always one person to sit beside.' Neville-sharp, impatient, scholarly-is a changing person driven by an unchanging desire for Percival (who loved Susan) and an awareness of the 'unchanging obstacle' of death. He has a passion for order that to some extent resembles Louis's. Like Louis, Neville feels alien-Louis because of his Australian accent and his commercial father, Neville because of his homosexuality. Louis is angry, resistant, anxious to 'amalgamate discrepancies'; acutely conscious of exclusion and oppression, he once smashed a closed door with his naked fist, and he always hears the chained beast stamping. Like Rhoda, he feels young and vulnerable, but like Bernard he finds imaginative freedom in alternative selves. Bernard lives in the people he sees, but Louis, when he puts off 'this unenviable body' in the darkness, lives multiply in histo-812- ry: 'I am then Virgil's companion, and Plato's'; 'I find relics of myself in the sand that women made thousands of years ago.'
Woolf's compound portrait of the author is a blend of Rhoda and Bernard, who, like Clarissa and Septimus in Mrs. Dalloway, are both counterparts and opposites. Like Rhoda, Bernard has no self, but whereas she is lacerated by social contact, he cannot bear solitude; he needs the stimulus of other people for his stories. Whereas Rhoda hates detail, pursuing ideal form, Bernard proclaims, 'I require the concrete in everything.' Bernard is always making stories, creating consecutive series of events, but Rhoda's fear is that one moment does not lead to another. Rhoda desires to elude representation, Bernard to extend it indefinitely. As a storyteller, a phrasemaker, he lies, but he also tells us that he lies, cueing us to do what he does when he's alone: to take upon ourselves the mystery of things. As he rounds his perfect phrases, he rejects their fluency, confessing a longing 'for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.' When he tries to find a phrase for the moon, or love, or death, he repeats: 'I need a little language…, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up some scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry.' Once, when he saw 'through the thick leaves of habit,' he realized that life was 'imperfect, an unfinished phrase.'
Life, as Woolf presents it, is a flow without end ('If there are no stories, what end can there be, or what beginning?'). To express the flow, Woolf sometimes uses images of waves and sometimes flowers: a lily (for Percival), a red carnation (for the six who sit around the dinner table with Percival), a rose (for Rhoda, whose name comes from the Greek word for rose). In those three flowers are the three major emphases of The Waves-death, the flesh (carnation is related to carnationem, meaning «fleshliness» or 'corpulence'), and a transcendence that may be simply another word for death. All of these characters battle with boredom, with habit: 'Was there no sword, nothing with which to batter down these walls, this protection, this begetting of children and living behind curtains, and becoming daily more involved and committed, with books and pictures?' And in this battle, this effort to see a fin (which is also a fin, or end) break the waste of waters, Louis burns his life out; Rhoda flies past to the desert; Neville chooses one out of millions; Susan loves and hates the heat of the sun; Jinny becomes an honest animal; and Bernard fights death. -813-
Bernard thinks, 'Life is not susceptible perhaps to the treatment we give it when we try to tell it.' In The Waves, Woolf tries to give life a different treatment-more immediate, less consecutive, more alive to the shifting identities and differences between people and things, more respectful of feeling, incompleteness, imperfection. To read this kind of flow, to see these changing shapes, which do not round themselves into a story but more closely resemble a poem, Bernard advises us to multiply our perspectives (like Lily in To the Lighthouse, who says, 'One wanted fifty pairs of eyes to see with'). He describes a more active and flexible method of reading the poem of life, which is also The Waves:
Certainly, one cannot read this poem without effort. The page is often corrupt and mud-stained, and torn and stuck together with faded leaves, with scraps of verbena or geranium. To read this poem one must have myriad eyes… One must put aside antipathies and jealousies and not interrupt. One must have patience and infinite care and let the light sound… unfold too. Nothing is to be rejected in fear or horror. The poet who has written this page… has withdrawn… Much is sheer nonsense. One must be sceptical, but throw caution to the winds and when the door opens accept absolutely. Also sometimes weep; also cut away ruthlessly… hard accretions of all sorts. And so… let down one's net deeper and deeper and gently draw in and bring to the surface what he said and she said and make poetry.
Woolf's final novels cope successively with the weight of the past, its drag on narrative, plot, and character. After The Waves was completed in 1931, Woolf again exhumed the past in The Years, treating it in the more conventional terms of the historical novel. In her last novel, Between the Acts (1941), she evokes the past yet again, through a village pageant that represents history as perfectly congruous with the hopeless present and a violent future. The pageant takes place on a June Sunday in 1939, with the events in Europe rumbling in the background: Germany had invaded Czechoslovakia in March of that year and in May had signed a full military alliance with Italy. The League of Nations, designed to prevent another world war, was dissolving, and in only three months Great Britain would declare war on Germany. Woolf, however, decides not to put war at the forefront of history; in the pageant, Miss LaTrobe doesn't even mention the British army, to the consternation of some members of the audience. Instead, her emphasis is on what falls between the actions, as well as on what falls between the acts of Miss LaTrobe's pageant of English history: as in To the Lighthouse, Woolf's attention falls on 'the marriage plot.' Here, however, — 814- Woolf implicitly links global aggressiveness with violence against, neglect of, and lust for women; both the public and private spheres reel back into the beast. Barriers 'which should divide Man the Master from the Brute were dissolved.'
Between the Acts is perhaps the most despairing of Woolf's books, completed shortly before her own suicide. It begins with a discussion about a cesspool, and it ends with a reversion to primeval darkness in which 'the house had lost its shelter,' and in which Isa and Giles will fight and embrace, 'as the dog fox fights with the vixen, in the heart of darkness, in the fields of night.' The accumulated burden of the past weighs heavy; the present isn't enough, because of 'the future, disturbing our present.' 'The future shadowed their present…; a criss-cross of lines making no pattern.' As William Dodge tells Isa, with 'the doom of sudden death hanging over us… there's no retreating or advancing.'
During the pageant, members of the audience mention dictators and Jewish refugees. Twelve aeroplanes fly overhead during the last scene. Giles, the 'sulky hero,' chafes with suppressed anger over the guns bristling in Europe and the band of men recently shot and imprisoned. He responds to the threat with a need to act, through violence or lust. He bloodies his shoes by stamping on a snake choking with a toad in its mouth, and finds relief in the action. Part of Mrs. Manresa's appeal for him is that she, too, as a 'wild child of nature,' makes him feel 'less of an audience, more of an actor.'
In sharp contrast to Giles, his wife Isa responds to a different, smaller 'war.' Whereas he reads about the shooting of sixteen men across the gulf in the newspaper, she reads about soldiers who drag a woman up to a 'barrack room where she was thrown upon a bed. Then one of the troopers removed part of her clothing, and she screamed and hit him about the face.' The echoes of this article follow her throughout the day. She is haunted by the desperation of domesticity: 'She loathed the domestic, the possessive; the maternal.' Her relations with her husband are strained; he adheres to a double standard, arguing that his infidelity makes no difference but hers does. Like Mr. Ramsay, he demands his wife's admiration, but unlike Mrs. Ramsay, Isa resists him. Isa, however, pays a price for her silent resistance; she wanders about, poisoned by the arrows of ambivalence-love and hate-for her husband, and yearning for death. She comes to resemble the silent lady (not an ancestor) pictured in the dining room, as well as the lady who was said to -815- have drowned herself for love in the lily pond. The poems she quotes are clearly suicidal- Keats's 'Ode to a Nightingale' and a melodic wish 'that the waters should cover me… of the wishing well.' Her fatal thoughts about marriage are further exposed in a rhyme about time that she composes to the rhythm of 'tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor': 'This year, last year, next year, never.'
As in The Waves, in Between the Acts Woolf represents the author through two different characters, Isa and Miss LaTrobe. Isa writes «abortive» poetry she hides from her husband, and Miss LaTrobe writes village pageants to be staged and forgotten. It is not surprising, then, that her representation of history, like Isa's reading of the news, stresses the tyranny of love: her scenes are all about betrothals or abandonments. In the Elizabethan period, the prince is reunited with his beloved, and Isa repeats ambiguously, 'It was enough. Enough. Enough.' During the Age of Reason Flavinda elopes with Valentine, but Lady Harpy Harraden is left with no one, having been demoted from Aurora Borealis to a tar barrel. The Victorian Age centers around a proposal of marriage followed by a sentimental rendition of 'Home Sweet Home.' Mrs. Lynn Jones muses, 'Was there… something… 'unhygienic' about the home? Like a bit of meat gone sour, with whiskers, as the servants called it? Or why had it perished?' Miss LaTrobe ('Whatshername'), the lesbian outcast, has presented a revisionary view of history, but the audience, although vaguely unsettled, has only partly understood the implied critique.
