In Between the Acts, Virginia Woolf turns the national gaze inward to view Englishness as constructed through palimpsests of artistic precedents and political ideologies. Consequently, borders continually destabilize. Intranational border crossings occur in complex intersections throughout the novel: pageantry and pastoral scenes conflate epochs; epochs convey unifying traditions; traditions transpose signs toward new meanings. Such conflations, unifications, and transpositions result from late modernists’ national gaze inward. In Woolf’s case, this turn inward is prompted by a threat at England’s borders as she anticipates an apocalyptic future caused by military invasion during WWII. Critics previously have focused on the embedded Edwardian pageant as the focal point of the novel’s commentary on historical and textual border crossing. However, I will argue that the pageant points toward a much more significant precedent – the renaissance masque. According to her own diaries, Woolf is particularly interested in the “Masque of Mutibilie” embedded in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen, but she also gestures toward John Milton’s Comus and Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Queens. By tracing the novel’s pageant to renaissance masques that prominently feature female artistry and agency, Woolf incorporates a feminist critique embedded within a Spenserian portrayal of the aeviternal, an appearance of permanence that is nonetheless fated to end. Women’s continual pursuit of agency and artistry is wound throughout an English history acted on the pageant’s stage and embedded in the pageant’s adaptation precedents. Yet the military planes overhead potentially foretell of an end to the nation, the artist, and the Englishwoman. Through explicit references to masques and through appropriations of the masque’s form and function, Woolf creates a dramatic backdrop for a novel that critiques a nationalist inward gaze and registers Woolf’s pessimism about the future of England as well as the future of female artists at the outset of World War II.
