Between the acts, p.22
Between the Acts, page 22
[26] the still, distilled essence of emptiness, silence: The cold alabaster vase, with its resonances of the silence and stasis of eternity, recalls John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819; 1820), a poem itself based not on a single urn but on a composite of memories. The sense of movement in stasis suggests an echo, too, of a passage from T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” (1936): “Words, after speech, reach / Into silence. Only by the form, the pattern, / Can words or music reach / The stillness, as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness.” Whereas both Keats and Eliot focus on the shape and form of the container, however, Woolf’s image draws our attention in to the hollow inside the vase, and her complex, off-center syllabic repetitions convey a pattern that is both fluid and resonant: still/[de]still[ed]; e[ssence]/e[mptiness; [ess]ence/[sil]ence.
[26] Manresa: The name Manresa is both a London street and a Spanish town noted for its Dominican monastery, but if there are connections between Mrs. Manresa and Katherine Mansfield (see the note to page 28, “Tasmania”), then Woolf may be thinking of the puns on sexual proclivities in both names.
[27] Somerset House: In 1939, this major government building housed the offices of Internal Revenue, Probate Registry, and the Registry for Births, Marriages, and Deaths.
[28] Tasmania: An island-state of Australia, noted for its unspoiled natural environment, it was separated from the Australian continent 10,000 years ago by the sea. In the early nineteenth century, settlement consisted mainly of transported convicts, although Katherine Mansfield’s grandfather had been drawn there, as a prospector, by the goldfields.
[28] not the right word: Presumably the right word is deported or transported (see above); Mr. Blencowe has been seeking the rhyme in the wrong syllable.
[28] spit and image: The colloquial expression (meaning exact likeness), usually rendered as spitting image in American English, indicates that the voice here is that of village gossip, and that it is this same voice that singles out Ralph Manresa as a Jew, and his money as new money (made in business) rather than the more respectable old money (from the landed gentry).
[28] stuffed man: Recalling the lines from T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” “We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men,” which in turn allude to Guy Fawkes, a Roman Catholic zealot who, in 1605, attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament, and whose stuffed effigies are traditionally burned in England on Guy Fawkes night.
[28] corkscrew: The more accurate term would be champagne opener, an instrument shaped like a pair of pliers with a curved gripping surface that would go around the cork, enabling it to be twisted open. This not-uncommon misnomer may derive from confusion with a champagne tap, which is like a corkscrew, but since the tap was used to draw out only a small amount of champagne, it would not accord with Mrs. Manresa’s “cocking her thumb” to uncork the champagne herself, or with her subsequent exuberance in filling the glasses. Manresa’s misusage then leads to an off-color pun, although it is probably unintentional: Given that she considers herself unconventional in saying the word stays out loud in this company (a rather old-fashioned word at the time, when corset or girdle would be the more usual term), it is unlikely that she consciously implies a double entendre with the word screw, despite some evidence that cork was a slang term for butler (SH). But the subsequent reaction of the company, “She’s said it, she’s done it, not I,” would suggest that at least some of them pick up on a welcome vulgarity in her speech as well as in her behavior. The novel’s concern throughout with puns, and with what can and cannot be said in “polite” company, suggests that the malapropism is intended as Mrs. Manresa’s, and is not Woolf’s own.
[29] Norman? Saxon?: History is thus written into the architecture of the house, recalling the Saxon (ca. 900–1066) or the Norman (post-1066) past.
[30] lily pond: Pools are frequent images in Woolf’s writing for the mind as a reservoir of both conscious and unconscious memories. See Woolf’s sketch “The Fascination of the Pool” (Complete Shorter Fiction) for a description of voices contained in a pool, including that of a girl who had drowned herself.
[32] He must change.: Giles follows proper etiquette by changing out of his business suit, but with the implication, too, of changing roles or identities.
[34] some Institute: Possibly the Courtauld Institute of Art, but for Woolf’s opinion of institutional judgments of art, see her essay “The Royal Academy,” which ends with her fleeing the horrors of institutional values: “Honour, patriotism, chastity, wealth, success, importance, position, patronage, power” (Essays 3: 93).
[35] Sir Joshua: The painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) (see also note to page 25).
[35] Tinker, tailor: An old counting rhyme, often played by children with the number of stones or pits left in their bowls of fruit, and used to predict the future. Dating back to the seventeenth century, it appears in many versions; Mrs. Manresa’s version is quoted in George Meredith’s Evan Harrington (book 2, chapter 8), but a slightly different version, which includes the word gentleman after sailor, appears in both Anthony Trollope’s The Three Clerks (chapter 4) and in the Rev. Walter W Skeat’s annotations to The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1894–1897), where it is described as “our common saying” (I.481–82).
[36] Figgis’s Guide Book: A fictional title but a common type of book, pointing to another kind of source text for the recording of history.
[38] To be, or not to be: Hamlet’s famous soliloquy (III.i. 56 ff.), which, at the time, most children would have memorized in school. Concerning the specific question of whether Hamlet’s best course of action would be to commit suicide, it also poses the larger question of whether thinking can inhibit action. Compare Prufrock’s “overwhelming question” in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “Between the idea / And the reality . . . / Falls the Shadow” in Eliot’s “The Hollow Men.”
[38] Fade far away: Isa and Dodge make an associative leap from Shakespeare to Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” reciting lines, albeit somewhat inexactly, that also concern an ambivalent wish for death as a release from suffering: “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget / What thou among the leaves hast never known, / The weariness, the fever, and the fret.”
[38] Reynolds! Constable! Crome!: Like Joshua Reynolds, John Constable (1776–1837) and John Crome (1768–1821) were eminent English painters, all recognized members of the Royal Academy.
[38] Why called ‘Old’?: John Crome was commonly called Old Crome, to distinguish him from his son, John Bernay Crome (1794–1842), who was also a painter.
[41] Gammer Gurton’s Needle: One of the earliest English comedies, dating from the sixteenth century, of uncertain authorship, and full of fun and scatological humor: Gammer (Old Lady) Gurton loses her needle, which, after much “horseplay,” is finally found in the seat of a young man’s pants. Woolf reviewed the play in 1920 and claimed that in its simplicity and directness, and its approach to “indecency” in a way that is “wholesome and natural,” the play is “pure English” (Essays 3: 237).
[41] The donkey: The story of Buridan’s ass, named after the fourteenth-century French philosopher Jean Buridan, and depicting a classic predicament of indecision (not unlike Hamlet’s) caused by being placed between equally compelling alternatives.
[41] manacled to a rock: In Greek mythology, Prometheus was the son of a Titan who offended Zeus by sympathetically giving fire to humans and bringing the arts and civilization to earth. As punishment, Zeus caused Prometheus to be chained to a rock, where each day an eagle tore out his liver, which—since Prometheus was immortal—reconstituted itself every night. Prometheus is a prominent figure throughout the history of sculpture, painting, and literature, but particularly in the Romantic period (in the works of Byron, Shelley, and Mary Shelley), where he epitomizes the defiant or heroic endurance of undeserved suffering. Although seeming perhaps to trivialize Promethean suffering, Woolf used similar imagery to describe the tortures of her own caged experience when restricted during an illness from walking and writing: “Here I am chained to my rock. . . . Still if one is Prometheus, if the rock is hard and the gadflies pungent, gratitude, affection, none of the nobler feelings hold sway” (Diary 2: 133). It also crops up in her account of suffering the oppressive presence of in-laws: “But there I am pinned down, as firmly as Prometheus on his rock, to have my day, Friday 26th of September 1930, picked to pieces” (Diary 3: 321). It should be noted, however, that neither passage is without self-criticism.
[42] this word, which he could not speak in public: Although he has changed out of his business suit and stockbroker identity, Giles is still conventional both in clothes and manner, censoring the words sodomite or bugger as being beyond the bounds of respectability to which he adheres.
[44] nettle-rash: The medical name is urticaria, but a common name is hives.
[45] unheard rhythm: Yet another echo of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.”
[46] A beaker of cold water: Isa echoes but reverses the speaker’s longing for “a beaker full of the warm South” in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.”
[46] picture paper: Illustrated newspapers (or newsmagazines) rose to great popularity in the nineteenth century, especially among less educated readers, and the twentieth century saw an upsurge in illustrated magazines designed specifically for women. In Woolf’s Jacob’s Room, a novel that distinguishes among characters according to their reading materials, it is Mrs. Pascoe, a cottager living in a Cornish village, who reads the “picture papers.” Mrs. Manresa is likely reading a slightly more upscale magazine like Vogue or the Tatler (a twentieth-century magazine that took its name from the famous eighteenth-century periodical), both of which offered news, society pages, fiction, and photography, and both of which Woolf knew.
[47] pan pipes: In Greek mythology, Pan, the goat-footed shepherd god, pursued the nymph Syrinx, a worshipper of Diana, until she escaped by metamorphosing into a cluster of reeds growing in a marshy river. Out of these reeds, Pan fashioned the “pan pipes” with which Pan challenged Apollo, whose instrument was the lyre, to a contest, which Apollo wins (the only dissenting vote being that of King Midas, whom Apollo punished by giving ass’s ears). In two companionate poems written for Mary Shelley’s play Midas, Percy Bysshe Shelley articulates the conflict as one between two musical and poetic genres: Apollo representing the Olympian, serene, and divinely ordered aesthetic, and Pan, the pastoral, human, and heterogeneous. Pan as nature god is a frequent motif in modernist writing, particularly in the fiction of E. M. Forster: In The Longest Journey, the semiautobiographical character’s collection of short stories is entitled “Pan Pipes” (see chapters 15 and 35).
[50] Neufoundland Dog: Most likely a reproduction of a painting by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802–1873) a popular Victorian English painter noted for his sentimentalized paintings of dogs. The Landseer variety of Newfoundland dog derives its name from his paintings.
[51] snake in the grass: A hidden enemy, or concealed danger, deriving from the incident, in Greek mythology, related by Virgil, in which Orpheus’s wife, Eurydice, attempting to flee an unwanted seducer, steps on a snake in the grass (anguis in herba) and is fatally bitten (Eclogues III 93). In Jacob’s Room, it is sex itself that is the hidden snake in the grass (81). In Cockney rhyming slang, the phrase means “looking glass.”
[51] of two minds: A common figurative expression meaning indecisive, but it also suggests literally that Lucy is hovering between two different modes of thought, the rational and the intuitive, the practical and the mystical.
[52] a tea plantation: Another indication that the tentacles of imperialism reach far down into the lives of ordinary people. Cobbet himself is a simple man connected with nature, but since there was not a single tea plantation in the United Kingdom until the twenty-first century, his work would have been in one of the colonies, most likely in India or Ceylon.
[52] Adsum: The traditional response, in Latin, to a roll call, meaning “Here! Present!” In the calling up to Holy Orders, it has the connotation as well of “I am ready to serve.” In the last chapter of The Newcomes (1855) by William Makepeace Thackeray, in a chapter titled “In which the Colonel says ‘Adsum’ when his Name is called,” Thomas Newcome pronounces this word on his deathbed, thus both returning to roll call at his (undoubtedly privileged) boys’ school and revealing humility before his Maker.
[52] a June day in 1939: Given that the pageant is likely being held on a Saturday, the date of the pageant would be either June 3, 10, or 17. By June 24, the king and queen would no longer be in Canada, since they returned to Britain on June 22 and participated in a royal procession to Guildhall on June 23.
[54] sacking: Coarse material, the wearing of which, in the medieval period, signified self-humbling and repentance, and thus appropriately the garb of pilgrims journeying to a shrine.
[54] Rhoderick: The martial opening might stir associations with Roderick, the last Visigoth king of Spain, and a heroic figure in Sir Walter Scott’s “The Vision of Don Roderick” (1811), Walter Savage Landor’s Count Julian (1812), Robert Southey’s Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814), and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812; canto 1). According to legend, Roderick’s rape of Florinda, daughter of Count Julian of the Visigoths, led to Julian’s inciting the Moors to invade, and to Roderick’s defeat in 711. In the context of English history, however, the more relevant Roderick would be Roderick Dhu, 39th chieftain of the McNeil Clan and a Catholic Jacobite, who was fatally wounded in his battle against the Protestant king James V. Roderick is a heroic figure in Sir Walter Scott’s poem “The Lady of the Lake,” a story replete with star-crossed young lovers, disguised identity, a talisman (a signet ring) enabling a recognition scene, and a marriage that reconciles warring factions.
[56] maying, nutting: The celebration of spring, or “going a-maying,” is a frequent motif in Elizabethan poetry and can be traced back, through Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale,” to the troubadour or trouvère lyrics of twelfth- and thirteenth-century France, and the medieval French poem the Roman de la Rose. “Nutting” has associations with the nursery rhyme “Here we come gathering nuts in May,” in which “nuts” is probably a corruption of “knots” or blossoms, gathered to decorate the maypole.
[56] Canterbury pilgrims: The villagers’ serpentine weaving through the trees suggests the progress of Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims, wending their way from London to Canterbury in a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Thomas a Becket, murdered by four knights believing that they were following the wishes of King Henry II.
[56] Merry England: Dating from the Middle Ages, the phrase invokes a positive, Utopian view of England, poetically expressed in images of spring and spring festivals and politically grounded in the ideal of an egalitarian, communal society. William Wordsworth responded to later cynicism about this ideal in sonnet III of “Poems Composed or Suggested During a Tour in the Summer of 1833”: “Can, I ask, / This face of rural beauty be a mask / For discontent, and poverty, and crime; / These spreading towns a cloak for lawless will? / Forbid it, Heaven!—and MERRY ENGLAND still / Shall be thy rightful name, in prose and rhyme!” (lines 9–14).
[58] Hawkins, Frobisher, Drake: Sir John Hawkins (1532–1595), Sir Martin Frobisher (ca. 1535–1594), and Sir Francis Drake (ca. 1540–1596) were naval commanders and explorers during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, 1558–1603. Woolf both celebrated glories of the Elizabethan age and perceived that its riches (of both objects and images) depended on imperialist plunder. See “Traffics and Discoveries,” her 1906 review of Professor Walter Raleigh’s The English Voyages of the Sixteenth Century (Essays 1: 120–24).
[58] throstle, the mavis: Old dialect terms for the song thrush (Turdus philomelos), a bird that characteristically repeats its melodic phrases. See “The throstle with his note so true” (Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream) and “The thrush replyes, the Mavis descant playes” (Edmund Spenser, “Epithalamion”).
[59] I fear I am not in my perfect mind: King Lear’s words when, recovering from his madness, he begins to recognize his daughter Cordelia: “Pray, do not mock me: / . . . / I fear I am not in my perfect mind” (King Lear, IV.vii.59; 63).
[59] a stricken deer: The image comes from William Cowper’s poem, The Task (Book III: “The Garden,” 108), in which the poet casts himself as a stricken deer pierced by the world’s arrows. The speaker’s overpowering sense of loneliness and alienation, and his withdrawal into rural life as an escape from the corrupt commercial world of London, make the poem an apt one for Giles to recall. There are ironies in Giles’s recourse to Cowper, however, given Giles’s homophobia and speculations that the source of Cowper’s profound melancholy was bodily and possibly sexual. Woolf joked about one particular and now discredited rumor when, referring to male and female parts of car engines, she declared their secondhand car “to be hermaphrodite, like the poet Cowper” (Letters 3: 463), but her published view of Cowper’s sensibilities was that “he was a man singularly without thought of sex” (“Cowper and Lady Austen,” The Second Common Reader, 145 [Orlando: Harcourt, 1986]). Woolf valued Cowper highly as a writer, finding lines and phrases in his poetry that burned with a “white fire,” and that conveyed a “central transparency” (Letters 3: 333), yet oddly, and perhaps self-defensively, she lacked sympathy for his mental afflictions, judged his melancholia as self-absorption, and did not pursue the possibility that Cowper’s domestic, putatively feminine identifications challenged prevailing stereotypes of gentlered masculinity. She most likely also distanced herself from the poem’s resolution in submission to the will of God.
