The June 1939 air in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts feels heavy with what Paul Saint-Amour calls “future conditional anxiety”—a restless, anticipatory dread that acts as a medium for injury long before any bombs actually fall (7). The characters seem caught in a state of “perpetual suspense,” trapped within their own limited consciousness and unable to reach a unified understanding of the world shifting around them (90). This feeling is strikingly familiar today, where the ongoing realities of global conflicts are mediated through algorithmic feeds, hyper-targeted propaganda, and curated data streams. Just as Woolf’s interwar subjects, we often find ourselves trapped within a similar framework and thresholds through which facts are easily manipulated, and individual perspectives feel either unrecognizable or increasingly isolated. In this age of hyper-mediation, recognizing the limits of our own cognitive framing is no longer just an academic exercise; it has become a necessary strategy for survival against the strong narratives of contemporary warfare in an anxious age.

To navigate this perpetual landscape of uncertainty, I suggest a re-reading of Woolf’s sophisticated narrative structure that reflects on strongor totalizing theories of history. This structure can be understood through the interplay of three key concepts: Gérard Genette’s focalization, Werner Wolf’s mise en cadre, and Saint-Amour’s “Weak Theory” (Genette 189; Wolf 198; Saint-Amour 40). First, Genette’s concept of focalization, which regulates information by filtering it through a specific, fallible consciousness, helps understand the structural flexibility found in Between the Acts (189). By fluidly shifting through the perspectives of different characters, Woolf exposes the illusion of perspicacity and the impossibility of a singular, authoritative vantage point. This is further layered by Wolf’s theory of mise en cadre, where the historical pageant serves as an anticipatory frame that mirrors and illustrates the village’s own fragmented reality (198). Through literal mirrors and metaphorical performances, Woolf prompts her audience to face the narrowness and fragility of their own perceptions. Finally, these layered thresholds coalesce into what Saint-Amour later introduces as the “Weak Theory”—a framework of pliant, flexible, readily bending borders that acknowledge the provisional, messy nature of human experience (40). Crucially, while the characters in the novel often experience their limited perceptions as a “failure,” Saint-Amour invites us to leave off theorizing weakness as a mere absence of strength and instead see it as a condition with its own possibilities (Woolf, Between the Acts 135, 142). In this light, the perceived failure of the village pageant in Between the Acts serves as a weak counter-punch to the strong narratives of fascism and total war that seek to monopolize our understanding of history.  

Within this theoretical landscape, this article argues that Between the Acts is a metafiction that, through the literal and metaphorical frames and thresholds that create conflicts and anxieties, illuminates the need to recognize our limited perceptions. Such recognition ultimately facilitates a transition towards a more transformative and creative future that can actively dismantle rigid social boundaries and foster a more inclusive mode of being. Re-reading Woolf’s final yet liminal novel is vital in our current historical moment, as we once again find ourselves in a world bracing for the “anticipatory panic” (Saint-Amour 65) of concurrent and imminent wars. 

As the novel’s title suggests, the text is concerned with in-betweenness: the literal breaks between pageant acts, the historical reference to the interval between the two World Wars, and the less direct reference to the gap between the artist and the audience. For an in-betweenness is bound to entail at least two contradictory elements and the recognition of the gap between them, the novel could also be read as a contemplation of differences and intervals. Boundaries such as stages, doors, windows, and mirrors are reiterated throughout, accentuating the existence of opposing sides and seemingly irresolvable gaps. Written just weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War, the novel addresses the urgency of navigating these unyielding conflicting factors.^[1]

This article focuses on both literal frames—picture frames, doors, windows, stages, mirrors—and metaphorical frames—perspectives, interpretations, and narrative structures—that structure vision but also limit and distort it. The dualistic nature of the frame is critical. Rachel Bowlby’s question, “Who’s Framing Virginia Woolf?,” highlights this ambivalence (3). Bowlby notes that the term “frame” embodies an inherent contradiction, signifying both a supportive structure and a deceptive “framing” process, such as conspiring to pin a crime on someone (8). Keeping these competing meanings in mind enhances the reading of frames in Between the Acts as a form of mise en cadre, where the literal thresholds of Pointz Hall act as anticipatory illustrations of the “exposure” the audience faces during the pageant (Wolf 198). Through the use of frames as a narrative tool, Woolf’s novel encourages a self-reflective critical reading of the stubbornness of limited perceptions that lead to accusations of failure and the violence of misrecognition.

Expanding the scholarship on modernist ethics, this article demonstrates how Woolf’s text exposes the fragility of seemingly solid frames. This intervention contributes to recent scholarship by Megan Pollard and Megan Fairbairn that calls for a rethinking of misperceptions as a way of resisting authoritative powers, offering a crucial response to earlier, more pessimistic criticisms on Between the Acts that viewed the pageant show’s failure as a tragic, apocalyptic archive of a dying civilization.^[2] Pollard characterizes the novel as a work of “deliberate failure,” where the absence of a central authorial voice acts as resistance against the oppressive forces of fascism (63).^[3]  Similarly, Fairbairn asserts that while Between the Acts demonstrates “the impossibility of forming one homogenous understanding,” it shows that art can momentarily unify its audience as a disparate “multiplicity” (42). If any unity is achieved, it lies in the shared inability to fully step into one another’s perspectives. The recognition that each life story is only momentarily captured and framed encourages a reading that emphasizes not merely what we perceive, but how the weakness of our frames allows for a more inclusive and creative future.  

Frames and Failures 

Between the Acts is a deliberately polyphonic narrative that exhibits the commotion of the day without guiding ways to filter through it. The novel begins with an ordinary evening in the Oliver household, but the narrative focus quickly transitions through a continuous flow of consciousness—moving from Lucy drawing the curtain to baby George playing outside, then to Bart, Isa, and beyond. This “variable internal focalization” (Genette 191) makes it harder to grasp a single narrative center, making it evident that there is no central resolution. The multifaceted structure evokes the “pluralist frame” noted by Melba Cuddy-Kean as the key to a “modernist ethics” that questions the violence of overdetermined universal systems (208-10). Rethinking the notion of failure through this pluralism allows art to offer readers an opportunity to reflect, however “cruel” it may seem, upon themselves.

Curtains, doors, and windows open and close throughout the novel in seamless ways that would be barely noticeable if they did not happen so often. Without hindering the flow of the narrative, the frequent openings and closings mark the beginnings and endings of many scenes, acting as structural thresholds that mark the transition from one “spatio-temporal universe” to another (Genette 94).^[4] The enclosures throughout Pointz Hall function as literal and literary frames that separate one scene from another while preserving the overall flow of the novel, which embraces a theatrical work. 

The opening scene, where the Olivers and the Haines converse, unfolds “in the big room with the windows open to the garden” (Woolf, Between the Acts 3). The description of the expanded space offers a sense of wholeness that embraces both the inside and the outside, light and darkness, people and animals, and a sense of connection through the summer breeze and noises that permeate the space. This feeling of expansiveness comes to a close a few pages later as nighttime gives way to early morning, marked as “Mrs. Swithin dr[aws] the curtain in her bedroom,” and the narrative shifts to convey Lucy’s stream-of-consciousness (6).^[5] The windows open again the following day when Lucy, still in her bedroom, reflects on her favorite book, The Outline of History, which recounts how everything started as one, but then slowly divides into different parts until, “she th[inks], jerking the window open, we descend” (7). The act of opening the window dramatizes the entrance of human beings into history, which, as Lucy understands it, illuminates how her thoughts quickly shift from one to another, and prompts the reader to align their perspective with Lucy’s.  

It took herself five seconds in actual time, in mind time ever so much longer, to separate Grace herself, with blue china on a tray, from the leather-covered grunting monster who was about, as the door opened, to demolish a whole tree in the green steaming undergrowth of the primeval forest. (7)

Kate Flint notes that the passage is one of many in Between the Acts showing how Woolf intends for readers to “carry the atmosphere of a book, its distinguishing marks of vision, into his or her comprehension of the world outside their window,” as demonstrated “by Mrs. Swithin’s literal opening of a window” (192). As Flint suggests, the novel persistently encourages readers to pay attention to the numerous literal openings and closings that materialize moment-by-moment shifts in perspective.  

These openings, however, also interrupt the flow of what is going on within the space—both physically and mentally—by bringing forth a framed fragment of another. By inviting characters to glance out, step beyond, or allow others to enter, the frame-like structures prompt readers to recognize the existence of simultaneous narratives beyond their own. Recognizing this boundary leads to the realization that it is misleading to assume that openings offer access to the entirety of what lies beyond. Life, as Woolf argues in “Modern Fiction,” is “a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end” (Woolf, The Common Reader 149). Here, Woolf advocates that modern fiction should reflect inner thoughts and intangible moments of existence in an effort to come close to depicting life, in contrast to traditional novels that enforce plots and objective details that could not help but fail to address the subjectiveness of life. Reading Woolf, Caroline Ruth Miller reminds readers that art may attempt to convey life but cannot possibly contain the wholeness of it, just as one cannot get a full grasp of our lives either, and therefore frames are “necessary” in both cases (ix). Life, when conveyed through art, has to be framed, contained, or enveloped in some way, which could easily end up being intentionally or unintentionally misleading. The frames in the novel—poised to open and close—highlight this inherent inaccuracy. 

One of the most conspicuous frames in Between the Acts is the two paintings in the hall—one of an unnamed woman and the other of a gentleman, an ancestor to the Olivers, whose name is recorded. Both pictures, we learn, are in some sense incomplete. The man wanted to include his dog in his portrait as well as his horse, but there was only room for his horse. Unsatisfied, the man is pictured as if “he seemed to say, addressing the company, not the painter, a damned shame to leave out Colin whom he wished buried at his feet, . . . but that skunk the Reverend Whatshisname wouldn’t allow it” (Woolf, Between the Acts 25). While the Olivers know at least that much about him, “the lady was a picture,” the text reiterates, unable to deliver any of her story (26). The picture of the lady does not offer any guidance on how it should be taken either, and in that sense, it could be understood that “[t]he picture looked at nobody” (32). In their own ways, the ancestor’s missing dog and the lady’s silent gaze expose what frames fail to capture. Staring at those pictures, viewers, who will also soon be the disappointed audience of the pageant show, are either left lost and disappointed, or intrigued, and can only judge the works from their own standpoints. By baring the device of these incomplete portraits, Woolf suggests that the failure of the frame is an epistemological necessity, as it prompts the observer to imagine beyond the fixed fragment the frame attempted to display.  

Weak, Pliant Frames

The audience approaches Miss La Trobe with mixed feelings of hope and cynicism, fueled by rumors that she is a failure. The villagers consider her “[b]ossy,” who “makes everyone do something,” and assume that she, with her strange name, must be a foreigner (143, 41). Groundless rumors are stretched to conclude that she is a failure to begin with, as if the villagers are prepping themselves for the moment she fails to meet their standards. The spreading rumors reflect the villagers’ condescending attitude towards Miss La Trobe and all her assumed aspects of failure, but at the same time, hint at the villagers’ low self-esteem in expecting that no one of pure English ancestry or a successful business owner or actress would come down to their village to lead the pageant. 

Miss La Trobe is acutely aware of her status as an outsider. She has been an “outcast” even before arriving at Pointz Hall, as the text elucidates, as “[n]ature had somehow set her apart from her kind” (143). However, rather than explaining her creative constraints—such as the tight budget forcing “conventions” to be outraged—she actively, and literally, conceals herself (45). She hides “behind the tree,” “bend[s] over something in the grass,” or assumes a “stooping position” (83, 140, 141). The trees thus become Miss La Trobe’s self-devised frames, offering both a necessary vantage point for artistic direction and a shield from the audience’s view and premature judgment.  

Recognizing the trees as Miss La Trobe’s self-devised frames adds significance to the moments when she steps out of her comfort zone, particularly as she does at the end of the pageant by literally “stepp[ing] from her hiding” behind the trees (68). 

Now Miss La Trobe stepped from her hiding. Flowing, and streaming, on the grass, on the gravel, still for one moment she held them together—the dispersing company. Hadn’t she, for twenty-five minutes, made them see? A vision imparted was relief from agony…for one moment…one moment. Then the music petered out on the last word we. She heard the breeze rustle in the branches. She saw Giles Oliver with his back to the audience. Also Cobbet of Cobbs Corner. She hadn’t made them see. It was a failure, another damned failure! As usual. Her vision escaped her. (68)

Notably, one of the first things she mentions is how perfect the ground is for the pageant, “[w]inding in and out between the trees” (40). Shifting through the trees, Miss La Trobe strives to empower herself over the audience as well as the stage. She eavesdrops on and observes the audience, attempting to influence them according to her script and to redirect the stage according to the audience’s reaction. Miss La Trobe frequently crosses her self-devised frames near the pageant’s end, as she becomes more desperate to interfere with how the audience takes her show. Then, Miss La Trobe’s anxiety reaches a point where she tries to take a step further and force the audience to change their perspectives instead of letting them figure out the blind spots of their perceptions on their own. Miss La Trobe’s conduct becomes violent in such moments, resonating with the gramophone, which “must be hidden; yet must be close enough to the audience to be heard,” and many critics have characterized it as the voice of the violence and of authority (44).^[6]

The forcible nature of Miss La Trobe’s actions is epitomized near the end of the pageant, when she fails to grab the attention of the audience and “st[ands] facing the audience,” thinking she should have installed a “backcloth to hang between the trees—to shut out cows, swallows, present time,” which would have blocked the view (122). Her imaginary backcloth is simultaneously exclusive and inclusive; it completely shuts out the sight of other stories that could be happening on the other side, yet also blocks distractions so that those on the inside are forced to immerse themselves in the given story. Through the figure of Miss La Trobe and her steps between the trees, the text visualizes the thin line between offering new perspectives and imposing them. This imaginary backcloth represents the temptation of what Saint-Amour defines as “strong theory”—a totalizing, paranoid framework that seeks to explain, control, and subsume all contingent phenomena under a singular, authoritative gaze (38). The way she conducts her art propels its viewers to be awakened to their preconceptions in approaching other people’s stories, but at the same time, risks overstepping—in other words, imposing how art should be perceived, which, in Miss La Trobe’s words, is only an “illusion” (122) bound to fail. The subsequent failure of the imaginary backcloth is a crucial political victory in the novel’s weak modernist design. By leaving the frame porous and exposed to the unpredictable whims of nature, the text shows that art must rely on plaint and weak frames that allow the audience’s spontaneous, disjointed presence to actively co-generate the work’s meaning.  

Accordingly, Miss La Trobe’s understanding shifts only when she recognizes the fragility and the porousness of her self-devised frame. From “lean[ing] against the tree, paralyzed” when she is feeling overpowered by failure, she moves to “[g]rating her fingers in the bark, [as] she damned the audience” the next time she feels again that “illusion fails” (96, 122). Then, near the end, she is distanced from the trees, seeing them with a new eye as starlings “attack” them (142). 

Then suddenly the starlings attacked the tree behind which she had hidden. In one flock they pelted it like so many winged stones. The whole tree hummed with the whizz they made, as if each bird plucked a wire. A whizz, a buzz rose from the bird-buzzing, bird-vibrant, bird-blackened tree. The tree became a rhapsody, a quivering cacophony, a whizz and vibrant rapture, branches, leaves, birds syllabling discordantly life, lie life, without measure, without stop devouring the tree. (142)

Here, the tree is more than a backdrop—it is at the center of the narrative for once, as if boasting its vitality that is finally recognized. Its spectacular, assaulted existence illustrates Miss La Trobe’s realization of the neglected nature of the trees that had both enabled and limited her actions of creating and showcasing her story and influencing her viewers. The trees, or the limited frame of Miss La Trobe’s reference, shape perspectives but are also subject to change. Ann Ronchetti refers to this moment as the tree becoming “a Tree of Life,” which “affirm[s] both her dramatic efforts and the real world of humanity and nature,” contrasting sharply with the earlier “crucifix-trees” that symbolized her creative agony (127). It is particularly notable that the exposure of the tree’s vulnerability, which is intertwined with its changeability, brings to readers’ attention the very existence of the trees as a visualization of Miss La Trobe’s frame of reference, which would have been barely noticeable, again, had the trees not so frequently appeared in the text, standing straight, unbending, as if set in stone. Hana Wirth-Nesher rightfully points out that Between the Acts “positions the reader exactly between both experiencing and observing illusion” and draws “this new terrain by canceling the dichotomy on which ‘between’ depends” (189). The cancellation of the dichotomy, an act that allows Miss La Trobe to realize her own perspective of condemning her work as a failure, is a catalyst for new creation: “Suddenly the tree was pelted with starlings. She set down her glass. She heard the first words” (Woolf, Between the Acts 144). The recognition of one’s own limitedness paradoxically leads to boundless creative potential. 

Strong, Unnoticeable Frames 

While the vulnerability of frames exposes the structures, their strength typically obscures their presence, making one less aware of alternative perspectives. Between the Acts explores these stronger frames through characters whose influence stems from culturally reinforced attributes like beauty and social authority. These individuals become arbiters of taste, dictating aesthetic and social frameworks that go unquestioned. 

The audience, bored by the familiar pageant, focuses intensely when the beautiful Mabel Hopkins, playing Reason, appears on stage. 

Eyes fed on her as fish rise to a crumb of bread on the water. Who was she? What did she represent? She was beautiful—very. Her cheeks had been powdered; her colour glowed smooth and clear underneath. Her grey satin rob (a bed spread), pinned in stone-like folds, gave her the majesty of a statue. She carried a sceptre and a little round orb. England was she? Queen Anne was she? Who was she? (85) 

The audience’s attention immediately leads to their dissecting her, assuming that her beauty should signify more, that she must have been given more importance. Her beauty easily veils the truth underneath, for example, by making a “bed spread” seem like a “satin rob” (85). Without realizing it, the audience is immersed in her words and the fictional world on stage that she leads them to. Accordingly, the Restoration comedy that she introduces happens to be about plotting, deceiving, and forcing taste: a lady’s scheme to take her niece’s dowry money, taking advantage of the condition that her niece “must marry to her Aunt’s liking” (90). The hilarious act maintains the audience’s undivided attention despite interruptions and omitted scenes that prompt the audience to “imagine” the details based on a given summary, and the beautiful Mabel Hopkins gracefully leads the actors downstage after the comedy (97). 

Another character whose beauty is emphasized and thus possesses power is Mrs. Manresa. She is a visitor passing through the town, but with her attractiveness, she somehow ends up leading the villagers at times. With her “rich fluty voice” and “[h]er hat, her rings, her finger nails red as roses, smooth as shells, . . . there for all to see,” she becomes the center of attention (26, 27). During the half-time interval, for instance, Mrs. Manresa is the first to step upon the doorway of the Barn, where the “tea time” is set (70). She “let[s] other people come first,” and the people, “hesitating, [dribble] past” (71). Then Mrs. Manresa, again comes forward with the text cueing how the people are “still h[angin]g back,” waiting for “someone to start the ball rolling” (71). 

“Well, I’m dying for my tea!” she said in her public voice; and strode forward. She laid hold of a thick china mug. Mrs. Sands giving precedence, of course, to one of the gentry, filled it at once. David gave her the cake. She was the first to drink, the first to bite. The villagers still hung back. “It’s all my eye about democracy,” she concluded. So did Mrs. Parker, taking her mug too. The people looked to them. They led; the rest followed. 

“What delicious tea!” each exclaimed, disgusting though it was, like rust boiled in water, and the cake fly-blown. But they had a duty to society. (71)

Mrs. Manresa’s way of strolling in and out through the Barn displays her confidence and gives her a sense of authority, almost as if she were the director of the interval. She is the one who ends up “heading the procession” of the audience going back to their seats after the interval, with Giles and Bart following by her sides (82). She looks “goddess-like, buoyant, abundant,” donning her scarf which “blew round her shoulders” (82). Not only does she jokingly say, at one point, “We will have a play of our own. In our Barn. We’ll show ’em,” but the text also elucidates that she “mak[es] [Giles] feel less of an audience, more of an actor, going round the Barn in her wake” (74). The text elucidates that, at this point, Mrs. Manresa, feeling like “the Queen,” is an arbiter of taste, deciding for everyone what is worth desiring (74). Based on her particular taste in people—“it was the women of her own class that [bore] her” (73), and she enjoys the attention of men—she pushes Mrs. Parker out of her circles and draws Giles “down the Barn, in and out, from one to another” (74), accompanying him in all of her conversations.

The immediate attraction that beauty creates and the way people voluntarily follow Mrs. Manresa in and out of frameworks in excitement—boosted by her disgust towards “the torture of boredom”—seems to contrast with the sense of ennui prevalent, particularly in the earlier scenes of the novel when people reluctantly follow Lucy through her tour of the house (76). The tour begins right after the luminous ending of the prior paragraph, where her brother Bart dozes off snoring “with his head on one side, his hand dangling above the dog’s head” (47). Extending the lethargic vibe, the tour is depicted as boring and repetitive, opening with an introduction to a long staircase. 

“This, is the staircase. And now—up we go.”

She went up, two stairs ahead of her guest. Lengths of yellow satin unfurled themselves on a cracked canvas as they mounted. . . .

She panted slightly, going upstairs. Then she ran her hand over the sunk books in the wall on the landing, as if they were pan pipes. . . .

She stopped. There was a door. 

“The morning room.” She opened the door. “Where my mother received her guests.”

Two chairs faced each other on either side of a fine fluted mantelpiece. He looked over her shoulder. 

She shut the door.

“Now up, now up again.” Again they mounted. “Up and up they went,” she panted, seeing, it seemed, an invisible procession, “up and up to bed.”(47-48)

The narrative focuses on how the group notices every staircase they must climb, doors that need to open and shut, and rooms they must stare into because Lucy’s tour is so dull. In the end, even Lucy grows tired of her own stories and sits on a bed, “tired, no doubt, by the stairs, by the heat”(49). By baring these tedious physical thresholds, Woolf structurally prefigures Genette’s concept of focalization not merely as a stylistic device, but as an active, spatialized, “restricted ‘point of view’” (Genette 186). 

What the laborious line of the house’s frameworks also suggests, however, is that the group is forced to share Lucy’s single point of view throughout. Lucy, too, acts as an arbiter of taste, editing and delivering her preferred version of the house’s history. It is just that in comparison to Mrs. Manresa, her stories are weaker, and thus, the enforced nature of her perspective, as visualized through the many stairs and doors, is more evident to those whom Lucy leads on the tour as well as to the readers. Ironically, the exposure of the frames—including both literal ones such as stairs and doors and metaphorical ones like her stories about the house—through which she leads the group weakens those frames and makes the alterities visible. The breezy air “lolloping along the corridors, blowing the blinds out,” and the way Lucy leaves “her sentence unfinished, as if she were of two minds, and they fluttered to right and to left” (51) at the end of her tour all allude to alternative openings. This domestic tour functions as a literal mise en cadre through which the frames and thresholds of the house expose themselves as fragile, pliant boundaries, preparing the viewer to accept the narrative’s weak epistemological condition as the only space where alternative, marginalized perspectives can become visible (Wolf 198).   

The final act of the pageant, “The Present,” which begins with Miss La Trobe’s 10-minute-experiment of having the audience stare into an empty stage, demonstrates the ultimate exposure of frames. The audience is forced into an uncomfortable silence: “All their nerves were on edge. They sat exposed, . . . they were suspended, without being, in limbo” (121). There is no guidance for the audience on how to think, only empty time and space nudging them to think. Then, the empty interlude is followed by a more forceful imposition, compelling the audience to think: the intrusion of multiple mirrors on stage, flashing towards the audience. 

So that was her little game! To show us up, as we are, here and how. All shifted, preened, minced; hands were raised, legs shifted. Even Bart, even Lucy, turned away. All 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 on curl, disturbed by the breeze, to its place. 

“Magnificent!” cried old Bartholomew. Alone she preserved unashamed her identity, and faced without blinking herself. Calmly she reddened her lips. (126)

People react to the display of mirrors in different ways. Most seem ashamed to face themselves or to share their reflections through unfamiliar mirrors in a public space, too frustrated to realize that no others will be in the right angle to see the same reflection. Undisturbed, Mrs. Manresa calmly fixes her makeup like she had done many times throughout the novel. However, it would be a stretch to say that she is reflecting on herself because she merely looks at her reflection, reinforcing her source of authority—her beauty. 

What deserves close attention is that the mirrors are all of different shapes, some even “cracked” (125). They offer flat, distorted images rather than the substance of whom they reflect. While the mirrors are forceful in the way they flash upon the audience, they are also intrinsically fragile and merely framed, which exposes their limitations. The final scene of the pageant suggests not merely the audience’s simple humility of seeing their reflections exposed in public but also the irresolvable gap between self-perception and external representation. This is the unsettling truth Miss La Trobe—and Woolf—expose: that frames can be “distorting and upsetting and utterly unfair” (125). As Miss La Trobe faces her audience, “illusion fails” (122), and “the old cronies” in the pageant audience mutter that “if we’re left asking questions, isn’t it a failure, as a play?” (135). Yet, seen through a “weak” lens, this conflict arises because both sides are clinging to “strong” expectations—the audience for a “nugget of pure truth” (Woolf, A Room of One’s own 4) and the artist for total control—failing to realize that the “failure” of the theatrical illusion is actually the novel’s success in exposing their limited perception (Woolf, Between the Acts 135, 142).^[7] The intrusion of the mirror is a quintessentially metafictional moment that exposes the collapse of the novel’s own mise en cadre, exposing its own fractured frames back to the audience (Wolf 198). The sense of failure at this moment, however, does not signify an inadequacy but points to a non-normative condition endowed with weak, alternative possibilities. Rather than succumbing to a strong, totalizing truth, this shared, vulnerable exposure of limited perspectives through this metafictional failure become a democratic catalyst.  

It is worth noting at this point that the clergyman, who comes to give a finishing speech at the end of the pageant, does not think that the show was a failure. It was a success, according to Rev. G. W. Streatfield, which raised “a sum of thirty-six pounds ten shillings and eight pence” towards their church (Woolf, Between the Acts 131). This shocking revelation, only mentioned near the end of the novel, immediately, although maybe temporarily, represents a 
stronger voice that threatens to overrun all others, along with the words of the reporter whose writing will be recorded, printed, and disseminated. These authoritative words, regardless of their partiality, constitute The Outline of History that Lucy reads and form the basis of the history for the pageant—which is, again, the “distorting and upsetting and utterly unfair” fact that needs to be recognized (7, 125). Building on Mia Spiro’s persuasive reading of Between the Acts as “a work that manifests [Woolf’s] deep ambiguity as to how anti-war protest can be achieved in a society that so easily succumbs to, and so passively consumes, mass culture spectacles—history pageants, military parades, and media extravaganzas” (Spiro 130), I add that the passive consumption of the audience is highlighted at this moment when the clergyman speaks, as the way they are listening to him confirms: “fold[ing] their hands in the traditional manner as if they were seated in church” (Woolf, Between the Acts 130). Judging the show a failure, therefore, gains more significance at this point, as such judgments can defy authority and history. Expressing one’s evaluation, as do Miss La Trobe and the audience, each with their own reasons, can be a courageous act of resistance. 

Beyond the Frames

The appearance of the clergyman encourages an interrogation of the borderlines between art, propaganda, and “a mode of resistance,” to borrow Spiro’s words (130). Critics have pointed out that Between the Acts is the most historically and politically attuned among Woolf’s works, written at a time of not only national and international crisis but also an aesthetic crisis.^[8] Modernist experimentalists were facing backlash for being outdated in the 1930s and 1940s, and Woolf was “routinely caricatured as a remote, outmoded, and declining aesthete,” according to Alice Wood (117). Pollard also notes that “Woolf’s fear of being rendered outdated and politically aloof” peaked in the 1930s, and she “revised and sought new ways of writing” (63) to respond to the changing political climate. In particular, as Patricia Klindiest Joplin notes, Woolf was preoccupied with figuring out the relation between “the nature of her own narrative authority” and the external crisis, as mirrored through Miss La Trobe’s artist figure (88).

One of the things Woolf set out to do, according to Ben Harker, was to participate in the “negotiation of besieging voices” at the time (433). The Bloomsbury group, of which Woolf was a leading figure, was central to a movement advocating for a coalition of communists, socialists, liberals, and progressive conservatives “to unite around ideas of nation, tradition and democracy in a political and cultural coalition to resist the rising fascist threat” (Harker 433). Harker’s analysis helps clarify the concept of “unity” suggested by Pollard and Fairbairn, in reference to the final act of the pageant. At least for a moment, facing the mirrors reflecting them, the audience members are “crashed; solved; united,” on “different levels,” “all comprehending” (Woolf, Between the Acts 125, 128), not that they are the same, but that they are all different, that they have been, and will be. Textualizing efforts to acknowledge and level different views without filtering them is one of the key literary accomplishments of Between the Acts. Furthermore, as Sayaka Okumura notes, Woolf’s frames and mirrors that create borders between worlds in Between the Acts emphasize “not the distinction between the two realms but their association” (32). This insight underscores the significance of the literal and metaphorical frames throughout the text in illuminating Woolf’s concerns with bridging divisive viewpoints. 

The ending of Between the Acts, capturing the gradual dimming of the day marked by the final drawing of the window curtains, culminates in two conflating sentences: “Then the curtain rose. They spoke” (Woolf, Between the Acts 149). These lines signal both an ending and a beginning. The quiet moment leading up to those closing phrases, as Isa and Giles prepare for the night and are about to start a private conversation, also conveys a paradoxical mood. The scene’s centrality is momentarily heightened when Giles turns on the light amidst the surrounding dimness and quietness, and then swiftly dissolves into the encroaching darkness outside.  

The old people had gone up to bed. Giles crumpled the newspaper and turned out the light. Left alone together for the first time that day, they were silent. Alone, enmity was bared; also love. . . . But first they must fight, as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night. 

Isa let her sewing drop. The great hooded chairs had become enormous. And Giles too. And Isa too against the window. The window was all sky without colour. The house had lost its shelter. It was night before roads were made, or houses. It was night that dwellers in caves had watched from some high place among rocks. (148-49)

This ending has generated much critical analysis addressing a variety of aspects. Some critics interpret the phrasing of the “heart of darkness” as a precise evocation of Joseph Conrad’s novel or other modernist texts, such as Eliot’s The Waste Land, which harken back to pre-historic times. Some emphasize that the text is conflating reality and fiction, leaving it unclear if the scene exists in reality or within Miss La Trobe’s consciousness. Some contend that Woolf shuts out the reality of war through art. Finally, some find in the ending the allusion to the birth of a new creation or a beginning, among other analysis.^[9] A commonality found among these diverse and compelling readings is that they try to find a conclusive meaning to the scene and to Between the Acts overall. This readerly approach mirrors the way the pageant’s audience seeks to interpret its significance—an endeavor both encouraged and criticized within the text itself.   

Then, a self-reflective interrogation on why the engrossing ending has garnered so much attention should contribute to the scholarly discussion focused on figuring out the meaning of the novel’s ending. Contrasted with the darkness outside the window, the room where Isa and Giles are sitting is highlighted, inducing a moment of total immersion. Mirroring the moment within the text, readers may also find themselves being absorbed in the pages where the cacophony of the text is suddenly quieted, shut out from everything except for the accentuated scene. Then, the final two sentences bring the windows back into focus by illuminating the curtains and challenging assumptions that may have formed up to this point. The curtains prompt a moment of recognition, encouraging readers to acknowledge that they may have been immersed in the story of Isa and Giles, even if only briefly and perhaps unconsciously. 

This brief but impactful experience of immersion and break demonstrates that darkness (to other perspectives) and immersion (in a single perspective) are like the flip side of a frame. Immersive stories can be persuasive or authoritative enough to blot out other perspectives, while weaker stories—silenced or even too cacophonous—may be harder to grasp, with the readers easily losing focus, but the distinction between the two is frail, as much as the thin curtains. The poignant ending demonstrates that perspectives, whether overpowering or undermined, are susceptible to change. Noting the particularity of the framed narrative in Between the Acts which allows characters and readers to “approach the window from both sides and reflect on their difference[s],” James Harker points out that “the graduation of the darkness suggests something other than blindness—a potential for limited visual perception” (17–18; emphasis added). Adding to that insight, I argue that potential is also found when the curtain rises and frames are exposed, illuminating interruptions and polyphonous voices—a potential for recognizing multiple perspectives. In this sense, a failure to immerse in any single, authoritative account may lead to the recognition of previously unacknowledged frameworks, which might in turn prompt acknowledgment of our own frail and limited perspectives, as well as those of others. 

By attending to the dissonant moments between the acts, Woolf prepares us to move beyond the “illusion” of unmediated truth (Woolf, Between the Acts 96, 122). It is through this metafictional openness that the novel invites its readers to participate in a weak, vulnerable, and shared process of interpretation. By dismantling its own frames, the text creates a democratic catalyst that allows for the coexistence of limited, yet ethically vital, perspectives. Like the audience of 1939, we are left in an interval. Only through this recognition of the limits of perception can we finally step towards the more creative and inclusive future that our anxious world so urgently requires. 

Works Cited 

Bakhtin, M. M. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, translated by Caryl Emerson, U of Minnesota P, 1984. 

Bowlby, Rachel. “Who’s Framing Virginia Woolf?” Diacritics, vol. 21, no. 2/3, 1991, pp. 3-10. 

Caughie, Pamela L. Virginia Woolf & Postmodernism: Literature in Quest & Question of Itself. U of Illinois P, 1991. 

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness and the Congo Diary, edited by Robert Hampson, Penguin Books, 2007. 

Cuddy-Keane, Melba. “Ethics.” Modernism and Theory: A Critical Debate, edited by Stephen Ross, Routledge, 2009, pp. 208–18. 

Esty, Joshua. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England. Princeton UP, 2003. 

Fairbairn, Megan. “Toward Multiplicity and Unity: Conditions of Art, Artist, and Audience in Woolf’s Between the Acts.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, vol. 97, 2021, pp. 42–43. 

Flint, Kate. “Reading Uncommonly: Virginia Woolf and the Practice of Reading.” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol. 26, 1996, pp. 187–98. 

“Frame.” Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford UP, https://www-oed-com-ssl.libproxy.snu.ac.kr/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=frame. Accessed 23 Nov. 2024.

Genette, Gérard, and Jane E. Lewin. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, translated by Jane E. Lewin, Cornell UP, 1985.

Graham, John. “Time in the Novels of Virginia Woolf.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2, 1949, pp. 186–201. 

Harker, Ben. “‘On Different Levels Ourselves Went Forward’: Pageantry, Class Politics and Narrative Form in Virginia Woolf’s Late Writing.” ELH, vol. 78, no. 2, 2011, pp. 433–56. 

Harker, James. “Misperceiving Virginia Woolf.” Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 34, no. 2, 2011, pp. 1–21. 

Harpham, G. G. “Ethics.” Critical Terms for Literary Study, edited by F. Lentricchia and T. McLaughlin, U of Chicago, 1995, pp. 387–405. 

Hawkes, Joel. “The Title of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, vol. 89, 2016, p. 26.

Joplin, Patricia Klindienst. “The Authority of Illusion: Feminism and Fascism in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” South Central Review, vol. 6, no. 2, 1989, pp. 88-104. 

Lauby, Daniel G. “Fascism, Resistance, Failure: Woolf’s Adaptations of Masques in Between the Acts.” Woolf Studies Annual, vol. 27, 2021, pp. 47–62. 

Laurence, Patricia Ondek. The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition. Stanford UP, 2022. 

Leaska, Mitchell. Pointz Hall: The Earlier and Later Typescripts of Between the Acts. University Publications, 1983. 

McWhirter, David. “The Novel, the Play, and the Book: Between the Acts and the Tragicomedy of History.” ELH, vol. 60, no. 3, 1993, pp. 787–812. 

Miller, Caroline Ruth. Virginia Woolf: The Frames of Art and Life. Macmillan, 1988. 

Okumura, Sayaka. “Reflections, Mirrors, and Frames in Between the Acts.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, vol. 94, 2018, p. 31. 

Pawlowski, Merry M. Virginia Woolf and Fascism: Resisting the Dictators’ Seduction. Palgrave, 2001. 

Pollard, Megan. “A Deliberate Failure: Politics, Form, and Woolf Between the Wars.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany, vol. 100, 2023, pp. 62-66. 

Pridmore-Brown, Michele. “1939-40: Of Virginia Woolf, Gramophones, and Fascism.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 113, no. 3, 1998, pp. 408–21. 

Ronchetti, Ann. The Artist-Figure, Society, and Sexuality in Virginia Woolf’s Novels. Routledge, 2013. Taylor and Francis. Accessed 6 Jan. 2026.

Saint-Amour, Paul K. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. Oxford UP, 2015.

Schneider, Karen. Loving Arms: British Women Writing the Second World War. The UP of Kentucky, 1997. 

Sears, Sallie. “Theatre of War: Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” Virginia Woolf: A Feminist Slant, edited by Jane Marcus, U of Nebraska P, 1983, pp. 212-35.

Snaith, Anna. Virginia Woolf: Public and Private Negotiations. Macmillan, 2000. 

Spiro, Mia. “Between Public and Private Acts: Woolf’s Anti-Fascist Strategies.” Woolf and the City, edited by Elizabeth F. Evans and Sarah E. Cornish, Clemson U Digital Press, 2010, pp. 130-35. 

Wiley, Catherine. “Making History Unrepeatable in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts.” CLIO, vol. 25, no. 1, 1995, p. 3.

Wirth-Nesher, Hana. “Final Curtain on the War: Figure and Ground in Virginia Woolf’s ‘Between the Acts.’” Style, vol. 28, no. 2, 1994, pp. 183-200. 

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———. Between the Acts, edited by Mark Hussey, Harcourt, 2008. 

———. The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume V: 1936-1941, edited by Anne Olivier Bell, assisted by Andrew McNeillie. The Hogarth Press, 1984. 

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“When Illusion Fails”: Metafiction and “Weak” Epistemological Frames of Between the Acts

Abstract

Park Minyoung

This paper examines how the literal and metaphorical frames in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts shape its exploration of failure. By utilizing structural concepts of focalization and mise en cadre, the study demonstrates how physical thresholds such as windows, doors, and mirrors, and self-conscious narrative structures regulate the flow of information to expose the inherent limitations of any single vantage point. While the characters and the village audience often experience these restricted perceptions as a sign of failure, this article argues that such weakness is, in fact, a deliberate, metafictional strategy that resists the rigid, totalizing narratives of history. By making the artificiality of these boundaries visible, Woolf encourages readers to confront the fragility of their own cognitive frames. Ultimately, the paper contends that recognizing this failure is not merely an aesthetic observation but an ethical imperative. It is through the shared, vulnerable exposure of our limited perspectives that we can transition from a state of perpetual suspense towards a more inclusive and creative future.

Key Words

Frames, Failure, Perspectives, Weak theory, Metafiction, Ethics

박민영

서울대학교 영어영문학과 강사

영미문학연구
Journal of English Studies in Korea
50 (2026): -31
http://doi.org/10.46562/jesk.50.1

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^[1] Woolf began drafting the novel, then titled Pointz Hall, in early 1938 and continued through the most harrowing years of the pre-war period.

^[2] For these classic pessimistic readings that interpret the pageant’s failure as a tragic symptom of cultural decay and historical paralysis than an intentional, productive strategy, see Mitchell Leaska, Sallie Sears, Mitchell Leaska and Alex Zwerdling.  

^[3] “I myself know why its [sic] a failure, & that its failure is deliberate.” (Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf (65)) 

^[4] Genette distinguishes the description of a “spatio-temporal universe” where the characters and objects actually exist in the story’s place, from a non-diegetic intrusion which does not belong to the world of the characters, such as in the case of the author intruding for commentary (94). 

^[5] In Between the Acts, Lucy is referred to as Mrs. Swinthin, Cindy, as well as by her first name. 

^[6] See Patricia Klindienst Joplin, Bonnie Kime Scott, and Michele Pridmore-Brown on how Miss La Trobe is being portrayed as a dictator-like artist.

^[7] I draw on the term “nugget of truth” from Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, where it refers to a systematic expectation that art should convey a definite truth (4).

^[8] For profound analysis on Between the Acts as a critique on fascism and imperialism and the role of art, see Melba Cuddy-Keane, Jed Esty, Joplin, Daniel G. Lauby, Patricia Laurence, Marlowe Miller, David McWhirter, Merry Pawlowski, Pridmore-Brown, Karen Schneider, Catherine Wiley, Hana Wirth-Nesher, Scott, Anna Snaith, Mia Spiro, and Alex Zwerdling. 

^[9] For connections with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and prehistoricism, see Ben Harker (451). For an analysis of the text’s conflation of reality and fiction, see John Graham (200) and Joel Hawkes (26). For studies on Woolf’s rejection of war through art and allusions to a new beginning, see Wirth-Nesher (193) and Joplin (102).