On Christmas Eve 1940, just threemonths before her death,Virginia Woolfwrote to Dame Ethel Smyth, a good

friend and then-contemporary composer ofopera: “Yes, I will come one day soon.Because I must exchange ideas” (Nicolson1980, 6:454). Listening to the exchange ofideas between Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)and Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) reveals that therelationship enabled Woolf to make new con-nections between art and subjectivity.Encountering Smyth as an engaged intellec-tual and a musician, getting to know and todisagree with her, became part of Woolf ’selaboration of new forms of being and writ-ing. More specifically, Smyth was a friend andartistic colleague through whom Woolf radi-calized her own ideas about subjectivity, soci-ety, and sound. Although Smyth did notinfluence Woolf ’s musical thinking directly—Smyth and Woolf did not explicitly theorize

Virginia Woolf, Ethel Smyth, andMusic: Listening as a ProductiveMode of Social Interaction

Elicia Clements

Elicia Clements teaches courses

in English and Humanities at

York University,Toronto. She is

currently writing on the music-

text relations in The Mother of

Us All, a collaboration between

Gertrude Stein and Virgil

Thomson, as well as Ethel

Smyth’s opera The Wreckers.

artistic principles of music and literature—the relationship did affect Woolf ’sideas about sound and community, both of which were already prevalent inher work at the time Woolf and Smyth met in 1930. The interchangebetween Woolf and Smyth, therefore, reverberates in Woolf ’s thinking aboutwhat constitutes both cultural and social meaning.

The first half of this paper demonstrates the effect of the relationshipbetween Woolf and Smyth on Woolf ’s artistic ideas, which manifests in threeprimary ways: an expanded sense of subjectivity; a heightened respect for dif-ference; and, a reconfiguration of the notion of community.Woolf ’s under-standing of music is also surprisingly similar to the way she comprehends herfriend and colleague.The second half of the paper, therefore, is an examina-tion of how these issues—subjectivity, difference, and community—emergein Between the Acts, as Miss La Trobe, the central character who is modeledon Smyth,1 and music become crucial components of the text. Just as Woolflistened to her friend both critically and compassionately, Between the Actsasks the reader to hear the many voices within it in order to elicit the sameproductive mode of communal interaction: apperceptive listening.

Exchanging/Engaging Ideas

Writing to Ottoline Morrell about Woolf in 1935, Smyth reflected, “‘itseems to me that the life of intercourse is interchange’” (qtd. Marcus 1977a,6).These comments prompt questions regarding the potential rewards suchan exchange between author and composer might produce. Did this signifi-cant relationship, which consisted of almost weekly letters for the last tenyears of Woolf ’s life, invigorate Woolf ’s reconfigurations of fictional subjec-tivity and community in her final novels? What effect, given that Smyth wasa composer, did this correspondence have on Woolf ’s figurative and narrativeutilization of music, especially conspicuous in Between the Acts?

Several critics have argued for the importance of the relationshipbetween these two feminist thinkers: Jane Marcus (1984) asserts that Smythwas a mothering figure for Woolf; Suzanne Raitt (1988) contends that thefriendship elicited personal narratives of the self from Woolf; and, morerecently,Alison Ames Galstad (1996) details a biographical portrait of Smyth.Hermoine Lee’s section on Ethel Smyth in her biography of Woolf (1996) iscommendably comprehensive and asserts the significance of the relationshipfor Woolf ’s imagination. Patricia Moran (1998) explores these artists’ mutualconcern with and pleasure in female same-sex desire. Most recently,VanessaCurtis (2002) also documents the biographical links between the artists.Smyth undoubtedly engaged Woolf ’s creative thought.

Woolf composes numerous versions of Smyth in her diaries and her fic-tions. Notably, in the early 1930s, her portraits fracture Smyth’s image,“shiv-

52 College Literature 32.3 [Summer 2005]

er into splinters the old vision” (1998a, 164).After one of their early encoun-ters,Woolf observes,

Lying in my chair in the firelight she looked 18; she looked a young vig-orous handsome woman. Suddenly this vanishes; then there is the old cragthat has been beaten on by the waves. [. . .] Then, she is worldly; by whichI mean something I like; unembarrassed, aired, sunned, acquainted with thisway of life & that; lived in many societies; taken her own way in shirt & tievigorously unimpeded. (Bell 1980, 3:313)

Detecting several different versions of her friend, Woolf merges three dis-parate personality types into one account. Smyth is simultaneously a youngwoman, an aged woman, and a robust public figure.Woolf continued to penportraits of Smyth in which the qualities of sincerity, forthrightness, andcourage figure most prominently, juxtaposed with comedic exclamations ofher haphazard appearance, and abrasive and thunderous manner.

Woolf also attended several concerts at which Smyth conducted her ownmusic.As she tells Smyth in May 1930, she hears the multiplicity of Smyth’ssubjectivity in her music.Admiring her “spontaneity and ruthlessness,”Woolfcomments,

Thats [sic] what I call living; thats [sic] the quality I would give my eyes topossess. Of course, in my furtive and sidelong way (being like a flat fish witheyes not in the usual place) I had read a good deal of this years ago in yourbooks, and now I begin to read it and other oddities and revelations too inyour music. It will take a long time not merely because I am musically sofeeble, but because all my faculties are so industriously bringing in news ofso many Ethels at the same moment. (Nicolson 1978, 4:172)

Comments about trading her eyes, or of having eyes that are not in the usualplace, are telling in the context of this scene in which Woolf is listening toSmyth’s music.Woolf suggests that she would give up the capability of sightto acquire Smyth’s ability to be impulsive and forthcoming. Smyth’s ener-gy—what Woolf calls “living”—is one of her admirable qualities.The letterconcludes that there are many different versions of the composer. Recallingthe three different Ethel’s from her diary description,Woolf perceives Smyth’spersonality from an oblique perspective (“sidelong way”) that fragments andmultiplies her subject position.

Moreover, in a passage that recalls The Waves (Woolf was then revisinganother draft of the novel),Woolf continues in the same letter,“There I sit amere target for impressions and try to catch, each one as it flies and finds itsgold or its white or its blue ring for it” (Nicolson 1978, 4:172).The title ofSmyth’s first autobiographical memoir, published in 1919, is Impressions thatRemained; thus Woolf, who was very familiar with the two-volume book,seems to be playfully combining her “impressions” of Smyth with both her

53Elicia Clements

own text and her friend’s. Smyth activates further possibilities of subjectivefragmentation for Woolf. Just as The Waves explores the multiple perspectivesof six subject positions,Woolf ’s descriptions of Smyth augment a single sub-ject to generate manifold impressions at once. Hence, the functions of boththe perceiver and the object proliferate; not only are there so many ways ofobserving and hearing Smyth, but there are also “so many Ethels.”

Smyth’s opinion of The Waves produces another opportunity for Woolfto expand upon her narrative techniques and the concept of loss of self thatshe was working toward.2 Somewhat surprisingly, Smyth suggests that TheWaves lacks a “moral principle”:

the book is profoundly disquieting, sadder than any book I ever read.Andbecause it has no adorable human being in it (like [unlike?] [sic] theLighthouse, sad as it is) there is no escape from its sadness. For the first timeI felt that beauty alone . . . is not enough. I think what makes King Learbearable is one’s consciousness of a moral principle in it all. (Nicolson 1978,4:395)

This response to The Waves is shrewd yet perhaps somewhat skewed. Smyth’srejoinder seems to reveal an uneasiness with a pluralistic notion of ethicalsubjectivity.

Accustomed to Victorian “morality” as located in, or articulated by, a spe-cific character (George Eliot’s Caleb Garth from Middlemarch, for example),Smyth finds no such equivalent in Woolf ’s groundbreaking novel. Smythdoes, nevertheless, provide Woolf with an opportunity to convey her ownprocess of decentering subjectivity.Woolf replies to Smyth’s comments thatthere are so many opinions of her work that she “cant [sic] think how tomake them all fit—what the thing is itself, finally and absolutely” (Nicolson1978, 4:395). In a postcard to Smyth she copies out a quotation from BernardShaw’s Man and Superman, introducing it with the question “Is it possiblythis?” (4:399).The excerpt reads:

“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognised byyourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you arethrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverishselfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world willnot devote itself to making you happy.” (Nicolson 1978, 4:399)

In a subsequent letter,Woolf suggests that the Shaw quotation describes theloss of “the egotistic self ” (4:400), precisely a capacity that Woolf claimedSmyth was often lacking. Thus, when Smyth suggests to Woolf that hernovel should have a “moral” center, Woolf responds, ambiguously eventhrough Shaw’s words, that “true joy in life” (4:399) is the loss of a unifiedor “egotistic” self, thus counterpointing Smyth with a destabilized notion

54 College Literature 32.3 [Summer 2005]

of subjectivity rather than one capable of a solidified ethics and all of itsimplied authority.

Smyth also elicits Woolf ’s respect for difference, as though their relation-ship, fraught with both deep admiration and respect as well as turbulent dis-agreements, is an exercise in simultaneous unity and dispersion:“I recognisedifferences [she declares to Smyth in 1934]—always have—but I don’t letthem separate; in fact, so contrary are human souls, they serve to ally. I don’trequire a repetition of V.W [sic]—not at all: what I want is a contradiction”(Nicolson 1979, 5:293).Woolf was able to disagree—fervently—with Smythand still maintain their valuable bond.3

Smyth’s personality and experiences are found in almost all of Woolf ’smajor texts from the time they meet, in 1930, until Woolf ’s death in 1941,and they often evoke the intersection of community and subjectivity. Explicitallusion begins in Woolf ’s speech to the London National Society forWomen’s Service in 1931; under the title “Music and Literature” the twoartists shared a platform on the occasion. In her paper,Woolf describes Smythas “a blaster of rocks and the maker of bridges” (Leaska 1978, xxviii). As amilitant suffragette in the years 1911-13, Smyth spent three weeks in prisonfor throwing a brick through the window of a prominent politician’s home.Mitchel Leaska documents that Woolf ’s speech to the Society would be theinspiration for both The Years andThree Guineas.4 In turn, these works wouldreproduce and reread Smyth both as a figure (Woolf depicts her as RosePargiter), and as the nexus of issues Smyth actualized: suffrage, feminism, andwomen’s professionalism.

Both Virginia and Leonard Woolf, after the Women’s League event,admire Smyth’s ability to “liquidate [her] whole personality in speaking”(Nicolson 1978, 4:280).Woolf notes that Smyth “threw in something neveryet written by being yourself there in the flesh” (4:280). Similarly, in 1932,when Smyth is planning a lecture at King’s College, London,Woolf regretsshe can not attend, stating,“I should like to hear you, with your gift for solid-ifying the connection between you and the audience” (1979, 5:13). In asketch of Smyth in Woolf ’s diary one observes Woolf ’s pending shift in focusfrom the multiplicity of singular subjects to her radicalization of social organ-ization and its link to Smyth. Early in their relationship Smyth informsWoolf, “‘I’m in the street. I belong to the crowd. I say the crowd is right’”(qtd. in Bell 1980, 3:292), prompting Woolf to ponder,“perhaps she is rightto belong to the crowd” (3: 292).Woolf is questioning the subject’s imbrica-tion in social circumstances, an idea that will circulate in Between the Acts tosuggest that those in the “crowd” are both produced by and producers ofsocial systematization. The references cited above suggest that Smyth andideas of community, audience, and subjectivity are interconnected.

55Elicia Clements

Smyth is also a frequent recipient of Woolf ’s musical thoughts, notablywhen Woolf recounts a conversation between them in another letter.Woolfdescribes how her mind wanders during their discussion:“merely what onethinks when someone else is talking:—in fun; by way of playing a tune onthe bass. I like trying to play tunes while people are talking—with a view tothe whole symphony” (Nicolson 1979, 5: 354).Thoughts that remain unsaidin a conversation are associated with the aural dimension of music.Significantly, the receiver of such thinking is Smyth.What the musical anal-ogy implies is simultaneous unity and dispersion—the capacity in music tosound notes in harmony with one another, yet to create singular melodiclines at the same time: counterpoint.Thus, not only does Smyth contributeto Woolf ’s ideas about community, belonging to the crowd as she does, butWoolf uses the musical metaphor of the symphony to communicate the con-cept of interconnection between people when describing their conversation.Miss La Trobe will be concerned with precisely these issues in her pageantand music will again be the inspiration that “makes us see the hidden. Jointhe broken” (Woolf 1998a, 108).

Jane Marcus has argued that the “Miss La Trobes who ‘get up’ pageants”(1977b, 2) have several counterparts. Many theatrical women influencedWoolf ’s depiction of Miss La Trobe, Marcus contends: “What these womenhave in common is a sort of swashbuckling English eccentric spinster’s style”(2). Strangely, however, Marcus does not make the connection between MissLa Trobe and Smyth in this article, although she alludes to the link in a dif-ferent publication.5 In still another paper,6 Marcus notes Smyth’s nickname,“the Old Buccaneer,” given to her by Lady Ottoline Morrell, but again doesnot link Miss La Trobe and Smyth.Yet, I maintain that the “swashbucklingEnglish eccentric spinster’s style” aptly evokes Smyth as well.7 Not only wasshe the “Old Buccaneer,” but she also was known for her “swashbuckling”and “eccentric” behavior, especially as she relentlessly pursued conductorsand theatrical directors in her efforts to get her operas performed.AlthoughMarcus might not disagree with this claim, I suggest that the resonances ofSmyth’s personality are louder than Marcus proposes.

More connections can be made between Smyth and Miss La Trobethrough Woolf ’s own comments. Between the Acts is set in the summer of1939, on the day of an annual village pageant at Pointz Hall.The theatricalproduction written by Miss La Trobe, is a history of the English and of cen-tral importance to the novel. As early as 1930,Woolf remarks to Smyth thatshe is “building up one of the oddest, most air hung pageants of you and yourlife” (Nicolson 1978, 4:214).The friendship,Woolf continues,

is one of the strangest aesthetic experiences I have ever had; many peoplewd. [sic] say Lord how I hate your bookishness!—but you, who are so com-

56 College Literature 32.3 [Summer 2005]

prehensive . . . will understand my use of aesthetic: then “air-hung”: you see,I evolve you and your life and your friends and your whole tremendousintricacy backwards, from letters and diaries. (Nicolson 1978, 4:214)

Many of the ideas that surface in Between the Acts have their genesis in therelationship between Woolf and Smyth.The comments quoted above suggestthat Woolf was thinking of how to build a character based on Smyth whenthey met and that the notion of a pageant surfaces along side the character-ization of Smyth.The letter reveals that even in 1930 Woolf is contemplatingemploying the scraps and fragments of Smyth’s life for an aesthetic purpose.

Woolf was also an avid reader of Smyth’s prose, a canon that consists often books in total (several autobiographical memoirs, a biography, and col-lections of essays that include short portraits of people in her life and storiesof her escapades). A long-standing admirer of Smyth’s first memoir(Impressions that Remained), from the time they met,Woolf read almost all ofSmyth’s new works before publication, giving her suggestions and in somecases even soliciting for publication particular speeches (Nicolson 1978,4:214), although this never did transpire. Additionally, Woolf also predictswhen they first meet that she will one day adapt aspects of Smyth’s writingstyle. In an excited exchange, Woolf exclaims, “I want to talk and talk andtalk—About music. . . .Yes. I think you are a kind woman, besides being sucha . . . etc etc.Those two happy dodges of yours come in useful on occasion,dot dot, dot—et cetera. I will write your character in that style one of thesedays” (Nicolson 1978,4:145). Indeed,Woolf does compose a portrait of Smythin Between the Acts, one that utilizes ellipses as a significant linguistic strategy.8

Musical Impressions

As the exploration of Woolf ’s correspondence with Smyth discloses,Woolf ’s understanding of her friend and colleague is intimately tied to heraesthetic contemplations not only about writing but also about music.Woolfdevelops ideas about music throughout her oeuvre. Although her musicalacumen was admittedly limited, she was an avid listener to “classical” musicand opera.9 I am not concerned, however, with the accuracy of Woolf ’sdeployment of Western musical form, rather with the effect of that intersec-tion.What was it about music that Woolf found applicable to her own medi-um? What particular forms did Woolf gravitate toward? And, what was pro-duced from such a collaboration? Lastly, what did questioning the bordersbetween her own art and music contribute to her understanding of language?

Several studies of Woolf ’s employment of music have occurred primari-ly in the last 15 years. Nora Eisenberg was one of the first critics to elucidatethe importance of Woolf ’s figurative use of music and its connection to lan-guage in Between the Acts and “Anon.” Music, she argues,“comes to stand for

57Elicia Clements

a variety of non-verbal forms which Woolf hopes might supplement a fail-ing language . . . a great, vital force, preceding and overpowering language”(1981, 259, 261). For Eisenberg, music seems to usurp words in order to tran-scend them. Conversely, Julie Vandivere asserts that “in Between the Acts,Woolflinks music with language to explore the aesthetics of language, using musicto empty language of its ability to gesture to something outside of itself andthen correlating this linguistic incapacity with our inability to construct sub-jectivity” (1996, 226-27). Vandivere argues that music is a mechanism bywhich the verbal domain is divested of its referential capacity. Rather thanexceeding linguistic signification, music is interpreted as connoting a lack ofmeaning, capable of producing the same effect on language. Her interestingarticle only understands music in terms of its relation to words, however, notas a significant component involved in its own production of meaning. SonitaSarker also discusses the importance of musical analogy for Woolf, readingmusic for its ability to produce dissonance:“Given that music is, literally andmetaphorically, one of the dominant components in Between the Acts, it is . . .worth explicating the formal and functional significance of Woolf ’s question-ing of center, by comparing it to its parallel innovation in Modernist music—atonality” (1996, 161). Sarker’s essay points toward an understanding of musicas a socially constructed art form, rather than a seemingly transparent onebecause it is devoid of words.

My study contributes to the growing body of scholars who interpretWoolf as a politically engaged writer who explores the ideological processesof sound.10 Melba Cuddy-Keane and Michele Pridmore-Brown have madeconnections between Woolf ’s conceptions of music, sound, and noise and hercritique of social organization. Cuddy-Keane argues that Woolf uses music inBetween the Acts to reconfigure community in a decentralized, pluralistic, andprocess-oriented way. Pridmore-Brown reveals that Woolf employs thenotion of sound and noise (almost against music) to fight fascism in the novelby exploiting both communications technology and the new physics. In alater article, Cuddy-Keane also explores the physical properties of sound andnoise to posit that several of Woolf ’s texts enact a new apprehension of soundthat developed in conjunction with new sound technologies. Additionally,according to Cuddy-Keane, this new understanding of aurality maps, simi-larly to John Cage, a new paradigm of human community.

Pridmore-Brown and Cuddy-Keane also disclose the importance thatWoolf places on the process of listening, coming to the conclusion that soundand music in Between the Acts promote engaged listening as “active resistanceto the values of war” (Pridmore-Brown 1998, 419) or to new ways of think-ing that can “replace the humanly inhabited center with a space in which toimagine the voices of otherness and diversity in the universe” (Cuddy-Keane

58 College Literature 32.3 [Summer 2005]

2000, 93). Both understand Woolf ’s Between the Acts as a radical reconfigura-tion of social order. The process of listening—as opposed to the semanticmeaning of what is spoken—can produce new forms of being in the world.Thus, not only is listening to what is said important, but the practice of doingso can change political circumstances.

Mikhail Bakhtin also understood the importance of hearing otherness,theorizing that the apperceptive listener—the auditor who is conscious ofhearing—is integral to the process of social interaction. As Bakhtin woulddescribe the practice, “understanding and response are dialectically mergedand mutually condition each other; one is impossible without the other”(1981, 282). This does not mean, however, that there are no dissonancesbetween the sender and the receiver of sound. On the contrary, the speaker,according to Bakhtin, optimistically anticipates both consonance and discord.The subject’s orientation, therefore, is “toward the specific world of the lis-tener; it introduces totally new elements into his discourse. . . .The speakerbreaks through the alien conceptual horizon of the listener, constructs hisown utterance on alien territory, against his, the listener’s, apperceptive back-ground” (282). The willingness of an amenable listener is vital to this rela-tionship of human interchange. I submit that Woolf believed similarly, thatlistening to others, perhaps even because of differences, is indispensable for anew understanding and method of communal interaction. Moreover,Woolf ’sown process of listening to music inspired such thinking,11 for it is in thecourse of suspending the assumption of easy signification—as music does12—that the apperceptive listener can create effective and political social change.

Woolf ’s writings document her astute perception of music and its auspi-cious qualities for her novels. As early as 1905 Woolf writes a paper for theNational Review entitled “Street Music” that discusses music’s unique “powerover us . . . whenever we give ourselves up to its sway that no picture, how-ever fair, or words however stately, can approach” (1905, 1:30). Similarly, in1906 she pens a short non-fiction piece titled “The Opera” that explores themultiple reactions of the audience and what constitutes their preference forGluck or Wagner.Woolf ’s diary records her attendance at many musical con-certs,13 including her visit to Bayreuth in 1909—the same year she first heardSmyth’s opera The Wreckers at its British premiere at Covent Garden. InBayreuth she made a careful study of several of Wagner’s operas, which shefrequented with Saxon Sidney-Turner and her brother Adrian. They firstread each opera (in German), then listened to it, and afterward discussed itin detail. This experience is also realized as an article, “Impressions atBayreuth.” These essays record her interest in the interconnections amongthose who listen to music, those who perform it, as well as the sonorous art’saesthetic value.

59Elicia Clements

In her two earliest novels musical sound manifests as a metaphor that sig-nifies human interconnections.These moments most often occur in crowds.In The Voyage Out, Rachel Vinrace’s piano playing at a dance produces theeffect on her auditors of perceiving the invisible strings that hold themtogether:“Then they began to see themselves and their lives, and the wholeof human life advancing very nobly under the direction of the music” (Woolf2001, 187). In Night and Day, both Ralph Denham and Mary Datchet expe-rience similar moments on or near the Strand; as they watch crowds pass bythey each contemplate in musical terms the associations between people.Ralph notices “the whole scene in the Strand wore that curious look of orderand purpose which is imparted to the most heterogeneous things when musicsounds” (199a, 133). Similarly, as Mary’s contemplation details,

Strange thoughts are bred in passing through crowded streets should thepassenger, by chance, have no exact destination in front of him, much as themind shapes all kinds of forms, solutions, images when listening inatten-tively to music. From an acute consciousness of herself as an individual,Mary passed to a conception of the scheme of things in which, as a humanbeing, she must have her share. (Woolf 1999a, 271)

In The Waves, Rhoda and Bernard uncover the invisible connectionsbetween subjects in the Music Hall, at St. Paul’s Cathedral, or in restaurants,all crowded public places. A poignant moment in Bernard’s final soliloquyrecalls Woolf ’s letter to Smyth about making up tunes while people are talk-ing,“with a view to the whole symphony” (Nicolson 1979, 5: 354):

Faces recur, faces and faces—they press their beauty to the walls of my bub-ble—Neville, Susan, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda and a thousand others. Howimpossible to order them rightly; to detach one separately, or to give theeffect of the whole—again like music.What a symphony with its concordand its discord, and its tunes on top and its complicated bass beneath.(Woolf 1998b, 214)

By the time of The Waves it is impossible to create the same sort of order forthe whole as it is in The Voyage Out and Night and Day. A moment of pro-ductive social organization is still likened to the experience of listening tomusic, but the metaphor Woolf employs includes both concord and discord.Between the Acts is no different in this respect, with one exception: thecrowd—or cacophonic symphony—becomes the focus of the narrative.

Several factors suggest Woolf understands music not only as an art formanalogous to literature but, especially later in her life, as a medium with pro-pitious methodological properties. After the Woolfs acquired an Algraphonein 1925 they listened to music in the evenings on a regular basis, in partbecause Leonard wrote record reviews for the Nation and Athenaeum between1926 and 1929.14 Woolf ’s comments about listening to Beethoven’s late

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string quartets and sonatas during her composition of The Waves suggest shewas hearing in his music not just inspiration but alternative formal modelsfor her new, radical novel. As she observes in June 1927 referring to “TheMoths” (which eventually becomes The Waves), “I do a little work on it inthe evening when the gramophone is playing late Beethoven sonatas” (Bell1980, 3:139).Woolf associates the novel’s method more directly to the expe-rience of listening to Beethoven in another entry in December 1930:

It occurred to me last night while listening to a Beethoven quartet that Iwould merge all the interjected passages into Bernard’s final speech, & endwith the words O solitude: thus making him absorb all those scenes, & hav-ing no further break. This is also to show that the theme effort, effort,15

dominates: not the waves: & personality: & defiance: but I am not sure ofthe effect artistically; because the proportions may need the intervention ofthe waves finally so as to make a conclusion. (Bell 1980, 3:339)

The association between the Beethoven quartet and the form and content ofthe novel illuminates the crucial connection between language and music:listening to Beethoven provides her with a model for enacting simultaneity.Bernard, according to the entry, will “merge” and “absorb all these scenes”and voices.Music is also a means by which Woolf conceives of producing rela-tional subjectivity in The Waves.All of the voices can be brought together likethe melodies of counterpoint that simultaneously move in contrary motionor begin on different pitches yet function in harmony with one another.

In 1940, Elizabeth Trevelyan praises Woolf ’s biography, Roger Fry, for itsmusical properties.With great pleasure,Woolf replies that Trevelyan has

found out exactly what I was trying to do when you compare it [RogerFry] to a piece of music. Its [sic] odd, for I’m not regularly musical, but Ialways think of my books as music before I write them.And especially withthe life of Roger,—there was such a mass of detail that the only way I couldhold it together was by abstracting it into themes. I did try to state them inthe first chapter, and then to bring in developments and variations, and thento make them all heard together and end by bringing back the first themein the last chapter. (Nicolson 1980, 6:426)

Notably, Woolf explicitly states that she conceptualizes her novels as musicbefore she even writes a word. Moreover, the specific model she describesillustrates techniques one would find in the “Classical” tradition of Westernmusic, themes stated and restated, developed and varied, and then recapitu-lated at the end, either in sonata allegro form or a fugue. From the time ofThe Waves onward,Woolf is listening extensively to Beethoven’s musical pat-terns and experiments, using them to reconceptualize her novelistic methods.

61Elicia Clements

Listening to Between the Acts

A loose contrapuntal structure is also Woolf ’s inspiration for Between theActs. As she suggests in her diary of 1937, “It came over me suddenly lastnight, . . . I saw the form of a new novel. Its to be first the statement of thetheme: then the restatement: & so on: repeating the same story: singling outthis & then that: until the central idea is stated . . . but all the scenes must becontrolled, and radiate to a center” (Bell 1984, 5:114-115).Woolf links themethod of the statement and restatement of themes to music in her com-ments about The Waves and her letter to Trevelyan; the account surfaces againin this description of Between the Acts. Clearly, the notion of musical themeshelps her to conceptualize her narrative method.

Moreover,Woolf ’s description of the novel in 1938 combines the issuesI have outlined that mark the exchange of ideas with Smyth—subjectivity,difference, and community:“but ‘I’ rejected:‘We’ substituted: to whom at theend there shall be an invocation? ‘We’ . . . composed of many different things. . . we all life, all art, all waifs & strays—a rambling capricious but somehowunified whole” (Bell 1984, 5:135; ellipses in original). One can hear threeechoes of the correspondence with Smyth in this description. The first isWoolf ’s use of Smyth’s textual “dodges”: a style that Woolf identifies asellipses and dashes that she herself will use extensively in Between the Acts.Thesecond is the shift to “‘We,’” recalling Smyth’s statement that she belongs tothe crowd.Thirdly, the comment that “all art, all waifs & strays” will producethe somehow unified whole suggests Woolf ’s recognition of difference.As inThe Voyage Out and Night and Day, the idea of contrapuntal music will be theanalogy Woolf draws upon to signify the pluralistic model of social organiza-tion. But like The Waves, in which the symphony is as cacophonic as it is har-monious,Woolf ’s musical concept enables diversity, an unpredictable, disso-nant, yet somehow inclusive whole.

As Lucy Swithin is keenly aware, “Sheep, cows, grass, trees, ourselves—all are one. If discordant, producing harmony—if not to us, to a gigantic earattached to a gigantic head [. . .]16 and so [. . .] we reach the conclusion thatall is harmony, could we hear it” (Woolf 1998a, 157).Although Lucy Swithinis, along with every character in the text, a somewhat parodic figure and thismention of a giant head in the sky is playfully ludicrous, the notion of har-mony articulated is integral to the novel. Heterogeneous and potentially dis-cordant harmony is made up of disparate elements—animals, plants, and sub-jectivities—that dispel homogeneity.As Cuddy-Keane has explored,Woolf ’sinclusion of all sounds and noises as equal reflects her apprehension of tech-nological and acoustical developments in New Music and her democraticpluralism.17

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Lucy Swithin hears the most important and ineffable sound in the novel,“the agony of the particular sheep, cow, or human being” (Woolf 1998a,157), and provides a poignantly aural metaphor for this sound: the ear.Thisear—a figurative representation of listening—is the metaphor for a namelessentity that can comprehend the paradoxically discordant harmony of “sheep,cows, grass, tree, ourselves” (157). Lucy Swithin also makes the significantconclusion that it is a lack of hearing that has produced the social conditionsof a country on the verge of war when she suggests that “all is harmony,could we hear it” (157). Between the Acts is highly innovative because it desta-bilizes the notions of singular subjectivity and unified community and insistsinstead on incongruous inseparability.

Furthermore, Between the Acts reveals how important audition is to socialinteraction.Traversing the many minds of the audience members, the narra-tive poignantly represents the gramophone that repeats its phrase of separa-tion, “Dispersed are we,” yet insists, “let us retain whatever made that harmony”(Woolf 1998a, 176, 77). Each time the pageant breaks for an Interval, the nar-rative reports multiple, various snippets of dialogue from the audience unas-signed to any particular body.The voices also recount the play from diverse,undesignated points of view so that they are both making elusive sounds andattempting to process their listening experiences.The variety of perceptionsare encapsulated in a question when an anonymous voice asks, “‘Did youunderstand the meaning?’” (177).The text encourages its reader/listener toask him or herself a similar question by dislodging the identity of thespeaker and slipping into the second person, implying that meaning is notfixed and one’s perception of it should be examined.This interrogative alsointimates that the comprehension unavailable to the individual members ofthe fictional audience might be accessible to the apperceptive listener ofthe novel who hears differently because he or she listens to all of the voic-es in the text.

If music functions figuratively in Between the Acts to destabilize meaningyet maintain connections between subjectivities, then it does so in both theouter world and the inner: “The audience was assembling. The music wassummoning them. [. . .] Voices chattered.The inner voice, the other voice wassaying: How can we deny that this brave music, wafted from the bushes, isexpressive of some inner harmony?” (Woolf 1998a, 107). In contrast to thepotential for some sort of subjective peace, the outer world imposes a con-stricting order that forces the subject into servitude, recalling the cityscapewasteland of T. S. Eliot:

“When we wake” (some were thinking) “the day breaks us with its hardmallet blows.”“The office” (some were thinking) “compels disparity.” [. . .]So we answer to the infernal, agelong and eternal order issued from on

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high.And obey.“Working, serving, pushing, striving, earning wages—to bespent—here?” (Woolf 1998a, 107)

Although marking this deadening experience of enforced organization,Woolf ’s text is more interested in exploring potential resistances to suchmonotony. Music enters the novel at this moment as a signifying process thatcan break open the assumptions and totalitarian methods of easy and clearcommunication, one that can also make links between the inner and outerworlds in an enabling way:

For I hear music, they were saying. Music wakes us. Music makes us see thehidden, join the broken. Look and listen. See the flowers, how they ray theirredness, whiteness, silverness and blue. And the trees with their many-tongued much syllabling, their green and yellow leaves hustle us and shuf-fle us, and bid us, like the starlings, and the rooks, come together, crowdtogether, to chatter and make merry while the red cow moves forward andthe black cow stands still.

The audience had reached their seats. (Woolf 1998a, 108; my emphasis)

Music evokes the tension and the empathy between the singular subject andcommunity.The sounds engage the perceiver in both listening and lookingand in understanding the hidden mechanisms that break apart and thenrepair the community.Aurality, then, beckons to the many, even as the novelquestions whether or not the community hears this call.

Furthermore, Between the Acts realizes the ambiguity of this interconnec-tion on the level of narratorial strategy.The narrative recounts the effect ofmusic first from the perspective of an “I”; then from the outside viewpointof a narrator (“they were saying”), with no quotation marks to signal directspeech; then seamlessly proceeds to communal first-person by depicting thenatural surroundings and sounds that the audience hears (“leaves hustle usand shuffle us”) which includes the narratorial voice; and lastly moves backto third-person outside perspective (“the audience had reached their seats”).Music, in this passage, somehow merges sight and sound (“look and listen”);it is capable of crossing boundaries.The narrative technique utilized by Woolfdoes the same.Traversing the borders of the narrator’s typical, singular stance,this passage provides no consistent order issued from an authoritative narra-tor. The perspective continually shifts as does the subject-matter it is dis-cussing, which destabilizes the notion of easy and direct communication byperforming its limits.

La Trobe’s response to the second intermission also undermines thenotion of transparent signification and marks aurality as a significant methodof inclusion. When the audience only observes the play and does not hearanything, La Trobe experiences a crisis: the possibility that the momentum ofthe play will not be continued, that connection will be lost.The Interval is a

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calamity because it brings with it the possibility of hopeless dispersion:“Noone was listening. Heads bent, they read ‘Interval’ on the programme” (Woolf1998a, 86). Sight distracts the audience from sound, the potential danger ofwhich La Trobe is keenly aware:“The audience was on the move.The audi-ence was strolling up and down. [. . .] How long would time hold themtogether? It was a gamble; a risk” (135). After observing the audience, LaTrobe then hears them:“over the tops of the bushes came stray voices, voic-es without bodies, symbolical voices they seemed to her, half hearing, seeingnothing, but still, over the bushes, feeling invisible threads connecting thebodiless voices” (135).The audience is half hearing and seeing nothing; soundcan reach them where sight cannot. Hence, the invisible threads of soundmake the connections between subjects.

But La Trobe is able to maintain the momentum of her play when thecrisis of the Interval arises, keeping the audience’s attention and producingmomentary glimpses of inclusion.When the music from the gramophone orthe play itself stops, La Trobe risks a loss of connection with her audience (acapacity, according to Woolf, at which Smyth was especially adept). As LaTrobe exclaims,“‘Curse! Blast! Damn ‘em!’ [. . .] Here was her downfall; herewas the Interval.Writing this skimble-skamble stuff in her cottage, she hadagreed to cut the play here; a slave to her audience. [. . .] Just as she hadbrewed emotion, she split it” (Woolf 1998a, 85). Subsequently, the gramo-phone laments, “Dispersed are we” (86). Yet La Trobe understands thatalthough relinquishing control is a potential nightmare, it is also her artis-tic salvation, for each time the Interval approaches La Trobe is able, at thelast moment, to allow such things as cows bellowing, silence, or a chuffinggramophone to continue the emotion and momentum of the play and“bridge the distance” (126).

Lucy Swithin is also able to discern the contrapuntal principle of music,but has difficulty communicating her understanding of it to La Trobe.Thisinability to converse is portrayed in terms of the failure of “a look,” whichresults in disclosing the interconnection between La Trobe’s function in thetext and its similarity to music:

Then, ignoring the conventions, a head popped up between the tremblingsprays: Mrs. Swithin’s.

“Oh Miss La Trobe!” she exclaimed; and stopped. Then she began again;“Oh Miss La Trobe, I do congratulate you!”

She hesitated. “You’ve given me. . . .” She skipped, then alighted—“Eversince I was a child I’ve felt. . . .” A film fell over her eyes, shutting off thepresent. [. . .]

She gazed at Miss La Trobe with a cloudless oldaged stare.Their eyes metin a common effort to bring a common meaning to birth.They failed; and

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Mrs. Swithin, laying hold desperately of a fraction of her meaning, said:“What a small part I’ve had to play! But you’ve made me feel I could haveplayed . . . Cleopatra!” (Woolf 1998a, 137)

They are unable to make a connection in the visual domain (“their eyes met.[. . .] They failed”); however, after Lucy Swithin desperately speaks only afraction of her meaning, Miss La Trobe translates its sounds:

“I might have been—Cleopatra” Miss La Trobe repeated.“You’ve stirred inme my unacted part,” she meant. [. . .] “You’ve twitched the invisible strings,’”was what the old lady meant; and revealed—of all people—Cleopatra!Glory possessed her. Ah, but she was not merely a twitcher of individualstrings; she was one who seethes wandering bodies and floating voices in acauldron, and makes rise up from its amorphous mass a recreated world.Her moment was on her—her glory. (Woolf 1998a, 138; my emphasis)

As I have already argued, for Woolf, music is the twitcher of invisible strings.Here, La Trobe functions similarly, describing her artistic craft in almost bur-lesque terms as a nebulous witch’s brew. Eventually, La Trobe also realizes thather “glory” (Woolf 1998a, 138) is as fleeting and insubstantial as the bodilessvoices and voiceless bodies of the audience. Music tentatively holds thecrowd together but it does not enforce regulation.

Importantly, the final enunciation of the play is an anonymous melody:“Was it Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart or nobody famous, but merely atraditional tune” (Woolf 1998a, 169).This melodic scrap is then transformedinto a social reconfiguring principle, one that recalls Woolf ’s letter to Smythabout the view to “the whole symphony” (Nicolson 1979, 5:354):

Like quicksilver sliding, filings magnetized, the distracted united.The tunebegan; the first note meant a second; the second a third. Then downbeneath a force was born in opposition; then another. On different levelsthey diverged. On different levels ourselves went forward; flower gatheringsome on the surface; others descending to wrestle with the meaning; but allcomprehending; all enlisted.The whole population of the mind’s immeas-urable profundity came flocking; from the unprotected, the unskinned; anddawn rose; and azure; from chaos and cacophony measure; but not themelody of surface sound alone controlled it; but also the warring battle-plumed warriors straining asunder:To part? No. Compelled from the ends ofthe horizon; recalled from the edge of appalling crevasses; they crashed;solved;united.And some relaxed their fingers; and others uncrossed their legs.

Was that voice ourselves? Scraps, orts and fragments, are we, also, that? Thevoice died away. (Woolf 1998a, 169-170)

The anonymous tune creates this cacophonic symphony with both vertical(“on different levels they diverged”) and horizontal (“on different levels our-selves went forward”) axes that emulate the contrapuntal form of music.This

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final “tune” instigates the inclusion of both dissonance (crash) and harmony(solved), recalling Woolf ’s comment to Smyth that musical polyphonicmovement can represent the tenuous connections between subjectivity andcommunity.

After the play there is one more vision/sound afforded to La Trobe: theinspiration for her next play. Depicting the intersection of music and socialorganization, the moment recalls a similar experience to Lily Briscoe in Tothe Lighthouse who imagines in a flash “her picture, and [thinks],Yes, I shallput the tree further in the middle” (Woolf 1999b, 115). La Trobe also expe-riences a final artistic moment linked to a tree. Lily Briscoe’s revelation, how-ever, finishes “with a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, shedrew a line there, in the center” (281).The line in the middle of her paint-ing depicts the possibility of a new order of things, of an alternative aesthet-ic method.The important addition to La Trobe’s vision is sound, and morespecifically, a cacophonic symphony. Leaving Pointz Hall feeling somewhatdefeated, La Trobe notices,

Then suddenly the starlings attacked the tree behind which she had hid-den. In one flock they pelted it like so many winged stones.The whole treehummed with the whizz they made, as if each bird plucked a wire.A whizz,a buzz rose from the bird-buzzing, bird-vibrant, bird-blackened tree. Thetree became a rhapsody, a quivering cacophony, a whizz and vibrant rap-ture, branches, leaves, birds syllabling discordantly life, life, life, withoutmeasure, without stop devouring the tree. Then up! Then off!18 (Woolf1998a, 189)

Onomatopoeic language and musical terms (humm, whizz, buzz, rhapsody,rapture, cacophony, discordantly) conjure an aural domain that revels in dif-ference and dissonance yet somehow produces the pulsating joy of life.Thespectacle of the devoured tree provides a visual splash of contrapuntal move-ment; the sounds of the birds evoke the plucked strings of violins.Subsequently, the final narrative moment with La Trobe again recalls the treeand its capacity to represent “all life, all art, all waifs & strays—a ramblingcapricious but somehow unified whole” (Bell 1984, 5:135). After “the treewas pelted with starlings. She set down her glass. She heard the first words”(Woolf 1998a, 191).This final vision/audition combines the two sensations,emphasizing the act of listening as being integral to the artistic process. LaTrobe’s ability to perceive this aural moment enables her to hear the firstwords of her next creation.

Woolf ’s relationship with Smyth and her understanding of music areboth represented in her final novel. Listening apperceptively to her friend,Woolf was able to accept Smyth’s inconsistencies, differences, and socialclumsiness, leading her to create an artistic figure who portrays both the fail-

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ures and triumphs of human interaction. La Trobe is abrasive and dictatorialat times, yet she is also capable of relinquishing complete control over herpageant and its players. She intermingles with the owners of the countryhouse, but is also behind the bushes with the group of performers from thecommunity, or lastly, in the pub, crossing boundaries not only of class but alsogender. In turn, the novel asks that the reader listen to La Trobe’s symphony,a vibrant rapture of discordant life. Ultimately, despite socially undesirablebehavior, La Trobe performs the most significant function in the novel: likemusic, she somehow holds the rambling, capricious whole together.

Notes1 In “Thinking Back through Our Mothers” Jane Marcus suggests that Smyth

“appears as Rose in The Years and contributes to Miss La Trobe in Between the Acts”(1981, 27).

2 Eventually, it became the focus of “Anon,” one of the texts she was writing atthe time of her death.

3 The suggestion that human souls are so contrary that they “serve to ally” willresurface in Between the Acts as Miss La Trobe attempts to keep the attention of heraudience.

4 See Leaska (1977) for an extended discussion of the speech’s reverberations inWoolf ’s other works.

5 See note 1 above.6 See Marcus (1977a).7 Additionally, not only was Smyth on familiar terms with the women Marcus

mentions—Cicely Hamilton, Edith Craig, Christopher St. John, and Lilian Baylis—but she was also linked to each of them as an artistic colleague: Cicely Hamiltonwrote the lyrics for Smyth’s suffrage anthem, The March of the Women; Edith Craigproduced Smyth’s comic opera, The Boatswain’s Mate, at the Leeds Art Theatre;Christopher St. John, who was a music critic for Time and Tide in the 1920s, wasSmyth’s biographer and literary executor; and Lilian Baylis, of whom Smyth wrote abiographical sketch in her book Female Pipings in Eden, provided Smyth with a long-standing friendship and a place to perform several of her works: the Old Vic.

8 For discussions of Woolf ’s employment of ellipses in the novels see PatriciaOndek Laurence (1991) and Michelle Mimlitsch (1999).

9 The conception of music in this paper is limited to the Western tonal systemand does not consider non-Western musical systems. This is primarily becauseWoolf ’s integration of music into her novelistic methods is based on the “Classical”tradition.

10 In addition to Melba-Cuddy Keane and Michele Pridmore-Brown who bothread Woolf ’s final novel as highly political, Susan Stanford Friedman and JessicaBerman include Woolf in their book-length explorations of community and globalculture. See Friedman (1998) and Berman (2001). Cuddy-Keane’s most recent con-tribution to our understanding of Woolf as a socially engaged thinker is an exami-

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nation of Woolf ’s non-fictional prose (2003). See also Pamela Caughie’s collection ofessays (2000).

11 My reading of sound differs from that of Judith Greenberg who has alsorecently discussed the aural elements of the novel, listening particularly for reverber-ations of trauma.While I agree with her that Woolf solicits the perceiver in Betweenthe Acts to be an active participant in the listening process, I would argue that Woolf ’sutilization of sound produces a movement that opens up meaning. Greenberg’sanalysis moves in another direction by suggesting that “stories lie hidden in frag-mented articulations” (2001, 57), reading the “echoes of the text to point to expe-riences of trauma lying in its sounds” (54). I understand Woolf ’s aurality different-ly, not just as a marker of albeit various and imperative meanings, but as a signify-ing process that represents and performs productive conceptions for political andcultural thinking.

12 As Cuddy-Keane has argued in relation to music in Between the Acts,“the gapsin semantic meaning signify not disintegration but a disruption of closure that offersmusic’s positive lack of ‘definite articulation’” (1990, 281).

13 From 1915 on we know that Woolf attended concerts at Queen’s Hall,Langham Place–at the time, London’s principal concert hall.Also, during the winterseasons of 1918-1921 Woolf went on her own to a number of private subscriptionconcerts at Shelley House, Chelsea, and 23 Cromwell Houses, South Kensington.She also faithfully attended the Beethoven festival week in 1921 at Aeolian Hall inwhich the London String Quartet played, in chronological order, all 17 Beethovenstring quartets.Thus, her familiarity with the quartets begins quite early in her writ-ing career:“But every afternoon for a week I’ve been up to the AEolian Hall; takenmy seat right at the back; put my bag on the floor & listened to Beethoven quartets.Do I dare say listened? Well, but if one gets a lot of pleasure, really divine pleasure,& and knows the tunes, & only occasionally thinks of other things–surely I may saylistened” (Bell 1979, 2:114).

14 For more on the significance of the gramophone in Woolf ’s life and finalnovel, see Cuddy-Keane and Bonnie Kime Scott (Caughie 2000) as well as MichellePridmore-Brown (1998).

15 Beethoven’s struggle with the process of composition was well known; thelate music is characterized by musical scholars as retelling the sense of agonizing effortit took Beethoven to compose, particularly because of his debilitating deafness.

16 There are so many ellipses in the text of Between the Acts that I will bracketmine in order to distinguish them from Woolf ’s.

17 See Cuddy-Keane’s excellent discussion of acoustical innovations (2000).18 Birds are often the carriers of Woolf ’s musical melodies, as in The Waves, when

Bernard experiences a similar artistic moment, “A bird chirps. Cottagers light theirearly candles.Yes, this is the eternal renewal, the incessant rise and fall and fall andrise again” (1998b, 247).

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