Women’s Prehistoric Imagination in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts

Abstract

This essay examines Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts (1941) through the two minor female characters, Mrs. Swithin and Isabella. It contends that Woolf features the women’s prehistoric imagination to introduce different temporalities into the British imperialistic narrative and imagine what might have been in history in a playful manner. The essay’s claim is that the playful mode of the two women’s imaginative minor narratives could reflect the author’s helplessness as a historical agent and can be understood to be part of her self-mocking gesture as an undetected conspirator of British imperialism. Though projecting her sense of powerlessness at the time of the impending World War Ⅱ onto the female characters, Woolf also strategically leaves the readers disoriented by an overlay of historical narratives in Between the Acts: the performances presented in and out of the pageant directed by Miss La Trobe is overlaid with the immediate interruptions introduced by natural environment variables and, more importantly for my argument, with the prehistoric imaginative narratives focalized through Mrs. Swithin and Isabella. Such a claim can argue against critics whose reading of the novel has identified Woolf with Miss La Trobe and criticized her authoritative vision as quasi-imperialistic. Instead of evaluating Woolf’s artistic complicity in British cultural formation in the time of imperialism, this essay offers a counter discourse by way of an interrogation of how women can indirectly engage with the British imperialist narrative and its exclusive formation with parody and imitation.