An Exploration of Conflict within Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts.

Throughout the novel we are confronted with these conflicting forces: Life and death in the servants’ preoccupation with the ghost; past versus future, embodied in Mrs. Swithins’ reluctance to accept that she has a future rather than living in the past (“Tick, tick, tick, the machine continued. ‘Marking time,’ said old Oliver beneath his breath. ‘Which doesn’t exist for us,’ Lucy murmured,” p51). There are others, such as the opposition of light and dark, of play and violence, but one is at the risk of just creating a static list of opposites – something that the novel also runs the risk of. However, this risk is averted by Woolf not simply imposing these opposites on something inanimate, but by highlighting them as elements of a personality or as a trait of the world around us. She pits characters against each other as a result of these differences (such as the patriarchal voice of Bart against the weaker, matriarchal voice of Lucy), or has the conflict within one person’s character (Isa’s poetry, for example). Opposing forces also occur in the surrounding world, such as the appearance of life versus death shown by the snake choking on the toad:

“There, crouched in the grass, curled in an olive green ring, was a snake. Dead? No, choked with a toad in its mouth. The snake was unable to swallow; the toad was unable to die. A spasm made the ribs contract; blood oozed. It was birth the wrong way round,” (p61)

The snake and the toad are also caught in a sort of limbo, between life and death.

        Love and hate are two of the strongest motivating factors, and the most powerful opposing forces within the novel. They are the forces that both encourage and restrain Isa, with her infatuation with Haines, “the ravaged, the silent, the romantic gentleman farmer,” (p11) competing with the ‘other’ love:

“on the washstand, on the dressing-table, among the silver boxes and tooth-brushes… love for her husband, the stockbroker.” (p11)

The feelings that Isa has for Haines are almost certainly not love, but more that his presence feeds the creative side of her personality, giving her more material to write in the journal that she hides from her husband. His status as a married farmer, and hers as a married mother of two, suggest that they will never have any kind of real relationship, and Isa is left to lust from afar. She is using Haines as a diversion, an attempt to find her way out of a situation that she finds suffocating, and yet she is not allowing herself to be the way out. Her search for her true identity seems to be caught up in other people’s solutions – she searches through the books in the library for some sort of inspiration:

“As a person with a raging tooth runs her eye in a chemist’s shop over green bottles with gilt scrolls on them lest one of them may contain a cure, she considered: Keats and Shelley; Yeats and Donne… None of them stopped her toothache.” (pp14-15)

She doesn’t realise that she needs to search within herself for the answers, preferring to concentrate her unhappiness into both the love and hate for her husband that “tears her asunder” (p128).

        The opposition of love and hate in Giles manifests itself in a slightly different manner to that of his wife: His hate doesn’t appear to be directed at Isa, or at the interval in their love, it is aimed more at the entire community at Pointz Hall on the day of the pageant, of whom he appears to be the only one who is at all concerned with the impending war. The love aspect concentrates more on the passion felt for Mrs Manresa, and some ambiguity remains about whether this passion was acted on or not: “Turning the corner, there was Giles attached to Mrs. Manresa.” (p123)

        In the sibling relationship between Lucy and Bart, we have another strong conflict: that of Lucy’s faith against Bart’s reason. It is an issue that comes up several times in the novel, entering not only simple discussions about the weather (“‘it’s very unsettled. It’ll rain, I’m afraid. We can only pray,’ she added, and fingered her crucifix. ‘And provide umbrellas,’ said her brother,” p17) but also used by Bart to explain away some of his sister’s actions: “How imperceptive her religion made her! The fumes of that incense obscured the human heart.” (p120) The struggle between faith and reason is entangled with that of the matriarchal and patriarchal influences within Pointz Hall: with the two siblings there is both male and female authority fighting for superiority in the house; this is a struggle that also reflects the society of the time, and it is a struggle that I believe the character of Miss La Trobe is designed to be a part of. The pageant that she creates is seen by many in the audience as over-ambitious, and very few appear to understand it. Despite a history of the British Isles that is largely male dominated, two of the acts of the pageant focus on periods with strong women at the head of the British Empire: Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria. The ending, an attempt to capture the present with mirrors as a symbol that the future will concentrate on the individual, is misunderstood by an audience who expected a rousing chorus of God Save the King and pomp and circumstance regarding the empire. La Trobe herself, alongside the pageant, challenges the social norm and the patriarchal society by admitting her sexuality to the world (“Since the row with the actress who had shared her bed the need of drink had grown on her… She was an outcast. Nature had somehow set her apart.” p125). She is, to the outside world at least, a strong, independent woman who challenges the patriarchal values of the society, and for this she is distrusted by the villagers.

        The conflict between men and women is highlighted by Woolf’s use of language. All through the novel, fragments of poetry, song, newspaper articles work their way into the thoughts and murmurings of the characters, to illustrate that our minds absorb information from the world around us and this shapes our own character. As La Trobe so aptly writes in her pageant, as an allusion to Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, we are only “scraps, orts and fragments,” (p112) in what we see of ourselves and of others, and of what we take in from the world around us. Using these fragments, Woolf created what has since come to be known as “little language,” something that she envisaged being used to create a more unified world, as it takes into consideration the way that our minds take in information; this is in comparison to conventional language, which she saw as adding to conflict:

“Composed of small or broken words, brief or unfinished sentences, cries, calls, songs, silences, and even sights and gestures, ‘the little language’ marks and fosters our common life, not the single life, the single self that wars with others.”

Woolf saw the “little language” and the fostering of this common life as part of the female way of life; conventional language and the single life as the male domain - a view that is illustrated by the pageant: the scraps of poetry and song celebrating the strong female history of the British Empire, something that is not understood by most of the audience, who are either subject to the patriarchal values of society, or perpetrating them. At the end of the pageant the Reverend Streatfield attempts to impose the masculine view onto the meaning of the pageant, regaining patriarchal control by interpreting the meaning within the “little language” they had just experienced, into a more proscriptive language. He belittles the pageant, claiming to be puzzled as to the actual message it had intended to display, and swiftly moves onto what he would see as the business of the day: the counting of the money for the church.

         However, Reverend Streatfield’s interpretive speech at the close of the pageant is interrupted; he himself becomes fragmented as a result of a sign of what is to come in the future:

“The word was cut in two. A zoom severed it. Twelve aeroplanes in perfect formation like a flight of wild duck came overhead. That was the music.” (pp114-115)

So we come to the biggest conflict of all in the novel: the one about to start. When the novel was published it was criticised for not dealing directly with the issues of war – apparently, “readers during the war… wanted a novel dealing directly and explicitly with the problems society was facing.” For this reason, Woolf faced intense scrutiny as she treated all problems as “part of the flow of life.” Some critics have suggested in the past that she ignored the war in favour of concentrating on the social issues and problems surrounding society at the time. Kenney, in fact, states that:

“The characters are more interested in their cesspool, their sex lives, and their pageant. Pretty clearly then her novel was her distraction, even her opposition to war. If life couldn’t go on as normal for her, it damned well would for her characters.”

However, I would disagree strongly with this claim. Although the war is not in the foremost of most of the character’s minds, there is a subtext of fear, violence and conflict in the novel that suggests the novel is much more concerned with the war than one at first might think.

        The occasional acts of violence in the novel suggest a preoccupation with violence elsewhere: Isa’s reaction to the conversation going on around her regarding the nailing of the placard to the barn suggests an awareness of violence that hasn’t been there in previous years:

“Every summer, for seven summers now, Isa had heard the same words; about the hammer and the nails; the pageant and the weather…The same chime followed the same chime, only this year beneath the chime she heard: ‘The girl screamed and hit him about the face with a hammer.’ (p16)

Giles’ encounter with the snake also implies impatience, adding to his feelings of rage from earlier in the day. As I have already mentioned, he is the only character who is outwardly aware of the approaching war, and is “enraged” that despite the violence encroaching on the country’s existence he allows himself to be caught up in the spirit of the pageant: “And he came into the dining room long like a cricketer in flannels… Had he not read, in the morning paper, in the train, that sixteen men had been shot?… Yet he changed.” (p30) He is angry that the world just carries on regardless, that no action is taken, and by killing the snake, he is able relieve a little of the feeling of uselessness and inaction that pervades the novel.

        It is not only the acts of violence that suggest awareness of the conflict. Throughout this essay I have discussed opposing forces, and I would argue that the conflicting emotions and the mood that make up the novel’s action are representative of the greater conflict permeating society:

“Between the Acts hovers on the brink of uncertainty and the prevailing mood is one of extreme instability, reflecting the world in which Woolf composed the novel.”

Indeed, rather than the novel being her “distraction” from the war, I would suggest that Woolf channels all of her feelings of uncertainty into the novel, and despite the criticism that the readers at the time wanted a novel that dealt with the issues of their time, I would say that the novel does deal with these issues: war and conflict, fear, violence; however, it is placed the context of community.

        At the conclusion of the novel, we are left in a similar position to the audience at the end of the pageant, trying to fathom the meaning that Woolf intended us to take away. The fragments of reflections of the audience play an important part: as well as Woolf’s desire that, like in “little language”, all fragments should work together for a common life, they also suggest the fragmentation of society. Only parts of a person’s personality are allowed to flourish under the strict social guidelines, such as Isa’s creative aspect forced to stay hidden and suppressed by the more socially acceptable domestic side. For most of those watching the pageant, the meaning is beyond them: they dislike the concept of having to examine themselves; and so, the ending is a negative one, highlighted by a lack of comprehension. The climax of the pageant is one of many conclusions to the novel, however nothing ever seems to actually conclude – ironic considering the nature of Woolf’s death in March 1941. The fragmentation, the opposites, the conflict within the novel: whereas they are illustrative of the form that Woolf wished to create, and of her “little language”, they are not conducive to a real resolution in the novel.

        However, one has to examine Woolf’s intention regarding this lack of resolution. I believe she meant the ending to be the culmination of these opposites: in Isa and Giles the major combinations of love and hate, male and female collide and conflict until they are forced to find a resolution. We do not know what this resolution, if any, will be. We are left only with the cyclical nature of life that Woolf wished to present: within all the fragments and conflict, nothing is ever resolved, there is merely continuance. Isa and Giles will resolve the argument of today:

“Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought, they would embrace. From that embrace another life might be born… Then the curtain rose. They spoke.” (p129-130)

From the end of this pageant we see the start of the next, the boundaries between them are blurred. Conflict permeates life, just as human nature will inherently create conflict in any blank space it finds between actions; and we discover that nothing will be resolved, it will just merge into the next occurrence.

WORD COUNT:

Bibliography.

• Beer, Gillian. 1996. Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground: Essays by Gillian Beer. Edinburgh University Press.

• Bowlby, Rachel. 1997. Feminist Destinations and Further Essays on Virginia Woolf. Edinburgh University Press.

• McNees, Eleanor (ed). 1994. Virginia Woolf Critical Assessments, Volume IV. Helm Information.

• Marcus, Jane (ed). 1981. New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf. University of Nebraska Press.

• Roe, Sue. 1990. Writing and Gender: Virginia Woolf’s Writing Practice. St. Martin’s Press.

• Woolf, Virginia. 2000. Between the Acts. Penguin Classics, London.

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