The Pageant of Mutabilitie: Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts and The Faerie Queene. (8th July 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Shackleton, David
• Is Part Of: Review of English studies. Volume 68:Number 284(2017)
• Page Start: 342
• Page End: 367
• Publication Date: 2016-07-08
• Subjects: English literature -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; English philology -- Periodicals; 820.90005
• DOI: 10.1093/res/hgw076
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0034-6551

Abstract

Abstract: By drawing a parallel between Miss La Trobe's pageant in Woolf's Between the Acts, and Mutabilitie's pageant in the Mutabilitie Cantos of Spenser's The Faerie Queene, this article elucidates the role played by the aevum —an order of duration that lies between time and eternity—in Woolf's last novel. While the fantasy of an aeviternally permanent nature is a comforting one for Lucy Swithin, this inherently conservative temporal fiction carries a troubling politics, and is deeply problematic from various perspectives. It threatens to petrify exploitative gender, colonial and class relations in a changeless nature, with no prospect of emancipatory historical change. Recognizing Woolf's use of the aevum serves to challenge Brechtian readings of the pageant, and to qualify recent interpretations of Woolf that depict her as holding a revolutionary materialist conception of history, similar to that of Walter Benjamin.