Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts: Thinking as an Intellectual Fighting

The late 1930s, the setting of Between the Acts, was a chaotic period, and at the same time saw the rapid growth of the mass media and the popular book market. The propagandistic public voices about the war and Fascism through the mass media, and the immense volubility and vulgarity of popular books intensified Woolf’s concern about the problem of people’s passive and uncritical thinking. And in times of crisis, she hoped that the public would be able to think critically without falling into delusion. Thus Woolf sought the form and the content to stimulate the reader’s perceptivity and to challenge them to think. And as an artist, Woolf tried to resist grim realities between the wars by an intellectual writing, opposing political participation. In Between the Acts, Woolf presents the problems issued from the mass media and commodity-driven books and seeks the possibilities to overcome them. Woolf seeks these possibilities by representing the process of the expansion of Isa's imagination and La Trope’s parodic pageant-play. In addition, Woolf tries to represent her vision by formal experiments in the novel. Between the Acts is an experimental novel where a number of genres come together. The novel is composed of dialogue, poetry, play, and prose. This layered text challenges her own readers to strive to understand the true meaning of the text. Woolf provides the reader like the audience of the pageant-play with chances to pause, think and feel through the layered style and words which rouse “the imagination, the memory, the eye, and the ear” as she says in “Craftsmanship.” Woolf also shows interruption, shock and silence as main sources of occasion for a critical thinking that induces a change of consciousness for both the audience and the reader. Woolf’s assertion of mental fighting is to think against the current and to explore new possibilities against chaotic reality. Like Woolf’s declaration that “thinking is my fighting,” to write Between the Acts is her intellectual fighting. And she requires the reader to join in her intellectual fighting.