“The Present Moment”: Reading Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts in the Anthropocene
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In an age where ecological disasters disrupt everyday human existence, Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts (1941) provides timely commentary on the revised positionality of humans, whose actions have amounted to a planetary force endangering all beings. Woolf’s narrative style, her inclusion of various nonhuman subjects and voices, and the contrast between the perceived time of human agents and the deep geological time challenge the traditional hierarchical understanding of species. The novel attributes agency to nature and helps readers rethink existence from a more holistic, planetary perspective. While previous ecocritical studies offer valuable commentary on Woolf’s consciousness of nature, few focus on the discourse of the Anthropocene and how it relates to questions of agency and time in her work. In this paper, I focus on how Woolf brings nature to the foreground, rather than position it as a passive background or setting of the action, a move that encourages the readers to reflect on one’s anthropocentric tendency. I further argue that a more acute understanding of present reality is possible through the text’s allusion to geological time.
Abstract
In an age where ecological disasters disrupt everyday human existence, Virginia Woolf’s novel Between the Acts (1941) provides timely commentary on the revised positionality of humans, whose actions have amounted to a planetary force endangering all beings. Woolf’s narrative style, her inclusion of various nonhuman subjects and voices, and the contrast between the perceived time of human agents and the deep geological time challenge the traditional hierarchical understanding of species. The novel attributes agency to nature and helps readers rethink existence from a more holistic, planetary perspective. While previous ecocritical studies offer valuable commentary on Woolf’s consciousness of nature, few focus on the discourse of the Anthropocene and how it relates to questions of agency and time in her work. In this paper, I focus on how Woolf brings nature to the foreground, rather than position it as a passive background or setting of the action, a move that encourages the readers to reflect on one’s anthropocentric tendency. I further argue that a more acute understanding of present reality is possible through the text’s allusion to geological time.
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