In Three Guineas (1938) Virginia Woolf suggests that writers, especially women, need to “find out new ways of approaching ‘the public’; single it into separate people instead of massing it into one monster, gross in body, feeble in mind” (117). The burden for many politically engaged writers in the 1930s was how to engage with the “public” to resist the harmful and alienating effects of fascism as it began to overtake European society. As many writers asked themselves: What cultural role could their novels play in a time of political crisis? How could they reach the public effectively without resorting to propaganda? Moreover, could fiction and reading constitute a mode of resistance and effect political change?

Between the Acts (1941) has often been recognized as an expression of Woolf's antiwar views, perhaps the strongest of all her works. Yet it is also a work that manifests her deep ambiguity as to how anti-war protest can be achieved in a society that so easily succumbs to, and so passively consumes, mass culture spectacles—history pageants, military parades, and media extravaganzas. In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord characterizes the spectacle as “a social relationship between people that is mediated by images” (12). As he explains, for those “to whom the real world becomes real images, mere images are transformed into real beings—tangible figments which are the efficient motor of trancelike behaviour” (Debord 17). The ideology of dictatorship relies on a society that treats the myth of the spectacle as real; these people become virtual “automatons” because they relinquish their desire to think for themselves. I interpret Between the Acts as a work that questions how to reach individual members of the larger British public strategically in order to warn against the dangerous allure of the fascist spectacle—how fascism promotes a sense of belonging, and connection to history, unity, and order. To investigate these possibilities, I consider how Between the Acts juxtaposes the passive consumption of mass culture in the 1930s with the utopian ideal of a Habermasian-type of “public sphere,” where “private people come together as a public” (27).