In her work Three Guineas, Woolf attempts to answer the question, “[h]ow in your opinion are we to prevent war?” (Guineas ch. 1). She explores this question through a strongly gendered lens, asserting the equivalence of patriarchal and fascist oppression, where fascism is just the patriarchy with a widened scope, “interfering now with…liberty” not just based on sex, but also on race and religion (ch. 3). In this extended essay, she thus exposes the educated Englishman’s hypocrisy of striving to fight the dictatorship abroad while failing to recognize the dictatorship that is rampant in their own country. Nevertheless, Woolf does not maintain a wholly pessimistic stance. Conjuring a photograph of a dictator with ruined houses and dead bodies behind him, Woolf asserts “that we cannot dissociate ourselves from [the] figure [of the dictator] but are ourselves that figure” (ch. 3). While aligning ourselves with the tyrant in the photo may be frightening and repulsive, Woolf claims that this recognition shows us not that we are “passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience but by our thoughts and actions [we] can ourselves change that figure” (ch. 3). In other words, Woolf maintains that even in the face of war when violence and oppression feel inescapable, we still have the power to make change through our beliefs and actions.
In Between the Acts, Woolf’s final novel set in a small English village just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Woolf engages with these questions of passivity versus action and what it means to resist violence and oppression in one’s own life. As the villagers join to watch a pageant on a summer’s day in June of 1939, Woolf shows how different characters engage with ideas of responsibility and agency. While resisting any concrete conclusions, Woolf draws attention to the little scraps and fragments of possibilities for change that emerge in the margins of the larger storyline.
Notions of responsibility are widespread throughout Woolf’s novel, with convictions of passivity permeating the small English village. Indeed, various characters see their everyday existence as passing them by, with little ability to resist this never-ending flow of life. For instance, Isa feels “entangled” (Woolf, Between 5) and “prisoned” (61) by her husband, weighed down “by the leaden duty she owe[s] to others” (62). Giles, who feels he had no choice in his profession—becoming a stockbroker rather than a farmer, as he would have wished—laments that “one thing led to another; and the conglomeration of things…held [him] fast, like a fish in water” (43). Furthermore, Bart, when describing Lucy’s recurring inability to decide whether to settle at Kensington or Kew, relates that “this led to that; that to the other” (22), so every year, Lucy takes lodgings at Hastings. Three different characters thus describe life as a force that “presse[s] you flat” (43). Life seems to be something that happens to a passive individual who must accept their circumstances and, as Giles sees it, come home for the weekend and change.
This passivity is also present during the pageant, where the narrator describes the villagers’ thoughts as they return to their seats. The villagers think about their daily lives in which they “answer to the infernal, agelong and eternal order,” an order that is a procession of labor, “‘[w]orking, serving, pushing, striving, earning wages” (Woolf, Between 107). Is it not this very procession that Giles sees himself as participating in or that Isa views as something she must bear the burden of? Indeed, Woolf exposes the processional quality to passivity, where humans follow mindlessly along on this march of labor, feeling pressed down by some pre-existing order. Indeed, Woolf questions this procession heavily in Three Guineas, reminding women—and men too—that they have a choice in joining this march or not (ch. 2). Furthermore, when an unidentified voice poses a question at the pageant asking if this procession is happening here, a voice emphatically disproves this. Rather, the voice claims, this march of labor occurs “[w]hen ears are deaf and the heart is dry” (Woolf, Between 107). As Woolf writes in her essay, we must criticize the spiritual, moral, and intellectual value of professional life, which makes people “lose their senses” (Guineas, ch. 2) over time. Their sight, sound, speech, sense of proportion, and humanity all are lost, leaving “[o]nly a cripple in a cave” (ch. 2). For Woolf, then, this passive procession leaves humans as a shell of what they once were.
However, if this procession does not occur at the pageant, as the voice strongly asserts, a new question thus emerges: does this pageant, therefore, allow for an escape from this agelong order? Or is the pageant a new procession that perpetuates the passivity of its spectators? In her essay, Mia Spiro argues that while the pageant itself “mirrors the workings of propaganda” (132), it is undermined by interruptions and intervals. Spiro asserts that these interruptions break the illusion of the play, thus allowing “people [to] begin to think critically” (133). In other words, while the pageant itself may be a new procession that perpetuates passivity, it is in the cracks and seams of this pageant—when individuals’ comments intersperse the play’s dialogue, when intervals let people discuss and debate, and when interruptions of cows and rain seem to save the pageant but, nonetheless, call attention to its fractures—where moments of potential resistance to passivity arise. In fact, for Isa, it is in the intervals—the moments when the play is at a standstill—that she can assert some agency over her patriarchal husband. Because it is in these moments when Giles expects her attention, Isa can deny him this, thus engaging with Woolf’s methods of indifference and absenting oneself (Guineas ch. 3). Indeed, over the course of the day she refuses to speak or look at him (Woolf, Between 100), rejects meeting his eyes (158), and, even after the pageant is over, declines any engagement with him, as she does by refusing the banana he offers her (192). Thus, Isa, by withholding any interaction with Giles, makes her presence desirable (Woolf, Guineas ch. 3), and it is the space of the pageant’s intervals and fractures that allow her to assert herself in this way.
The final scene of Woolf’s novel, where Giles and Isa prepare for their fight, becomes a moment of immense importance in establishing little possibilities for liberation. At this moment, Isa and Giles become “two scarcely perceptible figures” among the rocks on “the high ground at midnight” (Woolf, Between 191), thus embodying the vision of Miss La Trobe’s next play. What this final scene solidifies is the prehistoric nature of this vision, where the figures are “dwellers in caves” at a time “before roads were made, or houses” (197). In other words, they become the half-man, half-apes represented in the Outline of History book Lucy reads just before heading off to bed. As Gillian Beer contends in her chapter titled “Virginia Woolf and Prehistory,” “[p]rehistory is anterior to knowledge. It lies beneath the polarizations and emplotments of knowledge” (12). In this setting of pre-knowledge, new knowledge can be built from the ground up. In Three Guineas, Woolf insists on the importance of women acting as outsiders, which allows them freedom from the male-dominated structures of discourse (Guineas ch. 3). In short, by remaining outsiders, women can engage with possibilities of creating anew, rather than repeating the male procession. Therefore, the prehistoric as anterior to knowledge manifests these same outsider qualities. It represents the potential for Isa and Giles to rebuild outside the constraints of male, patriarchal discourse, thus providing a space where “another life might be born” (Woolf, Between 197). A new life, not yet entangled by leaden duties or infernal orders, but starting fresh from a place where discourse has yet to be constructed. Indeed, by becoming a part of Miss La Trobe’s future play, Isa and Giles seem to encapsulate the artistic dream discussed by Woolf in her extended essay: “the dream of peace, the dream of freedom” (197). While war and violence are on the horizon for these characters, Woolf still ends with a fragment of hope for positive change.
In Between the Acts, Woolf explores how feelings of passivity emerge in a processional manner, viewing life as something one has little control over. While the annual pageant perpetuates many of these processional qualities, it is between the acts of the pageant that little moments of agency and resistance are able to emerge. In this novel, Woolf asks us to look beyond passive spectatorship towards a potential for our thoughts, beliefs, and conscious actions to make necessary changes in the face of patriarchal and fascist oppression.
Works Cited
Beer, Gillian. “Virginia Woolf and Prehistory.” Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground: Essays by Gillian Beer, Edinburgh University Press, 1996, pp. 6-28. De Gruyter, https://doi-org.proxy3.library.mcgill.ca/10.1515/9781474464321.
Spiro, Mia. “Between Public and Private Acts: Woolf’s Anti-Fascist Strategies.” Woolf and the City, edited by Elizabeth F. Evans and Sarah E. Cornish, Liverpool University Press, 2010, pp. 130-135. Oxford Academic, https://doi.org/10.5949/liverpool/9780984259830.003.0017.
Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. 1941. Oxford University Press, 2008.
---. Three Guineas. 1938. Project Gutenberg Australia, Nov. 2002, https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200931h.html.
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