Between the acts, p.21
Between the Acts, page 21
[3] Roman road: Woolf associated the Roman road, because of its precise straightness, with sequential logic and administrative efficiencies: “Insiders are the glory of the 19th century. They do a great service like Roman roads. But they avoid the forests & the will o the wisps” (Diary 5: 333). In The Waves, Bernard describes the traditional “biographic style” as “phrases laid like Roman roads across the tumult of our lives” (Orlando: Harcourt, 2006: 192).
[4] Romans: The traces of Roman roads visible from the air mark the period of the Roman conquest from A.D. 43 to 420, when “Britannia,” as the Romans named the island, was itself subject to an imperial invader. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), Marlow similarly begins his narrative by imagining the invasion of England by imperial Rome.
[4] faded peacocks: The peacock names yet another bird, but Isa’s dressing gown (or kimono) also implies a lingering fin de siècle aestheticism, with its passion for Japanese style and design. See Aubrey Beardsley’s famous illustration The Peacock Skirt (1893), itself influenced by James McNeill Whistler’s decoration of the Peacock Room in Frederick Leyland’s London house (1877).
[4] She walks in beauty . . . So we’ll go no more a-roving: Poems by George Gordon Byron, aka Lord Byron (1788–1824), the second of which echoes the old Scots ballad “And we’ll gang nae mair a roving” (David Herd, Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, 1776), and which in turn is echoed in the chorus of “An Old Song” by the poet Edward Thomas (1878–1917): “I’ll go no more a-roving.” Although Woolf disdained the masculinist orientation of Byron’s letters and his poem Don Juan (“Indiscretions,” Essays 3: 461), she nevertheless singled out Don Juan as pointing the way to a new flexibility in poetry (“Poetry, Fiction, and the Future,” Essays 4: 435); note that Bartholomew recalls not the proud, rebellious Byron, beloved of Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1993), but the gentler, musical Byron of the short lyrics.
[5] duckweed: Small green plants that float on the surface of sheltered water. For Woolf, there may be further personal negative associations here with a play on Duckworth, the surname of her half brothers George and Gerald, both of whom exploited her sexually in her youth (see “A Sketch of the Past” in Moments of Being).
[6] Waterloo: The Battle of Waterloo, fought on June 18, 1815, in which Napoléon was decisively defeated by the British and Allied armies led by the Duke of Wellington.
[6] Outline of History: The history Lucy is reading conflates (and, at least in her mind, compresses) H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind (Cassell, 1920) and G. M. Trevelyan’s History of England (Longmans, Green, 1926). Wells’s evolutionary history devotes six chapters to history before the appearance of humanlike forms, marking the transition with “The Age of Mammals culminated in ice and hardship and man.” See also the note to page 147.
[6–7] when the entire continent . . . was all one: The idea, first posed by eighteenth-century geologists, is in Wells (above), but there may also be an echo of Matthew Arnold’s 1852 poem “To Marguerite—Continued” (“For surely once, they feel, we were / Parts of a single continent!”), especially given the poem’s modern theme of isolation in a crowd and longings for an imagined communal past. Recent scientific research further evidences the existence of a prehistoric land bridge uniting England and the European continent, later destroyed by cataclysmic floods.
[7] nurses: Nursemaids, employed to care for children.
[8] feller: The word feller (i.e., fellow) indicates a blending between the narrator’s voice and the voices of the nursemaids.
[8] you: The pronoun you suggests a narrator who is here a character in the story world.
[8] Caro: A variant of Caroline; also, in Italian, the masculine form of dear.
[8] the flower complete: Woolf records a similar experience of unified perception as one of her most powerful childhood experiences: “I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; ‘That is the whole,’ I said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and that was the real flower; part earth; part flower” (“A Sketch of the Past,” Moments of Being 71).
[9] Sohrab: See Matthew Arnold’s poem “Sohrab and Rustum” (1853), based on the tenth-century Persian epic, the Shahnameh. The story concerns a father who realizes he has slain the son whose existence has been hidden from him, only when the dying son reveals a seal that his mother has placed on his arm. Also relevant may be Arnold’s defense of his poem against one reader’s charge of plagiarism: In the second edition of his poems, along with excerpts from his sources, Arnold included a note distinguishing between plagiarism and reinvention (“remanier et réinventer à sa manière”): “I hope that it will not in the future be supposed, if I am silent as to the sources from which a poem is derived, that I am trying to conceal obligations, or to claim an absolute originality for all parts of it. . . . The use of the tradition, above everything else, gives to a work that naiveté, that flavour of reality and truth, which is the very life of poetry” (Poems. 2nd ed. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1854: 58–59).
[10] Daladier: Édouard Daladier (1884–1970) was the French prime minister and minister of national defense. His participation, along with the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, and Italy’s Benito Mussolini, in the Munich Pact in September 1938 was initially hailed as a peace-making effort but, after Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, the Munich Pact was increasingly condemned as an appeasement of, and hence capitulation to, Hitler.
[10] pegging down: To tie a monetary currency to a standard, as opposed to letting the value float. France finally abandoned the gold standard in 1936 but, on May 5, 1938, in an effort to restore a measure of economic stability and address its escalating economic crisis, France pegged the franc to the British pound sterling. While stabilizing the currency by setting the rate of 175 francs to the pound, with a maximum of F179/£, France also significantly undervalued the franc to give its government an advantage in borrowing money. Forced hastily to agree, the government of Great Britain considered France had failed to honor its commitment to international consultation under the Tripartite Agreement signed by France, Great Britain, and the United States in 1936.
[11] Pyecombe: A village in Sussex. See note to page 3, “Liskeard.”
[11] Sappho: Ancient Greek poet (7th–6th century B.C.) born on the isle of Lesbos, from which the word lesbian derives.
[12] mirrors of the soul: See Lecture 5, “The Hero as Man of Letters,” in Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (1841): “In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time.” By adding the image of a mirror, Woolf gives more emphasis to the reader’s active, self-reflexive role. Woolf generally mocks Carlyle’s approach to history as the “Biographies of Great Men”—the topic of an essay assigned to Jacob Flanders in her novel Jacob’s Room (1922) and a recurrent subject of Stephen Dedalus’s reading in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist (New York: Penguin, 1993: 55). However, Carlyle’s Lecture 5 presents a view very similar to one Woolf was herself developing in a concurrently planned book on the history of readers and reading: that the advent of the printed book superseded the authority of the university and democratized knowledge by making it available to all. See “‘Anon’ and ‘The Reader’: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays.” Edited by Brenda Silver. Twentieth Century Literature 25 (1979): 356–441.
[12] shilling shockers: Also called “railway novels,” shilling shockers were a genre of cheap paperback fiction, typically with sensational and sometimes science-fictional plots, which sold for a shilling in railway station bookstalls in the nineteenth century. In comparison, when the Victorian three-decker novel finally became available in one-volume editions, the retail price was six shillings. By 1939, prices had changed, but the distinction between light and serious reading, and their relative costs, still obtained.
[12] anguish of a Queen or the heroism of King Harry: The subject matter, for example, of Shakespearean drama, King Harry being Henry V.
[13] But no water . . . the shadow of the rock: Striking images from the first section of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922).
[13] youth and India: For a recent documentation of the lives of retired members of the Indian Civil Service in England, their work as paternalistic despots, and yet the loneliness of their later lives as exiles from India, see David Gilmour, The Ruling Caste: Imperial Lives in the Victorian Raj (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).
[13] The moor is dark: Isa is quoting, almost exactly, the first two lines of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Stanzas—April 1814,” concerning the withdrawal back into solitude of a repudiated (and guilty) lover: “Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon, / Rapid clouds have drank the last pale beam of even.”
[13] pegged down: Literally “held down” but also a rhyming pun with “pegging down the franc” (10). See also “another peg on which to hang his rage” (42) and “peg-top trousers” (112).
[14] The Faerie Queene and Kinglake’s Crimea; Keats and the Kreutzer Sonata: Books offering a choice of widely varied reading: a richly allegorical Elizabethan poem by Edmund Spenser, a nineteenth-century history of the Crimean War, a volume of Romantic poetry, and a Russian novel that concerns sexual conflict within a marriage, and in which the jealous husband kills his wife with a dagger. Together, these books mix themes of love and war. The other books named as being in the library further extend the range of genre: poetry (Shelley, Yeats, Donne); biography (Giuseppe Garibaldi, Lord Palmerston); county archival records (The Antiquities); science (the astronomer Arthur Eddington [1882–1944], the naturalist Charles Darwin [1809–1882], and the physicist Sir James Jeans [1877–1946]).
[14] A horse with a green tail: The detail accurately reflects a rape case reported in the London Times in June 1938, which ended in the conviction of the soldiers; the following month, the Times carried a report on the trial of the doctor who had performed a compassionate abortion on the teenage victim. The doctor was acquitted. See S. N. Clarke, “The Horse with a Green Tail,” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 34 (1990): 3–4.
[15] Cindy, or Sindy . . . was short for Lucy: In effect, three different variations of Mrs. Swithin’s Christian name, Lucinda, which itself suggests a combination of Lucida (Latin) meaning “shining, bright, and clear,” and Lucina, an older title for Juno (sometimes called Juno Lucina), the feminine principle of celestial light, and thus associated as well with Diana, the moon goddess.
[17] Touch wood . . . Antaeus: Touch wood, like “knock on wood,” invokes an old belief that touching the wood of sacred trees (later, the wood of the Cross) would bring protection or ward off evil; Antaeus, in Greek mythology the son of Gaia (Earth), was a giant wrestler whose strength was dependent on his remaining in contact with his mother, that is, on his touching the earth.
[18] Lempriere . . . the Encyclopaedia: Standard reference books: John Lempriere, Bibliotheca Classica or, A Classical Dictionary (1788) and the Engclopaedia Britannica.
[19] red and white paper roses: Recalling the Wars of the Roses (1455–1487) between the feuding houses of Lancaster and York, which ended with the death of Richard III (of York) and the victory of Henry VII (of the Lancastrian force). Henry VII united the red and white roses in the Tudor rose, but the memory of the conflict lived on, as witness the division of schoolboys into teams of Lancaster and York in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist.
[19] the Coronation: After Edward VIII abdicated to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson, his younger brother Albert ascended to the throne as King George VI. The coronation took place on May 12, 1937, and was marked by celebrations throughout the countryside.
[19] knobbed shoes: Rounded toes (shaped like a knob) would indicate unfashionable, “old lady’s” shoes in the 1930s, but there may be also an echo of the anticlerical, antiauthoritarian medieval poem, Pierce the Ploughmans Crede: “His hod was full of holes & his heer oute, / With his knopped schon clouted full thykke” (Edited by Rev. Walter W Skeat, Early English Text Society, 1867: lines 423–24). At the end of the poem, the narrator states that just as he has amended the words of the Ploughman, so he beseeches men after him to amend his own words. Thus, according to Helen Barr, at the end of the poem, “The voices of Peres, narrator and poet all merge” into a single “I” (Signes and Sothe: Language in the Piers Plowman Tradition [Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994]).
[20] simples: From the meaning of simple as humble, unpretentious, and so signifying people of low rank, the common people, as opposed to the gentry, or the people in the rank immediately below the nobility.
[21] false teeth . . . in the time of the Pharaohs: Encyclopaedia Britannica (11th edition, 1910–1911) points to evidence that the Egyptians and the Hindus had developed a method for replacing lost teeth with wood or ivory substitutes attached to adjacent sound teeth with threads or wires (SH).
[22] before the Conquest: In 1066, William, Duke of Normandy (known in history as William the Conquerer), defeated the English army at the Battle of Hastings and established Norman rule.
[22] another joke about Saints: St. Swithin was a Bishop of Winchester in the ninth century, whose shrine was a popular place of pilgrimage until its destruction in the Reformation. Perhaps originating in his request to be buried out of doors so that the rain would fall on his grave, a popular superstition arose about his feast day (July 15), as expressed in the following rhyme: “St. Swithin’s day if thou dost rain / For forty days it will remain / St. Swithin’s day if thou be fair / For forty days ’twill rain nae mair” (Catholic Encyclopedia).
[22] Domesday Book: The grand survey, made in 1086, of English land, buildings, occupants, animals, and property, commissioned by William the Conqueror for potential taxation purposes. It acquired its popular name in the twelfth century from Domesday as the day of Last Judgment, suggesting it was the book by which all men would be judged.
[23] Sung-Yen: The name may derive from Sung Yun, an early Chinese traveler who made a pilgrimage, in the early sixth century, on the Silk Road to the Peshawar region of India in quest of Buddhist scriptures. In 1942, two members of extended Bloomsbury, Arthur Waley (translator) with Duncan Grant (illustrator), published Monkey, an abridged version of Journey to the West, a sixteenth-century novel by Wu Cheng’en about the seventh-century travels of Xuan Zang (Hsuan Tsang), perhaps the most famous of the early Chinese Buddhist pilgrims to India. Among his sources, Waley cites Herbert Allen Giles’s History of Chinese Literature (Heinemann, 1901), which references Sung Yün [sic], but Waley, a prolific translator, most certainly would have known Samuel Beal’s 1869 translation, Travels of Fah-Hian and Sung-Yun: Buddhist pilgrims, from China to India (400 A.D. and 518 A.D.).
[23] before the Reformation: The period of the Reformation in England began when King Henry VIII rejected the pope as the supreme spiritual (and political) authority; what followed was a repression of the Roman Catholic Church in England, involving the destruction of monasteries, chantries, religious icons, and pilgrimage shrines.
[24] in the name of Thunder: Popular expression referring to the god of thunder, Thor (in Norse mythology), from which the name Thursday is derived.
[24] Bacchus: Roman name of Dionysus, the god of wine.
[24] cheeking the master: Standing up to the master, challenging the master’s authority.
[25] the man holding his horse by the rein: Although there are numerous portraits of men with their horses, notably Thomas Gainsborough’s George, Prince of Wales, Later George IV (1782), the implied facial expression here has more in common with Gainsborough’s painting William Poyntz (1762), who, although depicted with his dog not his horse, bears a name that resonates with the present novel as well.
[25] The lady was a picture: As has been noted, the description bears some resemblance to Thomas Gainsborough’s painting Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1783), depicting the duchess in a long yellow gown, with a pillar behind her back (SH); however, there are features in the description strikingly missing in Gainsborough’s portrait but present in Joshua Reynolds’s painting of the same name (1775–1776). Not only does Reynolds’s duchess have feathers in her hair and lean forward to rest her weight on a stone balustrade, but, more significantly, the background to the left of the figure leads the eye down a leafy allée to an opening of distant sky. The further detail of the silver arrow implies that the sitter in Woolf’s fictional portrait was posing as Cynthia or Diana, huntress and goddess of the moon, and there is indeed a portrait known as The Duchess of Devonshire as Cynthia, painted by Maria Cosway. Although it lacks physical resemblance to Woolf’s description, Cosway’s painting supplies the iconography, which Cosway emphasized with an accompanying quotation, in the Royal Academy exhibition catalog, from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. To further complicate the allusion, yet another Gainsborough painting of the duchess was the subject of a notorious theft, when it was stolen from the premises of an art dealer in 1875. Missing for over twenty-five years, until the thief finally agreed to arrangements for its return in 1901, it acquired a legendary status as the “Lost Duchess” and became the subject of innumerable reproductions. The portrait hanging in Pointz Hall is thus enriched through a palimpsest of multiple, syncretic allusions, while still remaining a portrait of an unidentified subject painted by an obscure artist—features which for Woolf (who celebrated the “Lives of the Obscure”) had positive implications. (In 1940, reviewing a collection of letters by the duchess’s daughter, Woolf significantly turned her subject about to focus on the daughter’s governess, Selina Trimmer.) The legendary duchess (an ancestor on the paternal side in the Spencer family and thus of Lady Diana Spencer, “Princess Di”) was further known to the British public through the triangulation of her unconventional sexual life, which involved a ménage à trois in which her dearest and closest female friend was also her husband’s mistress. She is further entangled in this text as a descendant, on the maternal side, of the Poyntz family, reminding us that Woolf’s earliest titles for this novel were Poyntzet Hall (Diary 5: 135) and Poyntz Hall (Diary 5: 141).
