"Dispersed Are We": Mirroring and National Identity in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts

Benziman, Galia

doi:10.1353/jnt.2006.0017

Cited by 13 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…A 2006 article by Galia Benziman performs a psychoanalytic reading of the role of mirrors and communal identity in Between the Acts, 54 paying close attention to the final scene of the play within the novel where Miss La Trobe turns a mirror on the audience. Benziman argues for a narrative of fragmented identity and Lacanian subject formation where the mother or other functions as a mirror.…”

Section: Abortive Reflections: Between the Actsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Mirrored Monster and Becoming-Wolf: Reflections on Desire in Woolf and Braidotti

Stobie¹

2022

Comparative Critical Studies

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Waves and water, the lens of a lighthouse, a lady’s looking-glass: reflecting surfaces abound in the writings of Virginia Woolf. These figurations, in turn, are repeated as a formative image, a reflective motif, in the theory of Rosi Braidotti. This article explores the material implications of both authors’ mirrors, arguing that they distort repronormative depictions of women as maternal figures. Particularly, I view the autopoietic theorization of desire in Braidotti’s oeuvre through the lens of Woolf’s major fiction and non-fiction from 1927 to 1941. With references to works including A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938), and particularly Between the Acts (1941), I argue that Woolf’s monstrous images inform Braidotti’s own writing, especially her 2002 monograph Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Yet it is vital to stress that these feminist-materialist echoes exceed binarized understandings of reflections. Alternating between reverence for motherhood, suspicion of procreation, and criticism of reproductive services/technologies, both writers suggest that women’s reproductive health cannot be neatly determined by one overarching narrative. They advance an emerging concept of reproductive agency where abortive desires are dangerous and dynamic, steeped both in histories of gestational violence and feminist potential.

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Section: Abortive Reflections: Between the Actsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Mirrored Monster and Becoming-Wolf: Reflections on Desire in Woolf and Braidotti

Stobie¹

2022

Comparative Critical Studies

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“…Woolf's use of the gramophone and its dynamism to illustrate the dangers of mediated sound as it penetrates ego boundaries to create, shape, and manage human emotion speaks to her anxiety. Galia Benziman (2006) has argued that, ultimately, Woolf's last novel suggests that "[t]he selfimage is no longer that of 'me' and 'others' as separate, but of a big, inclusive 'we,' which, unlike the nationalistic or totalitarian 'we,' is not stable and monolithic but accommodates difference" (p. 69). This seems an overly hopeful reading of the text, for after the play ends, the individuality of the audience members returns.…”

Section: Subjects Objects and Gramophones: Woolf And Intersubjectivitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“They Were Neither One Thing Nor the Other”: Media Technology’s Challenge to the Subject

Hibbs

2017

Sage Open

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This essay will examine the way in which media technologies, through object agency, produce intersubjectivity and, thus, challenge the autonomy of the self. For H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), the image produced by the cinema bridges differences created by conventional language, culture, and nationality. Her poems, "Projector" and "Projector II (Chang)," celebrate the importance of the projector that reasserts light as deity. By contrast, Virginia Woolf privileges sound in her search for intersubjectivity. Woolf's last novel, Between the Acts, presents a much bleaker view-particularly of machine-generated intersubjectivity-of the loss of autonomy in the rise of Hitler and Fascism.

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The Map of London Exhausted—Between the Acts

Larsson

2017

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies

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"Dispersed Are We": Mirroring and National Identity in Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts

Cited by 13 publications

References 4 publications

The Mirrored Monster and Becoming-Wolf: Reflections on Desire in Woolf and Braidotti

The Mirrored Monster and Becoming-Wolf: Reflections on Desire in Woolf and Braidotti

“They Were Neither One Thing Nor the Other”: Media Technology’s Challenge to the Subject

The Map of London Exhausted—Between the Acts

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