“Peace was the third emotion”

Abstract

In this essay Crossland explores Woolf’s writing of threes in Between the Acts, the title of which itself places emphasis on the three intervals between the acts of its central pageant. Both the number three and triple repetitions of specific words are prevalent across this text, while Woolf often provides strings of three words, such as the ‘orts, scraps and fragments’ summing up the pageant. Woolf also describes ‘Peace’ as ‘the third emotion’, joining with ‘Love’ and ‘Hate’ to ‘ma[ke] the ply of human life’. Although ‘Love. Hate. Peace’ only appear explicitly together once in the final novel, Crossland examines Woolf’s typescript revisions and argues that, by focusing on the novel’s tripartite structure, it is possible to read peace into certain other moments, in particular the end of the book in the form of both silence and sleep. By reading Woolf’s final novel through complementarity structures that go beyond dualities, Crossland shows how Woolf was able to writer a book with a ‘triple melody’ at its centre.