Between the Borders of the Acts

In “‘Dispersed Are We’:Mirroring and National Identity in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts,” Galia Benzimen examines the role of mirroring and national identity in pre-war England. She uses Lacan’s and Winnicott’s mirror stages to explain how Miss La Trobe has become the mother, using the mirrors in the pageant to help the audience form their identity as a united self. She claims,

“my claim is that although [Woolf] indeed deconstructs collectivity in Between the Acts and represents it as dispersed, fragmentary, illusory and potentially totalitarian, her consistent figurative portrayal of the community and the nation as an individual self foregrounds a contrasted yearning to see the dispersed fragments as belonging to a unified whole, which may save the national self from extinction at a moment when the apocalypse of German invasion still might seem an imminent event” (Benziman 55).

But Woolf seems to use mirrors throughout the text to show fracturing and fragmenting.

An important distinction between characters and their use of mirrors is the mention of “eyes.” Within the text, Woolf mentions “eyes” fifty-one times; ironically, she replaces “eyes” in a well-known saying with “books” when Isa remembers and quotes, “Books are the mirrors of the soul” (Woolf 12, 14). But this replacement does tie together mirrors, eyes, and literature as important themes in the text.

                While Woolf mentions mirrors sixteen times in the work, there are only two times that she seems to use the mirror to reflect a whole, or a soul. The first is when Isa is looking into the mirror and thinking of the gentleman farmer:

Inside the glass, in her eyes, she saw what she had felt overnight for the ravaged, the silent, the romantic gentleman farmer. “In love,” was in her eyes. But outside, on the washstand, on the dressing-table, among the silver boxes and tooth-brushes, was the other love; love for her husband, the stockbroker —“The father of my children,” she added, slipping into the cliché conveniently provided by fiction. Inner love was in the eyes; outer love on the dressing-table. But what feeling was it that stirred in her now when above the looking-glass, out of doors, she saw coming across the lawn the perambulator; two nurses; and her little boy George, lagging behind?” (Woolf 10)

Woolf uses the mirror in this case much like Foucault discusses, creating a utopia (a place that is not a place) inside the mirror, where Isa is “in love” and felt “inner love.” This love is much like the place inside the mirror, a love that is not love. But we see the duality, the whole, of Isa by being exposed to both her inner and her outer love.

The second mention of eye in a mirror comes when Mrs. Swithen is showing William around the house.

Standing by the cupboard in the corner he saw her reflected in the glass. Cut off from their bodies, their eyes smiled, their bodiless eyes, at their eyes in the glass” (Woolf 49).

This comes at a time when William feels that he is seeing Mrs. Swithen as a whole person, past and present. Again, the eyes paired with the mirror shows the reader a unity.

On the other hand, the rest of the uses of mirror in the text only show a fragment of a person. Mrs. Manresa is used four times to impart the importance of fracturing and fragmenting. When she is waiting for the pageant to start, “Mrs. Manresa had out her mirror and attended to her face” (Woolf 121). Then during the pageant, “Mrs. Manresa had out her mirror and lipstick and attended to her lips and nose” (Woolf 92). Neither of these occurrences mentions the eyes, and in fact only mentions the face, lips, and nose. The third mention comes during the “Ourselves” act of the pageant, when members of the audience “evaded or shaded themselves — save Mrs. Manresa who, facing herself in the glass, used it as a glass; had out her mirror; powdered her nose; and moved one curl, disturbed by the breeze, to its place” (Woolf 126). Not only is she participating in the reflection of the audience by the actors, she contributes her own mirror for reflection, a mirror that has only shown the reader fragments of Mrs. Manresa. And finally, after the play, When Giles is saying goodbye to Mrs. Manresa, he notices that, “But alas, sunset light was unsympathetic to her make-up; plated it looked, not deeply interfused” (Woolf 136). For all of her primping and preening, she is still fragmented, not interfused, not a whole.

               

As for the last act of the play, the actors use “[a]nything that’s bright enough to reflect, presumably, ourselves” (Woolf 125). Although “ourselves” would imply a unity of sorts – a group of individuals acting as a whole – the rest of the passage refers to only fragments of each individual: “Here a nose . . . There a skirt . . . Then trousers only . . . Now perhaps a face. . . . Ourselves? But that’s cruel. To snap us as we are, before we’ve had time to assume . . . And only, too, in parts. . . . That’s what’s so distorting and upsetting and utterly unfair” (Woolf 125); “And the audience saw themselves, not whole by any means, but at any rate sitting still” (Woolf 126). Woolf refers the audience  throughout the text as “scraps and fragments,” or “orts, scraps and fragments” (Woolf 84, 127, 128 (twice), 131, 146) and there is no change in this by the end of the novel. Only three pages from the end, Isa remembers only the “orts, scraps and fragments” (Woolf 146) message from the play.

Works Cited

Benziman, Galia. “‘Dispersed Are We’:Mirroring and National Identity in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts.” Journal of Narrative Theory 36.1 (2006) 53-71.

Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. Melba Cuddy-Keane, annot. And intro. 1941: NY: Harcourt, 2008.