Publication details
Beyond Mooing : Poetry, Music and Humour as Means Towards Collective Unity in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts
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| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The decade leading up to the Second World War was a time in which many authors in Europe felt the need (arising out of the circumstances of the impending horror in the examples of Hitler's rise to power and the Spanish Civil War) to revisit the idea of humanity in the sense of its collectivity and unity as well as the then obvious overall lack of both. A great number of authors in Britain wrote extensively about the need to fight fascism, as a threat to humanity, and tried to conjure up solutions for world peace. While most of their writings were concerned with practical steps towards world peace, such as the defence of pacifism and disarmament (for instance in the writings of Aldous Huxley, Dimitrije Mitrinović, or E. M. Forster), this paper addresses an internal and intimate nature of the problem: that of seeking for the feeling of unity with the community (local or otherwise) within an individual, as exhibited in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts. By analysing Woolf's reflections on cultural products such as poetry, music and humour, I explore her fictive world and its small countryside community as a paradigm of a global scene. Poetry, humour and music (often deemed as the universal languages) here serve as unifying factors for the otherwise disparate village community. However, though they make for a sound choice of unifying devices within the logic of this particular novel, I implore Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of the habitus and the field, as well as the symbolic capital, as proposed in his "Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste", to point to at least two ways of looking at these choices: 1. as a limitation of Woolf's otherwise plausible vision of unity, or 2. as an instance of a passed over subversive enterprise Woolf weaved into her novel to turn the literary canon upside down. |
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