The Gothic, the Abject and the Monstrous: A Revision of National Identity in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts

Abstract

ABSTRACTVirginia Woolf’s engagement with English national identity in Between the Acts (1941) cannot be seen as separate from the novel’s Gothic dimension, whose social and political work in this literary work has not been analyzed so far. In Between the Acts, there is a continuous blurring and disruption of the boundaries, spaces and genealogies that should define the familiar and native character of the community, with the subsequent interruption of the foreign and the alien. This liminal and ambivalent dimension, which I analyze following Kristeva’s discussion of the abject, is materialized in the presence of the monstrous, which has also escaped critical attention. The result is, borrowing Bhabha’s words, a depiction of the English nation as “neither unified nor unitary in relation to itself”.