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.