'Spectator of the Public'? Virginia Woolf, popular theatre and the First World War

In April 1918, author Virginia Woolf attends the patriotic and propagandistic Albert de Courville revue Box o' Tricks at the London Hippodrome. Later, she recalls in her diary how she laughed in spite of herself at the “queer English humour” on offer, calling it “something natural to the race, which makes us all laugh”.

In November 1918, she attends a variety show at the London Coliseum, however, her recollections of this trip to the popular theatre make no concessions to laughter or to Englishness. Rather, Woolf claims contradictorily that she is fated “always to be the spectator of the public, never part of it”.

This contradiction is one instance of a wider ambivalence on Woolf's part toward popular theatre and performed forms of patriotic propaganda. Throughout the First World War and the aftermath of the Armistice, Woolf repeatedly contradicts herself as she attempts to define her position as an individual within or outwith the national collective. Her diary entries during this period are troubled by conflicts of subjectivity and objectivity, performance and spectatorship, nationality and nationalism.

Accomplished researcher and experienced lecturer in the field of modern and contemporary literature, Dr Ellie Mitchell, will examine Woolf's trips to the popular theatre in April and November 1918, the contradictory diary entries which followed, and later writings by Woolf on what it means to be English, or to respond to a performance “in English”. Ellie will ask what we might learn from these contradictions, what might be the cause of Woolf's ambivalence as to her relative subjectivity or objectivity as a spectator, and how the irresolution of these conflicts might influence our readings of her post-war novels.