Woolf`s last novel Between the Act is constructed around a performance of a pageant play staged in the park of an age-old country manor house Pointz Hall. In this work the house stands as a symbol of Englishness for its tradition and the images from the past it represents, thus stabilizing national collective identity in the teeth of the advancing war. Such view of the country house seems to have been widely shared in the early 20th century Britain, presenting the idyllic utopian landscapes of the English country side as the repository of the ideal values of the Old England, untainted by industrial capitalism of the modern world, thus providing an image of the ideological homeland for the expanding British Empire. However, Woolf does not simply agree with the view, but deconstructs the seemingly peaceful rural landscape with the sub-current forces of violence of war and human cruelty against the other. Thus, the rural community assembled at the occasion of the pageant needs to find a new way of sustaining their communal identity to survive through the oncoming war. Woolf as an artist, like the director of the pageant, Miss La Trobe, interrogates the possibility of a new way of constructing communal identity, which might be through the very destruction of the community itself. Suggested in the theatrical connotations of the title, ``Between the Acts,`` one act is to be finished and the curtain must go down for a new act to begin. |