- 1 ‘A manifesto for renewing liberalism’, September 14, 2018; last accessed on 26 January 2025 at http (...)
1When even The Economist calls for ‘a liberalism for the people’, you know you have arrived at a truly populist moment.1 Trump’s second victory six years later indicates that populism is no fleeting phenomenon. Across the globe and across the political spectrum, populists champion ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’, deploying a vocabulary of political privileging and blame. There is little commonality, however, to how those two phrases are defined. The Economist’s joining the ranks of Hugo Chavez and Donald Trump evidences the lack of a unifying ideology to populism. Populism, then, might best be defined as a language or discourse, or a rhetorical strategy available to any kind of thinker. And while we might not expect Virginia Woolf to be germane to a conversation about populism, her oft-quoted phrase from A Room of One’s Own rhetorically relies upon ‘the people’ to advance one of that essay’s central claims: ‘Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind a single voice’ (Woolf 2015, 65). While the mandarin Woolf was no populist, she was, maybe surprisingly, deeply invested in its vocabulary: the nation, the land, and ‘the people’. Characteristically, however, she brings to these concepts her sceptical scrutiny and rhythmic renderings.
2As English history informs so much of A Room of One’s Own, it might be useful to compare her above statement with another by W.B. Yeats, from his early essay ‘Popular Ballad Poetry of Ireland’ (1887):
it is needful that the populace and the poets shall have one heart. . . . This condition Ireland has long had—whatever the people were the poets have been more intensely; were the people poor, they were poorer; did the people suffer, they suffered also. Did the people love their country, did not the poets keep alive that love through years of misfortune? They were one with the people in their faults and their virtues—in their aims and their passions. (Yeats 2004, 94)
3On the surface, we have here two major modernist writers theorising the relationship between literature and ‘the people’. Both seem to agree that the writer’s genius is not ‘solitary’, that it grows organically out of the ‘one heart’ they share with ‘the people’. Modernist studies have long shed the assumption that its writers disdained the masses, so we are not likely surprised that ‘the people’ play a role in the formation of modernist criticism, especially in Yeats’s early stage (Cuddy-Keane 2003). Yet these two texts originate from different societies with divergent historical traditions. Yeats writes from a place and time—Ireland, before Independence, at the dawn of the Renaissance—that is so riven with dislocation that concepts like tradition, society, and ‘the people’ are not stable or shared entities. The Irish Renaissance, we might say, searches for an Irish tradition on which to build a revival, cannot find one adequate to its purposes, and so constructs a series of foundational myths (Deane 2006).
4By contrast, the young Woolf voiced an anxiety of English influence—too much tradition—especially in her early unsigned book reviews, where she grapples with her cultural heritage. In ‘Some Poetical Plays’ (1908) (where, incidentally, she reviews Yeats’s play Deirdre), she wrote that the medieval legend ‘offers so much beauty and so strong a tradition that original talent seems enmeshed in it, and made incapable of individual action’ (Woolf 2011, 349). In The Voyage Out Rachel Vinrace feels burdened by the overwhelming literary inheritance of Austen and Gibbon (Friedman 1992). Central to the difference between Yeats and Woolf is language: Yeats, not knowing much Irish, does not have access to centuries of Ireland’s written works. For Woolf, by contrast, all of English literature is available, as she writes in her late, unfinished essay ‘Anon’: ‘I want . . . to go through English literature, like a string through cheese, or rather like some industrious insect, eating its way from book to book, from Chaucer to Lawrence’ (Woolf 2011, 580). By starting with Chaucer, rather than Beowulf, Woolf uses language, not place, as what defines her tradition, and can take advantage of the accessibility of the English language to explore a canon.
5What we have then, in A Room, is an articulation not just of the importance of a literary tradition, but also an assumption that such a tradition exists and is close at hand. She can depict the writer and ‘the people’ as in a relationship free of crisis: remarkable given the essay’s ambitious goal of upending literary traditions and of rewriting literary history, ‘thinking back through our mothers’. Woolf famously dramatises the exclusion of women from this canon: ‘I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out’, and when women write ‘they had no tradition behind them’ (Woolf 2015, 24, 75). Yet even in a text like this she can gesture, without irony, to ‘the people’ as a usable concept. Because of history and language, Yeats and his coevals were forced to grapple with the contingent nature of ‘the people’ as a phrase, and his late tortuous modernism partly represents a casting off of his attachment to ‘the people’. All the more striking, then, that the English Woolf arrives at a similar awareness of the legitimising function of ‘the people’ as a phrase in her late works, as I will argue. Usually, it is outsiders to English literary history—Yeats or V.S. Naipaul, say—who have to provide critical perspectives on Englishness. Woolf does it from within the English tradition, or, she might argue, from her Outsider perch.
6For Woolf literary history is never distinct from history itself. While we associate her with a hostility to Carlyle’s Great Man theory of history, we might ask, is her response to Carlyle—her whole historical oeuvre—a history of ‘the people’ instead of ‘Great Men’? Are the histories she writes, both fictional and non-, of outsiders and those at the margins: are they histories of ‘the people’? Are ‘the people’ outsiders, or those at the centre? If ‘the people’ have been slighted from historical accounts, because of history’s focus on Great Men, then Woolf’s historiographical investigations of outsiders might take on a populist tone, championing ‘the people’ against the elite. But Elena Gualtieri distinguishes a “later shift from eccentricity to obscurity” (Gualtieri 2000, 42), further complicating how we characterise Woolf’s historical project. Can ‘the people’ be both subaltern and dominant, marginal and central? Paradoxically yes, Woolf’s works suggest, and her rhythm of rhetorical deconstruction and assemblage of ‘the people’ is a practice that runs throughout her career, and that reaches its fullest expression in Between the Acts.
7Vexing any investigation of populism in Woolf’s work is the nebulous definition we attach to that term, one Woolf never uses. (As we shall see, she relies heavily on the term ‘common’ instead.) The populist swerve in Europe and the U.S. of the last few years—Brexit, Trump, Movimento 5 Stelle, Trump again—would suggest that populism is a nationalist, xenophobic ideology that responds to cultural threats from perceived outsiders, handing political power to illiberal strongmen. However, broadening the scope spatially to include Hugo Chavez, or temporally to the American People’s Party of the 1890s, means that such noxious traits might be incidental to populism. Yet what Trump and Chavez do share is a vocabulary of legitimation, where ‘the people’—however defined—are under threat from elite outsiders to a system. For theorists of populism, like Margaret Canovan and Ernesto Laclau, ‘the people’ are never a pre-existing category. Instead, they are produced by discourse. ‘the people’ are in a constant state of reproduction, every wielder of the phrase possibly redefining the terms (Canovan 1981; Laclau 2005).
8As we know from clichéd tableaus on civic pamphlets, representing ‘the people’ in visual or literary modes exposes the term to a scrutiny it cannot handle. As T.J. Clark writes in his exploration of French revolutionary painting in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999), ‘the categories [of defining the people] themselves had better be kept free from empirical detail, lest the actual distinctions and tensions that existed within the people’s ranks take on political form’ (Clark 1999, 47). Eugène Delacroix dares to represent them, however, in La liberté guidant le peuple (1830), where the left of the painting is dominated by a series of characters, each of whom signifies one sub-group of ‘le peuple’: a factory worker, a street urchin, and most prominently a petit-bourgeois. As the latter would no longer be part of ‘the people’ by 1848 and certainly not in 1870, ‘le peuple’ in the painting soon became rhetorically untenable, whereas the symbolic nature of Liberté and the tricolour flag still are functional enough today.
9Definitions of ‘the people’ are more efficiently conveyed via their enemies: blaming Jews in Hitler’s Germany helps to homogenise a society emerging out of a civil war where ‘the people’ as a stable concept might ring hollow. And it is usually at such historical crisis points that populism as a movement emerges, and for theorists like Laclau it is when an existing system cannot meet a broad array of demands, from various sectors of society, that ‘the people’ starts to operate as an umbrella term, really only signifying ‘those who feel excluded from the system’. Crucially, there is always a temporal element to populism: a system is depicted as having-been-ruined, implying it was working in the first place. Unlike both Marxist and neo-liberal discourse, both of which posit a better future, populist movements generally privilege a past, almost always an invented one: ‘Make America Great Again’ is silent on when exactly America was great.
10For Clark, ‘the question of the People is a question about representation’ (47), and the phrase ‘the people’ performs the heavy lifting of populism. The ‘the’ draws boundaries: as opposed to ‘a people’, which can be deployed neutrally, ‘the people’ implies that some people are real and legitimate, and some are not, some are outside the populist boundary. Woolf, a self-described outsider, might thus be the ideal theorist of ‘the people’. Even in a legalistic sense, Woolf is born excluded from the process of political representation by ‘the people’, but such status is altered by the Representation of the People Act of 1918. Suffragism concluded what we might term the Enlightenment phase of ‘the people’. For the early Enlightenment in the U.K. and the U.S., ‘the people’ were the landowning males, mostly Protestant, but such a definition slowly broadens to include other groups, and so halfway through her life Woolf finds herself part of ‘the people’.
11However, there is a counter-tradition in the West as well, quickly illustrated by the culture into which Yeats was born. In Ireland, the Enlightenment phase operates in a similar fashion to England and the American colonies: the discourse of Grattan’s Parliament in Dublin in the early 1780s sounds much like that of Boston in the 1770s and borrows from thinkers like John Locke. Yet such radical words led only to a failed 1798 revolution, and the subsequent Act of Union in 1801 that formally joins Ireland to the United Kingdom, effectively dismantling the Irish Enlightenment. ‘the people’ as a phrase does not lose its power, however, as it is reborn via the new notions of romantic nationalism immigrating from France and Germany. By the time of the Irish Renaissance, when writers like Yeats refer to ‘the people’, they mean the poor, uneducated, often Irish-speaking cottagers of the West of Ireland. The failure of the Enlightenment, and the success of cultural nationalism, transforms ‘the people’ into its own opposite in less than a century, from wealthy elite to subaltern. Similarly, in Germany Das Volk are the peasants of the German countryside, not the urban bourgeois.
12This form of romantic nationalism never finds fertile ground in England, and there ‘the people’ throughout the nineteenth century functions differently than on the continent (McWilliam 2012; Epstein 2003; Joyce 1994). Yet its Enlightenment tradition that witnesses a progressivist narrative of ‘the people’ is one that allows the English, as Woolf was well aware, to see themselves as operating in a continuous tradition. Such a narrative might well be fictional: V.S. Naipaul’s entire body of work dramatises the Trinidadian’s lament for his nation’s lack of a stable tradition, and when he travels to England he encounters one. While he often perceives such tradition to be a fiction, he judges it a socially functional fiction. Woolf might accept that the historical narrative called ‘Chaucer to Lawrence’ is a fiction: but as a fiction writer she knows the power of invented narratives.
13Two quotations can help stage Woolf’s relationship to ‘the people’ and this continuous tradition. The first is from her 1919 essay ‘Reading’, which, even though early, reads like a dress rehearsal for Between the Acts. It begins, ‘Why did they choose this particular spot to build the house on? For the sake of the view perhaps’ (Woolf 1988, 141). In this essay, the English tradition is visible: the speaker reads the landscape like a book: ‘If I looked down at my book I could see Keats and Pope behind him, and then Dryden and Sir Thomas Browne—hosts of them merging in the mass of Shakespeare, behind whom, if one peered long enough, some shapes of men in pilgrims’ dress emerged, Chaucer perhaps, and again—who was it? some uncouth poet scarcely able to syllable his words; and so they died away’ (142). Here literary history—once again back to Chaucer—persists, evidencing the stability and continuity of the English language. She writes, ‘I liked to read there’ (141), that last pronoun referencing both the literal house, but also the tradition in which she reads. She accesses the tradition from looking and reading, and in this essay the two are one.
- 2 The presence of Homer and Euripides complicates the notion of a single heritage and demonstrates th (...)
14The house itself literally houses the canon: ‘Here they all are; Homer and Euripides; Chaucer; then Shakespeare; and the Elizabethans’ (141).2 She will read these books as she ‘reads’ the landscape. But such a landscape, and the tradition it supports, is not empty of people:
But, as I say, even the gardener leading his pony was part of the book, and, straying from the actual page, the eye rested upon his face, as if one reached it through a great depth of time. That accounted for the soft swarthy tint of the cheeks, and the lines of his body, scarcely disguised by the coarse brown stuff of his coat, might have belonged to any labouring man in any age, for the clothing of the field labourer has changed little since Saxon days, and a half-shut eye can people a field much as it was before the Norman conquest. This man took his place naturally by the side of those dead poets. (142)
15Here the labourer sits alongside literary history, seemingly confirming Woolf’s claim from A Room that geniuses speak out of ‘the body of the people’. So is this labourer one of ‘the people’? Is he read in the same way as ‘the actual page’? He does ‘people a field’, so his presence would be missed, as without him, the landscape is a wilderness. Somehow this un-literary labourer embodies the literary tradition.
16A decade later, Woolf writes in her diary of being at Rodmell: ‘And I felt this is the heart of England—this wedding in the country: history I felt; Cromwell; The Osbornes; Dorothy’s shepherdesses singing; all of whom Mr & Mrs Jarrad seem more descendants than I am: as if they represented the unconscious breathing of England & L & I, leaning over the wall, were detached, unconnected’ (Woolf 1980, 197). It is a similar passage to the one in ‘Reading’: in both, the viewer reads the landscape as living, embodied history; in both, the rural labourers are privileged, selected to represent ‘the people’.
17The difference, of course, is the presence of the wall in the second text. The wall separates the Jewish, urban, cosmopolitan couple from ‘the people’: ‘L&I’ are not true ‘descendants’. Are the Woolfs above ‘the people’, because of their education and economic class? Are they marginal, or outsiders, because of their Jewishness, their political views, their queerness? Woolf continues, ‘I suppose our thinking is the cause of this’. So are ‘the people’ the unconscious, un-thinking part of a nation? But while we could focus on the various functions of this dividing wall—a wall that reappears in Between the Acts—it does not disrupt a key similarity between the two texts, which is simply the belief in ‘the people’ as a stable category. (And this repeats in a 1938 letter to Ethel Smyth, where she sees ‘the people—the peasants, wandering along the bank, and talking to us, like something in the time of Elizabeth so that I felt I was actually in Shakespeare’ (Esty 2004, 249). If Woolf is not part of ‘the people’, then she—the ‘I’ of the text—is outside any potential ‘we’ and ‘the people’ continue to be real, present, but just over there. As Gillian Beer has noted, Woolf was curious about this ‘we’ while being realistic about how it often threatens minority voices: ‘Her reaction in writing to social communities was skeptical and wary; she needed to find ways of maintaining difference as well as constellation, lest clusters become ordered as hierarchies. Yet her writing emphasises communality and the body’ (Beer 1996, 50). This is another concern that resurfaces in Between the Acts. But inside or out, wall or no, ‘the people’ are there across Woolf’s writing.
18Populism easily lends itself to nationalism, as one may posit ‘the people’ as essentially of one culture or even biology, threatened by perceived outsiders who are enemies of the nation. Woolf’s literary interests were of course widely cosmopolitan: Greek, French, Russian, and American writers were crucial to her formation, and when young she even reviewed Chinese and Japanese texts. Her lifelong interest in history, however, is almost exclusively English. As Julia Briggs writes, ‘she recognized and loathed the threat of nationalism, yet loved England’ (Briggs 2005, 370), and, I would add, accepted the national nature of most historical narratives. Her outsider critique of Carlyle is launched from within national boundaries. Sometimes her treatment of English history is plainly celebratory, as in her series of ‘The London Scene’ articles for Good Housekeeping in 1932. Note how, in these passages, English history is so visible, tangible, and accessible:
[St Paul’s Cathedral] is august in the extreme; but not in the least mysterious. . . . They still wear their stars and garters, their emblems of civic pomp and military pride. Their tombs are clean and comely. No rust or stain has been allowed to spot them. Even Nelson looks a little smug. Even the contorted and agonised figure of John Donne, wrapped in the marble twists of his grave clothes, looks as if it had left the stonemason’s yard but yesterday. Yet it had stood here in its agony for three hundred years and has passed through the flames of the fire of London. But death and the corruption of death are forbidden to enter. Here civic virtue and civic greatness are ensconced securely. (Woolf 2010, 302)
19The continuity of English history and culture, that ‘still wears’ emblems, is forever young and immune to death’s encroachments. St Paul’s is ‘not in the least mysterious’ because it is so close, so familiar, so alive. (Woolf will do very different things with such ‘civic pomp and military pride’ in Three Guineas!) In this passage, power is ‘secure’. The Good Housekeeping series is remarkable for its stable portrait of English culture and politics, best expressed when she visits the House of Commons: ‘Vague though our history may be, we somehow feel that we common people won this right centuries ago, and have held it for centuries past, and the mace is our mace and the Speaker is our speaker’ (324). Sentiments like this are free of any trace of populist crisis: power is legitimate enough, ‘the mace is our mace’ as the citizenry are ‘the people’ and vice versa. She is even part of the ‘we’, ‘we common people’. Woolf, writing for an organ like Good Housekeeping, is clearly performing a role; yet it is one Yeats or Naipaul could never play.
20A radically different picture emerges in Three Guineas. In that text, she is excluded from the ‘we’, she is only ‘a stepdaughter of England’, and ‘“we”—meaning by “we” a whole made up of body, brain and spirit, influenced by memory and tradition—must still differ in some essential respects from “you”, whose body, brain and spirit have been so differently trained and are so differently influenced by memory and tradition. Though we see the same world, we see it through different eyes’ (Woolf 2014, 22). Thus, if we return to the Woolfs looking over the rural wall, a further division emerges between male and female: they both gaze over the same wall at ‘the people’, but ‘through different eyes’.
21If we compare the general spirit of the 1919 ‘Reading’ with the 1937 Three Guineas, we might argue that Woolf’s ideas on English continuity had progressed from celebratory to hostile. But I would argue instead that what we witness with such a juxtaposition are the rhythms of her thoughts on ‘the people’. Woolf deconstructs a popular or populist tradition in A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, to be sure, but the cumulative effect of reading six volumes of The Essays of Virginia Woolf is to observe a construction of the English tradition that parallels her deconstructions, and while we might not categorise the resulting canon as populist, she does continually return to function of ‘the people’ in its creation. Her literary history is just this rhythm of assemblage and dissolution, which might double as a swing from ‘I’ to ‘we’ and back again. For Maria DiBattista, history as such is this rhythm: ‘History for Woolf is a process, but a process that primarily engages her imagination for its underlying generative rhythms, not for those surface discriminations of manners, dress, speech, class and economic organizations’ (DiBattista 1980, 209). This rhythm moves from appreciation to harsh critique of the English tradition, one that, in her last years, swings from deconstruction in Three Guineas towards adoration with her unfinished essay ‘Anon’.
22Woolf was contemplating an essay like ‘Anon’ all throughout the politically turbulent 1930s. ‘Anon’ is a work of literary history, but also a history of the book, a history of English culture, and quite possibly a history of ‘the people’:
The voice that broke the silence of the forest was the voice of Anon. Some one heard the song and remembered it for it was later written down, beautifully, on parchment. Thus the singer had his audience, but the audience was so little interested in his name that he never thought to give it. The audience was itself the singer; ‘Terly, terlow’ they sang; and ‘By, by lulla’ filling in the pauses, helping out with a chorus. Every body shared in the emotion of Anon’s song, and supplied the story. Anon sang because spring has come; or winter is gone; because he loves; because he is hungry, or lustful; or merry; or because he adores some God. Anon is sometimes man; sometimes woman. He is the common voice singing out of doors. He has no house. He lives a roaming life crossing the fields, mounting the hills, lying under the hawthorn to listen to the nightingale. (Woolf 2011, 581)
23Anon is the ‘common voice’, and, while central to an English heritage, is simultaneously an outsider, ‘singing out of doors’ and without a ‘house’. One way to read ‘Anon’ is as an extrapolation of her claim from A Room, ‘of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind a single voice’, where Anon is ‘the body of the people’. Or, Anon is that ‘single voice’, not separate from ‘the people’, but of them, speaking as them and for them.
24As the essay proceeds, Anon continues to sing, but her voice can only be heard ‘at the back door’. To repurpose Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous question, ‘can the subaltern speak?’, we might ask ‘can the people speak?’ Yes, Woolf suggests, but only at the back door. Class tensions animate the essay, and ultimately marginalise the voice of ‘the people’; yet, Woolf argues, Anon continues as a living presence in English society: ‘There never was a young world. Behind the English lay ages of toil and love. That is the world beneath our consciousness; the anonymous world to which we can still return’ (584). Note how accessible, how at hand the tradition is for Woolf. As in the Good Housekeeping pieces, Woolf can enter the ‘we’, and here more earnestly, without the performance she gives in her popular journalism.
25Furthermore, the ‘we’ of ‘Anon’ is not simply writers and intellectuals, but rather a wider society. English history is not solely present in rooms or landscapes as in ‘Reading’, it is ‘the world beneath our consciousness’, a collective Id, or, to borrow another German term, the Volk upon which society rests. Woolf must know, in the late part of the decade, that she is handling potentially toxic materials that continental fascism had monopolised. ‘The people’, the land, continuity, blood and soil: these are key terms for the European far right. Yet what Woolf might provide for us in ‘Anon’ is a way of thinking about ‘the people’ that does not fall into the stale divide of populism versus cosmopolitan technocracy. Woolf handles populist materials in ‘Anon’ without fear, she walks into the enemy’s camp and returns with treasures they have stolen.
26Such treatment is quickly evident with her portrait of Latimer the preacher: ‘He is a man of the people’. He spoke truth to power: ‘he will bring before the King the real state of England + He will unveil, show up, speak the truth, even if it brings him to the faggot as it brought his master, the gentle Mr Bilney’ (587). Latimer “saw the great house rising on the ruins of [the] old . . . denounced its luxury, its immortality” (587). While Latimer might suggest a template for populist politicians across the political spectrum, Woolf resists turning him into a Hitler or Mussolini. She is not looking for the 1930s in the distant English past; she does not equate a celebration of ‘the people’ with fascism. Woolf might be simply following her political instincts—which at this point start to radically diverge from Leonard and Bloomsbury at large—yet I would argue that her interest in language and literature informs the political sentiments of ‘Anon’. Part of Latimer’s protest against power took the form of the English language, as by insisting on saying his prayers in the vernacular instead of cosmopolitan Latin ‘he was putting English into high places. He was rescuing it from the back door. He was teaching the nobles and the peasants to respect their mother tongue. He was making it possible for the gentry and the commons to sit together in one house listening to a play’ (592). While Latimer does not bequeath a body of literature, as ‘man of the people’ his populist energies—ones radically distinct from those of the fascists—make possible the great age of the English Renaissance. He enabled the English language as a vehicle for tradition, providing exactly that continuity that Yeats felt he lacked. Thus, the emergence of an English populism—a healthy one—is central to Woolf’s history of English literature.
27But why, we might ask, was the English tradition such a treasured resource for Woolf, given her powerful critiques of it in A Room and Three Guineas? The existential threat of annihilation by Germany provides one answer. But note how important Woolf believes the voice of ‘the people’ to be for Spenser:
Those depths, those long years of anonymous minstrelsy, folk song, legend and words that had no name attached to them, lay behind him. Their confusion pressed upon him. He was conscious of them. ‘For why a Gods name’ he exclaimed ‘may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language…’? He was word conscious; an artist; aware of his medium; that words are not paint, nor music; but have their possibilities; their limitations. To be thus aware the writer must have a past behind him. (590)
28The Faerie Queene, then, might be what Woolf has in mind when she writes that ‘Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind a single voice.’ Comparing these two quotes, we can see that the word ‘behind’ is key for both. In A Room, ‘the experience of the mass’, that is, of ‘the people’, is ‘behind’; in ‘Anon’, ‘a past’ is ‘behind’. Thus ‘the past’ is interchangeable with ‘the people’, and ‘a history of the people’ is redundant. As we shall see with Between the Acts, an English history is the history of ‘the people’ and literary history simultaneously.
29‘Anon’ concludes, abruptly, with the emergence of Elizabethan drama. The populism of Latimer made possible not only the works of Spenser, but also allowed ‘the gentry and the commons to sit together in one house listening to a play’ (592). Who were ‘the commons’? Can they speak? ‘The audience is silent’ (594), Woolf writes, ‘the people themselves pass unseen. They too like the dramatists remain anonymous’ (595). We can imaginatively reconstruct them, however, based on what the playwrights were trying to deliver:
Of these the greater part were apprentices, citizens, soldiers, the common people seeking relief from the boredom of the afternoon. Their presence is obvious enough in the early plays. It is they who draw up the extravagance the hyperbole, as a sheet of paper draws up the fire. It was they who made the playwright capable of his great strides, of vast audacities beyond the reach of the solitary writer with his mind fixed upon the reader in the great room. If we could measure the effect of the audience upon the play we should have a hold which is denied us upon the play itself. But the audience, drawn though it is by an irresistible attraction to the play, is silent. (595)
30Silence is not a problem for the interrupting, gossipy audience in Between the Acts, but this passage from ‘Anon’ might serve as Woolf’s portrait of ‘the people’, at least in speculative outline. Reading early Elizabethan drama, we can find ‘the common people’ in the modes in which the ‘they’ of this passage are addressed by the language and tropes of the plays. Even the great Marlowe, and the young Shakespeare, had to cater to the audience.
31However, Woolf states, the mature Shakespeare knows he does not have to pander; he can make his plays less about plot and popular clownish humour, and more about individual character. This is the process of Shakespeare becoming less anonymous; Shakespeare becoming ‘Shakespeare’: ‘But at some point there comes a break when anonymity withdraws. Does it come when the playwright had absorbed the contribution of the audience; and can return to them their own general life individualised in single and separate figures? There comes a point when the audience is no longer master of the playwright’ (598). Shakespeare is now the ‘master’ of the playhouse, but, paradoxically, his works are not a silencing of the ‘common’ people, because with him, ‘the dramatist is separate, & yet is still united by a common life with the audience.’ Hence ‘Masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind a single voice.’ Woolf’s terms in these two essays are remarkably consistent a decade apart.
32Between the Acts focalises her interest in populism, both appreciably and critically, that scatter throughout her oeuvre. In ‘this remote village in the very heart of England’ (Woolf 2008, 12) Woolf launches her most probing investigation of ‘the people’ and how that phrase relates to an English heritage. Mrs. Swithin remarks of Miss La Trobe’s historical pageant, ‘there’s the whole of English literature to choose from’ (41), echoes the earlier ‘Reading’ and the late ‘Anon.’ The pageant itself might be a history of ‘the people’ (English history) by ‘the people’ (the villager actors) and for ‘the people’ (the villager audience); or, that phrase might be interrogated to the point of meaninglessness.
33Culturalist nationalism in the nineteenth century stressed the rootedness of ‘the people’, prizing continuity and longevity over civic cosmopolitanism. In Between the Acts such an ideology speaks through the various families’ long histories: Mrs. Haines’ ‘family, she told the old man in the arm-chair, had lived near Liskeard for many centuries’ (3). Woolf even literalises the concept of rootedness: ‘The Olivers who had brought the place something over a century ago, had no connection with the Warings, the Elveys, the Mannerings or the Burnets; the old families who had all intermarried, and lay in their deaths intertwisted, like the ivy roots, beneath the churchyard wall’ (5). As in her Good Housekeeping articles, tradition is accessible, just over there. But the novel complicates how we witness the formation of such a tradition, and how it is perpetuated:
“But you don’t remember . . .” Mrs. Haines began. No, not that. Still he did remember—and he was about to tell them what, when there was a sound outside. [ . . .]
“I remember”, the old man interrupted, “my mother. . . .” Of his mother he remembered that she was very stout; kept her tea-caddy locked; yet had given him in that very room a copy of Byron. (4)
- 3 See also Gabrielle McIntire: ‘Mr. Oliver’s mother, in the middle of the Victorian period, had also, (...)
- 4 de Gay writes that ‘Woolf thus interrogates assumptions about wholeness or unity by suggesting that (...)
34Here we see a literal handing down of the poetic tradition, one that allows such houses as those described in ‘Reading’ to fill themselves with books. Yet the process of canon formation is fragmented, constructed amidst interruptions and gaps, as Jane de Gay notes in Virginia Woolf’s Novels and the Literary Past (2006): ‘Woolf’s suspicions about organic wholeness were based partly on an awareness that it could not withstand the outside forces of conflict and fragmentation. This is at the heart of her sense that it was useless to listen to ‘poets answering one another at a time of crisis’ (de Gay 2006, 193).3 We see such deconstructions all throughout the novel: ‘A bishop; a traveler;—I’ve forgotten even their names. I ignore. I forget’ (48); ‘The villagers were singing, but half their words were blown away’ (54). Traditions in this novel are not automatic or natural, but rather assembled, often willfully: ‘Not an ancestress . . . But we claim her because we’ve known her—O, ever so many years’ (47), possibly echoing the ‘claiming’ of Greek literature by the English. Between the Acts reveals the seams in the stitching of English continuity, the making of the historical fiction called English History.4 Just as we are taken backstage at the pageant, in the novel we see behind the master narrative of English literary history.
35‘Anon’ had focused on the audience in Renaissance drama, and so we could now ask, is the audience of the pageant ‘the people’? They are, mostly, the villagers, and as I mentioned, in the novel they are not at all silent. They are as much a part of the reader’s experience as the pageant itself, especially in their interruptions of what they see and hear. If, for Woolf, ‘the people’ and history are wedded terms, is the pageant a history of ‘the people’? Or is the audience a truer embodiment of English history? Woolf offers no easy answers as so much of the novel is attuned to the process of the making and unmaking of the audience:
the trees with their many-tongued much syllabling, their green and yellow leaves hustle us and shuffle us, and bid us, like the starlings, and the rooks, come together, crowd together, to chatter and make merry while the red cow moves forward and the black cow stands still. (83)
36‘Crowd’ as a verb in this passage signals the novel’s exploration as to how communities are formed, how the ‘we’, the ‘us’ of the novel, is assembled. This was part of her initial motivation for the novel, as we know from her diaries: ‘the community feeling: all England thinking the same thing—this horror of war—at the same moment. Never felt it so strong before. Then the lull & one lapses again into private separation—’ (Woolf 1984, 215). Anna Snaith writes of this entry that this ‘coming together and dissipation of the public is a movement which she represents in the audience in Between the Acts’ (Snaith 2000, 137). Possibly, then, ‘the people’ for Woolf is not a stable entity—not a demographic—but rather a process, and such a rhythmic process is itself Woolf’s notion of history. In that case a ‘history of the people’ is, once again, the wrong formulation: maybe ‘the people’ as history—as a process—is what the novel proposes.
- 5 DiBattista writes of this passage: ‘In Woolf’s primary substitution of the communal “we”, with its (...)
- 6 Compare de Gay, for example, with Sabine Hotho-Jackson: ‘Time and again Woolf had viewed English hi (...)
37But what form does such a proposition take? At the formal level, the reader observes a constant ebb and flow of construction and deconstruction, assembly and disassembly. Mrs. Swithin, ‘she belonged to the unifiers; he [her brother] to the separatists’ (81). Between the Acts swings between these two poles of accumulation and fragmentation: ‘From the garden—the window was open—came the sound of someone practicing scales. A.B.C. A.B.C. A.B.C. Then the separate letters formed one word “Dog.” Then a phrase. It was a simple tune, another voice speaking’ (80).5 Fragments assemble into legible wholes. But then, the sound dies away, existing only as a memory. Does the sound no longer exist? It does, but now is enmeshed in the fragmented processes of memory and forgetting. This rhythm propels the novel, as the audience, like the scales, are assembled; but then, they collectively think, ‘Dispersed are we’ (71). Neither the construction or deconstruction of the scales, the audience, or history and ‘the people’ are the final word. It is helpful, as some critics do, to focus on one extreme or another, but we must always keep the larger process in our vision.6 Some of the bleaker deconstructions of the novel fail to account for moments like this: ‘As they listened and looked—out into the garden—the trees tossing and the birds swirling seemed called out of their private lives, out of their separate avocations, and made to take part’ (81). Note here the invocation to form a community. That word ‘part’ is so loaded in this novel: a role, or a section, or a fragment, as the Reverend explains:
We were shown, unless I mistake, the effort renewed. A few were chosen; the many passed in the background. That surely we were shown. But again, were we not given to understand—. . . To me at least it was indicated that we are members one of another. Each is part of the whole. . . . We act different parts; but are the same. (130)
38But the Reverend, a Unifier, does not have the final word—his constructing delivery is interrupted by the planes that remind both audience and readers of the war, the latest chapter of a disruptive history, for Beer ‘part of a general dislimning of securities’ (Beer 1996, 172). Woolf would not live to see the next few years referred to as ‘The People’s War’.
39‘The people’ as a process animates the free indirect discourse of the narrative voice. As the crowd is dispersed, we observe Isa’s thoughts: ‘“Dispersed are we,” she murmured’ (71). Isa, a ‘separatist’, may be dispersed from the crowd, yet is still united by the language of that dispersion, and forever linked by memory to the collective event. Thus, none of us are ever fully dispersed, even the romantic lyric ‘I’ that Isa valorises: she ponders Miss La Trobe’s collective voice, believing that the playwright may be able to represent other people, but ‘“Myself”—it was impossible. Other people, perhaps . . . But she won’t get me—no, not me. The audience fidgeted”’ (121). Isa believes she has resisted assimilation, but the free indirect discourse in this passage makes clear that she has not, not while she is remembering the collective event of witnessing English history, not while she is thinking in the language of Chaucer and Latimer and Spenser, not while the fidgeting audience includes her as much as any other individual. Even alone, in a room of her own, hiding poetry from her husband in an account book, Isa writes with the mass, literature is ‘thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind a single voice.’
40So while the ‘we’ could sometimes suffocate, the solitary ‘I’ is an illusion. The psyche is never alone, and in Between the Acts Woolf reinvokes the ‘invisible threads’ from Mrs. Dalloway: ‘but still, over the bushes, feeling invisible threads connecting the bodiless voices’ (103). Hence ‘none speaks with a single voice. None with a voice free from the old vibrations’ (106). Such an insight is double-edged: no one is alone, and no one is free either: ‘The gramophone was affirming in tones there was no denying, triumphant yet valedictory: Dispersed are we; who have come together. But, the gramophone asserted, let us retain whatever made that harmony’ (103). We could read such ‘harmony’ as the collective spirit that resists the Nazis, or the homogenising spirit of the Nazis themselves. As Briggs writes, ‘unity itself is not without its dangers, disastrously evident in totalitarianism’ (Briggs 2005, 374); and de Gay: ‘Woolf also hints at the sinister implications of drawing an audience into an unthinking harmonious group’ (de Gay 2006, 199). In this novel the benefits of a community, and its homogenising dangers, are presented simultaneously—possibly the only sane response to a war propelled by vicious nationalist populism where the only hope for England’s survival was in collective action and sacrifice: ‘The People’s War’ in every sense.
41The debate the novel stages between inclusion and exclusion, assembly and disassembly, ‘I’ and ‘we’, might indicate a debate between individualistic liberalism versus a collectivist populism: the media narrative of Brexit, Trump, Le Pen. If Isa is the (anachronistically) neo-liberal ‘I’, the extreme end of collectivity is Mrs. Swithin’s ‘one-making’, where all is harmony if you could pull back far enough. Woolf’s novels often begin with dispersed individuals but end with collectivities, with people (Clarissa’s party, Mrs. Ramsay’s dinner, etc.). But only Between the Acts, amongst her fiction, grapples with ‘the people’. Crucially, Woolf’s novel helps us complicate the contemporary, neoliberal versus populist narrative by demonstrating that populism can never signal an entire collective; it is not the opposite of the ‘I’: the ‘we’ of humanity is never the ‘we’ of populist discourse, which always works via exclusion. Whether it is the French Revolution with the aristocracy, romantic nationalism with Jews, or contemporary populism with immigrants, populism needs an Enemy of The People, it needs boundaries, walls, outsiders. And Between the Acts is full of them.
42Mrs. Swithin keeps reading about a separation, that of England from the Continent millions of years ago, the first Brexit:
when the entire continent, not then, she understood, divided by a channel, was all one; populated, she understood, by elephant-bodied, seal-necked, heaving, surging, slowly writhing, and, she supposed, barking monsters; the iguanodon, the mammoth, and the mastodon; from whom presumably, she thought, jerking the window open, we descend. (7)
43Here the ‘we’ is, on a simple level, the English, yet evolution does not quite work in this way: English humans descend, not from animals native to the British Isles, but from other humans in Africa who migrated across Europe. Thus, the novel asks the same question as the Brexit referendum: are we Europe or are we England? Are we an island apart, or are we part of a global community? But note how England, Europe, and humanity at large are all easily contained by the pronoun ‘we’: ‘we’ can divide as much as it unites, ‘we English’ can be an act of exclusion.
- 7 Cuddy-Keane writes: ‘perceiving difference of the other is also disruptive of the self in a formati (...)
- 8 Of the wall Rachel Bowlby writes: ‘the wall is less a solid substantial identity, than something wh (...)
44‘Just over there, across the gulf, in the flat land which divided them from the continent’, is the war, close yet distant enough to provide the quiet that marks the novel’s atmosphere. The planes menacingly fly overhead, but so do the more life-affirming swallows that fly in, and Mrs. Swithin’s real ancestors may have taken a similar route from Africa. Borders are thus continually established and transgressed. The novel deploys outsiders—those who are ‘trans’, who cross the boundaries—to define ‘the people’, which nationalism always insists are ‘cis’, rooted and unchanging. Miss La Trobe is a sexual outsider, and possibly Russian. The two visitors, Mrs. Manresa and William Dodge (the other queer outsider), are disruptive to the day, they intrude, interrupt. Melba Cuddy-Keane writes, regarding community in Woolf’s writings, that ‘Recognizing difference is disruptive of the self”, and sometimes in productive ways.7 The outsiders throw the rest of the villagers into relief, and thus ‘the people’ are produced by this contact with those beyond, the immigrants, exiles, refugees. ‘the people’ are both constantly dispersing and constellating, but also are in a continual state of redefinition from those who cross the channel or scale the wall.8
45Woolf did not cede the populist moment to the nationalist enemy, instead bravely confronting genocidal xenophobia on its own turf, refusing to see its language as inherently toxic, only infected by a noxious form of politics. While Woolf might forever be associated with literary depictions of a rarefied individual consciousness—the lyric ‘I’—she does not respond predictably to the real dangers of a fascist victory over Western liberalism, as Angeliki Spiropoulou has argued:
However much Woolf may have been aware of the danger of the audience turning into a herd, especially in view of the phantasmagoric rallies organised by the Nazis, turning the crowd into a spectacle to itself, as an artist, she desired a recuperation of an unmediated contact with the public. She identified such a possibility in the oral tradition represented by Anon and his/her song, appealing to people’s diachronic emotions. (Spiropoulou 2010, 171)
46Woolf does not fall back, defensively, onto the Lockean Enlightenment individual: ‘anything that comes into my head; but “I” rejected: “We” substituted: to whom at the end there shall be an invocation?’ (Woolf 1984, 135). In turning away from the lyrical ‘I’, she thinks of how to exist in the ‘we’, and what kind of ‘we’ we should strive for, one that includes or excludes. In this she provides us with a model for how we should react to our own historical, populist crisis.