[122] Tears. Tears. Tears.: Echoing a poem by Walt Whitman, beginning and ending “Tears! Tears! Tears!” in which a storm at night is imaged as the tears of some mysterious “ghost,” some “form in the dark” bent and huddled on the beach, weeping for the world. Compare Woolf’s “Not a sound this evening to bring in the human tears. I remember the sudden profuse shower one night just before war wh. made me think of all men & women weeping” (Diary 5: 274).

  [123] rebuilt (witness man with hod) by human effort: Compare the chorus of workmen in T. S. Eliot’s The Rock who chant of building with “new bricks,” “new stone,” and “new speech” a “Church for all,” and yet are reminded “We build in vain unless the LORD build with us.” Woolf was unable to attend a performance of the play but, in reading it, she judged Eliot’s writing as too full of priestly dogmatism (Letters 5: 315).

  [123] the League of . . .: In popular Empire Day celebrations mounted by schools and local communities, the participants typically dressed up to represent the colonies. La Trobe’s pageant goes beyond empire to represent the League of Nations. In the interwar years, the League of Nations pursued the goal of peace through international cooperation, but such efforts collapsed with Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in 1935. Through its lay societies, however, like the League of Nations Society, of which Leonard Woolf was a founding member, the League successfully mobilized public support for disarmament and international goals. A week before her death, writing to Lady Cecil about Lord Robert Cecil’s autobiography A Great Experiment (1941), Virginia Woolf wrote, “There wasnt, even for me, a non-politician, a word too much about the League” (Letters 6: 482). Leonard’s review of Cecil’s autobiography argued that a primary reason for the League’s failure was its exclusion from the bodies determining foreign policy of the national states, which preserved their right to autonomy, and he praised Cecil’s dedication to the establishment of a new international body for a postwar world (New Statesman and Nation, February 15, 1941: 163–64).

  [124] temple-haunting martins: A reference to Banquo’s speech welcoming Duncan to Macbeth’s castle in Shakespeare’s Macbeth: “This guest of summer, / The temple-haunting martlet, does approve / By his loved mansionry that the heaven’s breath / Smells wooingly here” (I.vi.3–6). The martin is a species of swallow, but in Shakespeare’s play, its augury of peace and prosperity functions ironically, since Duncan will be murdered in Macbeth’s castle.

  [124] in the crannied wall: A displaced image from Tennyson’s poem “Flower in the Crannied Wall” (1869), in which the intense visualization of the flower moves the speaker to reflect, “If I could understand / What you are, root and all, and all in all, / I should know what God and man is.” In the new hygienic vision, the refrigerator becomes the microcosm of macrocosmic design.

  [124] Jazz?: In rhythm and rhyme, this paragraph imitates the syncopations of jazz (which at this time referred loosely to a range of popular music, including ragtime), but jazz was understood to alter the sequence and syntax of linear progression as well. In an early protest against such perceived iconoclasm, Clive Bell sounded the warning that Virginia Woolf “has lately developed a taste for playing tricks with traditional constructions. Certainly she ‘leaves out’ with the boldest of them: here is syncopation if you like it. I am not sure that I do” (“Plus de Jazz,” Since Cezanne [New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922]). T. S. Eliot shared gramophone recordings and talk about the popular dances the Grizzly Bear, the Chicken Strut, and the Memphis Shake with Virginia Woolf. (See Bonnie Kime Scott, 102–3.)

  [124] shiver into splinters: The image of splinters runs throughout Woolf’s writing, sometimes signifying the destruction of warfare, sometimes pain, sometimes a new complex beauty. In Jacob’s Room, the target of the guns on a battleship “flames into splinters,” and in Between the Acts, Giles has premonitions of German planes coming to “splinter Bolney Minster into smithereens and blast the Folly.” In 1932, describing a neurasthenic attack, possibly heightened by thoughts about death, Woolf wrote in her diary of “pain, as of childbirth” and a gradual coming to consciousness until she “lay presiding, like a flickering light, like a most solicitous mother, over the shattered splintered fragments of [her] body” (Diary 4: 121). Yet in The Waves, Bernard speaks of a morning vision as “that sudden rush of wings, that exclamation, carol, and confusion; the riot and babble of voices; and all the drops are sparkling, trembling, as if the garden were a splintered mosaic, vanishing, twinkling, not yet formed into one whole” (182–83); and Woolf, as early as 1908, was writing of her attempt to achieve “a different kind of beauty . . . a symmetry by means of infinite discords . . . some kind of whole made of shivering fragments” with which to record “the flight of the mind” (A Passionate Apprentice 393). In a later (1940) essay, she wrote, “Yet it is the only way of getting at the truth—to have it broken into many splinters by many mirrors and so select” (“The Man at the Gate,” Collected Essays 3 [New York: Harcourt, 1967]: 220).

  [125] Mopping, mowing, whisking, frisking: Echoing Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” See note to page 59.

  [125] old man with a beard: A ghostly figure, like William Blake’s Urizen or Nobodaddy, who haunts Between the Acts either in the form of this actor or in the plant that Isa plucks at various times to sniff its bitter scent. See the note to page 77.

  [125] some phrase or fragment from their parts: The pastiche of allusions on page 126, which in turn draws on allusions in the words of both actors and audience, recalls the androgynous Tiresias’s line in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” In the following citations, page numbers refer to earlier occurrences in Between the Acts: I am not in my perfect mind (page 59); I’m the old top hat (music hall song; page 83); Home is the hunter (page 117); the miner sweats (page 85); maiden faith is rudely strumpeted (adapted from Shakespeare’s sonnet 66, see “strumpet” page 67); Sweet and low (song from Tennyson’s “The Princess,” see page 64); Is that a dagger (Macbeth, II.i, see references to daggers throughout); Lady I love (page 81); I’d be a butterfly (page 115); Hark, hark (page 80). “In thy will is our peace” echoes a line in T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday, “Our peace in His will,” a translation of “E’n la sua volontade è nostra pace,” from Dante’s Paradiso (canto 3, line 85), which in turn alludes to a line in the Confessions of Saint Augustine, which has been translated as “In thy good pleasure is our peace” or “In a good will is our peace” (book 13, chapter 9, section 10).

  [126] the audience saw themselves: Reflected in numerous little mirrors and shiny surfaces, the audience would see themselves in a manner possibly resembling Roger Fry’s description of the art of Henri Matisse: “By the magic of an intensely coherent style our familiar every day world . . . has been broken to pieces as though reflected in a broken mirror and then put together again into a far more coherent unity in which all the visual values are mysteriously changed—in which plastic forms can be read as pattern and apparently flat patterns are read as diversely inclined planes” (Henri Matisse [1930; London: A. Zwemmer, 1935]: 21).

  [127] orts, scraps and fragments: Words from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, occurring in a speech where Troilus rages against Cressida’s infidelity: “The fractions of her faith, orts of her love, / The fragments, scraps, the bits, and greasy relics, / Of her o’er-eaten faith, are bound to Diomed” (V.ii).

  [128] the warring battle-plumed warriors straining asunder: The image echoes the final scene in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India: The Muslim Aziz and the Englishman Fielding come together in a violent “love” scene in which the riders strain to be together but the horses force them apart.

  [129] Must I be Thomas, you Jane?: John Thomas and Lady Jane are common pet names for male and female genitalia, made famous by D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a novel first published in Italy in 1928 but banned in England, and then published in expurgated form in England in 1932.

  [130] A few were chosen: The Reverend Streatfield’s talk is laced with obvious allusions: “For many are called, but few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14); “For Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread” (Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism, line 625); “Speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another” (Ephesians 4:25). The latter phrase is reiterated as well in Winifred Holtby’s South Riding (1936), another novel that ends with a village pageant in which a gramophone plays a strong role.

  [135] Oracles?: In the ancient classical world, oracles (people or places) were consulted for prophetic utterances or “oracular wisdom,” generally spiritual in nature. The Later Typescript more correctly reads: “Were the oracles a foretaste, if I’m not being irreverent, of our own religion?” (PH 417).

  [135] science . . . is making things . . . more spiritual: James Jeans and Arthur Eddington were astrophysicists who wrote popularly accessible books on science (with which Woolf was familiar) and who both argued—although in radically different ways—that there was no incompatibility between science and religion. In a 1928 debate against the secularist Chapman Cohen, published as “Materialism: has it exploded?” C. E. M. Joad argued that physics had dissolved matter into a space-time continuum, citing Eddington as his authority. In Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable, a young Indian poet says, “The word maya does not mean illusion, it means magic. That is the dictum of the latest Hindu translator of the Vedanta, Dr. Coomaraswamy. And in that signification the word approximates to the views on the nature of the physical world of your pet scientists, Eddington and Jeans” (London: Penguin, 1940: 152–53).

  [135] Ah, that’s the question: The opening line of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy—“To be, or not to be: that is the question” (III.i)—and the question T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock dares not ask.

  [136] playing bodkin: A bodkin is a little dagger or a long pin; with the analogy of a long, thin object, to ride or sit bodkin is to travel squeezed between two people. The word appears in Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech, when he imagines that a man, “might his quietus make with a bare bodkin” (Hamlet, III.i).

  [136] Tears, tears, tears: A poem by Walt Whitman. See note to page 122.

  [139] couldn’t the blue thread settle: The wording in the Early Typescript illuminates the compression of the final version: “Can’t civilization—visible to her vision-haunted eyes as the blue thread or the dragon fly—light there? . . . She was retrieving from sharks above [the aeroplanes] and sharks below [imagined] a foothold for new people, other people, the red-skinned or if you like the black, to settle on” (PH 171). The dragonfly-blue thread conflation appears in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sonnet “Silent Noon,” a poem that conveys an experience of unity in a suspended moment of inarticulate silence: “Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly / Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky” (from The House of Life, 1870).

  [141] her semblable: A resonant word in the first line of Charles Baudelaire’s “To the Reader,” the opening poem in Les fleurs du mal (1857): “Hypocrite lecteur,—mon semblable,—mon frère!” (Hypocrite reader,—my double,—my brother!). Baudelaire’s direct address to the reader is quoted in the last line of “The Burial of the Dead” section in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (76).

  [141] Old Man’s Beard: See note to pages 77 and 125.

  [141] like Venus . . . to her prey: A line from Jean Racine’s Phèdre, “Venus toute entière à sa proie attaché” (Venus wholly fastened to her prey), depicting Phèdre as consumed by her guilty and unrequited love for her stepson, Hippolyte. Lytton Strachey praised the phrase as being as “compact as dynamite” (Books and Characters, 15) in representing “the furies of insensate passion” (Landmarks in French Literature ([1912; London: T. Butterworth, 1929]: 104). See also the note to page 97, “And so Racine.”

  [145] a woman, veiled; or a man?: Compare the hooded figure, “I do not know whether a man or a woman,” in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and the “veiled sister” in part 5 of his “Ash Wednesday.” Eliot associated the hooded figure with the Hanged Man of the tarot, the Hanged God of Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and the risen Christ (see his “Notes on ‘The Waste Land.’”)

  [147] beetle, rolling pebbles: The ancient Egyptians held the dung beetle or scarab to be sacred, since it was thought to resemble the sun god rolling the sun across the sky, thus conveying ideas of transformation, renewal, and resurrection. The image is used by D. H. Lawrence.

  [147] Outline of History: A simplified version of an early passage in G. M. Trevelyan’s History of England: “For many centuries after Britain became an island the untamed forest was king. Its moist and mossy floor was hidden from heaven’s eye by a close-drawn curtain woven of innumerable tree-tops, which shivered in the breezes of summer dawn and broke into wild music of millions upon millions of wakening birds” (3–4). See also the note to page 6.

  [148] raised great stones: G. M. Trevelyan refers to ancient monuments such as the Iron Age hill fort of Maiden Castle in Dorchester, and the prehistoric stone circle, likely of sacred significance, at Stonehenge in Wiltshire.

  [148] heart of darkness: The central image in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a novel that, like Between the Acts, opens by underwriting the present with evocations of the past when England was yet a swamp and wilderness, undergoing colonization by the Romans. See the note to page 4, “Romans.”

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING:

  Virginia Woolf

  Editions

  The Complete Shorter Fiction. Edited by Susan Dick. 2nd ed. San Diego: Harcourt, 1989.

  The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell. 5 vols. New York: Harcourt, 1977–84.

  The Essays of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Andrew McNeillie. 6 vols. [in progress]. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986–.

  The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. 6 vols. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975–80.

  Moments of Being. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind. San Diego: Harcourt, 1985.

  A Passionate Apprentice: The Early Journals, 1897–1909. Edited by Mitchell A. Leaska. San Diego: Harcourt, 1990.

  Biographies and Reference Works

  Briggs, Julia. Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life. San Diego: Harcourt, 2005.

  Hussey, Mark. Virginia Woolf A to Z: A Comprehensive Reference for Students, Teachers, and Common Readers to Her Life, Works, and Critical Reception. New York: Facts on File, 1995.

  Kirkpatrick, B. J., and Stuart N. Clarke. A Bibliography of Virginia Woolf. 4th ed. Oxford: Clarendon, 1997.

  Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Knopf, 1996.

  Marder, Herbert. The Measure of Life: Virginia Woolf’s Last Years. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000.

  Poole, Roger. The Unknown Virginia Woolf. 4th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

  Reid, Panthea. Art and Affection: A Life of Virginia Woolf. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

  General Criticism

  Abel, Elizabeth. Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

  Bazin, Nancy Topping. Virginia Woolf and the Androgynous Vision. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1973.

  Beer, Gillian. Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

  Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

  DiBattista, Maria. Virginia Woolf’s Major Novels: The Fables of Anon. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980.

  Fleishman, Avrom. Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975.

  Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilisation, Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

  Guiguet, Jean. Virginia Woolf and Her Works. 1965. Reprint, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976.

  Harper, Howard. Between Language and Silence: The Novels of Virginia Woolf. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982.

  Hussey, Mark. The Singing of the Real World: The Philosophy of Virginia Woolf’s Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986.

  ——, ed. Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality and Myth. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991.

  Majumdar, Robin, and Allen McLaurin, eds. Virginia Woolf: The Critical Heritage. Boston: Routledge, 1975.

  Marcus, Jane. Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988.

  ——, ed. New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981.

  ——, ed. Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

  ——, ed. Virginia Woolf and Bloomsbury: A Centenary Celebration. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

  ——. Virginia Woolf and the Languages of Patriarchy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.

  McLaurin, Allen. Virginia Woolf: The Echoes Enslaved. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

  McNees, Eleanor, ed. Virginia Woolf: Critical Assessments. 4 vols. New York: Roudedge, 1994.

  Minow-Pinkney, Makiko. Virginia Woolf and the Problem of the Subject: Feminine Writing in the Major Novels. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

  Phillips, Kathy J. Virginia Woolf Against Empire. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994.

  Roe, Sue, and Susan Sellers, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.