The politics of punctuation in Jacob’s Room and Between the Acts

Abstract

ABSTRACTWhile much critical analysis explores modernist poets’ experiments with the printed page, the print innovations of prose writers have been largely overlooked. Punctuation offered many modernist novelists a way to engage visually with marginalised or non-normative experiences of embodiment; many chose to remove punctuation in order to minimise ‘obstructions’ or impediments for characters and readers, but Virginia Woolf instead employed specific marks and space breaks to divide and animate her novels’ printed spaces. This article demonstrates how the pages of Jacob’s Room and Between the Acts integrate punctuation and spacing into the novels’ fraught representations of disability and gender. While Jacob’s Room frames blank space as a narrative resource for grappling with the difficulty of representing the ‘unseizable’ components of embodied life, the parentheses and ellipses of Between the Acts visually mark the opacity and ambiguity of each character’s social performance, placing visible pressure on any easy reading of Albert, a disabled pageant performer, or of Miss La Trobe, the marginalised artist-figure. Unpacking how punctuation and space affect these novels’ representations of characters’ embodied experiences, I argue, emphasises the importance of attending to bibliographic materiality as well as linguistic complexity when analysing modernist novels’ narrative innovations.