Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 38.1
March 2012: 249-275
The Lily Pool, the Mirrors, and the Outsiders:
Envisioning Home and England in
Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts
Ching-fang Tseng
Department of English
National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan
Abstract
Written against the historical context of the threats of fascism and World War
II, Between the Acts’s portrayal of rural England that highlights its traditional
way of life, the everlasting rural landscape, and the pageant then in vogue
seemingly echoes the prevailing national imagination during the war-crisis
years. Rather than replicating the nostalgic ruralist vision of England on the
verge of war, the novel not only furthers Woolf’s critique of the dictators in
England in Three Guineas, but also enacts the essay’s visionary idea of the
“Outsiders’ Society” in the setting of the English country. A prominent figure
in Between the Acts is the cultivated observer in rural England, who is there to
apprehend landscape as well as the universal evolutionary order.
Encapsulating the ocularized social power of the ruling landowning class, he
embodies Englishness and “civilization” as the apex of the developmental
progress of humankind. Woolf responds to such Englishness by positing
episodes in the novel involving La Trobe’s village pageant. The pageant
invokes an “Outsiders’ Society” composed of heterogeneous, anonymous
private spectators in resistance to the hegemonic perception of the
gentry-audience, thus making the latter think home landscape, “Ourselves,”
and civilization in a different light. At the same time, the “Outsiders’ Society”
is also enacted through Between the Acts’s multi-layered, open-ended, and
self-reflexive form, which disallows closure and totality of meaning and
predominance of the authorial vision.
Keywords
Between the Acts, Three Guineas, rural England, landscape, the cultivated observer,
Englishness, the “Outsiders’ Society,” the Outsider-artist

I express my sincere gratitude to the anonymous readers of an earlier version of the essay,
whose constructive comments help me improve the argument and organization of the essay.
250 Concentric 38.1 March 2012
Published posthumously in 1941, Virginia Woolf’s last novel Between the Acts
is noted for its thematization of England and Englishness, and its hybrid, interrupted
form that contains the playwright La Trobe’s village pageant and the cacophonic,
fragmentary voices its performance effects. Written against the historical context of
the threats of fascism and World War II, the novel’s portrayal of rural England
highlighting its traditional way of life, the everlasting rural landscape, and the
pageant then in vogue seemingly echoes the prevailing national imagination during
the war-crisis years, which nostalgically yearns for the placid, eternal home as
embodied by the idyllic English countryside. In correlating social community with
the audience of the pageant or art, the novel’s exploration of how to ensure the
survival of community as the nation faces the threat of obliteration continues and
complicates Woolf’s historical reflection on war and dictatorship in Three Guineas.
As Patricia Klindiens Joplin points out, Woolf in Between the Acts “seizes hold of
the gap, the distance, the interval, and the interrupted structure not as a terrible
defeat of the will to continuity or aesthetic unity [but] . . . elevates [them] to a
positive formal and metaphysical principle” (89). Likewise, Pamela Caughie argues
that the novel “gives [contingencies and interruptions] preference, and those
numerous breaks many critics see as a sign of discontinuity and a faulting of
structure actually enable the acts [of art] to be continually renewed” (53). While
some critics pay attention to Between the Acts’s unconventional presentation of the
form and audience of art and the artist’s role that diverge sharply from Woolf’s
previous visions of such, still others focus on Between the Acts’s anti-fascist
meditation on the communal mode as experimentally pluralistic or alternatively
unified by creative art. While Brenda Silver suggests that the pageant in the novel
recreates the Elizabethan playhouse and “provide[s] a form of community that will
survive the coming war” (296), Michele Pridmore-Brown maintains that the
community that takes form among the audience of La Trobe’s pageant “emphasizes
the particularities of the auditor or receiver” and by means of the “noise of
gramophone” “subverts the political message propelling civilization into World War
II” (416, 419). Similarly, Christine Froula asserts that “the pageant’s freedom from
fixed, ascertainable meaning” gives rise to a community of diverse, discordant free
spectators “against the totalitarian threat across the Channel” (322, 320). Yet despite
that the novel’s radically experimental vision of community represents the
Outsider-artist’s independence and creativity in defiance of dictatorial control as has
been discussed in Three Guineas, Between the Acts presents a portrayal of
communal life that is culturally and socially specific as it ponders the ideas of
England and Englishness in a precarious, ominous moment when the nation faces
Ching-fang Tseng 251
war. As Alex Zwerdling writes, the novel displays an “acute longing for an earlier,
more civilized phase of English culture” while harboring an apocalyptic view of the
community’s degeneration and decay as “a prehistory of the present” (308, 317).
Jed Esty perceives the novel’s nostalgic “nativist turn,” its interest in traditional,
pastoral English culture, as being used as “a bulwark against . . . continental fascism
and British imperialism” (93, 96). Gillian Beer also argues that the community
depicted in Between the Acts “typifies the attitudes that have brought the country to
the brink of war and of fascism,” and that significantly the novel “sought to produce
another idea of England” (129-30, 147).
Around the time of completing Three Guineas, Woolf had already outlined a
tentative scheme for her next novel in her journal on April 26, 1938:
. . . why not Poyntzet Hall: a centre: all lit. discussed in connection
with real little incongruous living humor; & 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—the present state of my mind?
And English country; & a scenic old house—& a terrace where
nursemaids walk? & people passing—& a perpetual variety & change
from intensity to prose & facts. (135)
The passage clearly reveals, after denouncing dictators and militarism and
deliberately adopting the Outsider role with the resolve to have no allegiance to
country in Three Guineas, that Woolf’s new novel will feature the traditional life
and culture in rural England which represent a mythologized notion of Englishness.
And yet the seeming discontinuity or contradistinction of Three Guineas and
Between the Acts is actually illusory. For just as she decides to have “‘I’ rejected”
and “‘We’ substituted” envisioning a “unified whole” that is nonetheless “rambling
capricious,” the novel furthers her critique of dictatorship not only on the continent
but also in England, and moreover enacts the essay’s visionary idea of the
“Outsiders’ Society” in the setting of the English country as it meditates on
communal constitution and survival, as well as the renewal of notions of
Englishness and civilization. Rather than finding solace or escape in the nostalgic
ruralist vision of England on the verge of war, Between the Acts exposes the
hereditary and masculinist class power embodied by the dictatorial, privileged “I”
in the traditional rural locality, who represents too the universalist “perfect type” of
252 Concentric 38.1 March 2012
“Man” delineated in Three Guineas. Governing rural England and also the
masculine public world, the elite ruler exemplifies what Woolf in her October 26,
1940 journal entry describes as “the complete Insider” who personifies the “glory of
the nineteenth century” and does “a service like Roman roads” (Diary 333). He is
the eminent public man who has made the mainstay of the society; he has the honor
to chronicle the history of the imperial nation whose master narrative nonetheless is
indifferent to “the forests & the will o the wisps” (Diary 333). Epitomic of “the
complete Insider,” the gentleman squire in Between the Acts manifestly acts the role
of the hegemonic cultivated observer. As his cultivated gaze apprehends landscape
as well as the universal evolutionary order, he not only encapsulates the ocularized
social power of the ruling landowning class in rural England, but also embodies
simultaneously Englishness and civilization signifying the apex of the
developmental progress of humankind. Yet in place of the stratified social order
paternalistically ruled by the cultivated observer and naturalistically mirrored by the
rural landscape, Woolf envisions in Between the Acts an unbounded, dynamic, and
yet unified “We.” The Outsider-artist’s creative, experimental vision of community
does not merely defy and challenge the thriving fascism on the continent. It
determinedly and profoundly contests the aestheticized social order rooted in
England while endeavoring to transcend both social and national boundaries.
Making the gentry-audience perceive home landscape, “Ourselves,” and civilization
in an alternative way, La Trobe’s village pageant triggers the “Outsiders’ Society”
composed of heterogeneous, anonymous private spectators in resistance to the
hegemonic cultivated perception. And as the Outsider-artist’s art is meant to
facilitate and nourish community based on unconstrained, creative private visions,
the “Outsiders’ Society” is at the same time enacted as well through Between the
Acts’s multi-layered, open-ended, and self-reflexive form, which disallows closure
and totality of meaning and predominance of the authorial vision.
“The Green Mirror” and the Lily Pool:
The Cultivated Observer at Pointz Hall
Depicting life in the English countryside, Between the Acts mainly recounts
the festive annual village pageant for which the local gentry gather on a June day in
1939. Its portrayal of the domestic and communal lives in the country centers on the
Olivers’ country house, Pointz Hall, where the continuity of tradition and the idyllic
life and rural landscape seem to withstand the flux of time. The setting and subject
of Between the Acts evidently resonate with the prevalent imagining of England in
Ching-fang Tseng 253
Woolf’s society, which regards countryside England, the South Country that
projects “an organic and natural society of ranks” (Howkins 80) or the so-called
“Constable country of the mind” (Potts 160), as embodiment of the everlasting
Home signifying order, health, stability as opposed to the ephemerality, decadence,
and unnaturalness of urban modernity. Nevertheless, the stable, stratified social
order depicted in Between the Acts, whose narrative progression pivots on the
activities at Pointz Hall, also reflects the rootedness of the contemporary national
imagination in the rural tradition that dates far back to the Middle Ages. Raymond
Williams has observed: “English attitudes to the country, and to idea of rural life,
persisted with extraordinary power” in the modern times (2). And the persistent
“forms of the older ideas and experiences” associated with rural life in the English
country attest to the resilience of the aristocracy after the ascendancy of the middle
classes (2). Furthermore, with its uninterrupted tradition and habits, the way of life
in rural England as constituted by the “idealized ‘organic’” class and gender
hierarchies is characterized by a “solidarity of place” which postulates the
hierarchized “natural order” of the manor house and the village, of the domestic
household and the public life in the pastoral country (Davidoff 44, 46). And as
Leonore Davidoff points out, life in rural England that seemingly reflects natural
harmony and endurance relies on a deliberate “blurring” of “the aesthetic” and “the
social,” as the naturalized domestic and communal lives and also the rural
landscape appear not only altogether integrated but also “aesthetically pleasing”
(45).
In Between the Acts, the continuity of the traditional social order and habits in
the country manifestly echoes the timeless rural landscape owned and appreciated
by the gentry. The local genteel families have lived in the secluded countryside for
many a generation: in the present time, they still seem able to reply to the “roll call”
of Mr. Figgis, author of the 1833 Guide Book—“Adsum; I’m here, in place of my
grandfather or great-grandfather” (52, 75). The family names of the villagers, on the
other hand, can be found in “Domesday Book,” the census made by William the
Conqueror in 1086, which is an earlier date of descent than the gentry’s in the rural
locality (31).1 The changeless, uninterrupted way of life in the country corresponds
with the enduring natural scenery, which seems to mirror the organic social
harmony. The view the gentry enjoy has always remained the same: as Mr. Figgis
observed, Pointz Hall “commanded a fine view of the surrounding country. . . . The
spire of Bolney Minster, Rough Norton woods, and on an eminence rather to the left,
Hogben’s Folly”; what he said “still told the truth” as “1830 was true in 1939” (52).
1
For more discussion on this, see Johnston 260.
254 Concentric 38.1 March 2012
Under “the shelter of the old wall” in the garden, the Oliver family and the guests
taking their after-lunch coffee share not only the shade but also the view: “They
looked at the view; they looked at what they knew, to see if what they knew might
perhaps be different today. Most days it was the same” (52, 53). Like the annual
village pageant which repeats every year the same preparatory procedure as if
always the “same chime followed the same chime,” the enduring view of landscape
the gentry look at bespeaks the naturalness of the social order, under which the
ruling landowning class plays the role of the leisured audience appreciating culture
and natural beauty (22).
As Bart Oliver blithely states, “Our part . . . is to be the audience,” “a very
important part too,” or as his son Giles sulkily grumbles, “‘We remain
seated’—‘We are the audience,’” the gentry as the privileged ruling class in the
country has been the leisured viewers rather than the serving or toiling laborers (58,
59). The pervading imagery of chairs in Between the Acts underscores leisure as the
distinctive prerogative of the gentry: there are the assortment of chairs prepared for
the gentry-audience on the terrace (75), the “Windsor chairs” of Lucy Swithin and
Bart Oliver in the barn (108), and the “monumental” chair in which the old squire
dozes off after dark (218). Though on the June day the village pageant is the reason
why the local gentry gather together, it is their unfailing, spontaneous congruous
appreciation of the view that unequivocally indicates their class distinction as the
landowning class.
The pursuit of “natural beauty” or “pleasing prospects” in the English country
first emerged in the eighteenth century, when the continual process of land
enclosing which had begun hundreds of years before intensified (Williams 122).
The enclosure made by the English landlords at the expense of large extents of
villages and farmlands, as Williams puts it, is nothing less than acts of “imposition
and theft” (122). With the historic accelerated enclosure and attendant brutal
changes to the land and rural way of life, a newly “discovered” countryside is
taking shape as a “cultural and aesthetic object,” rather than merely site of
agricultural production (Bermingham 9). As Ann Bermingham asserts, “Precisely
when the countryside . . . was becoming unrecognizable, . . . it was offered as the
image of the homely, the stable, the historical” (9). The landlords then begin to
build landscape parks and prospect views which emphasize in particular the notions
of “nature” and “the natural,” making the landscape they hold and create look as if
emptied of artificial boundaries and signs of labor or communication (10).
Architecturally arranged to look merged with the surrounding landscape, the
country house indicative of land ownership, together with the landlord’s
Ching-fang Tseng 255
aggrandized property and agricultural production, thus seem to become part of the
timeless natural scenery and the processes of nature. At the same time, the viewing
or appreciating of the aestheticized landscape that embodies naturalness and eternal
beauty is self-consciously taken up by the landlords, who endeavor to agriculturally
as well as aesthetically improve the country estate, as “an experience in itself,” a
routine, pleasurable practice of art that indicates taste and social status (Williams
121). From an elevated position, such as on the “terrace” and “lawns” which
seamlessly conjoin the country house and the receding surrounding landscape, or
from the country house’s “large windows” overlooking the estate’s expanded layout,
the landlord observes the landscape he owns (Williams 124). The aesthetic
appreciation of landscape is performed by a single person from specific angles,
following a proper set of perceptual rules and framing structures which correspond
with the compositions and light gradations in painting. The observer knows the
proper procedure of “jockeying for position, of screwing up the eyes, of moving
back and forth, of rearranging objects in the imagination” (Barrell, The Idea of
Landscape 5). As Williams succinctly remarks, “It is in the act of observing that this
landscape forms” (126). Such observation of landscape thus has as much to do with
its physical contours as with applying abstract principles of beauty, which
analogously can be applied to paintings and literature on landscape. Mastering the
aesthetic appreciation of landscape requires the cultivation of correct taste, and its
“genuinely abstract aesthetic,” ultimately “a poetic or pictorial convention,” entails
separation and control, characteristics of the privileged observing position occupied
by the leisured, educated ruling class (Williams 126). The cultivated or aesthetic
perception of landscape therefore betokens not only the landowning class’s
economic and political dominance but also its cultural hegemony.
In Between the Acts, the social power of the ruling landowning class is
distinctly ocularized, as the gentry’s distinctive practice of looking at the view
suggests not just their ossified, insular class purview and class self-identity, but the
fixity of the hierarchized class division in the English country. The novel describes
in a vivid, detailed fashion the topography of the Olivers’ country estate, which
represents the extent and composition of the landscape view the gentry collectively
share. Significantly, located at the steep end of the “stretch of turf half a mile in
length and level,” which is an integral part of the view the Oliver family command,
the lily pool literally delimits the gentry’s social space and scope of vision, and also
symbolizes their self-interested, narcissistic class identification (10). Within the
gentry’s perceptual bounds emblematized by the reflecting surface of the lily pool,
the pleasant view of the country landscape bespeaking the everlasting peace and
256 Concentric 38.1 March 2012
harmony of home and the social order is all the gentry habitually “see.” Beyond the
lily pool, though, is still the nether, scarcely trodden space outside the gentry’s
purview: “Beyond the lily pool the ground sank again, and in that dip of the ground,
bushes and brambles had mobbed themselves together. It was always shady;
sun-flecked in summer, dark and damp in winter” (56). However self-evident it
appears, reflection on the lily pool hinges on suppression of the irregular,
incomprehensible views occluded by and alien to the changelessly illumined
surface. Just as the villagers are “[s]wathed in conventions” and “couldn’t see”
there might be alternative ways of living and doing things, the gentry-audience who
“respected the conventions” avoids walking beyond the lily pool to step on the
sunken ground reserved for the villager-actors, or for the children catching
butterflies in the summer (64, 151).
When looking at the view that embodies the eternal home and essentialized,
mythologized Englishness, the gentry also perceive their collective bond and class
self-identity that are repeatedly authenticated and assured. This explains why the
recently-built houses seen to impair the beauty of the view that conjures up the
gentry’s gratifying familiar sense of self should aggravate them and provoke their
criticism. Looking for seats before the pageant starts, some members of the
gentry-audience express their disapproval of the obtrusive sights impinging upon
the view: “That hideous new house at Pyes Corner! What an eyesore! And those
bungalows!—have you seen’em?” (75). As a tangible, visible symbolization of their
social status, the view of landscape evoking the gentry’s sense of belonging makes
them unwittingly assume “some . . . determinate relation to its givenness as sight
and site” and associate their class self-identity with the natural scenery (Mitchell 2).
Back in 1918, Woolf in her review essay “The Green Mirror” already paid attention
to the “family theme” in early twentieth-century British novels that highlights the
perpetuated class self-identity and prosperity of the hereditarily propertied family
(215). Commenting on the namesake in Hugh Walpole’s novel The Green Mirror,
which has always hung in the drawing room of the Trenchard family, Woolf writes:
“Many of generations of the Trenchard family had seen themselves reflected in its
depths. Save for themselves and for the reflection of themselves they had never
seen anything else for perhaps three hundred years, and in the year 1902 they were
still reflected with perfect lucidity” (214). The treasured “green mirror” betokens
the fixed and complacent inherited self-image of the Trenchard family, which
remains lustrously distinct even in the modern era. The enduring self-image
reflected by “the green mirror” also bespeaks the family’s unbroken material
advantage: “If there was any room behind the figures for chair or table, tree or field,
Ching-fang Tseng 257
chairs, tables, trees and fields were now and always had been the property of the
Trenchard family” (214-15). Furthermore, signifying not only the self-image of one
Trenchard family but also that of the entire ruling class, “the green mirror”
represents as well “a type of the pig-headed British race with its roots in the past
and its head turned backwards” (215). While betokening inherited familial prestige
and fortune, the indestructible patrimonial mirror symbolizes the uninterrupted
narcissistic self-identification of the ruling class and also the nation which is
accompanied by an insular and backward-looking inclination. Signaling the
prerogative of the landed genteel families, the view of landscape in Between the
Acts patently serves a function similar to the imperishable hereditary “green
mirror,” through which the gratifying, abiding self-image epitomic of class
supremacy and Englishness is repeatedly imagined and affirmed.
As it emblematizes the landed gentry’s class dominance and self-identity, the
lily pool synecdochic of the view essentially signifies the masculinist preeminence
of the universalist cultivated perception mastered by the gentleman squire. Between
the Acts notably opens with Bart Oliver’s talk in the big room with Mrs. Haines, the
gentleman farmer’s wife, about the cesspool and the panoramic view of
territorialized national history. As symbolized by the big room’s windows which
appear at the beginning and the end of the novel, what the old patriarch perceives
represents the hegemonic view epitomic of Englishness and civilization that
dominates the rural locality as well as the national public. And if the windows of the
big room symbolize the masculinist hegemonic vision, the books housed in the
country gentleman’s library more concretely and eloquently embody its lasting and
transcendent significance. Pointz Hall is located at “the very heart of England,” and
its library—“the heart of the house”—stores collections of books that are likened to
“the mirrors of the soul” (16). Though at the present moment people must
acknowledge “the mirror that reflected the soul sublime, reflected also the soul
bored,” standing “[w]ith his arms akimbo” “in front of his country gentleman’s
library,” Bart Oliver still ponders the bequeathed, enlightening truth that books are
“the treasured life-blood of immortal spirits” and poets “the legislators of mankind”
(16, 115). However, the transcendence of the soul-reflecting books he is
contemplating is belied by their exclusive ownership, as such substantial collections
of books can only be found in the country gentleman’s library which is solely
occupied by Bart Oliver the cultivated observer. Indicative of learning and
refinement, landscape art is associated with “political authority” whose measure is
based on the discourse of “civic humanism” (Barrell, “The Public Prospect” 19). As
John Barrell points out, the cultivated observer of landscape possesses the “true
258 Concentric 38.1 March 2012
taste,” as being able to “abstract” the “generic classes” of objects in nature rather
than seeing only the “accidental forms” of them (“The Public Prospect” 24, 25).
Unfettered by the minute, random sights of objects and by “the tyranny of sense or
need,” he perceives panoramically the organizing structures and arrangements of
the prospect view (26). Superior to those imprisoned “within their few acres at the
bottom of the eminence,” the cultivated observer is “liberal,” “learned,” and
“polite” as contrasted with the “ignorant,” “servile,” and “vulgar” who cannot
generalize and abstract particular objects submerged in contingency (27). While
those within the landscape are “the observed” and hence “the ruled,” “the
observers” above the landscape get to perform the role of “the rulers” who
apprehend it (33). And with reason and the “liberal mind,” the cultivated
ruler-observer has not merely the capability to abstract but the “will” to transcend
instincts and private interests (29, 27). He is then qualified to be the “public man,”
the “free citizen” participating in public affairs; masterfully perceiving the
landscape views as well as the “order of society” and “nature,” he “abstract[s] the
true interests of humanity, the public interest” (29, 27).
While the aesthetic perception of landscape manifestly signals class hegemony,
the gentleman squire as the elite ruler-observer exemplifies at once class cultivation
and the free and liberal mind of the public man concerned with universal truth and
the good of the public and humanity. Though the taste for landscape materially rests
on class opulence, the underlying logic of the prospect view presupposes the
autonomous, universal public subject. The elite ruler-observer typifies what Martin
Jay describes as “Cartesian perspectivalism,” “the modern scopic regime per se,”
which combines the Renaissance invention of perspective in the visual arts with
scientific rationality of the Cartesian subject emergent in the seventeenth century
(4). Yet even though the cultivated surveying of landscape, as Barrell notes, results
in a definite set of “visual and linguistic procedures” that ultimately renders every
landscape observed “part of the universal landscape,” the prospect view signifying
transcendence and civic governance is actually only commanded by gentlemen
from the landowning classes and the newly flourishing mercantile middle classes
(The Idea of Landscape 7). This select group of men constitutes the ruling power
ever since the eighteenth century, whose consolidation remarkably signals an
“ideological rapprochement” between the aristocratic and middle-class elites
(Eagleton 32). As Terry Eagleton remarks, the “ruling social bloc” composed of
cultivated gentlemen engenders “a ‘public sphere’—a political formation rooted in
civil society itself,” the operation of which pivots on the free and enlightened
universal subject, and also on the code of refined manners derived from patrician
Ching-fang Tseng 259
gentility (32). If the bourgeois public sphere functions through the internalized
power of the autonomous, equal universal subject, then the social constitution of the
ruling body is distinctly delimited by gentlemanly manners and taste considered not
merely proper but spontaneously styled. Such “aesthetics of social conduct or
‘culture,’” contends Eagleton, serve as a “vital mediation from property to
propriety,” cloaking the grim “structures of power” founded on possessions of lands
and wealth in the appealing garment of “structures of feeling” (42). The taste that in
principle represents universal truth and disinterestedness in reality develops into the
“aesthetics” of cultivated refinement that signal and help consolidate the hegemony
of the ruling political and social powers. Originally the prerogative of the landed
squire, the prospect view of landscape gradually also becomes a vital pursuit of the
entrepreneurial middle-class man, who, as termed by Elizabeth K. Helsinger, is the
“vicarious investor of the British scenery,” educating himself diligently about the
rules and procedures of the correct taste (25). As such, the aesthetic perception of
landscape eventually represents “a national topography” signifying culture and
Englishness, over which hereditary and self-made gentlemen alike imaginarily
share “a national consciousness” (24).
The gentleman squire in Between the Acts thus not just carries on ancestral
lineage and patrimony in the English country, but embodies the masculinist
preeminence of the elite ruler-observer governing the rural locality and the nation.
Epitomizing at once Englishness and the cultivated taste, he lays claims to
civilization and disinterestedness ensured by an ostensibly universal public which
operates and legitimates itself by enlightened communication and knowledge as
indicated by the newspaper and the establishments of learning. As the owner of
Pointz Hall, Bart Oliver is obliged to “tell them [the guests] the story of the
pictures”; just like the ancestor “holding his horse by the rein” in the picture who
“had a name” and “was a talk producer,” the patriarch continues and disseminates
the verbally as well as pictorially chronicled patrilineage of the Oliver family (48,
36). On the other hand, Bart Oliver also acts as the detached, disembodied
ruler-observer exemplifying “Cartesian perspectivalism” who apprehends from a
height the abstracted universal order of beauty, nature, and civil society. The old
squire as the public man exercises superb discernment of art and landscape views,
and staunchly believes in reason, disinterestedness, and rationalistic universal truths.
As the inheritor as well as transmitter of culture and knowledge, he “would carry
the torch of reason till it went out in the darkness of the cave” (206-07). While
constantly mocking the superstition of the servants and her sister Lucy, he himself
trusts the Encyclopaedia and the meteorologist’s weather forecast and
260 Concentric 38.1 March 2012
authoritatively claims that Pointz Hall’s distance from the sea is “[t]hirty-five [miles]
only,” “as if he had whipped a tape measure from his pocket and measured it
exactly” (22, 29). Just as he decides that the horse’s “hindquarters” in the ancestor’s
picture “were not satisfactory,” he magisterially leads everyone in the garden to
appreciate how the view instantiates the landscape taste axiomatically applicable to
the immortal works of the great painters: “‘There!’ Bartholomew exclaimed,
cocking his forefinger aloft. ‘That proves it! What springs touched, what secret
drawer displays its treasures, if I say’—he raised more fingers—‘Reynolds!
Constable! Crome!’” (49, 54-55). As an enlightening doyen of the public world,
Bart Oliver, who links “the lamplit paper” with “reason,” also “flicked on the
reading lamp” for the family, the “circle of the readers, attached to white papers”
(204, 216). The old squire’s “torch of reason” that symbolizes the universal public
interests enables the family’s vicarious participation in what Benedict Anderson
calls the imagined community of the nation, whose imaginarily conceived
“fraternity” or “deep, horizontal comradeship” which is “secular, historically
clocked” pivotally relies on people’s daily “mass ceremony” of reading the
newspaper (Anderson 7, 34). And as the public man with the transcendent “liberal
mind,” Bart Oliver grumbles about his people’s parochial concern as typified by the
usual fund-raising at the end of the pageant—“Nothing’s done for nothing in
England”—but values the disinterested magnanimity of the man “connected with
some Institute” who “goes about giving advice, gratis” on art (Woolf, Between the
Acts 177, 49). Long playing the eminent role of “the complete Insider” ruling the
public world, the gentleman squire personifies not just class cultivation and
dominance, but also the universalist, masculinist command and conception of taste
and civilization.
Further, the gentleman squire as the cultivated ruler-observer has not merely
landscape as his observed object, but the uncivilized, alien others perceived as
antithetical or inferior to the values of Englishness and civilization. His
commanding universalist gaze essentially accommodates the exotic species and
peoples across the globe under the Eurocentric historical or evolutionary framework.
In parallel with the recurrent images of savages and the prehistoric in Between the
Acts, the Outline of History that records the times of “the iguanodon, the mammoth,
and the mastodon; from whom presumably . . . we descend” and features pictures of
prehistoric beasts constantly preoccupies Lucy Swithin, who faithfully, unwittingly
mimics the perception of her retired colonial-administrator brother (8-9). Just like
Bart Oliver’s talks and reading of newspapers, the Outline of History as avidly read
and imagined by Lucy marks too the beginning and end of the day at Pointz Hall.
Ching-fang Tseng 261
As Edward Said observes, in the era of rapid, competitive imperial expansion, the
British hegemony fundamentally hinges on a self-identity imagined against the
background of a “geographically conceived world,” or a “hierarchy of spaces”
under which “home,” center of the geographical imagination, exercises dominant
military, economic, and cultural influences (52, 59). This “geographical” sense of
the Western self underlies the “authority of the European observer” that appears
extensively in novels, travel tales, scholarly treatises, and business accounts (58).
The vision of “the European observer” significantly corresponds with the scientific
narratives of the species and races in the world in various disciplines (59). As Mary
Louise Pratt argues, linked with “the European male subject of European landscape
discourse,” the “seeing-man” figure in natural history vitally encapsulates the
European “planetary consciousness” that authorizes imperialist dominance and
subjectivity in the innocent guise of epistemological neutrality (7). And the
empiricist, rationalist observer in disciplines like natural history and anthropology
employs evolutionary time to construct a universal teleological paradigm of history
and development that encompasses all peoples and species in the world. According
to Johannes Fabian, the universal historical development perceived by the scientific
gaze in these disciplines is consistently “visualized” and “spatialized”: observed
and documented, the exotic flora and fauna and non-Western races acquire
meanings and find their places in a global taxonomic or encyclopedic order that
reflects the evolutionary stages of development or civilization (15-16). Being
“observed from the Time of the observer,” the geographical and temporal “distance”
of the savage, alien others that denotes deficiency and inferiority rather than
“difference” is then visibly and definitively decreed (25, 16). During the heyday of
imperialism, the panoramic, evolutionist observing position of “the European
observer” is vicariously taken up by the mass public, and ultimately becomes a
prevailing way of knowing and representing the world. Reflecting the geographical
self-centeredness and transcendent progress of “the European observer,” the
symbolic predominance and pervasiveness of the Outline of History in Between the
Acts suggest that heir to indigenous patrimony and tradition, the gentleman squire is
also exemplary of the masculinist evolutionary zenith of “the complete Insider” that
embodies the panoramically universalist public.2
Legitimately governing those lacking reason and learning by mastering the
2
As Gillian Beer argues, Virginia Woolf “disperses [prehistory] throughout the now of
Between the Acts,” in which “[t]he engorged appetite of empire, the fallacy of ‘development’
based on notions of dominion or of race, are given the lie by the text’s insistence on the
untransformed nature of human experience” (26, 27).
262 Concentric 38.1 March 2012
cultivated taste, the elite ruler-observer in the country observes and dominates the
subordinate others enmeshed in landscape or nature inside England as well as
across the globe. Like the “perfect type” of “Man” in Three Guineas “of which all
the others are imperfect adumbrations,” the figure that quintessentially embodies
ideal Western masculinity and explains the root cause of war, the gentleman squire
at Pointz Hall as “the complete Insider” is confident in his civic preeminence and
universal transcendence as underlain by his cultivated perception (Three Guineas
142). Just as he observes the country landscape, Bart Oliver’s perceptions of the
ruled, inferior others who are without taste and cultivation rely on abstracted
aesthetics or the panoramic evolutionist discourse that categorizes and visualizes
the others in exotic, primordial space and time. And the observed others entrapped
in landscape or nature in turn serve merely to illustrate the universal principles of
beauty or the universal evolutionary development as commanded or topped by the
cultivated ruler-observer.
As object of the old squire’s gaze that represents ideal embodiment of beauty,
the pictured lady beside the male ancestor seems to exist outside the vicissitudes of
time; her inscrutable, unseeing eyes only lead the viewers of the picture “down the
paths of silence,” “to the heart of silence” (Between the Acts 45, 50). Paradoxically,
the aestheticized feminine image in domestic space is nonetheless also associated
with social inferiors like the servants, the villagers, or the homosexual and the
sensual woman outside the norm of the bourgeois family whose observed or
visualized subordination similarly corroborates the masculinist supremacy. Much
like the class others, the upper-class ladies in Between the Acts as the internal
Outsiders are not just of an inferior standing compared to the gentleman squire, but
also perceived in imagery of prehistoric savagery or benightedness. Clearly, the
evolutionist narrative of the Outline of History that records the times “[w]hen we
were savages” is echoed by the pseudo-scientific language accounting for the social
stratification topped by the cultivated ruler-observer (30). Just as the “old lady, the
indigenous, the prehistoric” in the country is likened to “an uncouth, nocturnal
animal, now nearly extinct,” the Oliver women who are seen as tethered to native
tradition and corporeality personify primitive instincts and atavistic barbarity (203,
93-94). With her devout faith, Lucy Swithin appears to resemble “a dinosaur or a
very diminutive mammoth” stuck in the Victorian age; she is also teased by her
brother for being too feeble-minded to comprehend the massive bulk of “English
literature,” thus “leaving books on the floor” like the “donkey who couldn’t choose
between hay and turnips and so starved” (174, 59). Having internalized the
hegemonic masculinist view, Isa the young mother in the stable yard likewise
Ching-fang Tseng 263
compares herself mournfully to the “last little donkey in the long caravanserai
crossing the desert,” “burdened with what they drew form the earth; memories;
possessions,” with the duty to procreate like “the great pear tree” (155). Such
atavistic bestiality similarly defines the social other like sensual, vulgar Mrs.
Manresa, the nouveau riche with a disreputable colonial background, who openly
confides that “I’m on a level . . . with the servants,” “I’m nothing like so grown up
as you are” (45), or William Dodge the homosexual who appears to Giles Oliver “a
fingerer of sensations” that should be excluded from “the more civilized” (60, 111).
The Eurocentric evolutionary order perceived by the elite ruler-observer
categorically ordains his own supremacy and mastery over the uncultivated inferior
others, indiscriminately perceived in benighted, primordial imagery. The
evolutionist, racialist visualization of otherness, just like the abstracted aesthetics of
taste, extinguishes the variety and vitality of life, and moreover naturalizes the
hierarchized social or racial order based on the universalist gaze of “the complete
Insider.”
Corresponding to the commanding, panoptic “European observer” positioned
at the apex of the evolutionary order, the gentleman squire as the elite
ruler-observer is not just the inheritor of status and wealth ruling the rural locality,
but the public man who makes claims to objectivity and universality and thus
legitimately dominates the observed and ruled within and across national bounds.
As James Clifford maintains, up until the early twentieth century, culture or
civilization refers to “a single evolutionary process” of “humanity,” whose “natural
outcome” is the “European bourgeois ideal” of the “autonomous, cultivated subject”
regarded as “a telos for all humankind” (92, 93). Owing to the gentleman squire’s
transcendent, universalist cultivated perception, local ruralist Englishness founded
on patrilineal continuity and indigenous tradition then readily becomes synonymous
with expansive universalist Englishness seen as exemplar of progress and
civilization. Ostensibly representing disinterestedness and categorical truths, the
cultivated perception predicated on fortune and education not merely underlies
correlated internal class hegemony and masculinist power, but bespeaks the
universalized superiority of the civilized “Man” or nation which spurs and
rationalizes expanding, annexing imperialism.
The Unsheltered House and the “Outsiders’ Society”
Opposing the virile masculinism of the dictators ruling within and without the
nation, Woolf’s idea of the “Outsiders’ Society” in Three Guineas aims to refuse to
264 Concentric 38.1 March 2012
“follow and repeat and score still deeper the old worn ruts” of patriarchal England
(105). Founded on the threshold position of “daughters of the educated men” yet
meant to be transgressively inclusive, the “Outsiders’ Society” seeks to dissolve the
constricting divisions and distinctions in society as if they were “chalk marks only”
(143). The Outsiders reject the hypnotizingly propagated views of the public world
that not only maintain and reinforce the belligerent masculinist order but also
cripple “the free action of human faculties” and stifle “the human power to change
and create new wholes” (114). Intended then to be “elastic” and “anonymous,” the
“Outsiders’ Society” distinguishes itself from the existent social structure by its
embrace of “obscurity” as opposed to the glaring “illumination” of the masculinist
public’s propagandist control (106, 114), and by its attempt to “penetrate deeper
beneath the skin” to see alternative or hidden facets of reality (22). In Three
Guineas, Woolf highlights the politics of looking and its centrality in the
masculinist order governed by “the complete Insider.” While insisting on retaining,
nurturing the free and unconstrained private looks, she argues that in order to
envision a better future where all enjoy “freedom, equality, peace,” an integral aim
of the “Outsiders’ Society” is to employ “private means in private” to make
“critical” and “creative” “experiments” (113). And to have alternative, innovative
ways of seeing and thus be able to form “new wholes,” the Outsiders depend on the
artists among them “to increase private beauty,” to help them perceive “the
scattered beauty” creatively assembled and arranged by the artists “to become
visible to all” (113-14).
Coming into being by the Outsider-artist’s triggering the shifting or deepening
of people’s perceptions, the “Outsiders’ Society” is ingeniously enacted in Between
the Acts through the performance of La Trobe’s village pageant and the
gentry-audience’s reactions to it. The alternatively, subversively “private” visions
presented and stimulated by the Outsider-artist La Trobe’s village pageant
momentarily transforms the gentry-audience into a self-reflective and imaginative
collectivity of the “Outsiders” for once not positioned as the privileged ruling class.
Though the village pageant as an annul local tradition signifies the continuity of the
way of life in rural England and is a popular nationalistic form of drama mainly
performed on Empire Day in Woolf’s time, 3 La Trobe’s village pageant
3
Julia Briggs points out that “[f]or Woolf, the pageant was simultaneously old and new: its
roots were in ‘the old play that the peasants acted when spring came,’ but the historical pageant
had been reinvented in the early twentieth century by Louis Napoleon Parker, and had since
become hugely popular as a local activity”; and that “[d]uring the 1930s, many small towns and
villages acted out their own supposed pasts in secular pageants, often performed on Empire Day
(24 May), though they could reflect a range of political attitudes” (384). Ayako Yoshino notes that
Ching-fang Tseng 265
nevertheless innovatively contests the hegemonic cultivated perception epitomic of
Englishness and civilization. By presenting, provoking the de-familiarized and
performative visions of landscape and “Ourselves,” it divests the gentry-audience of
their ingrained, naturalized class self-image as represented by Pointz Hall. Despite
its faithfulness to the canonized ethos and motifs of the historical periods, La
Trobe’s pageant as a playful, parodic dramatization of English history and literature,
of “our island history” customarily likened to organic human growth and birth (76),
is a deliberate yet contingent “experiment” meant to “[make] them [the audience]
see,” that is, to spark unconventional, creative visions of self and community, home
and civilization (179, 98).
While set against the scenic backdrop of the view, La Trobe’s outdoor village
pageant enacting English history and literature nevertheless does not intend to make
the gentry-audience “see” what attests to their distinction and glories, so much as
how they as a whole have shared a delusional and less than honorable class
self-identity, founded on the hegemonic narrative of England and Englishness or the
cultivation of taste. Analogous to “the shelter of the old wall” in the garden where
Bart Oliver authoritatively guides his guests to apprehend landscape views, the
painted wall in the pageant’s last act triumphantly symbolizes “Civilization” (52,
181). As Mr. Page, the reporter personifying the reigning public views of “the
complete Insider,” confidently scribbles in his notebook, the wall with a ladder
surrounded by diligently working men and women of different races “conveyed to
the audience Civilization (the wall) in ruins; rebuilt . . . by human effort”; altogether
“they signify” some “League” of venerable trans-national collaboration (181-82). In
the meantime, the gentry-audience applauding the spectacle symbolic of universally
emancipatory, humane civilization regards it as a “flattering tribute to ourselves,”
thinking it no doubt reflects “what the Times and Telegraph both said in their
leaders that very morning” (182). Yet just as the abrupt break and change of music
lead to snappy, cacophonic sounds and rhythms, or the suddenly emerging mirrors
from the bushes mock and fissure the gentry-audience’s elite class self-image, “the
old vision” represented by the deceivingly all-inclusive civilization is relentlessly
“shiver[ed] into splinters,” and what it perceives as “whole” “smash[ed] to atoms,”
by the pageant’s parodic disruption of the historicist, universalist narrative of
Englishness and the aesthetic perception of landscape naturalizing the ruralist vision
“[d]iscussion of the Parkerian pageantry by its contemporaries makes it clear that it was seen at
least initially as a nationalistic form of drama,” and its “emphasis shifted between the democratic
potential of the pageant and its role in reinforcing communities, its use as a tool for teaching local
and national history, and perhaps most commonly, as locus of patriotic sentiment” (51).
266 Concentric 38.1 March 2012
of home (183).
To debunk and challenge “the old vision” of the actually discriminatory
“Civilization” bespeaking the hegemonic cultivated perception means contestation
of the ruling gentry’s fixed, complacent class self-image imaginarily mirrored by
the view, as well as deflation of the transcendent, masculinist prominence of the
cultivated ruler-observer topping the universal evolutionary development. With her
creative power that “seethes wandering bodies and floating voices in a cauldron,
and makes rise up from its amorphous mass a re-created world,” the Outsider-artist
La Trobe audaciously experiments with the Olivers’ estate’s outdoor space, turning
it into an open theater which then ceases to be the aesthetically constructed and
perceived lands indicative of class privilege (153). The landscape view is hence
de-familiarized and the estate’s outdoor space re-created as a lively and
occasionally chaotic stage performing national history and literature. It becomes a
dynamic, performative space newly inscribed onto the aestheticized country scenery,
a nearly uncharted natural space now denuded of the abstracted aesthetic meaning
and the naturalized, territorialized historical consciousness that have underlain the
ruling gentry’s class hegemony. Moreover, the Outsider-artist’s village pageant
collapses the boundary between the cultivated ruler-observer and the demeaned,
primitivized ruled and observed, thereby demolishing not only the elite class
self-image of the gentry-audience but also the “perfect type” of “Man” that
epitomizes it. And as it parodies the hegemonic cultivated perception of
aestheticized landscape and historical progress, La Trobe’s pageant moreover
foregrounds interruptions and “present-time reality” to counter eternalized
historicist continuity and teleology (179).
Surveying the country estate’s outdoor space, La Trobe has told its owner Bart
Oliver: “There the stage; here the audience; and down there among the bushes a
perfect dressing room for the actors,” and the terrace is “the place for a pageant”
which allows the villager-actors’ “[w]inding in and out between the trees . . .” (57).
On the June day of its performance, the outdoor village pageant consequently has to
constantly compete with the landscape view for the gentry-audience’s attention and
appreciation. Instructing the villager-actors in the bushes, the playwright senses that
“[m]any eyes looked at the view,” and “[o]ut of the corner of her eye she could see
Hogben’s Folly; then the vane flashed” (151-52). Such tension is deliberately
created in the playwright’s experiment to obstruct and de-familiarize the
gentry-audience’s accustomed perception of the landscape. Watching the
terrace-stage which is part of the view, the gentry-audience seated in rows enjoys
the pageant but in the meantime has to face between the acts altogether “the empty
Ching-fang Tseng 267
stage, the cows, the meadows and the view, while the machine ticked in the bushes”
(177). As they are looking at the view as usual, the gentry-audience also has to
confront the disconcerting emptiness of the terrace-stage, where the acted-out
uneventful “present time” nullifies the timeless natural beauty and harmony of
home, and the monumental historical scenes that interpellate the gentry-audience
repeatedly affirm their notions of Englishness and class self-identity. As La Trobe
“wanted to expose them, as it were, to douche them, with present-time reality,” not
only does the gramophone blare the music “Dispersed Are We” whenever an
interval starts, but between the acts and during the last act “Present Time.
Ourselves” the gentry-audience intensely experiences the real, non-dramatic present
time and suddenly feels ill at ease with their familiar sense of self (179, 95). Facing
the terrace-stage stripped of the pageant’s historical spectacles as well as the
eternalized beauty of the view, they feel “a little not quite here or there”; they “sat
exposed” and “[a]ll their nerves were on edge,” as if “[t]hey were neither one thing
nor the other,” “suspended, without being, in limbo” (149, 178). And the
gentry-audience’s elite class self-image of “Ourselves” is not just problematized but
powerfully invalidated and pulverized, when all the villager-actors are coming out
from the bushes, holding “[a]nything that’s bright enough to reflect” the unguarded,
fragmented images of “ourselves,” still in the guises of the noble and commoner
characters from the different ages and declaiming lines or phrases of their roles (183,
185). The gentry-audience is unwillingly confronted with the “awful show-up” as
“[t]he hands of the clock had stopped at the present time,” and the unflattering,
disintegrated class self-image exposed in the suspension of the historical progress
fully alienates them from their petrified social identification (184, 186). Moreover,
in the midst of “the jangle and the din” when the “cows” and “dogs” also excitedly
join the commotion, “the reticence of nature was undone, and the barriers which
should divide Man the Master from the Brute were dissolved” (184). In the
Outsider-artist’s “little-game” that ferociously parodies, challenges the
soul-reflecting mirrors in the country gentleman’s library, the shifting, unrelenting
mirrors from the bushes overturn as well the panoptic, civilized eminence of “Man
the Master,” the discerning, autonomous universal public subject representative of
“Ourselves” with which the audience identifies (186). Instead of being prominently
positioned above “the Brute” or the categorically classified or abstracted nature, the
cultivated “Man” is placed right among the supposedly dominated and observed.
The blurring of the distinctions of nature and the performing stage, of the cultivated
observer and the uncivilized observed within landscape or nature, cancels the
universalist, masculinist objectivity and transcendence, and accordingly subverts
268 Concentric 38.1 March 2012
the representative authority and dominance of the gentleman squire.
Now as a whole unrestricted by received ideas or training and constituted by
anonymous and performative identities, the gentry-audience watching the
Outsider-artist’s pageant not merely confronts disillusioning, fracturing
self-reflecting mirrors, but also sees beyond the eternally illumined surface of the
lily pool to perceive the lively, ordinary beauty of the villagers and everyday life. In
the dwindling “light of evening that reveals depths in water,” the gentry-audience at
the end of the pageant then stands facing the “linger[ing],” “mingl[ing]”
villager-actors (196, 195). As if the class divide no longer exists and constrains
one’s perception, the gentry-audience notices the random, dynamic beauty of the
villager-actors that “[e]ach still acted the unacted part conferred on them by their
clothes” (195). They perceive that “[b]eauty was on them,” “[b]eauty revealed
them,” and also see the exceptional beauty rather than irking unsightliness of “the
red brick bungalow radiant” (195-96). Dislodged from the elevated observing
position at the country house from which to appreciate landscape views, the
gentry-audience meanwhile is instead looking at Pointz Hall, as if penetrating “the
golden glory” to have a glimpse of “a crack in the boiler” and “a hole in the carpet,”
of the ordinary and quotidian that have been hidden from the cultivated observer’s
purview (197). And before the unrehearsed, transgressive perception of home and
“Ourselves” eventually dissipates, the gentry-audience applauds not only the
characters “Budge and Queen Bess,” but also “the trees; the white road; Bolney
Minster; and the Folly” (197). Until the gramophone’s equivocal last refrain
“Unity-Dispersity” that characterizes the unbounded, anonymous “Outsiders’
Society” fully dissolves the assembly, the aestheticized home landscape has once
appeared, if only transitorily, as impermanent and improvisational as the stage and
performance of the village pageant (201).
Though intended to de-familiarize and contest the hegemonic views of
“Ourselves,” Englishness, and civilization, the village pageant nonetheless does not
impose a predominant vision on its audience. Rather, it is purposely made to be
de-centered, polyvocal, and open-ended so as to arouse and inspire multiple and
divergent reflections. Further, as the pageant’s venue and success are markedly
contingent upon the weather in Between the Acts, La Trobe is not always in control
of the “[i]llusion” it creates (140); she is unable to preclude its unexpected effects
since at times “[h]er vision escaped her” and her audience is “slipping the noose”
(98, 180). Apparently free from the totality of meaning and organicist closure that
the commanding cultivated perception decrees, the Outsider-artist’s work does not
abide by the abstracted rules of taste and is subject to unforeseen, random
Ching-fang Tseng 269
interruptions.4 More important, together with its contingent effects, the pageant’s
intended experiment, its cacophonies and open-endedness, provokes the diversely
inspired, confounded, or disapproving reactions and interpretations from the
gentry-audience, which amount to a communal collaboration of meaning and vision
of the Outsiders as the “orts, scraps and fragments” unbounded by class privilege
and supremacy (188). Speaking “only as one of the audience, one of ourselves,” the
Rev. Streatfield humbly offers his interpretation of the pageant: “We act different
parts; but are the same. . . . I thought I perceived that nature takes her part. Dare we,
I asked myself, limit life to ourselves?” (191). Among the dispersing
gentry-audience, the anonymous, fragmented voices also are discussing the purport
of “Ourselves” that has been unsettlingly explored by the pageant: “Did you
understand the meaning? Well, he said she meant we all act all parts”; “He said she
meant we all act. Yes, but whose play? Ah, that’s the question! And if we’re left
asking questions, isn’t it a failure as a play?” (197, 199-200; emphasis in original).
And at Pointz Hall, “[s]till the play hung in the sky of the mind—moving,
diminishing” after dinner; the family “all looked at the play” and “[e]ach . . . saw
something different” (212, 213). Whereas Bart Oliver assuredly remarks that it is
“[t]oo ambitious” “[c]onsidering her [La Trobe’s] means,” the Oliver women
chatting about the pageant are uncertain whether it is true “what he said: we act
different parts but are the same” (213, 215).
Furthermore, with Between the Acts’s blurred and discontinuous boundary
between the pageant and the novel that disallows textual closure and authorial
control, the Outsiders’ alternative private visions are not just facilitated and
provoked by La Trobe’s village pageant. They are presented as well in the narrative
when the characters are having their private moments, then not merely the audience
of the pageant. In his country gentleman’s library, the old squire has a gratifying
dream of his bygone colonial venture in which he sees “as in a glass, its luster
spotted, himself, a young man helmeted” (17). The dream thrillingly enacts his
exploit in the wild land, and nostalgically brings back “youth and India”: the young
Bart Oliver as a colonial explorer holds “a gun” “in his hand,” facing “a hoop of
ribs” “in the sand,” “a bullock maggot-eaten in the sun,” and the “savages” “in the
shadow of the rock” (17). Ironically indicating the supposed origins of civilization
4
As Joplin suggests, in Between the Acts, “Woolf forces the likeness of woman playwright to
fascist dictator to press her recognition of her own will to power as practicing author,” and at the
same time, though, the playwright is also “the author as anti-fascist . . . [who] celebrates the
intrusion of nature’s wild and uncontrollable whims to counter the fixity of social behavior,” as
she “stops resisting the freedom of the wind, the rain, the instincts of the grazing animals . . . [and]
treats meaning as shared, as mutually generated by author, players, and audience” (90).
270 Concentric 38.1 March 2012
are nothing less than a breeding ground of imperialist impetus and aggressivity, the
gentleman squire’s dream vision corresponds with the domesticated woman’s vision
of rape which occurs similarly in the country gentleman’s library. Browsing the
Times in her father-in-law’s library, Isa accidentally reads about the news that a girl
was raped by the soldiers in the barrack room at Whitehall. Startled by its horrific
details, which are “so real” and soon surmount her expectation of a “fantastic,”
“romantic” story, she cannot help but imaginarily sees the rape scene “on the
mahogany door panels” (20). Moreover, the weapon she imagines to have been used
by the girl “screaming and hitting [one of the troopers] about the face” is in her
mind’s eye conflated with the hammer carried by Lucy, who at this point suddenly
opens the door and walks in the room (20). Isa’s envisaging of the heinous crime at
the locus symbolic of state power and order and its textual association with the
“educated man’s daughters” implies that, as Woolf argues in Three Guineas, terror
and tyranny are not extrinsic so much as internal as the dictators in England share
hidden affinities with those in Nazi Germany. Like the pageant’s disillusioning,
de-centering mirrors from the bushes, the alternative Outsiders’ visions of the
country gentleman’s library reveal it as barbaric space of unseen or concealed
violence, forcefully subverting the differentiation between civilization and atavistic
benightedness and savagery.
Another alternative Outsider’s vision that reveals the gentleman squire’s
barbarity and brutality rather than enlightenment and civility is presented in the
narrative, when Bart Oliver is dexterously and unselfconsciously exercising his
colonialist virility and peremptoriness in the garden. Masquerading as “a terrible
peaked eyeless monster” behind the morning paper folded into a “snout,” the old
squire suddenly comes up and mercilessly violates his grandson George’s tranquil,
joyful universe of plenitude in the garden (Between the Acts 11-12). Then,
“appear[ing] in person” and yelling “Heel! . . . heel, you brute!,” the retired colonial
administrator manages to subdue “among the flowers” Sohrab the Afghan hound
scarcely distinguishable from little George, who is meanwhile terrified and bursts
out crying (12). Notably, no sooner had Bart Oliver noted that “[t]he boy was a
cry-baby” after his relentless act of coercion than he began to read the “smooth[ed]
out” “crumpled paper” while intermittently marveling at the picturesque beauty of
the landscape views (13). In venting his hatred of the degenerate others, Giles
ferociously stamps on the snake “choked with a toad in its mouth” perceived as “a
monstrous inversion” and secretly has the “white canvas on his tennis shoes” uglily
“bloodstained” (99). Just like his son who inherits his property and status and also
masculine assertiveness, Bart Oliver’s clandestine exerting of his brutish virile force
Ching-fang Tseng 271
turns the newspaper as well as the aesthetically “[f]ramed” “picture” of landscape
under his cultivated gaze into nothing but undisclosed vehicles of irrationality and
barbarity (13).
Interwoven into and splitting the narrative of Between the Acts, the
Outsider-artist La Trobe’s pageant that withstands totality of meaning finds its
message multivocally, variedly echoed by the narrative visions of the individual
characters in their private moments. Moreover, the novel’s counter-totalizing
anti-closure culminates in ultimately dissolving the distinction between the pageant
and the novel that equally seek to present and foster alternative Outsiders’
perceptions, as well as self-reflexively draw attention to the provisionality, partiality,
and constructedness of the Outsider-artist’s own vision. As the day is darkening, Isa
again visualizes in her mind not just the pageant, but also the haunting scenario of
the struggling girl who “had gone skylarking with the troopers” at Whitehall (216).
While Pointz Hall is losing its command of views in the dusk, Isa reflects upon the
pageant’s possible meanings and still wonders “[w]hat then” happened afterwards
to the raped girl (216). Her concurrent envisaging of the rape and the village
pageant throughout the day underscores the discreteness and yet interpenetration of
the novel’s manifold layers, intended to arouse divergent and multiple
interpretations that enact the unbounded, creative “Outsiders’ Society” whose unity
consists in its resistance to the tyrannical hegemonic perception (215).
Correspondingly, the playwright La Trobe in the dusk perceives the house’s
imminent lapsing into darkness and then looks at the country landscape realistically
as “land merely, no land in particular” (210). Yet the sight of the land provides
inspiration for La Trobe’s new play: walking toward the gate of Pointz Hall, she
senses “something rose to the surface,” and suddenly has a glimpse of its first scene
which contains “two scarcely perceptible figures,” “half concealed by a rock”
beside “the high ground at midnight” (212, 210). “[A]lways” having “another play”
lying “behind the play she had just written,” La Trobe envisions her next play
taking shape before Between the Acts comes to its close, and moreover its first
scene coincides with the unfolding domestic quarrels and intimacy of Isa and Giles
which end the novel (63).
In the desolate, prehistoric open fields where “[t]he house has lost its shelter,”
the young couple at Pointz Hall that presumably symbolizes the future of England
and civilization will be confronting each other after a day’s unspoken rancor and
jealousy, like “the dog fox” and “the vixen” fighting “in the heart of darkness, in the
fields of night” (219). In the primordial darkness, the couple has lost their cultivated
semblance and prominent observing position and instead becomes a spectacle as
272 Concentric 38.1 March 2012
actors on stage about to reveal their story as yet untold. The darkness that
eventually engulfs Pointz Hall conflates Woolf’s open-ended narrative with La
Trobe’s next play, and at the same time also bridges the village pageant that is just
finished and the evolving new play confusing reality with the performing stage. It
clearly reverses and parodies the evolutionist plot of the Outline of History and
intimates the precariousness, fictionality, and corruption of the hegemonic
perception of Englishness and civilization. Yet as contrasted with the glaring
“illumination” emanating from the elite ruler-observer, the darkness also points to
the Outsiders’ alternative visions that are textually enacted through the novel’s
conspicuously interrupted, multi-layered, and open-ended structure. As the
multi-perspectival and even anti-perspectival novel self-reflexively highlights its
playful constructedness and heterogeneous “orts, scraps and fragments” of voices
and perceptions that simultaneously contest the oppressive hegemonic view and
situate the Outsider-artist’s own vision, it embodies and also enables the “Outsiders’
Society” that critically and collaboratively engages in the innovative, private
interpreting and imagining of meaning.
Between the Acts’s at once foreboding and self-referential closing scene of
primordial darkness thus does not univocally symbolize or prophesize civilization’s
degenerate retrogression under the looming threats of war and annihilation, as many
critics have argued.5 The staged, (un)framing prehistoric darkness is also a parodic
reversal of the complacent hegemonic class self-image epitomic of Englishness and
the evolutionist telos of civilization. Moreover, it emblematizes, like the
boundary-exploding, multifarious mirrors from the bushes, the replacing of the
commanding cultivated perception with the emergent, pluralistic views of the
Outsiders. After playfully, multi-vocally unveiling the repressiveness and
incompleteness of the cultivated gaze and its underlying brutality and instinct of
domination, the novel envisages the full dismantling of the bounds of civilization as
Pointz Hall or the civilized self-image of “Ourselves” can no longer distinguish
itself from prehistoric savagery. Further, it proposes an alternative sense of
5
Many critics have noted the temporally backward-moving degeneration at the end of
Between the Acts. As Judith Johnston argues, “The terrifying movement backward in historical
time at the end of Woolf’s novel reflects Marlow’s opening strategy in his narrative, drawing his
audience back to an England that seemed uncivilized to a Roman commander” (273). Mark
Hussey points out that “the book actually moves backwards although it is apparently
progressing,” and “[a]t the close, Isa and Giles have been abandoned by their ‘island story’” (251;
emphasis in original). Sallie Sears remarks that the rape story in the newspaper “haunts Isa
throughout the day and presages the brutal lovemaking between herself and Giles and the novel’s
conclusion—a scene that both initiates and symbolizes the work’s vision of a collective return to
the savagery of the past” (215).
Ching-fang Tseng 273
“Ourselves” based not on a shared taste or lifestyle but on a common recognition of
the human vulnerability and savagery faced with the menace of war, as well as on
the Outsiders’ insistence on maintaining and generating creative, discrete visions
that counter the hypnotizing hegemonic perception dominating the masculinist
public. Refusing to be “the passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience”
(Woolf, Three Guineas 142), the anonymous, dynamic “Outsiders’ Society,” by the
help of the Outsider-artist, collectively produces and imagines the “private beauty,”
the innovatively combined “scattered beauty” that has been occluded or unseen by
the predominant “complete Insider” (113, 114). As Woolf agues in “Thoughts on
Peace in an Air Raid” written in August 1940, to prevent war and secure a future for
people in England as well as across the national borders, it is essential to “fight for
freedom without firearms,” to “fight with the mind,” with “mak[ing] ideas” (244).
Between the Acts envisions the dissolving of constricting, repressive boundaries and
distinctions, the possibility of the “Outsiders’ Society” as the “new wholes”
composed of the resistant spectators who seek to preserve and nourish the human
power to see differently and to think freely.
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About the Author
Ching-fang Tseng is Assistant Professor in the English Department of National Taiwan
Normal University. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature,
post-colonial literature, and literary modernism. Her work in progress is a book-length
project that studies representations of Englishness and home in Virginia Woolf and a number
of post-colonial writers in a comparatively trans-national context of empire.
[Received 20 March 2011; accepted 15 December 2011]