"Cold Pastoral:" Virginia Woolf's Reevaluation of the Late Modernist Aesthetic in Between the Acts By Anne Aufhauser Virginia

Woolf opens her last novel, Between the Acts, with a summer nights discussion about a cesspool and an offhand remark suggesting a new attitude that locates art in the everyday. Mrs. Haines, a guest at a country house that is to host a pageant the next day, hears a bird and asks if it is a nightingale, a bird associated with the lyric poetic voice.[14] No, the narrator replies, It was a daylight bird, chuckling over the substance and succulence of the day, over worms, snails, grit.[15] From the outset of Between the Acts, Woolf challenges the ability of modernist literature as it stands to include the chucklingsubstance and succulence of the quotidian. Using John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn as a framework to examine the limitations of modern art, especially in its written form, Woolf suggests in Between the Acts that modernism fails to affirm breathing human passion.[16] While using Keats to comment on the state of modernism may seem a stretch, as Keats wrote Ode on a Grecian Urn in 1819, Woolfs exploration of Keats themes draws on the modernist tradition of entering into a sort of conversation with the art of the past, and places Between the Acts within the modernist tradition that built itself upon the reinterpretation of traditionally revered authors, such as Keats.[17] In a world again on the brink of war, the silent and lifeless quality of modernist art seems to be stretched to its limits, and Woolf explores ways to reinvent it for the loud and the living. Woolf locates the limitations of modernism within an older generation and its allusively unoriginal and barrenly silent forms of communication, suggesting that art can only retain significance by directly involving audible expression. Woolf critiques modernism, arguing that the revolutions of form and content of the high modernist age demand reevaluation for a new generation and a new epoch. Woolf employs modernist techniques in her exploration of how they fall short, seeking to reinvent, rather than reject, modernism. Pericles Lewis describes the modernist movement as a crisis of representation, in which modernists began to question their ability to represent reality in historically new types of experience, including modern technology and mass culture; a new scale of warfare; changing gender roles and attitudes to sexuality; the questioning of empire, themes that Woolf explores in Between the Acts.[18] To some extent, Between the Acts, began in 1937 and published posthumously in 1941, is anticipated by all Woolfs work.[19] From shifts in perspective, form, and narrative structureWoolf advises her readers against puzzling out the plotWoolf still operates within a modern framework.[20] Her relative success and failure within the contained world of the novel, however, suggests a dissatisfaction with the fruits of over twenty years of literary modernist experimentation. "Ode on a Grecian Urn" Woolf references Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn in the beginning and the end of Between the Acts, establishing a framework through which to challenge current conceptions of art the role of the artist. Before the pageant begins, the narrator describes Isabellas dining room:

Empty, empty, empty; silent, silent, silent. The room was a shell, singing of what was before time was; a vase stood in the heart of the house, alabaster, smooth, cold, holding the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence.[21] Woolfs description of the vase echoes Keats description of the urn, especially in its focus on silence and emptiness: Thou, silent form! Dost tease us out of though/As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral![22] Cold Pastoral seems an apt term to apply to Between the Acts; Woolf focuses on the vases smooth, cold quality within the setting of the English countryside, a departure from her more metropolitan novels such as Mrs. Dalloway. Mark Hussey sees the empty, empty, empty passage as especially noteworthy as a replacement of a passage Woolf had labeled Silence in an early typescript: Who observed the dining room? Who noted the silence, the emptiness? What name is to be given to that which notes a room is empty? This presence certainly requires a name, for without a name what can exist? And how can silence or emptiness be noted by that which has no existence?...Does it not by this means create immortality? And yet we who have named other presences equally impalpablecalled them God, for instance, or again the Holy Ghosthave no name but novelist, or poet, or sculptor, or musician, for this greatest of all preservers and creatorsNameless it is yet partakes of all things named; it is rhyme and rhythm; it is dressing and eating and drinking; is procreation and sensation; is love and hate and passion and adventure.[23] Woolf initially envisions the artist as able to combine life, from rhyme and rhythm to love and hate, with a detached artistic silence. In contrast, Keats poem, alluded to only in the later version of the passage, examines the art itself rather than the artist. By removing the artist from the equation, Woolf asks if an essentially lifelike quality of the room disappears. Her replacement of the artist with a stark image of the artistic object hints at an evolving attitude towards modernist techniques. Maria DiBattista writes that the removal of the author from the typescript was a rejection of the damned egotistical self she discerned and disliked in the writing of Joyce and Dorothy Richardson, two pioneers in the stream-of-consciousness technique.[24] By changing the focus of the novel from the artists role to the participants, Woolf examines modern arts dependence on the insertion of the authors own lifelike force into it, testing modernisms claims of immortality. The Modernist Aesthetic for Older Generations Woolf addresses the question of mortality and spoken communication, an issue at the forefront of her mind as she wrote Between the Acts from 1937-1941, by examining generational differences in the Giles/Swithin household. Hermione Lee, Woolfs biographer, writes that aging and mortality began to preoccupy Woolf from 1932 onward, and she ties these thoughts to Woolfs feelings about silence and the relative power of words. Lytton Stracheys death in 1932 left Woolf with the greatest silence. It was a closing-down of the past; it made her feel (as she always in any case tended to feel) older, more mortal, part of an age that was past.[25] Two years later, Roger Fry would die, and Woolf was saddled with the task of writing his biography, a project that occupied her through its publication in 1940. After attending his funeral, which featured musical rather than spoken eulogies, Woolf wrote, I liked the wordlessness. She also felt suddenly and powerfully, a fear of her own death.[26] While associating spoken words with mortality, Woolf does not denigrate their impact, writing we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.[27]

Woolfs bittersweet approach to silence in Between the Acts is an outgrowth both of her musings mortality and of an appreciation for the artistic forces that shaped her generation. Woolfs sense of impending death and its wordlessness is reflected in the older generations peaceful silence in Between the Acts. Lucy and Bartholomew, elderly siblings, seem able to achieve an admirable artistic goal through their silent communication. During the pageants intermission, for example, Lucy responds to a cue from Bartholomew as if he had said [it] aloud.[28] The silent communion between Lucy and Bart accomplishes the transcendent and timeless connection that Woolf described in her typescript: Flesh and blood was not a barrier, but a mist. Nothing changed their affection; no argument; no fact; no truth. What she saw he didnt; what he saw she didnt and so on, ad infinitum.[29] Lucy and Bart deny a universal perspective, each retaining his or her individual world view, yet nevertheless find a common element in which the perishable is preserved, and the separate become one.[30] DiBattista writes that the silent communication between Lucy and Bart, while comical in a Bergsonian sense, develops that concord in discord and unity in dispersity by which society paradoxically renews itselfad infinitum.[31] While DiBattista celebrates the seemingly immortal continuity in Lucy and Barts silent communication as signifying a social renewal, a discussion of their mortality calls DiBattistas optimistic reading into question: Tick, tick, tick the machine continued. Marking time, said old Oliver beneath his breath. Which doesnt exist for us, Lucy murmured. Weve only the present.[32] While partially justified in evaluating the effectiveness and beauty of their unspoken connection, DiBattista describes a connection that is limited to the present, especially when interrupted by the industrial and bellicose tick of the machine. While Woolf acknowledges power and value of Bartholomew and Lucys connection, she does envision its impending end. Jed Esty notes that the technological advances of the late 1930s fed a sense of English imperial contraction. This sense, he argues, prophesied an end to what Keynes called the international but individualistic era of European culture, or to the historical, cultural, and economic forces that had first given rise to modernism.[33] John Maynard Keynes, a close friend and Bloomsbury contemporary of Woolfs, wrote of European capitalism in the post-World War I period: It is not intelligent, it is not beautiful, it is not just, it is not virtuousIn short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it.[34] By the late 1930s, Woolf, while not engaging in the same scathing rejection of modern forces as Keynes, still predicts the end of these forces with the tick, tick, tick towards war and a new epoch. The Limitations of Literary Modernism for a New Generation In a further comment on the future constraints on the modernist aesthetic, the younger generations attempts at silent communication seem unproductive, lacking the artistic unity achieved by Lucy and Bart. When Lucy declares Weve only the present, Isabella disagrees: Isnt that enough? William asked himself. Beautyisnt that enough? But here Isa fidgeted. Her bare brown arms went nervously to her head. She half turned in her seat. No, not for us, whove the future, she seemed to say. The future disturbing our present.[35] Keats, posits that beauty is, in fact, enough: Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.[36] Isabellas unspoken disagreement and her fidgeting in relaying it, however, hints at a discomfort with static beauty. Her worries about the future of art disturbs

the present, suggesting that even though the cataclysm of war has yet to arrive, the feeling that it cannot be regenerated has already marred its quality. The question of beauty without a future continues to trouble Isabella, especially regarding procreation and her relationship with her husband and children. Keats calls the urn a foster child of Silence, a statement both about artistic silence and, in the context of Between the Acts, about an unnatural approach to the future and reproduction.[37] Isabellas immersion in clichd literary tropes, for instance, isolates her from her children. Musing on a crush she has for the ravaged, the silent, the romantic gentleman farmer, Isabella thinks of her other love; love for husband, the stockbrokerThe father of my children, she added, slipping into the clich conveniently provided by fiction.[38] Isabella notices her children in the garden. Attempting to make them notice her, she tapped on the window with her embossed hairbrush. They were too far off to hear. The drone of the trees was in their ears; the chirp of birds; other incidents of garden life, inaudible, invisible to her in the bedroom, absorbed them.[39] Distracted by two clichd literary images, both silent throughout the novel, Isabella becomes unnaturally isolated from her children and their participation in the incidents of garden life. Isabellas isolation from her children differentiates them from Keats foster children of Silence, for, although separated from their mother, they participate in a linguistic world that focuses on sound rather than meaning. Their nurses speak with rolling words, like sweets on their tongues; which, as they thinned to transparency, gave off pink, green, and sweetness.[40] The nurses, imparting a modernist aesthetic to the children, do so in the absence of a creative, nurturing maternal presence, perhaps hinting at Woolfs worries about modernism after her death. The nurses spoken contact with the children makes them, rather than Isabella, the conservators and curators of modernisms next generation.[41] Isabellas fixation on literary clich prevents her from participating in the genesis of a new linguistic understanding. Isabellas efforts to break free of her isolation through silent communication offer little hope for the continuity, represented through reproduction, of a silent modernist aesthetic. Isabellas only moments of silent connection block the possibility for creation or regeneration by inviting William Dodge, a homosexual artist whose childs not my child, into her relationship with Giles, her husband.[42] During the pageant, the three share a brief moment of silent connection: He said (without words), Im damnably unhappy. So am I, Dodge echoes. And I too, Isa thought. They were all caught and caged; prisoners; watching a spectacle. Nothing happened. The tick of the machine was maddening.[43] Isabella and Dodges relationship, in inhibiting her communication with Giles, alludes to T.S. Eliots Burial of the Dead from The Waste Land: There was Dodge, the lip reader, her semblable, her conspirator, a seeker like her after hidden faces.[44] In Burial of the Dead, the speaker wades among the dead, finally finding a friend and paraphrasing Charles Baudelaire: 'You! hypocrite lecteur!mon semblable,mon frre!'[45] Woolfs places Isabella in Eliots world of the dead while conflating reading and Dodges unproductive artistic sensibility, making him both a Hypocrite Reader and her likeness.[46] The refraction and repetition of allusion suggests not a modernist regeneration but rather a prolonged and self-perpetuating pessimism regarding the future of literary art.

Reinventing Late Modernism In the face of the limitations and the sense of an impending end for literary modernism, Woolf attempts to breathe life into the static and unmoving. While Keats envies arts separation from life, writing, More happy love!...All breathing human passion far above,/That leaves a heart highsorrowful, Woolf argues that art should incorporate human passion.[47] . In Silence, Woolf discusses not only the role of artist as a preserver, but also as a participant in human feeling: it is rhyme and rhythm; it is dressing and eating and drinking; is procreation and sensation; is love and hate and passion and adventure.[48] Art should, Woolf argues, incorporate the pain of reality and human passion, the burning forehead, and a parching tongue that Keats seeks to escape.[49] Lucy and Barts silence, compared with Isabella and Giles, hint at the inability of art to carry a sense of human passion and sensation into the future, an inability Woolf confronts by approaching art not as an end in itself but as a framework within which to understand and advance everyday human life. Woolf approaches art not as an imitation of life but vice versa, a perspective that frees art from its stasis, making it relevant to the future. In what critic Melba Cuddy-Keane deems an extraordinary life-art intersection, Woolf attended a village play in August 1940 that is interrupted by the sounds of an air raid, a case of life mirroring the Reverend Streatfields interruption by twelve aeroplances in perfect formation that Woolf had already written into Between the Acts.[50] While the real-life interruption of the village pageant should not be interpreted as anything beyond coincidental, Woolf seems to have been anticipating the future in her writing. In a more deliberate example of Woolfs bringing art alive, she animates Keats heifer lowing at the skies that leads it.[51] The cows bring a moment of transcendence in the face of arts failure: Miss La Trobe leant against the tree. Her power had left her. Beads of perspiration broke on her forehead. Illusion had failed. This is death, she murmured, death. Then suddenly, as the illusion petered out, the cows took up the burden. One had lost her calf. In the very nick of time she lifted her great moon-eyes head and bellowed. All the great moon-eyes heads laid themselves back. From cow after cow the same yearning bellow. The whole world was filled with dumb yearning. It was the primeval voice sounding loud in the ear of the present momentThe cows annihilated the gap; bridged the distance; filled the emptiness and continued the emotion.[52] A new kind of expression, one more natural and coming from Natures, rather than the artists, hand takes up the burden. The insertion of nature as the artist resolves the problem of the artists inevitable mortality; Nature, Mrs. Manresa notes, will be therewhen were not.[53] As the director of the pageant, Miss La Trobe feels she has failed as an artist. This is death, she says, reinforcing the sense that deliberately contrived art in Between the Acts is lifeless. The cows, however, refer back to Keats sacrificial heifer, both bemoaning the effect of art (the calf has been lost) and, in their pain, giving the image of the sacrificed calf emotional meaning in the present. The cows wordlessly filled the emptiness, filling Keats empty vase not with formal beauty but a temporal and real emotion, one that prevents Miss La Trobes illusion from petering out, and suggesting a solution for bridging the gap between modernism and a new age that demands the injection of a lifelike force.

Miss La Trobe reflects that the pageant is a failure, but her despair is interrupted by a flock of birds sylablling discordantly life, life, life, without measure.[54] Miss La Trobe looks for the source of the interruption, finally settling on old Mrs. Chalmers, creeping through the grass with a bunch of flowerspinks apparentlyto fill the vase that stood on her husbands grave.[55] At the end of the novel, in the midst of challenging and rethinking the modernist tradition, Woolf returns to the image of the empty vase associated with death. Mrs. Chalmers action in filling the vase, however, spurs a life-affirming cacophony. Between the Acts does not reject the modernist tradition it builds upon, but nevertheless challenges future modernists to enliven the movement. The pageant structure within the novel and the novels ending argue that a reinvented form of modernism, perhaps spoken and acted rather than written, can carry modernism forward. Isabella and Giles finally face one another, and the silent enmity of modernisms forms creates the possibility for generation and creativity: Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. Before they slept, they must fight; after they had fought. They would embrace. From that embrace another life might be bornThen the curtain rose. They spoke.[56]