Melissa Sullivan

University of Delaware

melsul@english.udel.edu

Re-visioning the Great House:

“Outsider” Artists and Counterpublic Spheres in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and “Anon”

Virginia Woolf continually extended the public spaces women writers moved between through her work as a journalist, an essayist, a press owner, and a novelist. Clearly, Woolf opposed the Victorian ideology of “separate spheres.” Yet she also insisted upon maintaining her “outsider” status to the mainstream public sphere, most obviously through her espousal of an “Outsider’s Society” in Three Guineas (1938), but also through her relations with the mainstream public sphere in her literature and work. To do so, Woolf constructed and inhabited counterpublic spheres, or marginalized public spaces, where alternative discourses that challenged dominant social constructs were developed and then dispersed to the mainstream public sphere. As her interaction with both the literary marketplace and actual public spaces became increasingly limited during the early years of the Second World War, Woolf explored fashioning the home, specifically the Great House, as a counterpublic sphere for the “outsider” artist. In Between the Acts (1941) and the posthumously published essay “Anon” (1979) the English Great House is a liminal and a privileged place that becomes a communal space for artistic production. This counterpublic sphere emphasizes not only the intersections of the public and the private, as well as those of class, art, nationalism, time, and gender. Unlike public sphere theorist Jürgen Habermas, however, Woolf does not claim that differences along power structures can be set aside within public spaces to solve problems discursively, either within the mainstream or counterpublic spheres.

For Woolf, the relationship between the female artist and the home is of course a problematic dialectic: the artist needs a room of one’s own to create work, but is stifled by the patriarchal conventions of the domestic sphere. The Great House too has conflicting values; it is a symbol of the traditional British social system, but is also a space which encourages communal interaction, however unbalanced. In her essay, Woolf claims that the voice of Anon creates a fluid and collective form of literature. Though technically homeless, his art is also directly connected to the Great House where it is produced and performed. When the Great House becomes the location of a yearly pageant in Between the Acts, Woolf temporarily rewrites Pointz Hall as a space that can confine or develop women’s artistic and public identities based upon the community’s use of it. Miss La Trobe, an “outsider” through gender, class, and probably sexuality, uses this space to express the vision of her pageant. As she does so, Isa Oliver is increasingly released from her roles as the wife and the mother of Pointz Hall; her production of art increases and becomes more frequent throughout the course of the day. Reading Between the Acts in relation to “Anon” emphasizes the complexities of the artist’s relationship to the home and explores how re-visioning the Great House as a counterpublic sphere grants the artist space to work in public apart from the pressures of the literary marketplace. It also, however, questions the advantages of viewing the English Great House as a counterpublic sphere, given the unequal power structures within this space and its vulnerability to the influences of the mainstream public sphere. In Between the Acts and “Anon” the Great House becomes a counterpublic sphere that explores, rather than instates, new definitions of the home and the public. Woolf examines the porous boundaries between the public and the private to challenge traditional patriarchal values through “outsider” art, yet she also emphasizes that alternative artistic spaces, while productive, must continually evolve and negotiate with the mainstream public sphere.