Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts
Set shortly before the onset of WWII in 1939, Between the Acts takes the domesticity of the home and extends it to include the village, the country, and the present. Woolf’s home is a multisensorial one: her descriptions are not restricted to the visual. She seems to have a sense of the many aspects of home. Both the Bachelardian daydream and Freud’s uncanny are present throughout the the novel.
Comments of comfort, security and domesticity identify areas of the home of significance to Woolf’s characters.
A foolish flattering lady, pausing on the threshold of what she once called “the heart of the house,” the threshold of the library, had once said: “Next to the kitchen, the library’s always the nicest room in the house.” Then she added, stepping across the threshold: “Books are the mirror of the soul.” (P. 12)
The library as a place of contemplation and reverie through reading. The kitchen as center of the household. Woolf refers to kitchen noises echoing throughout the house, signaling to everyone by the increasing density of the sounds emanating from it that a meal is approaching.
References to auditory events pervade the novel. The clock ticking in the house is a constant reminder of the passage of time. The silence and emptiness of empty rooms evokes a stillness and refers to a possible era before humans inhabited the earth.
Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell,singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence. (P. 26)
Silence, of course, doesn’t exist: the clock is always ticking. Silence belongs to mute objects, to the visual world, the world of stasis. Sounds are always dynamic and are always events. Sound cannot be static. While the view from the house is mute and static, the activities in the house are full of life, as is the pageant.
The uncanny is present by the ‘invasion’ of the house by strangers arriving for the pageant. “The family was not a family in the presence of strangers.” (P. 34) While this statement is referring to arriving local visitors, it seems suggestive also, of the potential invasion of the German air force in the pending war. The formation of war planes makes this manifest with the roar of the engines making it impossible to ignore. “The future disturbing our present.” (P. 57) The ongoing march of time, history in the making, the inexorable forces of nature and culture uproot and transform the characters’ lives. What is home may change through outside forces: “…dispersed are we…” (P. 66) The home, the family unit, the village, and the country may be dispersed at any moment: is in fact dispersed continually through the cycle of birth and death, through immigration and emigration. Change is constant and is an affront to the familiarity of home. Stability and stasis may be desired, but only as an abstract utopian dream. “…Change had to come, unless things were perfect; in which case she supposed they resisted Time. Heaven was changeless.” (P. 118) Stasis equals death, yet change disrupts the homely. The opposing forces may reach a deadlock. How to act? How to choose? What to do? What to do next?
