The Comedy of Nature: Darwinian Feminism in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts

Woolf's Concentration

I like wine. Air raids much less.

—Virginia Woolf¹

In a letter that scholars provisionally date to March 18, 1941, Virginia Woolf explained to her husband Leonard why she was "going mad again." "I begin to hear voices, and cant concentrate," Woolf records: "You see I cant even write this properly. I cant read. What I want to say is that I owe all the happiness of my life to you."² In the intervening days before she took her life on March 28, Woolf sent a copy of her last novel, Between the Acts (1941), to John Lehmann, managing director of Hogarth Press. Despite his enthusiastic praise for the text, Woolf wrote Lehmann on March 27 to declare that she would continue to revise the novel,³ which she had earlier called "a concentration—a screw" amidst the "many air raids" of World War II and a "concentrated small book" that contained "many varieties of mood" (DVW, 5: 311, 114). The next day, Woolf wrote Leonard a note similar to her letter of March 18—omitting the sentence about her inability to "concentrate"—and drowned herself hours later in the River Ouse.

A writer who believed that "to shut out, to concentrate—that is perhaps—one of the necessary conditions [. . .] of genius," Woolf knew that retaining her concentration was also, by the time she omitted it from her final letter to Leonard, a necessary condition of survival (DVW, 4: 179). World War II escalated the struggle that Woolf had endured throughout her life to retain such focus: numbered 115 and 116 on Hitler's secret arrest list for England, the Woolfs both planned to kill themselves should Hitler invade England, which seemed increasingly plausible during the Blitz (DVW, 5: 165). Contemplating the alternatives of "we in concentration camps, or taking sleeping draughts," Woolf avowed her intention to do the latter or gas herself in her garage rather than submit to Hitler, for "capitulation will mean all Jews to be given up. Concentration camps. So to our garage" (DVW, 5: 292-3). The Nazi concentration camps presented Woolf with two fatal options—taking her own life or having it taken from her—that would eliminate the possibility of concentration altogether.⁴

At the expense of finishing what she otherwise considered to be a "triumphant" novel, however, Woolf did retain through her final days "a concentration" in the "concentrated [. . .] variety of moods" of Between the Acts, a book that critiques the Nazi regime and that provided Woolf focus during the Blitz (DVW, 5: 340). As her use of the word to describe both her personal attention and her novel's aesthetic suggests, concentration was, for Woolf, not only a state of mind in this period but a medium of aesthetic, ethical, and political agency. Her March 18 letter to Leonard establishes such links as it correlates Woolf's personal facility to "concentrate" with her aesthetic abilities to "write" and "read." The goal of this correlation, she says, is to express her belief in and gratitude for intersubjective bonds: "I owe all the happiness of my life to you."

Woolf's concentration thus highlights a central aesthetic and ethical paradigm in her late work, namely the need to overcome the boundaries of the self in order to sympathize with a world of others, what Natania Rosenfeld calls Woolf's "politics of intersubjectivity."⁵ While her association of the phrases "to concentrate" and "to shut out" might appear to imply just the opposite, Woolf actually concentrates by shutting out the self, specifically the self's socially-constructed identity. Woolf's concentration is as she says "a screw," a binding agent between subject and object made acutely necessary by the war, during which she wrote that "now's the time to see if the art, or life, creed, the belief in something existing independently of myself, will [. . .] hold good" (DVW, 5: 264). As a transitive verb, "concentrate" requires such selective focus on others: it denotes the fixation of personal faculties on an object, and it can mean bringing a group of...