“Contemplating the idiot” in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 94
Author(s):  
Pulsifer
Keyword(s):  
Between The Acts

Late Works (1933–1941)

2021 ◽  
pp. 116-129
Author(s):  
Alice Wood
Keyword(s):  
Political Engagement ◽  
Feminist Politics ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Late Works ◽  
Formal Experiment

This chapter traces the development of Woolf’s late feminist politics and aesthetic experimentalism, focusing on her penultimate and final novels, The Years (1937) and Between the Acts (1941), and her anti-war pamphlet, Three Guineas (1938). It reads across these texts and Woolf’s wider writings from 1933–1941, including essays, unpublished drafts, and her fictional biography Flush (1933), to identify key strands of social and political enquiry in Woolf’s late works. The chapter pays particular attention to Woolf’s late analysis of the role of art in society and her evolving feminist-pacifist critique of the links between patriarchy, nationalism, fascism, and war. Rejecting a narrative of creative decline, the chapter highlights the productive relationship between political engagement and formal experiment in Woolf’s late works.

Allusion and Metaphor

2021 ◽  
pp. 196-211
Author(s):  
Jane de Gay
Keyword(s):  
Between The Acts ◽  
Female Writers ◽  
Night And Day ◽  
Organic Metaphors ◽  
Room Of One's Own

This chapter demonstrates that Woolf’s allusive practice involved transforming and interrogating texts rather than invoking the authority of earlier texts or their scholarly interpretations. It shows how Woolf’s allusions are often supported by metaphors that draw attention to the longevity of past literature that is essential to the act of allusion. These include organic metaphors such as the growth of seeds, plants, and flowers; familial metaphors of conception, birth, and reproduction; and the ethereal metaphor of haunting. The chapter examines how Woolf uses allusion and metaphor to articulate relationships with the literary past in A Room of One’s Own and in her representation of characters who are female writers in Night and Day, Orlando, and Between the Acts.

scholarly journals The Female Künstlerroman in the Writing of Virginia Woolf

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Rebekah Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Narrative Development ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Creative Identity ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Future Potential

<p>The defining features of the female Künstlerroman in Virginia Woolf’s writing suggest a revision of the narrative form to accommodate, navigate, and interrogate the artist’s gender and origins of her creativity. This thesis plots the birth of the female artist and the conditions of her artistic development within Woolf’s writing by first examining the construction of Rachel Vinrace, the rudimentary artist of the equally embryonic text, Melymbrosia (1912-1982). Rachel’s failure to privately self-identify as an artist is contrasted with her reluctance to accept her future potential as a wife and mother, suggesting that “woman” and “artist” are two mutually exclusive identities. For this reason, Woolf’s use of the female Künstlerroman examines the complexities of the female artist’s ability and, indeed, inability to acknowledge and inhabit her creative identity.  But how, exactly, the narrative form develops in Woolf’s writing relies upon a reading of the relationship between the figure of the artist and the novel she occupies: Rachel Vinrace in Melymbrosia; Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse (1927); Orlando in Orlando: A Biography (1928); Miss La Trobe and Isa Oliver in Between the Acts (1941). Each of these works present a modification of the female Künstlerroman, and, in doing so, a markedly different artist-as-heroine. Moreover, in Woolf’s later writing, the narrative development of the female artist incorporates aspects of historical non-fiction, the biographical and autobiographical, and epistolary and essayistic fictions. An analysis of the intertextual relationship between A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Orlando: A Biography, and Three Guineas (1938) and Between the Acts, is therefore critical to the argument of this thesis.  The following is an exploration of how a variety of female artist-figures are constructed within Woolf’s writing: a musician, a painter, a social artist, a poet, and a pageant-writer-director. Through Woolf’s diverse expositions on the creative process, her heroines embody the personal difficulties women encounter as they attempt to realise their artistic potential. In this way, the female Künstlerroman is used by Woolf to examine, often simultaneously, the aesthetics of failure, as well as the conditions of success. But that a multitude of creative mediums appear in Woolf’s writing suggests there are universal obstacles when the artist in question is a woman, an implication in the narrative of the female Künstlerroman that the gender of a protagonist is the primary source of complication. Therefore, the degree to which each heroine achieves a sense of creative fulfilment is dependent on her ability to recalibrate her identity as a woman with her self-authorisation as an artist.</p>

She Walks in Beauty Like the Night: BETWEEN THE ACTS ofAufheben

2014 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-130
Author(s):  
Yi-Chuang E. Lin
Keyword(s):  
Between The Acts

Reverend Gentlemen and Prophetesses

2018 ◽  
pp. 88-113
Author(s):  
Jane de Gay
Keyword(s):  
Church Of England ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Women's Ministry ◽  
To The Lighthouse ◽  
Three Guineas ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
The Waves ◽  
The Church ◽  
Critical Interest ◽  
English Heritage

This chapter reveals the extent of Woolf’s critical interest in the clergy. It demonstrates that the clergy remained important within middle-class life during Woolf’s lifetime and that Woolf reflected this in her novels. It draws attention to the element of social criticism in Woolf’s novels The Voyage Out, Jacob’s Room, Mrs Dalloway, The Waves, The Years and Between the Acts, as she represents the variety of roles played by the clergy: the cure of souls, the conduct of worship, the burial of the dead, and conserving English heritage and historical buildings. The chapter also examines Woolf’s detailed critique in Three Guineas of the decision of the Church of England to continue to exclude women from ordination in the Church Commissioners’ 1936 report The Ministry of Women. It also shows that Woolf was supportive of women’s ministry, both in her examination of the historical precedent for this in Three Guineas, and in her representation of Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse as a prototype female priest.

Taking a Parallel Path

2020 ◽  
pp. 32-40
Author(s):  
Barbara Tepa Lupack
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Continuous Performance ◽  
Historical Drama ◽  
Saint Louis ◽  
Parallel Path ◽  
Between The Acts ◽  
Grand Opera

This chapter discusses how Leo Wharton got into the film industry. Leo's earliest documented stage appearance was in 1893, in the play The Fairies' Well. After a few years of itinerant acting, Leo was able to secure steadier employment at the Hopkins Grand Opera in Saint Louis, where his brother Ted was already performing. As part of Colonel Hopkins's theatrical company, Leo assumed various stage roles in the popular daylong “continuous performance” programs that Hopkins pioneered, which combined live drama and between-the-acts vaudeville. Leo's first known (and first credited) film appearance was in the title role of Lincoln in Abraham Lincoln's Clemency (1910), a photoplay produced by Ted Wharton for Pathé. The role not only garnered good reviews for his sympathetic performance and even for his resemblance to the revered figure whom he was portraying; it also led to an offer as a director for Pathé, the studio for which Ted was then working. There, Leo began directing similar shorts, such as the period historical drama The Rival Brothers' Patriotism (1911). Since early movie audiences seemed especially fond of marital comedies, Leo produced several shorts in 1913 that revolved around wedding-day complications. While these and other short pictures that Leo produced for Pathé were often predictable in their plotting and formulaic in their execution, they were nonetheless popular with audiences and profitable for Pathé. Moreover, they established his reputation in the industry.

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