The Carnival-Pageant in Between the Acts

概要

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Between the Acts (1941) includes Virginia Woolf's liberal treatment of the pageantry genre, which was used to boost the nationalistic swpirit to survive the post-Boer and post-Imperial England. Woolf elaborately weakens the manipulative national discourse by parodying its formalities and underlining their absurdities. Such subversive elements in the pageant of Between the Acts necessarily recall Mikhail Bakhtin's study of a carnival in folk culture. Miss La Trobe, the artistsurrogate, manages not only to authorize bgut also to de-authorize the English pageantry tradition of the 1930s. Androgyny, which Woolf terms as "marriage of granite and rainbow," is brought forth through Miss La Trobe's elaborate amalgamation of dissolving divisions between different categories. Finally, she is able to act out a delightfully carnivalistic stage, where language no longer articulates but is heterogeneous.