Woolf Between the Acts (Annotated)

Enriched Edition. An Experimental Modernist Novel of Village Pageantry, English History, and the Shadow of War
1. Auflage 2013
ISBN: 978-80-7484-500-0
Verlag: e-artnow
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

This carefully crafted ebook: 'Between the Acts' is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. Between the Acts is the final novel by Virginia Woolf, published in 1941 shortly after her suicide. This is a book laden with hidden meaning and allusion. It describes the mounting, performance, and audience of a festival play (hence the title) in a small English village just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Much of it looks forward to the war, with veiled allusions to connection with the continent by flight, swallows representing aircraft, and plunging into darkness. The pageant is a play within a play, representing a rather cynical view of English history. Woolf links together many different threads and ideas - a particularly interesting technique being the use of rhyme words to suggest hidden meanings. Relationships between the characters and aspects of their personalities are explored. The English village bonds throughout the play through their differences and similarities.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Woolf, Virginia

E-Artnow

Weitere Mitwirkende

Tallowmere, Cora

Leseproben

Mrs. Neale laughed; Mrs. Manresa laughed; Giles too smiled, and looked down at his shoes.

She drew him down the Barn, in and out, from one to another. She knew ‘em all. Every one was a thorough good sort. No, she wouldn’t allow it, not for a moment—Pinsent’s bad leg. “No, no. We’re not going to take that for an excuse, Pinsent.” If he couldn’t bowl, he could bat. Giles agreed. A fish on a line meant the same to him and Pinsent; also jays and magpies. Pinsent stayed on the land; Giles went to an office. That was all. And she was a thorough good sort, making him feel less of an audience, more of an actor, going round the Barn in her wake.

Then, at the end by the door, they came upon the old couple, Lucy and Bartholomew, sitting on their Windsor chairs.

Chairs had been reserved for them. Mrs. Sands had sent them tea. It would have caused more bother than it was worth—asserting the democratic principle; standing in the crowd at the table.

“Swallows,” said Lucy, holding her cup, looking at the birds. Excited by the company they were flitting from rafter to rafter. Across Africa, across France they had come to nest here. Year after year they came. Before there was a channel, when the earth, upon which the Windsor chair was planted, was a riot of rhododendrons, and humming birds quivered at the mouths of scarlet trumpets, as she had read that morning in her Outline of History, they had come … Here Bart rose from his chair.

But Mrs. Manresa absolutely refused to take his seat. “Go on sitting, go on sitting,” she pressed him down again. “I’ll squat on the floor.” She squatted. The surly knight remained in attendance.

“And what did you think of the play?” she asked.

Bartholomew looked at his son. His son remained silent.

“And you Mrs. Swithin?” Mrs. Manresa pressed the old lady.

Lucy mumbled, looking at the swallows.

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” said Mrs. Manresa. “Was it an old play? Was it a new play?”

No one answered.

“Look!” Lucy exclaimed.

“The birds?” said Mrs. Manresa, looking up.

There was a bird with a straw in its beak; and the straw dropped.

Lucy clapped her hands. Giles turned away. She was mocking him as usual, laughing.

“Going?” said Bartholomew. “Time for the next act?”

And he heaved himself up from his chair. Regardless of Mrs. Manresa and of Lucy, off he strolled too.

“Swallow, my sister, O sister swallow,” he muttered, feeling for his cigar case, following his son.

Mrs. Manresa was nettled. What for had she squatted on the floor then? Were her charms fading? Both were gone. But, woman of action as she was, deserted by the male sex, she was not going to suffer tortures of boredom from the refeened old lady. Up she scrambled, putting her hands to hair as if it were high time that she went too, though it was nothing of the kind and her hair was perfectly tidy. Cobbet in his corner saw through her little game. He had known human nature in the East. It was the same in the West. Plants remained—the carnation, the zinnia, and the geranium. Automatically he consulted his watch; noted time to water at seven; and observed the little game of the woman following the man to the table in the West as in the East.

William at the table, now attached to Mrs. Parker and Isa, watched him approach. Armed and valiant, bold and blatant, firm elatant—the popular march tune rang in his head. And the fingers of William’s left hand closed firmly, surreptitiously, as the hero approached.

Mrs. Parker was deploring to Isa in a low voice the village idiot.

“Oh that idiot!” she was saying. But Isa was immobile, watching her husband. She could feel the Manresa in his wake. She could hear in the dusk in their bedroom the usual explanation. It made no difference; his infidelity—but hers did.

“The idiot?” William answered Mrs. Parker for her. “He’s in the tradition.”

“But surely,” said Mrs. Parker, and told Giles how creepy the idiot—“We have one in our village”—had made her feel. “Surely, Mr. Oliver, we’re more civilized?”

” said Giles. He looked, once, at William. He knew not his name; but what his left hand was doing. It was a bit of luck—that he could despise him, not himself. Also Mrs. Parker. But not Isa—not his wife. She had not spoken to him, not one word. Nor looked at him either.

“Surely,” said Mrs. Parker, looking from one to the other. “Surely we are?”

Giles then did what to Isa was his little trick; shut his lips; frowned; and took up the pose of one who bears the burden of the world’s woe, making money for her to spend.

“No,” said Isa, as plainly as words could say it. “I don’t admire you,” and looked, not at his face, but at his feet. “Silly little boy, with blood on his boots.”

Giles shifted his feet. Whom then did she admire? Not Dodge. That he could take for certain. Who else? Some man he knew. Some man, he was sure, in the Barn. Which man? He looked round him.

Then Mr. Streatfield, the clergyman, interrupted. He was carrying cups.

“So I shake hands with my heart!” he exclaimed, nodding his handsome, grizzled head and depositing his burden safely.

Mrs. Parker took the tribute to herself.

“Mr. Streatfield!” she exclaimed. “Doing all the work! While we stand gossiping!”

“Like to see the greenhouse?” said Isa suddenly, turning to William Dodge.

O not now, he could have cried. But had to follow, leaving Giles to welcome the approaching Manresa, who had him in thrall.

The path was narrow. Isa went ahead. And she was broad; she fairly filled the path, swaying slightly as she walked, and plucking a leaf here and there from the hedge.

“Fly then, follow,” she hummed, “the dappled herds in the cedar grove, who, sporting, play, the red with the roe, the stag with the doe. Fly, away. I grieving stay. Alone I linger, I pluck the bitter herb by the ruined wall, the churchyard wall, and press its sour, its sweet, its sour, long grey leaf, so, twixt thumb and finger… .”

She threw away the shred of Old Man’s Beard that she had picked in passing and kicked open the greenhouse door. Dodge had lagged behind. She waited. She picked up a knife from the plank. He saw her standing against the green glass, the fig tree, and the blue hydrangea, knife in hand.

“She spake,” Isa murmured. “And from her bosom’s snowy antre drew the gleaming blade. ‘Plunge blade!’ she said. And struck. ‘Faithless!’ she cried. Knife, too! It broke. So too my heart,” she said.

She was smiling ironically as he came up.

“I wish the play didn’t run in my head,” she said. Then she sat down on a plank under the vine. And he sat beside her. The little grapes above them were green buds; the leaves thin and yellow as the web between birds’ claws.

“Still the play?” he asked. She nodded. “That was your son,” he said, “in the Barn?”

She had a daughter too, she told him, in the cradle.

“And you—married?” she asked. From her tone he knew she guessed, as women always guessed, everything. They knew at once they had nothing to fear, nothing to hope. At first they resented—serving as statues in a greenhouse. Then they liked it. For then they could say—as she did—whatever came into their heads. And hand him, as she handed him, a flower.

“There’s something for your buttonhole, Mr… .” she said, handing him a sprig of scented geranium.

“I’m William,” he said, taking the furry leaf and pressing it between thumb and finger.

“I’m Isa,” she answered. Then they talked as if they had known each other all their lives; which was odd, she said, as they always did, considering she’d known him perhaps one hour. Weren’t they, though, conspirators, seekers after hidden faces? That confessed, she paused and wondered, as they always did, why they could speak so plainly to each other. And added: “Perhaps because we’ve never met before, and never shall again.”

“The doom of sudden death hanging over us,” he said. “There’s no retreating and advancing”—he was thinking of the old lady showing him the house—“for us as for them.”

The future shadowed their present, like the sun coming through the many-veined transparent vine leaf; a criss-cross of lines making no pattern.

They had left the greenhouse door open, and now music came through it. A.B.C., A.B.C., A.B.C.—someone was practising scales. C.A.T. C.A.T. C.A.T… . Then the separate letters made one word “Cat.” Other words followed. It was a simple tune, like a nursery rhyme—

The King is in his counting house,

Counting out his money,

The Queen is in her parlour

Eating bread and honey.

They listened. Another voice, a third voice, was saying something simple. And they sat on in the greenhouse, on the plank with the vine over them, listening to Miss La Trobe or whoever it was, practising her scales.

He could not find his son. He had lost him in the crowd. So old Bartholomew left the Barn, and went to his own room, holding his cheroot and murmuring:

“O sister swallow, O sister swallow,

How can thy heart be full of the spring?”

“How can my heart be full of the spring?” he said aloud, standing in front of the book case. Books: the treasured life-blood of immortal spirits. Poets; the legislators of mankind. Doubtless, it was so. But...