The Authority of Illusion: Feminism and Fascism in Virginia Woolf's "Between the Acts"
1989; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 6; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/3189558
ISSN1549-3377
Autores Tópico(s)Modernist Literature and Criticism
ResumoWe are not passive spectators doomed to unresisting obedience, Woolf wrote at close of Three Guineas, 'but by our thoughts and actions we can change figure who called in German and Italian Fuihrer or Duce; in our own language Tyrant or Dictator.' In June of 1938 book written in response to question a distinguished public official was said to have addressed to Woolf-How in your opinion are we to prevent war?-allowed her to say all that had been building in her during thirties, as she collected newspaper clippings of Hitler's speeches and Nazi political rallies which she had an opportunity to observe firsthand in 1935 when she and her husband Leonard traveled through Germany and saw written on a banner stretched across a street in Bonn: Jew is our enemy and There is no place for Jews in-.2 When, at close of Three Guineas Woolf argues that art reminds us of the capacity of human spirit to overflow boundaries and make unity out of multiplicity, she emphasizes role of artist whose work is necessary in a crisis to keep alive the recurring dream that has haunted human mind since beginning of time; dream of peace, dream of freedom (143). These two concerns preoccupied Virginia Woolf in last decade of her life: nature of her own narrative authority and its relation to external crisis in social and political authority as she saw it-patriarchy at home and its extreme form abroad, fascism. These two concerns meet not only in Three Guineas, her most radical feminist pamphlet, but in her posthumous novel, Between Acts, where she creates in lesbian playwright, Miss La Trobe, a female artist who in key moments of crisis-most notably when power of her artistic illusions fails-bears a striking resemblance to a petty dictator in her will to re-impose unity on her fragile, dispersed, uncontrollable work of art, a pageant of English social life which disintegrates as soon as it reaches present day.3 La Trobe takes command of a strip of what narrator tells us is naturally hallowed high ground above Pointz Hall (which is built in a hollow), as outdoor stage for village's yearly pageant. The narrative of family life in troubled Oliver house where aging brother and
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