Between the Acts takes place on the day of an annual village pageant, pre- senting “Scenes from English History” (81). Well before the reader knows the subject of the pageant, however, “history” is introduced. Lucy Swithin is seen reading an Outline of History,1 which describes an antediluvian London
populated by “the iguanodon, the mammoth, and the mastodon; from whom . . . we descend” (8–9). Lucy’s long view of time is complemented by the more traditional accounts of national history in the pageant, and a comic look at the family history of the Olivers.
The last of these is emphasized by the two portraits at the top of the stairs in Pointz Hall: a “long lady” and a “man holding his horse by the rein.” The lady is described as a “picture,” purchased for aesthetic reasons, while “the man was an ancestor. He had a name” (36). The juxtaposition of the two paintings initially seems to offer the reader the typically “modernist” distinc- tion between art and life, with the former an independent and autonomous project, and the latter linked to history and politics.2 In Allen McLaurin’s dis-
cussion of the novel, he uses the two paintings to focus on Woolf’s formalism, asserting that Woolf approves of the independent artistry of the “picture” because of its “pure form” while disapproving of the contamination of the portrait by social and worldly concerns. McLaurin allies Woolf’s aestheti- cism with the formalism of her friend and fellow member of the Bloomsbury circle, Roger Fry, who insists that “the essential aesthetic quality . . . has to do with pure form” and that “the value of the aesthetic emotion” is “infinitely removed from . . . ethical values and likewise from the concerns of history and politics” (54).3 The “picture,” from this perspective, is a floating signifier
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with no referent, while the portrait signifies something beyond itself: the external world, or reality.
No sooner, however, is this separation of art and life introduced than it is undermined. Although the ancestor has all the weight of reality and history initially attached to him, the reader soon learns that the portrait excludes, omits, and deletes elements of his past in an effort to configure it as his- tory. While Buster the horse is included in the portrait, Colin, the “famous hound,” is omitted because the “Reverend Whatshisname” would not allow him at the sitting. Immediately, Colin’s exclusion puts the mimetic claim of the portrait into question, as it only selects certain elements of the ancestor’s life and personality. It later becomes clear, however, that Colin has not been lost to history but has been amply recorded elsewhere. Bartholomew Oliver, Lucy’s brother, asserts, “The dog has a place in history” (48), noting how one text’s process of selection and excision is not the limit of history’s resources.
Lodged within the lighthearted discussion of Colin is a commentary on the nature of historical representation. The dog’s situation indicates the propensity for historical representation to exclude, omit, and select elements of the past, determining what is to be considered “important.” Likewise, because the ancestor records Colin’s existence elsewhere, his absence from the portrait becomes a central fact of the ancestor’s history, leading Lucy to identify the ancestor purely by his desire to be painted with the dog (48– 49). In fact, while Colin’s name is emphasized, the ancestor’s individuality recedes, left unnamed, and determined by the absence of his pet. In this microcosm, it is clear that historical discourse makes what is selected seem essential, while omitting other potentially important facts.
Seeing how the ancestor’s portrait is constructed, framed, and manipu- lated for aesthetic and ideological content, one might then be tempted to see it as essentially identical with the lady’s picture, as two examples of “art” or even “fiction.” There are still, however, substantial differences between the ancestor’s portrait and the lady’s picture. As David McWhirter observes, the lady has more in common with Colin than she does with the ancestor, due to her lack of social power. In fact, her “formal perfection—the objectification of her beauty in the male artist’s ‘picture’—is inseparable from her gendered powerlessness, her absence from history and its discourses” (806). While the portrait is revealed to be closer to “art” than to objectively referential “his- tory” in its posed, mediated, and constructed form, the supposedly “pure” form of the picture is revealed as a reflection of the struggles, oppression, and power relations of historical existence. When paired with the portrait, the picture reveals how men’s stories and patriarchal pursuits (in this case, hunting) are considered worthy of historical consideration, while women are
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reduced to objects of the male gaze, worthwhile only to the degree to which they give aesthetic pleasure.4
Rather than call for a separation of art from history, then, Between the Acts presents the telling of history itself as an artistic creation, while aes- thetics cannot help but bear the imprint of history. Beyond the family history of the paintings, Miss La Trobe’s pageant dominates the novel, foregrounding how one artist, or historian, “creates” history, recording, selecting, erasing, and editing vast expanses of time in order to construct a unified text. In this, the novel presages the postmodern theorization of the discursive and tex- tual construction of history. In addition, the pageant confuses and conflates English history with the nation’s literary history, presenting pastiches of his- torical literary styles like the Renaissance drama and Restoration comedy as history itself. La Trobe’s pageant, like the two paintings, puts pressure on the division between fact and fiction. The dissolving of this boundary is central to Linda Hutcheon’s definition of the postmodern, in which “the familiar separation of art and life . . . no longer holds” (Poetics of Postmodernism 7), and leads some recent criticism of the novel to place it in the postmodern camp.5
The clearest example of the dissolving of the art/life distinction occurs after the pageant has ended and Miss La Trobe retires to the local pub, enter- taining a vision of her next artistic creation. “There was the high ground at midnight; there the rock and two scarcely perceptible figures. Suddenly the tree was pelted with starlings. She set down her glass. She heard the first words” (212). At first, this passage seems to be a simple description of artistic inspiration. At the novel’s close, however, Giles and Isa Oliver confront one another angrily after a day in which Giles has engaged in adulterous flirta- tion. Isa “let[s] her sewing drop” and the couple are described “against the window” merging into the natural outside world and the prehistoric past. “It was the night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among the rocks. Then the curtain rose. They spoke” (219).
This closing passage does more than close the book on the Olivers’ contentious relationship for the day; it also puts their status as independent agents into question. The reference to the “high place” reflects the “high ground” that La Trobe foresees, while the “two figures” in her vision are almost certainly versions of Giles and Isa. When the final sentence encloses the Olivers on a stage where the curtain rises, we are presented with the pos- sibility that Giles and Isa are part of a play, rather than merely its observers; that they are artistic creations and not “real people,” refusing their status as ethically autonomous subjects. They are certainly seen here as creations of another, whether it be Miss La Trobe or Woolf herself, or both. Just as the two paintings at first seem diametrically opposed with one representing art
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and the other reality, the actions that take place within the pageant initially seem to be art, while those between its acts seem representative of life. This division is, however, destabilized when a theatrical curtain rises on Giles and Isa, exposed as actors in a play and, of course, characters in a novel.6
While the dissolution of art/life boundaries may suggest an advocacy of an incipient postmodernism, several of Woolf’s essays caution us from jumping too quickly to that conclusion. In “Modern Fiction,” “Phases of Fiction,” and “The Narrow Bridge of Art,” Woolf maintains the distinction between art and reality and identifies the central problem of artistic creation as the difficulty in maintaining unity, order, and coherence while also rep- resenting the real world accurately. “[S]tyle, arrangement, [and] construc- tion, . . . put us at a distance from the special life and . . . obliterate its fea- tures; while it is the gift of the novel to bring us into close touch with life. The two powers fight if they are brought into combination” (“Phases” 101). Woolf here notes that unity and order are not to be found in the real world and that these provinces of art are in natural opposition to the truth-telling duty of the novel.
The difficulty of trying to maintain order, unity, and coherence in a real world antithetical to these concepts is illustrated also in Mrs. Dalloway, wherein Clarissa desperately tries to sustain them at her party. When she hears of Septimus Smith’s suicide, she thinks, “Oh! . . . in the middle of my party, here’s death” (183). The unity and order of the party is shattered by the intrusion of the chaos and despair of Septimus’s world, the real world. How- ever, far from choosing artistic form over the accurate portrayal of reality, Woolf, in “Modern Fiction,” praises Joyce’s Ulysses not for its unifying mythic structure, à la Eliot, but for its capacity to disregard structural concerns in favor of the “flickerings” of real “life” (126). While Woolf is often taken, in this essay, to be promoting an aestheticism divorced from the materialism of the “real world,” her praise of Joyce reveals a commitment to accuracy in content over and against beauty in form.
Between the Acts is also characterized by the tension between the unity of artistic achievement and the chaos of reality. Lucy, for instance, is prone to “one-making,” the attempt to draw everything in her surroundings into one central meaningful order, while Miss La Trobe attempts to do the same with her pageant. The tension between unity and the inevitable reality of dispersal are also expressed explicitly by La Trobe’s gramophone. When there is an unexpected gap in the unified whole of her play, La Trobe, like Clarissa Dal- loway, bemoans its loss: “Illusion had failed. ‘This is death,’ she murmured, ‘death’” (140).7
As in Woolf’s analysis of the disjunction between reality and art, Hayden White and other postmodern historians see the shaping unity, coherence, and
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emplotment of historical narrative as incompatible with reality’s chaos and uncertainty. From this perspective, La Trobe can be seen both as a historian in the White mode and as an artist in Woolf’s theory of fiction. In fact, for constructivist historiographers like White, the distinction between artistic creation and historical discourse is obscure, since both take raw material and shape it into the form of a narrative through exclusions, erasures, and selections, fictionalizing that which has any purchase on empirical reality. La Trobe’s pageant is then both a work of art and a historical text and, like White’s account of the historian, she desperately attempts to create unity out of contradictory raw material. This attempt at ordering, often through nar- rative, leads the historian/artist increasingly further away from representing reality in Woolf’s and White’s theories. Woolf, too, undertakes a critique of narrative in an effort to expose and overcome its nonmimetic properties.