Shadowed Life:Traumatic Interpretation Of Between The Acts

Between the Acts is Virginia Woolf’s last novel completed just one month before her suicide in 1941. The novel is addressed by Mitchell A. Leaska as "the longest suicide note in the English language". Against the backdrop of World War II, this swansong novel tells of a story about a small English village in one day. There are two storylines in the novel: one describes the story of the Oliver family, and the other is about the pageantry directed by Miss La Trobe. Beneath the storylines, this novel reveals the fact that marginalized figures especially females are shackled and restrained by patriarchal society and all villagers are obliged to live in the shadow of the impendent world war.In view of Virginia’s individual experiences and the creation background, this thesis, by means of previous trauma theories, mainly analyzes the symptoms of individual trauma of typical characters and collective trauma embodied in Between the Acts. In addition, the author explores the causes of traumatic experiences in the novel and proposes that the term of trauma refers to a victim’s emotional response to sufferings that are reflected as feelings like jealousy, shame and horror, and will eventually affect the person’s resilience, self-awareness and the standards by which he evaluates society.Through the analysis of individual and collective trauma, this thesis draws a conclusion that trauma whose causes are complex is a complicated process. Individual experiences and self-resistance of those figures in the novel reflect the culmination of Virginia’s lifelong exploration of trauma directly or indirectly. In this sense, it is more like a psychological textbook concentrating on traumatic themes, and urges readers to dig deep into the unclaimed sufferings.