Whose Play Is It?
“Dispersed are we,” laments the gramophone, signaling the end of Miss La Trobe’s historical pageant. Thus informed, the audience disbands, some lingering to mingle, some trailing off to their cars. Narrative strains of the scattering crowd pepper Woolf’s page in intermittent threads as many voices are heard questioning the meaning of the inconclusive pageant:
“…He said she meant we all act. Yes, but whose play? Ah, that’s the question! And if we’re left asking questions, isn’t it a failure, as a play? I must say I like to feel sure if I go to the theatre, that I’ve grasped the meaning . . . Or was that, perhaps, what she meant?”
The “play” the confused spectator refers to is an historical pageant, and as such the comments on theater are metaphorical comments on history. The question “but whose play?” might be literally rephrased “but whose history?” In a novel about an English historical pageant, spectators both inside the novel and external to it are compelled to accept, interpret, or reject La Trobe’s spectacular history. In addition, the reader is not only spectator to the pageant, but also spectator to the spectators, and as such is subject to the whole host of historical opinions engendered by the play: “They all looked at the play; Isa, Giles and Mr. Oliver. Each of course saw something different”. At the novel’s end, the aforementioned confused spectator has indeed hit upon the novel’s central questions: In whose history are the characters acting? Is there any “meaning” to history at all? Is one reading of history privileged over another? To understand this question requires a close look at La Trobe’s historical pageant and the varied reception it receives.
In the opening scenes of Between The Acts, long before La Trobe’s historical pageant takes us on a reductive tour of English history, Mr. Oliver (Bart) and Mrs. Swithin (Lucy) present two distinct character lenses through which to understand events in the novel. Brother and sister are diametrically opposed in almost every aspect of their being: “What she saw he didn’t; what he saw she didn’t—and so on, ad infinitum”. Bart and Lucy demarcate the boundaries of the historiographic battle that wages in the novel. On the one extreme, a masculine, secular, separatist who holds a notion of linear irreversible time; on the other, a feminine, religious, unifier with an ahistorical cyclical conception of time. Between these poles the novel’s other characters stake their ground.
Mr. Oliver is the representative of a masculine nationalistic English history. The English history. His first appearance in the novel positions Pointz Hall, and by extension himself, in the direct line of the isle’s militaristic history.
“The old man in the arm-chair—Mr. Oliver, of the Indian Civil Service, retired—said that the site they had chosen for the cesspool was, if he had heard aright, on the Roman road. From an aeroplane, he said, you could still see, plainly marked, the scars made by the Britons; by the Romans; the Elizabethan manor house; and by the plough, when they ploughed the hill to grow wheat in the Napoleonic wars”.
Mr. Oliver’s preoccupation with the history of his residence is no doubt perpetuated by his shallow English ancestry. In 1939, the year the novel takes place, the Olivers have been in Pointz Hall “only something over a hundred and twenty years” and the family shares no connection “with the Warings, the Elveys, the Mannerings or the Burnets; the old families who had all intermarried, and lay in their deaths intertwisted like the ivy roots, beneath the churchyard wall”. To compensate, Mr. Oliver cultivates the appearance of historicity with portraits and memorabilia. In a glass case at the top of the principal staircase is “a watch that had stopped a bullet on the field of Waterloo”. The watch belonged to a butler who bore no connection to the family. Its value is purely representational. Nearby a large portrait depicts, “an ancestress of sorts”, or so the narrator informs us, though the portrait’s identity is never mentioned. Later on, when Lucy gives Mr. Dodge a tour of the house she reveals that the woman in the portrait is in fact “Not an ancestress,” directly contradicting the narrator’s earlier description. Mrs. Swithin continues, “But we claim her because we’ve known her—O, ever so many years.
Over time, the fictions of those in power become the facts of those in power. Historical inaccuracies are magnified. The “ancestry” of the female portrait is so engrained in the history of Pointz Hall that even the narrator’s limited omniscience is deceived, a valuable lesson demonstrating all histories in the novel, whether narrated or spoken, are suspect. In Mr. Oliver’s house objects’ historical value suggests irreversible time has prevailed. As Guy Debord writes in The Society of the Spectacle: “The triumph of irreversible time was also its metamorphosis of the time into things”. Mr. Oliver confirms his perception of irreversible time by describing the passage of his life in a linear metaphor: “She had persisted in stretching his thread of life so fine, so far”.
Lucy’s first scene presents a view of English history very different from her brother’s. When we first see her she has been reading her favorite book, An Outline of History, and “spent the hours between three and five thinking of rhododendron forests in Piccadilly; when the entire continent, not then, she understood, divided by a channel, was all one”. The maid enters, interrupting Lucy’s “imaginative reconstruction of the past” that she has built upon the founding myth of England in An Outline of History. This founding myth reinforces her present perception of the world as a united natural environment—the description of the ancient Pangaea when the land “was all one”—aligning Lucy’s use of myth with Debord’s understanding of the importance of myth in agrarian societies:
“Myth was the unified mental construct whose job it was to make sure that the whole cosmic order confirmed the order that this society had in fact already set up within its own frontiers”.
Strikingly, Lucy’s conception of time further aligns her with a Debordian notion of the agrarian society. Lucy experiences a cyclical time based on the seasons. Her life is “circled . . . by one recurring question. Hers was, should she live at Kensington or Kew? But every year, when winter came, she did neither”. Her “recurring question” cycles with the seasons, and one year is no different from another, as she always makes the same decision.
With a distant myth reinforcing her cyclical experience of the present, Lucy is given to “increasing the bounds of the moment by flights into the past or future; or sidelong down corridors and alleys”. These “flights,” though expanding backwards and forwards in time, always remain grounded in the present. Not to be confused with movement along a linear history, Lucy present includes and is colored by past and future. Indeed, Lucy’s conception of the present is very similar to Eliot’s in the poem Burnt Norton: “Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present”.
Religion is also important to Lucy, and helps reconcile her attraction to myth with her position in a consciously historical society. Lucy employs Christianity, as Debord writes, to
“Monotheistic religions were a compromise between myth and history, between the cyclical time which still dominated the sphere of production and the irreversible time which was the theater of conflicts and realignments between peoples”.
Debord’s use of theatrical metaphor in the quote is especially apt in the context of Between The Acts. He conflates “history” and “theater” much like the confused spectator mentioned in my introduction.
The frames through which both Bart and Lucy as “man” and “woman” view the world are epitomized in the actual framing of a man and woman in Pointz Hall. These portraits offer clear readable metaphors for man and woman’s respective role in English society, roles Bart and Lucy fill and confirm:
“Two pictures hung opposite the window. In real life they had never met, the long lady and the man holding his horse by the rein. The lady was a picture, bought by Oliver because he liked the picture; the man was an ancestor. He had a name. He held the rein in his hand.”
The lady is a picture, a representation, and is only valuable insofar as she is aesthetically pleasing to look at. The man, on the other hand, has an identity, and the rein in his hand symbolizes the control he wields over his personal history, even over the painting he is figured in. Indeed, the description of the ancestor provides almost no descriptive visual details. Rather than representing the portrait his history is told: “He had said to the painter: ‘If you want my likeness, dang it sir, take it when the leaves are on the trees.’ There were leaves on the trees”. The ancestor even controls the terms of his own representation. He is described as a “talk producer,” marking him as a contributor to and source of historical discourse; an active member of society.
“But the lady was a picture,” a simple picture and no more:
“In her yellow robe, leaning with a pillar to support her, a silver arrow in her hand, and a feather in her hair, she led the eye up, down, from the curve to the straight, through glades of greenery and shades of silver, dun and rose into the silence.”
The descriptive language praises the picture’s representational qualities. It leads the eyes over pleasing curves and straights “into the silence.” It tells no story. It is part of no history. If anything, the silver arrow and feather imbue the picture with a mythic atemporality quality. The language describing the picture uses the discourse of “naturalness” woven throughout the novel to connect the idea of “woman” to the idea of “nature.” The woman’s “yellow robe” associates the woman with the many appearances of yellow in nature throughout the novel: George’s flower blazes “a soft yellow”; Sohrab the Afghan hand has “wild yellow eyes”; The cat of the manor is a “fine yellow”; Candish pauses in the dining room “to move a yellow rose”; at one point the view of the fields outside glares “green yellow, blue yellow, red yellow”.
In a similar vein, the feather in the woman’s hair associates her with the birds that permeate the novel’s fabric. Analogies comparing birds to women recur throughout the text: Isa first appears in the novel “like a swan swimming its way” and she is wearing “a dressing gown with faded peacocks on it”; Mrs. Haines glares “out of goose-like eyes, gobbling”; Bart alludes to his sister saying, “Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow”. Both woman and nature bear silent witness to a masculine historical progress. Their presence is constant, though their stories go untold. They are ignored, given no voice, and simply praised for their representational qualities. The desire to silence and represent both nature and woman is expressed in Mr. Oliver’s use of the word “picture” in dealing with both. The painted woman’s identity is merely a “picture”; Mr. Oliver’s newspaper is blown by the wind and frames the landscape with its edge, he thinks: “Had he been a painter, he would have fixed his easel here, where the country, barred by trees, looked like a picture”. English history has no place for a woman’s voice or values, and, like nature, she is safely confined to the realm of representation, outside of history.
Mr. Oliver’s framing is a means of separation. It is a way to divide both nature and women from masculine English history. On the other hand Lucy’s “one-making” does not allow for a causal linear history, a fact William confirms when he rightly exclaims, “You don’t believe in history”. Her unified conception of the world only needs the support of myth and religion. It is this dichotomy, of unifier and separatist, that emerges as the tipping point and central question of historiography in the novel. When Mr. Oliver distinguishes himself from his sister: “For she belonged to the unifiers; he to the separatists,” he is categorizing all of humanity into one of two camps. This distinction, which hinges upon masculine and feminine identity, is firmly in place when La Trobe arrives to begin the pageant.
Before getting into the pageant itself, some context will be helpful. In 1905, Louis Napoleon Parker “invented a new form of dramatic art with the Sherborne Pageant” (Parker, Preface). The pageant, originally intended to involve one hundred people, quickly expanded to nine hundred participants. In a rehearsal ten days before the first performance two newspaper journalists stumbled upon the pageant and released the story. News spread quickly, and the Sherborne pageant brought fifty thousand people to the Dorset Village. Following this great success, Parker mounted five more pageants in the next four years. The final pageant in York involved some sixteen thousand participants and attracted half a million spectators. Parker’s pageants were a vehicle for teaching local and national history and conjuring patriotic sentiment.
Parker’s preface to The Book Of The York Pageant conveys the unbridled nationalism that the pageant prided itself upon:
Drama covering all English history from 800 B.C. to the Great Rebellion; written by Englishmen, set to music by Englishmen, costumed and acted by English men and women—acted by thirteen thousand of them—and listened to by over half-a-million spectators in twelve weeks. Drama lifting our souls to God, and our hearts to the King—is not that National Drama?
When Woolf set out to write Between The Acts, historical pageantry was less than forty years old. She fully understood she was dealing with a fresh and highly political form of theater used as a platform for spreading patriotism through reductive displays of history. Dubious of the English nationalism of her day, Woolf saw the pageant form as the perfect vehicle to satirize and critique the idealistic nationalism pageantry strove to inspire.
Woolf keeps the satire close to its origins throughout the text; both pageant and pageant-master are loyal caricatures of the original. From Miss La Trobe’s first entrance the parody of Louis Napoleon Parker is clear. Parker was named Louis Napoleon by accident. Born in France while his father was away, a Frenchman christened him Louis Napoleon when his mother knew no French to name him herself. The obviously foreign first name threw Parker’s English identity into question throughout his life (Yoshino, 8). La Trobe, like Parker, has a name that isn’t “presumably pure English”. Woolf creates a neat comic variation on the suspicion of Parker’s French origins: “Mrs. Bingham suspects that she had Russian blood in her”.
True to the spirit of pageantry and her identity as a woman, Miss La Trobe sides with Mrs. Swithin as a unifier. However, as a woman both alienated from history and charged with representing it, La Trobe must submit to the hegemonic system in order to subvert it. Like Debord’s necessary reliance upon the very framework he seeks to debunk, La Trobe must use a separatist model to unify; She must operate within a masculine historical framework to change her audience’s views on that very same framework. Her problem mirrors the same one Woolf struggled with throughout her career: “As men have established an order of values in life, so too, since fiction is largely based on life, these values prevail there also to a very great extent.” The same can be said of history. La Trobe’s submission to masculine values is total, affecting even her outward appearance, which is distinctly unfeminine:
Outwardly she was swarthy, sturdy and thick set.; strode about the fields in a smock frock; sometimes with a cigarette in her mouth; often with a whip in her hand; and used rather strong language—perhaps, then, she wasn’t altogether a lady?
This is certainly not a representational description of a woman similar to the “picture.”
Rather, the description shares much more in common with the portrait of the “ancestor.” Over and above her obviously mannish physical traits (swarthy, sturdy and thick set) she is given to strong language, much like the ancestor who felt it “a damned shame to leave out Colin” in his picture. The whip she often carries also echoes the reigns the ancestor is depicted to be holding. Completing the androgynous profile, La Trobe’s description ends with a not-so-subtle sexual pun: “At any rate, she had a passion for getting things up”.
As the audience waits for the play to begin they sit uncomfortably on the lawn:
They stared at the view, as if something might happen in one of those fields to relieve them of the intolerable burden of sitting silent, doing nothing, in company. Their minds and bodies were too close, yet not close enough. We aren’t free, each one of them felt separately, to feel or think separately, nor yet to fall asleep. We’re too close; but not close enough. So they fidgeted.
“Close; but not close enough,” the audience comprised of all background and classes seems to be seeking guidance on how to interact. Their discomfort rephrases the separatist vs. unifier problem in body language, as they are poised and waiting to be pushed or pulled, together or apart.
The pageant commences with the sounds of the machine chuff, chuff, chuffing away in the bushes. “Then the play began. Was it, or was it not, the play?” This chuffing continues throughout the rest of the pageant, and its rhythmic progression reminds spectators of the inexorable march of history. It is La Trobe’s homage to irreversible time. But La Trobe is careful to ensure cyclical time is able to stake its inconspicuous claim. In the background of the action, punctuating historical scenes, a group of villagers pass back and forth between the trees in single file. “Digging and delving,” they sing, “for the earth is always the same”. David McWhirter writes that these villagers “evoke ‘a timeless world’ of communal values, a world where historical inessentials such as ‘costume and name’ change, ‘but the people beneath,’ nature and human nature, ‘remain the same’”. La Trobe inserts the villagers as a subtle undercurrent of unification throughout the historical progress of scenes.
A little girl begins the play as the founding myth of England: “England am I . . . A child new born”. Her prologue speech is patchy, and she struggles with her lines. Meanwhile, the ahistorical villagers pass in and out of the trees behind her. Their words are swept away by the wind and cannot be understood. As Mrs. Manresa looks on she feels “a vast vacancy between her, the singing villagers and the piping child”, a vacancy present in the rest of the glaring audience. It is not until the popular tune plays out that everyone comes together, “the play had begun”.
This early reliance on music signals a clear choice in La Trobe’s presentation, and as the play develops it becomes more and more obvious the pageant-master values the emotional involvement conjured by music over the clarity of her message. When the Elizabethan scene’s complexity increases to show a play within a play the action becomes incomprehensible. “There was such a medley of things going on, what with the beldame’s deafness, the bawling of youths, and the confusion of the plot that she could make nothing of it. Did the plot matter?” Perceptively, Isa recognizes that “the plot was only there to beget emotion”. That emotion is realized and all is forgotten as the momentum builds into the Act 1 Finale:
It was a mellay; a medley; an entrancing spectacle (to William) of dappled light and shade on half clothed, fantastically coloured, leaping, jerking, swinging legs and arms. He clapped till his palms stung. Mrs. Manresa applauded loudly. Somehow she was the Queen; and he (Giles) the surly hero.”
La Trobe creates “an entrancing spectacle” to unify the audience, but in doing so the story is sacrificed: “It didn’t matter what the words were; or who sang what. Round and round they whirled, intoxicated by the music”. La Trobe’s unifying strategy lies in the emotional content of the spectacle. Bumbling through a linear and separatist history, La Trobe unifies the audience with the theatricality of the presentation, its color, its song, its dance, etc..
As the scene ends and the audience disperses “across the lawns, and down the paths” for the interval, Miss La Trobe emerges from her hiding. Watching her audience stream away she tries to comfort herself: “Hadn’t she, for twenty-five minutes, made them see? . . . She saw Giles Oliver with his back to the audience. Also Cobbet of Cobbs Corner. She hadn’t made them see. It was a failure, another damned failure!”. La Trobe’s vision, however briefly present, made no ostensible impression on her audience. Her pageant has been another failure, but why? Debord’s comments on spectacular time offer one possibility. Debord’s Thesis 157 reads:
“Another aspect of the historical life in general is that the individual’s life is not historical. The pseudo-events that vie for attention in the spectacle’s dramatizations have not been lived by those who are thus informed about them. In any case they are quickly forgotten, thanks to the precipitation with which the spectacle’s pulsing machinery replaces one by the next.”
The passage lends itself to a theatrical context. La Trobe’s scenes from English history vie for the spectator’s attention as they are dramatized in the pageant, however, the historical events have not been lived by the audience that is thus informed about them. Irregardless, each event from history is quickly forgotten as the ceaseless chuff, chuff, chuff of the machine replaces one scene with another. The Thesis continues:
“At the same time, everything really lived has no relation to society’s official pseudo-cyclical rhythm of that time’s consumable by-products. Such individual lived experience of a cut-off everyday life remains bereft of language or concept, and it lacks any critical access to its own antecedents, which are nowhere recorded. It cannot be communicated. And it is misunderstood and forgotten to the benefit of the spectacle’s false memory of the unmemorable.”
The real lives of the characters, witnessed between the acts, bear no relation whatsoever to the pageant’s basic progression—society’s official stance on time. Indeed, the entire tone of the pageant is directly opposed to the tone of the novel it punctuates. The pageant and its characters are comic; the novel and its lives are tragic. This blaring disparity is most obvious when the pageant reaches “Present Time. Ourselves,” and La Trobe tries to “douche them with present-time reality”.
[Giles] said (without words), “I’m damnably unhappy.”
“So am I,” Dodge echoed.
And I too, Isa thought.
They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle. Nothing happened. The tick of the machine was maddening. (176)
As Debord rightly says, each character is bereft of a language to express the pains of “individual lived experience.” Their feelings “cannot be communicated,” and find no language outside of their own heads. Caught and caged in the spectacle, these feelings are “misunderstood and forgotten to the benefit of the spectacle’s false memory.”
In La Trobe’s grand finale the performers hold up mirrors to the audience as the entire procession of characters marches out declaiming “some phrase or fragment of their parts”. The result is a giant cacophony in which “The very cows joined in” and “the barriers which should divide Man the Master from the Brute were dissolved”. This chaos, easily mistaken for the fragmented muddle of modernism, is in fact quite the opposite; it is La Trobe’s supreme unifying gesture celebrating all the disparate parts of a separatist history in their joyous entirety, including nature and the spectators themselves. This act, to borrow a phrase from critic Stuart Christie, “levels any topographical valuation of historical greatness (such as nineteenth-century nationalism) in favor of subtlety”. But it does not work: “All evaded or shaded themselves—save Mrs. Manresa who, facing herself in the glass, used it as a glass; had out her mirror; powdered her nose; and moved one curl, disturbed by the breeze, to its place”. With the exception of Mrs. Manresa, whose representation in the glass is no different from the way she represents herself to the world, nobody looks in the mirrors. No one is willing to see themselves as complicit with La Trobe’s history. The presentation is there, but the fundamental problem remains: “the individual’s life is not historical”. The spectacular representation of English history has nothing to do with the realities of individuals’ lives. Bereft of a language of day-to-day life, the only communication that can take place between characters is mediated by the spectacle. Debord describes this relationship in Separation Perfected:
Spectators are linked only by a one-way relationship to the very center that maintains their isolation from one another. The spectacle thus unites what is separate, but it unites it only in its separateness.
This explicates one of La Trobe’s central problems. La Trobe’s use of the spectacle to unify the separatist vision of history unites it only in its separateness. The characters’ one-way relationships to her pageant maintain their isolation even as they sit together, and the lawn of Pointz Hall becomes the gathering of a “lonely crowd”. La Trobe’s final vision, though complete, though unified, maintains separation. In trying to subvert the separatist ideology through unification, La Trobe misunderstands the properties of the powerful spectacle she wields and separates anyway.
La Trobe’s final peroration rings hollow: “What? You can’t descry it? All you can see of yourselves is scraps, orts, and fragments? Well then listen to the gramophone affirming…”. Like the final words of the mayor in the pageant mockumentary Waiting for Guffman: “Because that my friends is America, and nothing says America more to me than determination and pride.” both pageants actually say very little. Just what each pageant means is ultimately unclear.
In the end, the triumphant cry of the gramophone fades to a lament, “Dispersed are we…,” as the audience disbands. The gramophone’s final cryptic words: “Unity—Dispersity”, assert no clear historical position, equalizing both separatist and unifier. Reverend Streatfield’s post-pageant analysis recapitulates his interpretation of the pageant with the aphorism, “We act different parts; but are the same”. Like the gramophone, his words privilege no stance, instead asserting the paradoxical view that a separatist and unified conception of history might coexist harmoniously.
As David McWhirter reminds us, “Woolf distrusted the conventions not only of comedy, but of all the established genres, for she recognized that literary conventions are inextricably tied to social conventions of which ‘men are the arbiters’”. The product of her distrust, Between The Acts, offers a panoply of literary genres and styles, ranging from comic to tragic and lyrical to discursive. Is its loose polyphonic form separated or unified? Perhaps it is unified in its separation? In the end we can only be certain of Woolf’s rejection of conventional narrative, both literary and historic. Whose play will replace it? One might imagine Woolf’s sentiments echoing Reverend Streatfield’s: “That I leave to you”.