Reinventing the Tradition: The Aesthetics and Politics of the Outsider's Pageant in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts

Abstract

Virginia Woolfs Between the Acts powerfully draws on the ancient genre of pageantry that was revived in modern Britain as a viable cultural practice for celebrating historical continuity and the harmonious unity of communal identities. Woolfs pageant-play in Between the Acts certainly recognizes the function of pageantry as a highly articulated means of imagining a unified communal Englishness. The interpolation of the pageant-play into the novel allows her to pursue the novels primary thematic concern about communal Englishness by presenting the annual village ritual, the intended aim of which is to survey English history and unify individual voices into collective subjectivity. Yet by tracing Englands national history from distinctly critical and satirical perspectives, Woolf burlesques the entire tradition of pageantry itself. The peculiar structure of Between the Actsthe interlacing of the pageant-play with the novelistic narrativefurther ironizes the ideological rationale behind the traditional pageant by disclosing the near-impossibility of enacting the pageant as it is scripted. Written from the position of the outsider in her own country, Woolfs final novel presents the aesthetics of between-the-acts and narrates the politics of new communal Englishness suspended between unity and disparity.