“The world…seen from this angle undoubtedly looks queer”: History, Heritage, and the Queer Domesticity of Between the Acts

The paper reads Woolf’s last work as a queerly domestic novel: centered on the space of Pointz Hall and the history of England and simultaneously decentering the heterosexual romance plot and the British Army, rewriting the English home and English heritage. Woolf crafts her revision by connecting the creative work of Miss La Trobe and Isa Oliver, whose particular expressions turn the queer and queering gaze of the female outsider onto the two faces of domesticity—private and national—and demonstrate their inextricable links to each other. In Three Guineas, Woolf repeatedly describes the queerness of the vantage point available to the daughters of educated men: the view of the world seen through the filter of domesticity, queer in that it renders strange the accepted order of the patriarchal world. Woolf draws together the reluctantly domesticated Isa’s private poetry, hidden in the family accounts book, and the lesbian, quasi-foreign La Trobe’s publicly performed play about English national history to produce a queer revision of domestic inheritance on personal and national levels. Isa’s and La Trobe’s creative efforts and their domestic lives are marked with incompleteness, dissatisfaction, and failure, which suggests that a queerly domestic viewpoint cannot be an end in itself, particularly on the brink of war. But the novel also insists that women’s queering perspectives on domestic life provides a necessary counterpoint to personal and national stories of violence and patriotism.