“‘Between the Acts’ of Hybrid Spaces”

This paper focuses on the complex and proto-postmodern treatment of space relevant to theatrical performance in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts. Woolf’s explicit insistence on borderline trespassing and liminal spaces points to a move from modernism into a different ontological domain that borders on postmodern liminality and instability, even if it also tries to hold it back. After previous forays across boundaries, in this work Woolf largely thematizes and manipulates space in order to convey the increasing hybridization between outsideness and insideness, fiction and reality. The spatial blurring between them, activated by an outdoor theatrical performance placing the audience’s experience in a tangible rural space, results in the increasing dominance of reality and coincides with a meta-artistic awareness in the play’s audience and the novel’s readers. By thematizing and formally representing a complex dynamics of border zones, mixing spaces, and interspaces (ranging from the main theatrical metaphor to minor graphic hiatuses and including issues of identity and literary genres), Woolf’s last novel testifies to an already postmodern ontology of dislocation, openendedness, and changeability.