The language of the Other in Between the Acts

This article examines Woolf’s quest to create the quintessential text, in its relation to the ruptures and dislocation which characterise her work. It seeks to shed light on the links between these apparently opposing aspects of her fiction and their role in the creation of the quality of strangeness familiar to her reader, through an analysis of The Waves and Between the Acts. Following Kristeva’s observation on the madness of Woolf, which links it to the author’s relation with the symbolic paternal order theorised in the works of Lacan, this investigation seeks to explore what constitutes the strangeness of Between the Acts—and the impact the final novel visited on its author—through a reading of selected concepts from Lacan’s Seminar III (The Psychoses).