Memories and Time in Between the Acts

Between the Acts is as ingenious in its design as it is in its execution- the concept of a play within a novel offers an oddly fitting portrayal of the way Woolf associates memory with the visual, as theatre is in itself a form of visual representation of literature.  It is even more relevant that the pageant is one about the history of England, again illustrating such ties between imagery and memory.  Time is once again an important element in this work, although it plays a much more subdued yet equally profound as it does in Woolf’s other novels such as To the Lighthouse and The Waves.  Like Mrs. Dalloway, the events in the novel take place during a single day in a small town outside of London, slowing time down enough for Woolf to paint her own picture of a day in modern England.  It is particularly important that all of the character’s are known in only a day’s time, because it suggests that the characters have all reached this specific collective moment in which they are seen, being taken as a singular instance in time while retaining its quality of fleetingness and progression. 

It is as if Woolf is making an argument for the reasons society stands as it does in the present by depicting a play of historical significance, even if the only part of society exposed to the reader is that which is directly associated with Bartholemew Oliver and his life.  This is further conveyed by the final scene of the pageant, during which Miss La Trobe uses mirrors to symbolically illustrate what society has become in the present.  The final effect of this scene is not in any way meant to gratify the audience, nor by extension the modern society that they represent.  Instead it presents a rather pessimistic point of view, but whether Woolf is blaming society for its present state despite England’s past accomplishments or if she is simply offering her explanation is debatable.  Regardless of the reason, it is obvious that throughout the novel Woolf is depicting the negative aspects of society.  Very few marital relationships seem stable- possible a comment on the social expectations of marriage versus the needs of an individual- which is seen in the relationship between Giles and his wife, who instead desires the attention of Mr. Haines.  The principal characters also negatively receive the promiscuity of Mrs. Manresa and the homosexuality of William Dodge, despite clear problems in the other characters’ own sexual relationships.  In yet another notion of irony, the audience assembles itself to watch a play that is a clear representation of social commentary, which is the same function that the novel itself has for the reader.  This divide between the narrative and the visual is once Woolf seeks to close together through her own representation of the visual within the frame of her narrative.  Like Septimus’s death in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s use of a play at the climax of the novel is another visual culmination of the tensions within the narrative that build up to this final scene.  This is not to say that imagery is forgotten in the earlier parts of the novel- this is certainly not the case- but the convergence of images in the final section are representative of the way Woolf intertwines imagery and narrative together in order to create an effect more profound than each of these elements taken at face value.

Critical Summary: Virginia Woolf and the Visible World

Emily Dalgarno’s book Virginia Woolf and the Visible World explores the ways in which Woolf uses imagery in her novels. Dalgarno’s primary argument is that Woolf uses imagery in specific places and gives them perspective through her writing that is beyond simple description. Dalgarno writes that Woolf is presented with a conflict between what is writable and the “unrepresentable visible,” which is best described as the difficulty in portraying a specific object or moment as perceived by the initial viewer in the same way to another viewer. As other critics have noted, Dalgarno also emphasizes Woolf’s association of imagery with memory, and Dalgarno argues that what is percieveble by light (an image) is therefore made into an object, correlating with the sense of tangibility that a visual memory suggests. Dalgarno references multiple instances in Woolf’s works, such as the moment when Septimus commits suicide in Mrs. Dalloway, illustrating how the use of narrative has captured the profoundness of the moment in his memory that Septimus relives.

Maggie Humm: Modernist Women and Visual Cultures

In her book Modernist Women and Visual Cultures: Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Photography and Cinema Maggie Humm explores the development of photography and cinema alongside prominent female artists of the early twentieth century including Woolf, Bell, and their associates.  As the 19^th century brought forth the technology of photography, many claimed that there finally existed a medium to portray objective images of events and reality, although emerging film criticism suggested that photography itself could express an artist’s emotional visions through the way photography is used.  Humm illustrates how these ideas directly affected Woolf’s life in her own photography and that of Vanessa Bell, writing that even the selection of photographs for the family photo album required choosing which moments were to be retained, and therefore altering the reality of the original moment.  This idea in itself also illustrates another key point of Humm’s book, that photography and visual representations of memory are inherently linked to time.  While the original moment is in some way preserved in an image, it takes on a new meaning in the context it is finally shown.  Humm also argues that photography is one way many women identified themselves artistically, as many women adopted the art of photography (Humm even notes how many manufacturers marketed cameras towards them), and the medium endowed them with a unique perception of memory.  She argues that the selection of photographs for albums creates a sort of montage that provides for a “visual narrative.”  This idea of the visual narrative is one that directly applies to the writing of Virginia Woolf.  Woolf adopted photographic language in many of her essays, writing specifically about how sequences are used to portray moments and successions in time.

Critical Summary: Leslie Hankins

Leslie Kathleen Hankins writes in her essay “A Splice of Reel Life in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Time Passes’: Censorship, Cinema and ‘the Usual Battlefield of Emotions’” of the role emotion has in the arts, explaining how Woolf believed emotion could not be separated from political issues because they are a primary trigger of emotional response. During a time when critics and peers often censored notions of political motivation in favor of pure aestheticism, Woolf saw a need to include these aspects as she believed emotional aesthetics encompassed all that which affected one’s emotional life, including the political issues (such as gender) that affected them. Hankins argues that Woolf sought to relate emotion through imagery, inspired partially by the emergence of the cinema in the early twentieth century. While Woolf was writing the “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse, she was also writing her essay “The Cinema,” and Hankins suggests that there is a clear correlation between the way in which emotion is expressed in moving images and the way Woolf uses imagery in this section of her novel. Hankins argues that Woolf perceived symbolism inherent in images such as those produced by the cinema, and that she was also influenced by the relationship between images and time in the cinema in her own use of time in “Time Passes.”

Critical Summary: Humm and Three Guineas

In her essay “Memory, Photography, and Modernism: The ‘dead bodies and ruined houses’ of Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas,” Maggie Humm argues that Woolf utilizes the juxtaposition of the perceived masculinity of photographs published in newspapers of the Second World War and her own narrative point of view in her descriptions of images from the Spanish Civil War in order to expose the patriarchal means by which society portrays war.  Humm argues the photographs published along with Woolf’s essay are absent from Woolf’s commentary and therefore her personal point of view, meaning that the symbolism present within the photographs is able to penetrate the reader’s mind on its own accord.  The five photographs to which Humm and Woolf refer are of prominent male figures including what Humm describes as a general, judge, and university professors.  Therefore such photographs emphasize a patriarchal portrayal of the war, suggesting that men are playing the most important roles in its execution and that the war is providing for male needs.  In contrast Woolf describes through writing images of the Spanish Civil War, which Humm argues alters the point of view of these images to fit her own feminist one.  In addition, Humm writes about Woolf’s thoughts on the relationship between photography and memory, saying Woolf believes that photography is not as objective as one might be led to believe as they all present their own points of view through the inherent symbolism in photography.

Feminism, Elitism, and A Room of One's Own

As the 1920s were brought to a close, much of the developed world had already undergone radical social changes regarding women’s rights.  Most of these movements were organized around political rights not given to women that had long been enjoyed by men, such as the right to vote, own property, and equal access to higher education.  Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, while influential at its time, has since become a staple of feminist literature.   While Woolf makes clear that she is opposed to society’s domestication and objectification of women, most of the argument in her essay concerns women’s rights in the political world.  This includes women’s suffrage, which was finally granted in full to women living in the United Kingdom in 1928, only a year before the book’s publication.  In a time when European nationalism was at its peak, it might not have been uncommon for writers like Woolf to directly address the aspects of society under government control, such as legal matters in owning property and voting.  After all, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, the sovereign state we know today, was formed only two years prior to publication in 1927.  Yet the women’s rights movement was much greater than the attainment of political power, and Woolf knew that.  Many of the social inequalities seen between men and women were brought upon them by society itself, such as popular views of traditional gender roles, and what were considered men and women’s respective “realms.” 

It is appropriate and fitting that Woolf would base her essay around the metaphorical “room of one’s own,” which in itself suggests that men and women have long lived and worked in their own separate realms.  A woman’s role was largely seen as being subservient to men, and also to remain in the house and tend to the children.  In contrast, a man’s realm was defined by his trade, and on a more social level, by his wealth and his character.  In this respect women have long experienced a sort of either dehumanization or hyper-humanization- depending on how one perceives the situation- that is characterized by a woman’s fundamental ability to reproduce without any importance given to her personal morality or character.  As a writer Woolf had long fought against these traditional gender roles by creating detailed and complex female characters in her novels, but even such characters were often privileged in ways many women at the time were not.  Much like the women seen in Shakespeare, most of the female characters in Woolf’s novels are, like Virginia Woolf herself, of a high social standing and are usually from relatively wealthy or influential families. Characters such as Clarissa Dalloway, Mrs. Ramsay, and Jinny were not portrayals of typical women of the time, and throughout her work Woolf has imposed a sense of elitism that lingers over her greater desire for women’s rights.  Perhaps Woolf had forgotten that not all men went to college and lived luxurious, self-centered lives typical of the men she portrayed in her novels, and even within A Room of One’s Own, there is a lack of recognition of the great social injustices that plagued England during the time aside from those pertaining to solely to women.  If Woolf thought that by the twenty-first century all humans regardless of sex would have access to education and political influence, she would be sorely disappointed to see the world in which we live today.  Aside from the numerous gender-related discrepancies that remain to this day (which in all due respect have lessened since the 1920s thanks in part to the efforts of Woolf and her peers), there also remain inequalities pertaining to race and social class to which the elite have long turned a blind eye.  It would not help Woolf’s argument to state that even white men living in the wealthiest nation in the world often do not have access to higher education, but one can subdue such thoughts in recognition of the impact and accomplishment in women’s rights that have followed in the wake of her work.  Despite these accomplishments, Woolf ultimately fails to acknowledge the correlation between the elite and the oppressors, and the poor and the oppressed, and she is strangely silent when it comes to the needs of working class women who would not be able to attend a university regardless of what the law permits them to do so.  Perhaps Virginia Woolf did realize all of this, but she played to her strengths and knew that such a social movement would need to stem from those with influence.  Perhaps I am just overly invested in the troubles of the twenty-first century that it inhibits me from accurately representing the political landscape of the 1920s.  After all, Woolf never blamed the government, she blamed society, and that is something we should all remember.

Gender Roles Revisited: The Waves

It seems that one cannot make it through a Woolf novel without being confronted in some way by the gender issues of her time.  This is not to say that they are in any sense unwelcome of irrelevant to today’s reader, for instead of directly addressing the politics of her day, Woolf instead infuses her ideas into the lives of the characters themselves, making them in some sense living examples of these tensions at work.  But Woolf carefully avoids archetypes in her work, which works to her advantage: While Susan ultimately chooses to lead a domesticated, family-oriented life, we do not have any hyper-masculine character to which she can e compared, and even Susan herself contemplates her loss of individuality as she chooses what she sees as a stereotypical lifestyle for a woman.  Also to this effect Susan compares herself to the other women in the novel.  Jinny has a completely superficial, externally-oriented personality, and is closest to what could be considered a “man’s woman” because she is obsessed with physical beauty and plays up to men’s desires.  The other extreme is Rhoda, who, unlike the other two, is more of a recluse and very internal.  Her near constant depressive state questions her role in the world.  In many ways her concerns are more humanistic than sexual, and despite her attraction to Louis, she expresses little in terms of sexual desire.  Feeling lost and shut out of the world, she often looks to Susan and Jinny to know how a woman should even act, as they seem to her to be much more in touch with their womanness. 

Such a questioning of gender identity is seen again in the lives of the male characters.  Aside from Neville, none of the male narrators are overly concerned with sexual pursuit.  Louis and Rhoda’s relationship is more about their internal and personal development than it is about expressing their love for each other, which is one of the reasons their relationship ends.  What concerns most of the men is the intellectual aspect of life, as all of them have strong ambitions for intellectual achievement, yet once again only Neville is the exception in their collective success.  While one may argues that despite his failure to produce a novel Bernard achieves a rather fulfilling intellectual life, his love for words and his never-ending pursuit of new ways to express himself serves as a model for the other male protagonists.  Louis is constantly self-conscious of his perceived social status, and seeks to appear smarter and more refined than how the others see him.  Neville is also in constant intellectual pursuit, and is ultimately successful in becoming a writer.  It is slightly ironic that Woolf would create a group of male characters with such academic endeavors, as she often portrays women as having a suppressed intellectual superiority, such as Mrs. Ramsay and Clarissa Dalloway.  However, Rhoda is probably the most self-reflective character of the group, and possibly overly so, as it ultimately drives her to commit suicide.  There is something to be said for the way Rhoda constantly feels as if she must keep such thoughts and emotions internal, which might be Woolf commenting on the social norms which determine what kinds of thoughts men and women are allowed to express.  In a final ironic move, only Bernard is allowed to discuss her death, suggesting that Rhoda’s death does not lead to any definite resolution, instead leaving the reader to ponder its significance.