama?” She thought his characters “stiff as pokers. … And the chief poker is Tom: but cant speak out. A cold upright poker. And the Fates behind the drawing room curtain. A clever beginning, & some ideas; but they spin out: & nothing grips: all mist—a failure: a proof hes not a dramatist. A monologist. This is stated very politely by the papers this morning.”³⁶ She recognized that her “growing detachment from the hierarchy, the patriarchy” made her “dislike, & like, so many things idiosyncratically”; and as Eliot’s failure fed her hope of success, his success made her fear failure: “When Desmond praises East Coker, & I am jealous, I walk over the marsh saying I am I; & must follow that furrow, not copy another” (D 5:347, 29 December 1940). Having raised the question of dialogue in formally specific terms, Woolf covertly replies to Eliot’s blank-verse drama with her “playpoem” (a generic hybrid as apt for Between the Acts as for The Waves): against the monologist Tom who “wont speak out,” the dialogist La Trobe, who (no less paradoxically) hides in the bushes to harangue her audience through a megaphone, along with a dialogist narrator who writes this poetics large on the plane of the story.³⁷

In contrast to the “monologist” Eliot, the dialogist outsider La Trobe brews a “we” from the spectators’ “wandering bodies and floating voices” (BA 153). In her memoir “A Sketch of the Past” (1939–40), Woolf projects a lyrical image of this “we” in summing up what she calls her “philosophy”: “Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself” (MB 72). Beside this idea that art (Hamlet, Beethoven) and “all human beings” are woven into nature’s (the world’s) great unfathomable “pattern,” the “religion” or philosophical “systems” of “[Herbert] Read; Tom Eliot; Santayana; Wells” seemed to Woolf “queer little sandcastles”: “weathertight, & giv[ing] shelter to the occupant” but finally “only word proof not weather proof” (MB 72, D 5:340, 18 November 1940). When she muses, “I am the sea which demolishes these castles” as she counsels herself to stay the outsider’s course, she allies her art with nature against the force of history:

“Woolf’s view of the historian G. M. Trevelyan as “The complete Insider,” “the perfect product of the Universities,” similarly allies the outsider symbolically with nature: “Insiders are the glory of the 19th century. They do a great service like Roman roads. But they avoid the forests & the will o the wisps” (D 5:333, 337, 26 October, 5 November 1940). In Pointz Hall’s last pages, Woolf weaves imagery from his History of England, with its foldout frontispiece map tracing ancient roads through the forests and marshes of “Celtic and Roman Britain,” into Lucy’s “Outline of History,” where she reads of a time when England was “‘a swamp. Thick forests covered the land. On top of their matted branches birds sang.’”³⁸ From Trevelyan’s imagined island Woolf conjures a heuristic new beginning, a “now” before roads or houses were made, paths still to be cut toward an uncharted future.

It was a pity that the man who had built Pointz Hall had pitched the house in a hollow, when beyond the flower garden and the vegetables there was this stretch of high ground. Nature had provided a site for a house; man had built his house in a hollow. Nature had provided a stretch of turf half a mile in length and level, till it suddenly dipped to the lily pool. … There you could walk up and down, up and down, under the shade of the trees. (BA 57, 10)

The perfect site for a house becomes “the very place for a play” (BA 57). Like women discovering that “there is no God” but in the “we” who are the words, the music, the thing itself, La Trobe pursues the outsider’s quest to “free the religious spirit” when she transforms this terrace into an “open-air cathedral, … a church without a roof” (TG 172, BA 64–65). Taking her chances with the weather, setting the pageant’s illusion amid fields where a cow’s yearning bellow, a sudden shower, a wind that blows the actors’ words away, birds on the wing, “twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation” play parts unscripted yet not uninvited, she releases the spectators from convention to contemplate the human world as part of nature. The “representatives of our most respected families,” some “there for centuries, never selling an acre,” become part of a immeasurably greater past and future; the “we” gathered in this cathedral under the sky overflows this small community to represent the human species, evoked by Lucy’s prehistoric Piccadilly swarming with “monsters … from whom presumably … we descend” (BA 74, 8–10). Without ceasing to be themselves, the villagers are people on the earth come together in the sociability that Between the Acts, like Kant, sees as human beings’ “true ‘end’”; and, at the same time, human beings who belong to a nature that works with hidden purposes, beyond any single life and beyond human comprehension.³⁹

Opening the pageant’s borders to chance showers, swallows, wind, cows, and, most important, the audience, La Trobe lets nature in its beauty—its purposiveness without purpose—and its mysterious purposes shimmer through art’s illusion as she blends the pageant, experientially and formally, into that unfathomably great work of art “the world.” Staged outdoors, the pageant speaks on many planes and in different voices. Unlike Eliot’s Family Reunion, its meaning, and that of the novel, are not to be sought in the words—the virtuosic interplay of utterance, conversation, silent reflection and communication, reported speech, citation, the written word in books and newspapers, talking objects and rooms, script, and performance, the animate web of spoken and unspoken words from all across the bandwidths that is Between the Acts. Rather—embodying the “very latest notion” that “nothing’s solid,” as a spectator says—the novel dissolves plot, story, event, and character into these myriad voices, seemingly random yet orchestrated, as if ordinary language were throwing off mundane functionality and aspiring to the condition of music (BA 199). Capturing ephemeral thought, speech, and performance on the wing, Between the Acts is a tour de force of listening to the words for the sake of a music that plays through and between them, beyond the reach of sound. We turn now to two crucial aspects of its dialogic art: beauty and change.

Bodying forth the “death” of the author, La Trobe’s advanced theatrical practice foregrounds the spectators as the play’s coauthors.⁴⁰ As Bart informs his guests, “Our part … is to be the audience. And a very important part too” (BA 58). La Trobe does not invent this dialogic drama out of nothing. “One year we wrote the play ourselves,” Lucy Swithin recalls at the family luncheon on which Mrs. Manresa and William Dodge have intruded with their picnic hamper. The blacksmith’s son “had the loveliest voice,” and that natural mimic Elsie at the Crossways “Took us all off,” she remembers. “People are gifted—very. The question is—how to bring it out? That’s where she’s so clever—Miss La Trobe” (BA 59). In line with this job description, La Trobe (a. k. a. “Miss Whatshername”) strives to bring out the community’s voices, hidden and potential (BA 197).

And the villagers need her, for we glimpse the sort of thing they come up with when they write the play themselves when Colonel Mayhew wonders, “Why leave out the British Army? What’s history without the Army, eh?” and his wife describes what La Trobe has probably planned for a finale: “a Grand Ensemble. Army; Navy; Union Jack; and behind them perhaps—Mrs. Mayhew sketched what she would have done had it been her pageant—the Church. In cardboard. One window looking east, brilliantly illuminated to symbolize—she could work that out when the time came.”⁴¹ La Trobe’s part is not to execute their conventional visions, which arguably resemble them far less closely than does her mirror play at the end. Rather (like Orlando’s Shakespeare and “the moderns” in the “Essay on Criticism”), she “rule[s] them, impose[s] her will,” to bring out their mute thoughts and feelings. Her part is to be their “Bossy” leader (“someone must lead. Then too they could put the blame on her”) and equally their “slave” (“O to write a play without an audience—the play”) in the effort to call out voice, speech, and feeling they do not yet know they have.⁴²

[1] “What luck!” [2]Mrs. Carter was saying. [1]“Last year …” [2] Then the play began. Was it, or was it not, the play? [3]Chuff, chuff, chuff [2]sounded from the bushes. It was the noise a machine makes when something has gone wrong. Some sat down hastily; others stopped talking guiltily. All looked at the bushes. For the stage was empty. … While they looked apprehensively and some finished their sentences, a small girl, like a rose-bud in pink, advanced; took her stand … and piped:

[4] Gentles and simples, I address you all . …

[2] So it was the play then. Or was it the prologue?

[4] Come hither for our festival [2](she continued)

[4] This is a pageant, all may see Drawn from our island history.

England am I. …

[5+] “She’s England,” [2]they whispered. [5+]“It’s begun.” “The prologue,” [2]they added, looking down at the programme.

[4] “England am I,” [2]she piped again; and stopped.

[2] She had forgotten her lines.

[6] “Hear! Hear!” [2]said an old man in a white waistcoat briskly. [6] “Bravo! Bravo!”

[7a] “Blast ‘em!” [2]cursed Miss La Trobe, hidden behind the tree. …

[7b] “Music!” [2]she signalled. … But the machine continued: [3]Chuff, chuff, chuff.

[7c] “A child new born …” [2]she prompted. (BA 76–77)

Before the play has progressed six lines, we hear at least seven voices: Mrs. Carter, the narrator, the gramophone (“chuff”—the voice of the thing itself, mediating nothing), little Phyllis, whispering spectators, the kind old man, and the director in three vocal modes, cursing sotto voce, calling in vain for music, then prompting from the script, a sort of eighth voice. Like Mr. Erskine in Jacob’s Room, who tells Charlotte Wilding that he can count “twenty different sounds on a night like this,” the narrator records each one moment by moment as if it were a rolling camera pointed at the scene: “‘Sorry I’m so late,’ said Mrs. Swithin … ‘What’s it all about? I’ve missed the prologue. England? That little girl? Now she’s gone. … And who’s this?’ It was Hilda, the carpenter’s daughter. … ‘A cushion? Thank you so much’”; “‘O,’ Miss La Trobe growled behind her tree, ‘the torture of these interruptions!’” (JR 60, BA 79–80).

Who speaks? Together the spectators’ unscripted comments, the faltering little actor, the exasperated director, the gramophone’s scraping needle, the script, and the observant narrator create the rustling, glancing voice of the play in performance—and something more: a voice beyond all these voices, a metavoice that belongs to no one, not even the narrator, whose gaze and reportage more nearly resemble a documentary cinematographic apparatus than an omniscient, moralizing storyteller. Yet there is nothing mechanical about the quality of her attention, which suffuses this Chekhovian human comedy with aesthetic feeling. It is as if she at once attends to every moment for its own sake and listens, watches, for possible designs and refrains to appear—for that ephemeral “something” that Orlando calls “beauty” to transform into a “playpoem” the documentary field of human speech marked out by the novel’s first sentence (“they were talking”) and its last (“They spoke”).

Or: it is as if, behind the narrative’s quasi-documentary mode, a metavoice (the artist? the author? we’ll come back to this question) were weaving everything, from the not very privileged script to the most trivial interruption, into an encompassing intention or design, an aesthetic whole that requires each element as a tapestry requires each thread or an orchestral composition every note, motif, and instrument. In the essay that describes Chekhov’s stories leaving “clouds in the summer air, … a wake of meaning in our minds which gradually fades away,” Woolf writes that “fictitious people” must not say what the narrator can say “more economically for them” (E 4:455). Recalling this caution, we begin to see that it is the very triviality of the characters’ utterances that makes them transparent to this metavoice, Beauty, behind the voices. Triviality is indispensable to the aesthetic effect that lifts what they say “simply in their natural voices” out of the mundane and exceeds, yet does not violate, the director’s plan (E 4:453). Although the “excruciated” La Trobe damns these interruptions to which the narrator gives equal time—these trivial, irrelevant voices that wander from the script, transgress the actor/audience divide, and (she fears) threaten to ruin the pageant—the playwright-director and narrator are not at cross-purposes (BA 203). Precisely because the narrator’s wide-angle lens exceeds and even betrays La Trobe’s local intention, it makes her radically dialogic art fully visible, even as it weaves it almost imperceptibly into that greater work of art, the world.

In keeping with the dissolving boundaries between the work of art and the world according to Woolf’s “philosophy,” between the real rape and the novel’s fictional world, between nature and the pageant, the narrator writes the “real” spectators and the “real” world into the picture. The pageant provides an occasion and a temporal frame to hang the human voices on, a canvas for the narrator’s documentary art. Its mere existence is drama enough: anticipation, preparations, acts, intervals, performance, and aftermath on this festival day engender the subtly eventful social panoply of the playpoem all around the pageant that the narrative exists to capture. The question, then, is less Who speaks than How, though thinking about How leads to a different understanding of Who. Between the Acts dissolves any notion of a divide between functional and poetic language. Like a stone chip in a mosaic, the most ordinary utterance brushes against, calls out, even becomes poetry through context and contiguity, as when at tea in the Barn a voice says, “A bit too strong? Let me add water,” and Isa thinks, “That’s what I wished … when I dropped my pin. Water, water” (BA 104). Speech is never naked. Like Lucy Swithin, the narrator constantly “increas[es] the bounds of the moment” through kaleidoscopic juxtapositions (BA 9). Every utterance is richly laden, nuanced, made strange by spatial and temporal resonances, reverberating with and against others like the strings of a piano, exceeding any speaker’s intention. So too the play in performance exceeds the artist’s intention without leaving the realm of the aesthetic. The pageant casts a spell over the world that surrounds it, drawing the “real” life around it under the sway of this mysterious beauty.

The spectators are taken with La Trobe’s natural effects, part art, part chance. “Look, Minnie!” cries Etty Springett as birds flit across a fake pond. “Those are real swallows!” (BA 164). The audience sees double: dishcloths are silken headdresses, a painted sheet is a pond circled by green stakes for bulrushes, “Eliza Clark, licensed to sell tobacco,” is Queen Elizabeth. The villagers show through their roles and costumes: “Who came? … Love embodied. … Sylvia Edwards in white satin” (BA 91). Conversely, the Intervals do not spill and waste the emotion La Trobe brews but refract it through life’s translucent medium as spectators become impromptu players: “Hail, sweet Carinthia. My love. My life,” William greets Isa at tea in the Barn, echoing the Elizabethan scene. “My lord, my liege,” she returns with an ironic bow (BA 105, cf. 88). As in a hall of mirrors, illusion and the “real” world collide and intersect, unsettling hardened conventions to release a question that reverberates through the pageant’s reception: “D’you think people change? Their clothes, of course. … But I meant ourselves …” (BA 120–21, ellipses Woolf’s). Without forgetting beauty, let us look at the way the novel stages the question of change by tracking Isa from the scenes leading up to the pageant through her role as privileged spectator to the closing scenes where she becomes the unwitting protagonist of next year’s play.

Prompted by the historical pageant, the question of whether people change, if so, how, and what art has to do with it goes to the heart of the dialogic poetics of play and narrative. The scenes that set the stage for the pageant and everything “between” establish Isa among the novel’s dramatis personae through an array of domestic and psychic scenes involving sex, love, violence, infidelity, jealousy, money, class, and gender. This “real”-life documentary at the pageant’s permeable borders introduces characters who will play the audience’s “very important part”: the Olivers chat with the neighbors about the cesspool, Lucy wakes with the birds, little George digs a flower, Bart scares him with his monster-beak, Isa muses on her two kinds of love for Haines and Giles and orders the fish. Isa’s consciousness shapes the library scene with the newspaper, the hammer, the question of the weather, while luncheon preparations go on in kitchen and dining room and the scullery maid takes a break by the lily pond. The Olivers extend hospitality to the “strangers,” Mrs. Manresa—a racy New Zealand-born “wild child of nature” married to a “disinterested” Jewish businessman whose initials imitate “a coronet” on his “great silver-plated car”—and the homosexual poet-clerk, William Dodge. Giles comes late from the city, the company sits uncomfortably over coffee on the hot terrace, Lucy shields William from Giles’s contempt, and it gradually emerges that thirty-nine-year-old Isa is drawn to Haines, unhappy with her womanizing husband, tender with her two children though pinned unwillingly into domesticity, and teeming with suppressed thoughts and feelings that issue in the poems she hides in account books.

The news report of the rape challenges Isa’s silence, as we have noted; and in Pointz Hall it has already changed Isa before the pageant begins. Although “it seemed impossible that any thing should change” these seven years, “she changed; it changed—the thing that was behind the wall: today ‘it’ was ‘the girl screamed; and hit him about the face’” (PH 56). Once the pageant begins, the Intervals create broad arenas for performances of spectatorship through conversations and solitary reflections. Left “stranded” and “separate” at the first Interval as the gramophone wails “Dispersed are we,” Isa follows “that old strumpet” Mrs. Manresa (who has been ogling Giles) toward the Barn for tea, murmuring a singsong of despair: “what wish should I drop into the well? … That the waters should cover me … of the wishing well. … Water. Water. … Should I mind not again to see may tree or nut tree?” (BA 95–96, 103–04). First William, then little George, interrupt her desolation; then Isa silently mocks Giles (“Silly little boy, with blood on his boots”) and sweeps William (riveted by Giles’s beauty, loath to go) off to the greenhouse, plucking “bitter herb” and “Old Man’s Beard” on her way. There she picks up a knife and improvises for William a mock scene of love betrayed:

This melodramatic play-speech comes not from the pageant but from the “real” love-hate plot that tears her asunder, which the pageant brings bubbling up from her mind’s “mud” through convention’s “marble” pavements (BA 45). The play clears a psychic space that allows Isa to act out buried feelings for William without having to avow them. She is only playacting, and his discreet “Still the play?” does not intrude.⁴³ But suddenly they are talking “as if they had known each other all their lives,” and when she wonders “why they could speak so plainly to each other,” he gestures at “the doom of sudden death hanging over us” (BA 114). During the first Interval, in short, Isa moves from solitary singsong through improvised play-speech to “plain” speech. Meanwhile, as if confirming the dialogic interchange between pageant and spectators, the communal “inner voice, the other voice,” takes on Isa’s murmuring rhythms—“Working, serving, pushing, striving, earning wages—to be spent—here? Oh dear no. Now? No, by and by. When ears are deaf and the heart is dry”—as if the pageant has unstopped not just Isa’s stifled speech but a common spring of hidden feeling (BA 119).

The pageant now depicts the Age of Reason, its advances, evils, and foibles declaimed (once Bart has urged her to speak up so the audience can understand her) by a superb Mabel Hopkins in the title role. “Commerce” pours out a “Cornucopia” of “ores,” sweated out of the earth by “savage[s]” in “distant mines”; “At my behest, the armed warrior lays his shield aside; the heathen leaves the Altar steaming with unholy sacrifice”; music and the arts flourish in “peace.” So do vanity, duplicity, and greed, the Congreve parody “Where there’s a Will there’s a Way” insists—no surprise to Cobbet of Cobbs Corner, who has “known human nature in the East” and finds it “the same in the West” (BA 123–24, 110). Still, “reason prevails,” affirmed by the “triple melody” of music, cows, and view (BA 134). When finally the young lovers flee their elders’ snares and a voice exclaims, “All that fuss about nothing!” everyone laughs and La Trobe “glow[s] with glory”: “the voice had seen; the voice had heard” (BA 138–39). The voice sees more or less what Isa saw during act 1, the postimpressionist emphasis on abstract emotion: “Did the plot matter? … The plot was only there to beget emotion. … Perhaps Miss La Trobe meant that …? Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing. … Love. Hate. Peace. Three emotions made the ply of human life” (BA 90–92).

Reason’s proclamation of the end of “unholy sacrifice” seems lost on Isa, who, alone again in the second Interval, wavers from her wish “that the waters should cover me” to paint herself “the last little donkey” in history’s “long caravanserai,” stumbling under a burden of personal and cultural memory. As La Trobe calls for “The next tune! Number 10!” Isa wanders off, sees Haines vanish in the crowd, and stops in the stable yard by that ancient fertility symbol “the great pear tree” to soliloquize, as if she were already a shade,

“Where do I wander? … Down what draughty tunnels? Where the eyeless wind blows? And there grows nothing for the eye. No rose. To issue where? In some harvestless dim field where no evening lets fall her mantle; nor sun rises. All’s equal there. Unblowing, ungrowing are the roses there. Change is not; nor the mutable and lovable; nor greetings nor partings; nor furtive findings and feelings, where hand seeks hand and eye seeks shelter from the eye. …” (BA 154–55, my emphasis)

“Change”—greetings and partings, shifting light, blowing roses—holds Isa ambivalently to life through her despair and evokes dreams of life set free of possessions and memories:

“How am I burdened with what they drew from the earth; memories; possessions. This is the burden that the past laid on me, last little donkey in the long caravanserai crossing the desert. ‘Kneel down,’ said the past. ‘Fill your pannier from our tree. … Go your way till your heels blister and your hoofs crack.’

… “That was the burden … laid on me in the cradle; murmured by waves; breathed by restless elm trees; crooned by singing women; what we must remember: what we would forget. …” (BA 155)

If it obliterated history’s burden, even catastrophe—apocalyptic “lightning”—might herald “a good day”:

“Now comes the lightning … from the stone blue sky. The thongs are burst that the dead tied. Loosed are our possessions. …

“It’s a good day, some say, the day we are stripped naked. Others, it’s the end of the day … But none speaks with a single voice … free from the old vibrations. Always I hear corrupt murmurs; the chink of gold and metal. Mad music. …

“On, little donkey, patiently stumble. Hear not the frantic cries of the leaders who in that they seek to lead desert us, nor the chatter of china faces glazed and hard. Hear rather the shepherd, coughing by the farmyard wall; the withered tree that sighs when the Rider gallops; the brawl in the barrack room when they stripped her naked; or the cry which in London when I thrust the window open someone cries …”⁴⁴

Tormented by “corrupt murmurs,” Isa counsels herself to listen for other voices—a shepherd’s cough, the withered tree’s sigh, the girl’s screams, the London street cry that plays both in her memory and on the gramophone, calling her back to act 3 and life.⁴⁵

Seeing Giles emerge from the greenhouse with Mrs. Manresa, Isa follows them back unseen for the parodic Victorian scene. Mingling with Colonel Mayhew’s call for “the Army,” “who’ll buy my sweet lavender” stirs the elderly widows Mrs. Lynn Jones and Etty Springett to an overture of reminiscences: “You couldn’t walk—Oh, dear me, no—home from the play. Regent Street. Piccadilly. Hyde Park Corner. The loose women” (BA 157–58). No loose women appear onstage where “Budge the publican”’s truncheoned constable glares “eminent, dominant, … from his pedestal” while Mrs. Hardcastle poses the burning question “O has Mr. Sibthorp a wife?” on behalf of her four daughters to a top-hatted, side-whiskered “chorus” (BA 160, 163, 169). The widows feel vague indignation when the donkey’s hindquarters, played by Albert, become “active” during Mr. Hardcastle’s closing prayer and the young lovers take up “the white man’s burden” “To convert the heathen!” “To help our fellow men!” while Budge praises “’Ome, Sweet ’Ome” (BA 172–73). But as the third Interval begins, change is on all the spectators’ minds: Isa and Lucy discuss whether the Victorians were “like that” or “only you and me and William dressed differently”; Etty flings William “a vicious glance,” as if blaming him for the empire’s wane; Mrs. Jones admits, “Change had to come”; Giles, William, and Isa confide “(without words), ‘I’m damnably unhappy’” as if yearning for change (BA 173–76).

While waiting for act 2, someone has remarked, “Perhaps she’ll reach the present, if she skips,” doubtless unaware of the Parkerian doctrine that “It is most unwise to include any episode more recent than, say, fifty years ago” when staging “History without Tears.”⁴⁶ The Intervals already form a bridge to the present, sometimes confusingly, as when the last one segues into a finale that takes the Mayhews and everyone else by surprise. La Trobe’s script reads, “try ten mins. of present time. Swallows, cows, etc.” As Parker might have warned, “something was going wrong” (BA 179). The spectators await a spectacle: “How long was she going to keep them waiting? ‘The Present Time. Ourselves.’ They read it on the programme. … ‘The profits are to go to a fund for installing electric light in the Church.’ … Over there. You could see the spire among the trees.” La Trobe watches in agony as her daring experiment, indispensable to the pageant’s success, looks to be failing: “what could she know about ourselves? … Other people, perhaps. … But she won’t get me” (BA 178).

This is not exactly what Barthes means by the death of the author, but La Trobe’s anguish does implicate the spectators, passive before the empty stage (BA 180). “‘Reality too strong,’ she muttered. ‘Curse ’em!’ … Panic seized her. Blood seemed to pour from her shoes. This is death, death, death, … when illusion fails” (BA 178–80, my emphasis). Has La Trobe, like Woolf, been reading Freud? “One can try to re-create the world,” Freud writes, but one “will as a rule attain nothing. Reality is too strong for him. He becomes a madman, who for the most part finds no one to help him in carrying through his delusion” (CD 28, my emphasis). But La Trobe is not a “madman,” and as she struggles to re-create the world for her scattered, distracted audience, “reality” is on her side: a “sudden, profuse” rain shower pours from a “black, swollen” cloud “like all the people in the world weeping. Tears. Tears. Tears. … all people’s tears, weeping for all people … sudden and universal.”⁴⁷ Wiping her cheeks, La Trobe sighs, “That’s done it.” Nature saves her experiment, bringing tears to the spectators’ minds. The “risk” she has taken in acting outdoors, opening the pageant to nature and chance, pays off in a History with Tears that no Parkerian would have dreamt of, or dared.

Isa “helps” too, spontaneously making meaning of this moment: “‘Oh that our human pain could here have ending! … O that my life could here have ending’. … Readily would she endow this voice with all her treasure if so be tears could be ended. … On the altar of the rain-soaked earth she laid down her sacrifice” (BA 180–81). No “idle reader” but an active Barthesian spectator, Isa answers the “simple tune” that takes up where Nature leaves off—“the voice that was no one’s voice, … the voice that wept for human pain unending”—with a fantasy of her death as no longer an escape but a sacrificial offering to end “all people’s tears.”⁴⁸ As the narrative weaves Isa’s prose poems into the pageant’s web of music, rain, and tears, the dialogic pageant now interrupts with a worldly tableau (“Crude, of course”) that draws her from private fantasy to public utterance:

“O look!” she cried aloud.

That was a ladder. And that (a cloth roughly painted) was a wall. … Mr. Page the reporter, licking his pencil, noted: “With the very limited means at her disposal, Miss La Trobe conveyed to the audience Civilization (the wall) in ruins; rebuilt (witness man with hod) by human effort; witness also woman handing bricks. Any fool could grasp that. Now issued black man in fuzzy wig; coffee-coloured ditto in silver turban; they signify presumably the League of …”

A burst of applause greeted this flattering tribute to ourselves [ … ] all liberated; made whole … (BA 181–83, bracketed ellipsis mine)

As the audience lapses into self-congratulatory Grand Ensemble complacency, Isa’s “O look!” keeps in view this far from realized vision of a civilization created not by parricidal brothers but by an inclusive global brother/sisterhood, beyond national and racial “chalk marks” (“the League of …”).⁴⁹

While they all “look,” La Trobe’s tour de force mirror scene begins. The actors leap out of the bushes flashing “Anything that’s bright enough to reflect, presumably, ourselves,” until the spectators glimpse their own faces onstage beside the broken wall (BA 183). “What’s more,” as the narrator says, they hear themselves—and even see their thoughts embodied—as each actor “declaim[s] some phrase or fragment from their parts,” including that very important part, the audience (BA 185). Earlier in the day, Giles mutters, “I fear I am not in my perfect mind” watching Great Eliza come apart onstage; during the Victorian scene Mrs. Lynn Jones reflects on “something—not impure, that wasn’t the word—but perhaps ‘unhygienic’ about the home”; Isa thinks of the rape, picks Old Man’s Beard, and improvises (“Plunge blade!”) for William in the greenhouse (BA 85, 174, 113). Now, in the play’s last scene, the actors echo, mime, and embody these unscripted moments in a sound-collage as mysterious as Chekhov’s breaking string: “I am not (said one) in my perfect mind. … Home? Where the miner sweats, and the maiden faith is rudely strumpeted. … Is that a dagger that I see before me?” (after Lear, sonnet 66, and Macbeth) while “the girl in the Mall” and “the old man with the beard” dance out from the bushes with the rest (BA 185).

How is this done? Has La Trobe, busy in the bushes during the Intervals, transcribed those “stray voices, voices without bodies, symbolical voices they seemed to her, half hearing, seeing nothing, but still, over the bushes, feeling invisible threads connect the bodiless voices” (BA 151)? Does she direct her actors to catch the spectators’ utterances and freely repeat them in this scene—to make their secret voices sound in this final chorus of aural mirrors? Or—since “She felt everything they felt”—does she somehow divine their inward voices, just as she hears “the first words” of next year’s play the moment Isa and Giles speak them? Whatever her method, it is writ large by the narrator, who not only hears the characters’ unspoken thoughts but shows them overhearing each other’s, soundlessly conversing in a hyperreal form of free indirect discourse—as when Giles hears Isa think “as plainly as words could say it, ‘No, … I don’t admire you … Silly little boy, with blood on his boots’” (in quotation marks, as if her feeling is so palpable she seems to have spoken) and silently wonders: “Whom then did she admire? … Some man, he was sure, in the Barn. Which man? He looked round him” (BA 111).

For the narrator as for La Trobe, it is a small step from rendering such silent, wireless talk to a collective “voice that was no one’s”; from the characters’ inner voices to the audience’s and even the pageant’s. Before the discomposed spectators can flee the “indignity” of their reflections, an impersonal amplified voice pins them to their seats, implicitly countering Hitler’s exhortations to a “master race” with a “megaphonic, anonymous, loud-speaking affirmation” of humanity in all its variegated, interwoven vice and virtue:

let’s talk in words of one syllable, without larding, stuffing, or cant. … And calmly consider ourselves. Ourselves. Some bony. Some fat. … Liars most of us. Thieves too. … The poor are as bad as the rich are. Perhaps worse. Don’t hide among rags. Or let our cloth protect us. Or … book learning; … Or … white hairs. Consider the gun slayers, bomb droppers, here or there. They do openly what we do slyly. … A tyrant, remember, is half a slave. … O we’re all the same. Take myself now. Do I escape my own reprobation, simulating indignation, in the bush, among the leaves? … Look at ourselves, ladies and gentlemen! Then at the wall; and ask how’s this wall, the great wall, which we call, perhaps miscall, civilization, to be built by (here the mirrors flicked and flashed) orts, scraps and fragments like ourselves? (BA 186–88)

The voice borrows Hitler’s braying tactics only to insist (with Three Guineas) on the spectators’ agency. As the war makers are “Ourselves” (including “myself”), so too “civilization” depends on “orts, scraps and fragments like ourselves.” But the voice seeks not just to exhort but to inspire: “What? You can’t descry it? All you can see of yourselves is scraps, orts and fragments? Well then listen to the gramophone affirming” (BA 188). After the mirrors splinter their longing for heroic spectacle (“a Grand Ensemble. Army; Navy; Union Jack; … the Church”) into scraps, orts and fragments while the braying megaphone urges them, even so, to build civilization’s broken wall, La Trobe’s cacophony of voices culminates in music. Sweating in the bushes, Jimmy fits a record on the gramophone—“Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart or … merely a traditional tune?”—and fills the pageant’s space with the music, the thing itself that “we” are: “Was that voice ourselves?” they wonder. “Scraps, orts, and fragments, are we, also, that?” (BA 189). Who speaks?—no thick little ego, no solitary, bounded mind, but the “we” who are the words, the music, the thing itself. The gramophone gestures toward a greater music of the human voice and of the world, a music not merely heard but felt and imagined as that great unfathomable “pattern” to which the narrative attunes us (MB 72).

In this voice too harmony and discord contend. In place of the hoped-for Grand Ensemble, the music bodies forth the “whole population of the mind’s immeasurable profundity,” and the community, with “the doom of sudden death hanging over” them, affirms itself not in its univocality but in the inexhaustible differences without which no “pattern,” “music,” or authentic “we” can exist (BA 189). The music’s inner voices now “strain[] asunder,” now are “solved; united,” made “whole”; now sound “On different levels ourselves” going “forward; flower gathering some on the surface” or “descending to wrestle with the meaning; but all comprehending; all enlisted” (BA 189). Against the enforced univocality of totalitarianism, parodied and deconstructed by the megaphone, the music gathers up in its aural mirror a dialogic community, to which real differences, as Arendt says, are so much less dangerous than indifference; a community of spectators who enact a public “form of being together” where “no one rules and no one obeys,” where people seek to “persuade each other.”⁵⁰ It is almost as if the pageant conjures the “we” Churchill vowed would “fight in the fields” against the Nazis’ scapegoating perversion of community, even as it bodies forth the outsider’s wish to give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world.⁵¹ Ephemeral as a cloud or play, perpetually moving between unity and dispersal, pageant and novel together listen for the metavoice of that “rambling capricious but somehow unified whole,” that we whose “hidden … pattern” connects “all life, all art, all waifs & strays” (D 5:135, 26 April 1938, MB 72).

“What’s more” (to borrow the narrator’s phrase), even as the narrative attunes us to this silent music, it also—like Reverend Streatfield—“speak[s] … in another capacity,” to which the “distant music” of twelve aeroplanes in formation that cuts his word in two draws attention (BA 193). The “opp … portunity” (broken but mended with three ps) to “illuminat[e] … our dear old church” recalls the opp portunity to build civilization’s broken wall on firmer ground and more lastingly. As the warplanes cut through a word that a human voice (“I speak only as one of the audience, one of ourselves”) completes around them, the question voiced at the end of the pageant reverberates: How rebuild the wall, a world laid ruin by war (BA 192)? That question lingers and floats with the play in the sky of the mind, as when Lucy sees in the lily pond leaves a floating world of Europe, India, Africa, America and wonders whether “civilisation”’s fragile “blue thread,” if broken here, might flourish elsewhere (PH 423, BA 205).

After the music ceases and Mrs. Manresa wipes her eyes, the audience’s applause seems to make an end; and then another after Reverend Streatfield’s proposed “vote of thanks to the gifted lady” fails for lack of an “object corresponding to this description” and “God Save the King” blares from the bushes (BA 194, 191). But as the mirrors and music finesse the moment when art leaves off and “real” life resumes, here again, with La Trobe nowhere in sight, the pageant prolongs itself in unscripted spectacle and applause:

Was that the end? The actors were reluctant to go. They lingered; they mingled. There was Budge … old Queen Bess. And the Age of Reason hobnobbed with the foreparts of the donkey. … And little England, still a child, sucked a peppermint drop. … Each still acted the unacted part conferred on them by their clothes. Beauty was on them. Beauty revealed them. …

“Look,” the audience whispered, “O look, look, look—” And once more they applauded; and the actors joined hands and bowed.

… Dispersed are we; who have come together. But, the gramophone asserted, let us retain whatever made that harmony.

O let us, the audience echoed …, keep together. For there is joy … in company.

… So … for the last time they applauded. (BA 195–97)

In this accidental tableau, the actors and spectators are the words, the music, the thing itself, beyond any Shakespeare, Beethoven, or La Trobe. The audience’s “Look … O look, look, look” recalls Woolf’s converse of Faust’s bargain that the day he says “Stay” to a passing moment shall be his last: “If one does not lie back & sum up & say to the moment, this very moment, stay you are so fair, what will be one’s gain, dying? No: stay, this moment. No one ever says that enough.”⁵² Struck by this “Beauty,” the departing guests fulfill La Trobe’s hope that they have “taken” her “gift”—come together in the sociability and community mediated by art (“O let us … keep together. For there is joy … in company”) to find the world transformed once the illusion ends (BA 196, 209).

The spectators’ spontaneous response to the postpageant tableau—“Oh look, look, look”—not only enacts Kant’s understanding of aesthetic judgments as positing that anyone who looks in freedom, that is, without personal interest, would find this sight beautiful but materializes the social dimension always implicit in the act of judging. Further, it illustrates Arendt’s view that a Kantian theodicy would have the “beauty of things in the world” at its heart (LK 30). Both this ending beyond the ending and the novel that captures it gesture toward beauty as a modernist theodicy, a belief that nothing holds people to life, community, and hope in face of history’s horrors more surely than the beauty of things in the world. “I’d no notion we looked so nice,” Lucy whispers between scenes. “Hadn’t she?” William wonders. “The children; the pilgrims; behind the pilgrims the trees, and behind them the fields—the beauty of the visible world took his breath away”; the “entrancing spectacle (to William) of dappled light and shade on half clothed, fantastically coloured, leaping, jerking, swinging legs and arms” makes him “clap[] till his palms stung” (BA 82, 93). During the preparations, clothes, crowns, paper swords, turbans lie flung over the grass in “pools of red and purple,” “flashes of silver,” giving off “warmth and sweetness” that draw butterflies; now the dispersing “pilgrims” feast on the found beauty that trails in the pageant’s wake (BA 62–3, 201).

“Beauty—isn’t that enough?” William ponders. “But here Isa fidgeted. … ‘No, not for us, who’ve the future,’ she seemed to say. The future disturbing our present” (BA 82). “Little England”’s part in this tableau on the cusp between pageant and “real” world evokes the future no “Beauty” can forestall. “A child new born” at the pageant’s beginning, she is “still a child” now, her future clouded by imminent war. As “little England” melts into this “real” child who, with George and baby Caro—glimpsed as a fist throwing a toy from a pram—embodies the unknown future, the spontaneous tableau sutures the pageant to a historical world that never ceases beginning (BA 11). Their scripted parts yield to their “unacted parts” as the actors carry the play’s expectant aura into “real” life (BA 153). The pageant achieves its “end” as the spectators see themselves performing a script of their own making: “‘He said she meant we all act. Yes, but whose play?’” (BA 199–200). The play for which, Bart says, they must “‘Thank the actors, not the author. … Or ourselves, the audience’” melts imperceptibly into a living theater, history in the making (BA 203).

For Isa, disturbed by the future, beauty is not enough. As the play yields the stage to “real” life, her question—“D’you think people change?” looms large in her own case. The novel’s last two scenes depict Isa and La Trobe in mysterious dialogue. Alone in the darkening landscape, La Trobe feels triumph and despair: “She could say to the world, You have taken my gift! … But what had she given? A cloud that melted into the other clouds on the horizon,” a “failure” that “meant nothing” (BA 209). Suddenly the tree that shelters her during the pageant bursts into activity, its boughs “pelted” by starlings like “winged stones,” humming with natural music “as if each bird plucked a wire”: “A whizz, a buzz rose from the bird-buzzing, bird-vibrant, bird-blackened tree. The tree became a rhapsody, a quivering cacophony, a whizz and vibrant rapture, branches, leaves, birds syllabling discordantly life, life, life, without measure, without stop devouring the tree. Then up! Then off!”⁵³ From feeling that she has “suffered triumph, humiliation, ecstasy, despair, for nothing,” La Trobe suddenly finds herself standing (like Antaeus) on an earth that metamorphoses before her eyes into the setting of her next play:

There was no longer a view—no Folly, no spire of Bolney Minster. It was land merely, no land in particular. She put down her case and stood looking at the land. Then something rose to the surface.

“I should group them,” she murmured, “here.” It would be midnight; there would be two figures, half concealed by a rock. The curtain would rise. What would the first words be? The words escaped her.

Again she lifted the heavy suitcase to her shoulder. She strode off across the lawn. … It was strange that the earth, with all those flowers incandescent … should still be hard. From the earth green waters seemed to rise over her. She took her voyage away from the shore, and, raising her hand, fumbled for the latch of the iron entrance gate. (BA 210–11)

Buoyed and replenished by the earth’s green waters, the dialogic artist sets off in her cockleshell toward new lands, new civilizations, the future potential in the “real” voices she weaves into art. Drinking alone in the “shelter” of the village pub, she drowses and nods and dreams in “oblivion” among “voices” until “Words without meaning—wonderful words” rise from her mind’s “fertile” depths, “above the intolerably laden dumb oxen plodding through the mud”; she sees “the high ground at midnight; there the rock; and two scarcely perceptible figures. Suddenly the tree was pelted with starlings. She set down her glass. She heard the first words” (BA 212).

As La Trobe listens in the pub, Isa and Giles are about to speak in the private house. Over dessert Lucy asks what the play meant—“The peasants; the kings; the fool and … ourselves?” Each looks at the play that still hangs “in the sky of the mind—moving, diminishing,” “drifting away to join the other clouds,” and sees “something different” (BA 212–13). Remembering “not the play but the audience dispersing,” the “looking-glasses and the voices in the bushes,” Isa wonders, “What did she mean?”; as the play fades in the darkening sky she thinks of the girl who “had gone skylarking with the troopers,” had “screamed” and “hit him. … What then?” (BA 213, 216). Reading of “mammoths, mastodons, prehistoric birds” in her Outline of History, Lucy unknowingly sets the stage for the scene La Trobe imagines by symbolically obliterating that “house in a hollow” Pointz Hall: “‘Prehistoric man, … half-human, half-ape, roused himself from his semi-crouching position and raised great stones’” (BA 218). Finally, Giles and Isa, left alone, become the “two figures, half concealed by a rock,” in La Trobe’s mind’s eye, “enormous” against the window, about to speak:

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.

… The window was all sky without colour. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks.

Then the curtain rose. They spoke. (BA 219, my emphasis)

Here Woolf restages Genesis for the last time, returning full circle to the jungle scene in The Voyage Out. Isa—who longs for change, for a new plot—is poised on the verge of speech. But whereas a fatal silence weighs down Rachel and Terence, Isa and Giles, abstracted into the first man and woman in a world always beginning, always to be created anew, face a future that despite the looming war remains unknown, “open and free.”⁵⁴ Added very late to the last page of Woolf’s adventure toward new civilizations, the Conrad allusion frames this scene as a challenge to Marlow’s famous speech act, the mortal-tasting “lie” he throws to the sentimental idea that women must be kept “out of” the public world “lest ours gets worse.”⁵⁵ Like a wave approaching this sandcastle, the scene brings a woman armed not with clubs or guns but with words—symbolic weapons that rise up menacingly all day, shaking their fists—out of a not so beautiful private world onto the public stage. Will Isa’s speech—which is to say ours, since “Our part is to be the audience”—only repeat, as some critics hold, like Mrs. Haines’s on the cesspool: “What a subject to talk about on a night like this!” … “What a subject to talk about on a night like this!” (BA 58, 3–4)? Or might she/we speak a new word, to whose infinite possibilities the myriad speech acts captured in the narrative attest? That Isa, thinking of the rape as the play floats in the sky of her mind, wonders “What then?”; that a new “life” may issue from their fight and embrace; that La Trobe awaits their words as she voyages away from the shore: all keep an unforeseeable future in play.

What does Isa say? Will her words join that “force of tremendous power” that is breaking through the private house to the public world? Like Civilization and Its Discontents, Between the Acts and Woolf’s modernist quest close with the eternal battle of Eros and Thanatos; and like Freud she forbears to rise up before her fellow men and women “as a prophet.”⁵⁶ We want to hear Isa, or think we do; we resist Woolf’s dissolution of her art’s objecthood. But while we await Isa’s words we resemble the spectators staring blankly at the empty stage as “The Present Time. Ourselves” unfolds. “We’re the oracles,” as a departing spectator says (BA 198). Only in the real world can the pageant and novel in the sky of the mind water and replenish a fighting force for what “we call, perhaps miscall, civilization” (BA 188). Woolf’s last ending beckons us over the edge of the page toward opp portunities that history’s violence continually interrupts but can never foreclose.

Overspilling its fictional bounds into a real future beyond its ending, Between the Acts is an eloquent capstone to Woolf’s and Bloomsbury’s thinking in public in the spirit of Enlightenment modernity. As Kant was hailed as the philosopher of the people—of the French Revolution, human rights, freedom, self-governance—the dialogic novel and the pageant created by a “we” of orts, scraps, and fragments address not a cult or an elite but the people, the demos, the community. Theater—the communal art par excellence, originating in public festival—calls out a “we” with roots in European democracy’s Athenian origins. In 1939, with Europe under totalitarian threat, the experimental pageant master La Trobe stages in public the spectators’ freedom to create, talk, judge, and differ in the sociability that is human beings’ highest end.

As Arendt observes in pursuing the political implications of Kant’s aesthetics, the spectators constitute the public realm in which the pageant appears. It is they who create the field of its possibility; even its makers and actors—even La Trobe with her blood, sweat, and tears—must exercise the spectator’s judgment to make their vision intelligible. In this sense, spectators “exist only in the plural,” as a “we” whose members are always imaginatively involved with each other, and who—by contrast with the univocal mass audiences of Nazi extravaganzas, and even the comparatively passive audiences of Parkerian pageants—at once preserve their individual judgment and enlarge it in communication and community with others (LK 63). As the example of Isa shows, Between the Acts’ narrative zeroes in on perspectival shifts between the private person encumbered with interests and prejudices and the spectator who looks and judges in company with others (“O look!”); who, since the spectators’ part is to have “no part,” to be “impartial,” “outside the game,” engaged in contemplation, can, at least in theory (theōrein, looking), cast off prejudice to see and judge disinterestedly—freely (LK 55).

For Kant, as we saw, to judge is not simply to give one’s opinion but to set aside “interested” sentiment and prejudice, merely private and personal criteria, to experience the imaginative freedom and pleasure that a work of art puts in play. It is to widen one’s thinking by taking others into account so as to form a judgment one believes ought to command assent from other unprejudiced spectators, whether or not it does in practice—a judgment for which one posits “subjective … universal validity.” This only seemingly paradoxical claim, we noted, is binding not on others but only on the one who judges. It posits not that everyone must agree in judgments of beauty but that, in judging, I think beyond my own interests, take into account “the possible, rather than the actual, judgments of others”; I consider people in general, not by empathy (exchanging my prejudices for what I imagine to be theirs) nor by going along with the crowd but by imagination: by thinking in my own identity where actually I am not.⁵⁷ To judge, Arendt observes, is neither to jettison critical thought for passive acceptance of others’ views nor to “cut off” one’s thinking from others’. It is to make others “present” by “force of imagination”: “one trains one’s imagination to go visiting,” in the spirit of that “right to go visiting” Kant posits in Perpetual Peace (LK 43). For “One judges always as a member of a community,” and ultimately as “a member of a world community,” in “one’s ‘cosmopolitan existence’”; one “take[s] one’s bearings from the idea, not the actuality, of being a world citizen,” “a world spectator”—like the Outsider who would give to England first what she desires of peace and freedom for the whole world (LK 75–76).

“The idea, not the actuality”: the gap between theory and practice guarded by the notion of subjective universal validity means that there is always room for disagreement. Against the totalitarian threat across the Channel, the difference and disagreement voiced in the pageant’s wake become practical proofs of the spectator’s freedom. The spectator promises nothing. “D’you get her meaning?” Lucy asks, adding when Isa demurs, “But you might say the same of Shakespeare” (BA 175). As the spectators disperse, their voices float in air, subsumed in the phrase “someone was saying,” punctuated by pauses in a rhythm of talking and listening:

“I do think,” someone was saying, “Miss Whatshername should have come forward and not left it to the rector … After all, she wrote it. … I thought it brilliantly clever … O my dear, I thought it utter bosh. Did you understand the meaning? Well, he said she meant we all act all parts. … He said, too, if I caught his meaning, Nature takes part. … Then there was the idiot. … Also, why leave out the Army, as my husband was saying, if it’s history? And if one spirit animates the whole, what about the aeroplanes? … Ah, but you’re being too exacting. After all, remember, it was only a village play. … For my part, I think they should have passed a vote of thanks to the owners. When we had our pageant, the grass didn’t recover till autumn … Then we had tents. … That’s the man, Cobbet of Cobb’s Corner, who wins all the prizes at all the shows. I don’t myself admire prize flowers, nor yet prize dogs …” (BA 197–98, Woolf’s ellipses)

The music of spectatorship sounds in this medley, a sort of vocal reprise ad libitum (Latin: at pleasure) of the instrumental voices that earlier strain apart, crash, solve, unite, advance on the surface or dive under to wrestle with meaning, “all comprehending; all enlisted” in the “mind’s immeasurable profundity” (BA 188–89). The narrator who wonders of La Trobe’s musical finale, “Was that voice ourselves? Scraps, orts and fragments, are we, also, that?” transcribes the spectators’ talk as discord and harmony, ephemeral as a cloud or play, perpetually moving between unity and dispersal within that “rambling capricious but somehow unified whole” whose unseen “pattern” connects “all life, all art, all waifs & strays” (BA 189).

These voices, not judging in theory but talking in practice, end prospectively, like pageant and novel: “‘Next time … next time … ’” (BA 201). If the gap between the subjective universal validity of judgments and their actual practice of spectatorship seems all but unbridgeable, at least one spectator muses, “was that, perhaps, what she meant? … that if we don’t jump to conclusions, if you think, and I think, perhaps one day, thinking differently, we shall think the same?” (BA 200). In its tentative aspiration the question enacts spectatorship as a public “form of being together” where “no one rules and no one obeys,” where people seek to “persuade each other” (LK 141). Its abstractness registers the sensus communis or common understanding, the community sense, as alive, not written in stone but actively held and perpetually open to debate, critique, reaffirmation—change.⁵⁸ When La Trobe refuses thanks as the dialogic pageant’s “author,” when Reverend Streatfield doffs the authority of his office to speak “only as one of the audience,” when the spectators who at first mockingly fold their hands as if in church later repeat and debate his remarks, each performs spectatorship as thinking in freedom and community with others.⁵⁹

“What is important is not that the orts, scraps, and fragments who compose this “we” should “think the same” (the totalitarian spectacle’s aim) but that in their individuality and freedom they can imagine doing so “one day.” Repeated in fractal relation from pageant to “real” world to real world, this prospective view points beyond story or event to “the truth about this vast mass that we call the world”: meaning lies not in the event (“Don’t bother about the plot: the plot’s nothing”) but in the way it opens into “new horizons for the future” (MB 72, BA 90–92; LK 56). So the pageant floats in the sky of the mind, “melt[ing] into the other clouds on the horizon,” and the spectators carry it into the world, giving it meaning as only they can, in the myriad ways summed up by Lucy’s postpageant vision by the fishpond of “speckled, streaked, and blotched … beauty, power, and glory in ourselves” (BA 205, 209). As the spontaneous tableau beyond the ending suggests, the pageant, like the novel, has its “end” (formal and teleological) in “Ourselves”: the spectators who are in the largest sense its protagonist, whom art enables momentarily to escape their—our—thick little egos to see ourselves reflected in the future of the community and human species that little “England” embodies and evokes (LK 57). In Arendt’s words, “the Beautiful teaches us to ‘love without self-interest,’” “to liberate ourselves” from “private conditions and circumstances” so as “to attain that relative impartiality that is the specific virtue of judgment”; to find that we have “an ‘interest’ in disinterestedness,” in thinking and feeling as (in Streatfield’s words) “part of the whole.”⁶⁰

“And if we’re left asking questions,” someone says, “isn’t it a failure, as a play? I must say I like to feel sure if I go to the theatre, that I’ve grasped the meaning … Or was that, perhaps, what she meant?” (BA 199–200, ellipsis Woolf’s). Does the pageant fail “as a play”? The voice first assumes that there is one meaning, “the” meaning, then wonders whether La Trobe meant to dispel that idea. Is it not the pageant’s freedom from fixed, ascertainable meaning that signals its success—indeed, its very nature—as art: beauty, purposive without purpose; a new form, another nature, which gives rise to concepts without end, yet to which no concept is adequate; which offers not singular, universal meaning but the “gift” of pleasure and sociability, of talk as changing, ephemeral, and free as clouds? Against the young poets Woolf addresses in “The Leaning Tower,” who declare that art makes nothing happen, Between the Acts’ study of spectatorship proposes that art makes something important happen, not despite but because its effects are as diffuse as the shower that rescues the pageant from incomprehension. Diverging from her monologist friend Tom, Woolf allies her “new idea … about the drama” with nature—and human nature—as change: with the sea that demolishes systems like sandcastles, rain like all people’s tears, art like clouds in the sky of the mind that regenerate feeling and community, private thought and public speech. To fail would be to make nothing happen: to fail to create beauty and the pleasures—free, disinterested judging, talk, community, a sense of “the whole” that preserves the individual, hope for the future—that beauty in its freedom occasions.

In its focus on the spectator’s freedom, Between the Acts reflects on Woolf’s long career of fighting by thinking in the intimate public that was Bloomsbury and the greater, ever widening public in which her voice continues to sound. Woolf belonged to that public as writer or Schriftstellerin—her profession on the Nazi list, stamped “Geheim!” (secret), that names the Woolfs among the first in England to be arrested—and until 1938 as publisher, disseminating others’ voices along with her own.⁶¹ Totalitarian regimes can exist only by suppressing the freedom and truth telling of public speech, filling the vacuum with propaganda and jingoism. For Kant, in fact, “the most important political freedom” is “the freedom to speak and to publish”; and publicity is the very key to political good and evil (LK 39). Publicity—as essential to a good state as censorship to a bad one—solves “the problem of organizing a state” “even for a race of devils, if only they are intelligent,” for if rational, they must assent to “universal laws for their preservation,” even if each is “secretly inclined to exempt himself”; and a constitution designed so that they “check each other” produces the same “public conduct” as if each were not so inclined.⁶² Kant’s “devils,” Arendt notes, are simply “those who are ‘secretly inclined to exempt’ themselves’,” which to do publicly would expose them as “enemies of the people, even if these people were a race of devils. And in politics, as distinguished from morals, everything depends on ‘public conduct’” (LK 17–18, emphasis in original).

When Woolf reflected that as co-owner of a press she was “the only woman in England free to write what I like,” she identified her freedom with her public voice (D 3:43, 22 September 1925). Owning a press, she could attack and outmaneuver “Hitler in England,” could think in public on the world stage—a feat possible only in a “good” state, one that in principle protects public speech, whatever its practical obstacles.⁶³ Throughout her writing life the outsider Woolf exercised the free speech protected by Britain’s democratic state—a freedom invoked by Leonard when, in 1939, he discounted Hitler’s and Mussolini’s impact on “the future of civilization,” since “Even a semi-civilized state like Britain or France” could vanquish any dictator “if it remained true to the principles and traditions of its semi-civilization.”⁶⁴ A year later Virginia alone held out against the prospect of a fascist victory while talking “about Civilisation” one evening with Leonard, Eliot, Clive Bell, and Saxon Sydney-Turner: “All the gents. against me. … Said very likely … this war means that the barbarian will gradually freeze out culture. … Clive also pessimised—saw the light going out gradually. So I flung some rather crazy theories into the air.”⁶⁵ Having fought to escape Marlow’s “beautiful world” and to forge a public voice, as the Bloomsbury gents (even the Jewish Leonard, a Cambridge Apostle after all) had not had to do, Woolf held to faith in the power of free public speech to vanquish Hitler in England and abroad.

When Woolf swam to her death on 28 March 1941, perhaps it was not that she had ceased to believe in civilization’s future but that she could fight no more. If, like La Trobe, she could re-create the world only in collaboration with her audience; if hearing no “echo” from the wartime public felt like part of her death, neither the madness to which she attributed her suicide nor her death negate the future that pageant and novel leave open.⁶⁶ “‘Let it blaze against the yew trees,’” says Bernard of the “One life” the six friends have made. “‘There. It is over. Gone out’” (W 229). Woolf’s late writings voyage toward a “whole world” as beautiful in its unfathomable purposes as a work of art. Herself gone out, her work survives—lives beyond her own life, lives more and further and better—in the private and public conversations, the public thinking and fighting, it continues to inspire. Woolf’s legacy and Bloomsbury’s is the unfinished and unfinishable fight for civilization—peace, freedom, art, beauty, sociability—that they hand on to the later generations of the “whole world,” figured “first” in “little England,” little George, and baby Caro’s fist.