Embracing “Scraps, orts and fragments”: Virginia Woolf’s Narratives of History in The Years and Between the Acts

Virginia Woolf’s last two novels, The Years and Between the Acts, show both her conceptualization of history and her experimental writing to narrativize history in the novelisitc discourse. The Years traces in a form of a family saga social changes from 1880 to the present day, portraying the collapse of the Edwardian social order and concerning the rise of Fascism in the 1930s. Set on a mid June day in 1939, Between the Act stages in the form of a village pageant, the play within the novel, the history of England from the primeval times through the various eras of English civilization to the present year. Intense and pervasive as the sense of the present is, the two novels are saturated with allusions to the past. While some critics such as James Naremore and Alex Zwerdling read the two novels as Woolf’s aesthetic affirmation of the past in face of the present marked with the sense of historical decay, Susan Squire and Melba Cuddy-Keane emphasize the possibility of the new social order and a new concept of English community that the two novels envision.

Considering the fact that Woolf’s The Years and Between the Acts embrace all at once the sense of despair and hope, melancholy and blessing on the course of history, this paper proposes to read the two novels not as either mourning or celebrating historical process but as problematizing the nature of fiction and history. Woolf questions the referentiality of language and representation, deliberately disrupting the traditional modes of narrative. If The Years shows Woolf’s complex comprehension of historical process with its multiplicity and its inclonclusiveness with all its temporal movement, Between the Acts plays on the slippage between the double temporality of history–the narrative and the performative.

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