Writing for a “New Plot” in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts = Writing for a “New Plot” in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Writing Between the Acts under the threat of an impending war, Virginia Woolf attempts to reconfigure the present time for a new plot against the seeming inevitability of war through her reflections on people’s individual and collective identities (re)constructed through their performance of daily routines and roles. The novel examines how violence within the patriarchal system entangled with the violence of war is choking the interval time between the two wars in a deadlock. Looking into representations of British history through the pageant’s ironic performance, the novel questions the vision of historical unity as provided in the nationalist historical discourse. The play in the pageant historicizes the present time and exposes the fictional nature of the conventions. Attentive to the repressed desires and silenced possibilities of main characters and to the outsiders, those marginalized in the nationalist historical discourse, Woolf explores the possibilities for “a new plot” with a “different song and different conclusion.” In the ending, those words Giles and Isa spoke but untold to the reader invite the reader to fill the silence.