Alexandra Harris argues in Romantic Moderns that planting flowers in the middle of a war was tantamount to affirming one's firm belief in the future. Mrs. Virginia Woolf's Dalloway, published in 1925 seven years after the First World War, and her last novel Between the Acts, published in 1941 in the middle of the Second World War, are full of flowers. The pastoral and natural imagery of these novels echoes nostalgia, commemorating happier times past and hoping for their recreation. However, even in their abundance of flowers and birdsong, the pastoral images in Woolf's work do not always portend a better future. The images are distorted and corrupted, resonating with remaining fears from the previous war and the encroaching fear of the war to come. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayIn Between the Acts, Woolf uses natural imagery as a way to connect the present with the past, reflecting nostalgia as well as hope that nature ensures continuity. Miss La Trobe floundered before the silence of the scene, but fortunately, “the cows took the burden…just in time she raised her great moon-eyed head and howled.” Pastoral animals fill the silent void, all in unison with “the same ardent bellow” (p. 87). Cows are gentle and "big", with eyes like a "moon", a timeless orbit and worldly continuity. The visceral “howling” connects the past and the present: “it was the primal voice that rang loudly in the ear of the present moment” (p. 87). Their ability to cross the boundaries of time extends beyond the rescue context of the show as they have “annihilated the divide; bridged the distance; filled the void and continued the emotion” (p. 87). The “gap” and “distance” of time are “bridged” by the cry of nature, that which has filled the “emptiness” left by human action, presenting pastoral care as an instrument to connect with the past and continue towards a saved future. While the actors are always decked out in their stage costumes depicting figures from English history, “each always played the unplayed role that their clothing gave them” (p. 121). Their “beauty” (p. 121) of the past is “revealed” (p. 121) by light: “the tender, faded, uncurious but inquisitive light of the evening which reveals the depths of the water and makes even the brick radiant bungalow red” (p. 121). The natural glow is "tender", enveloping both nature and the industrial "red brick bungalow", bringing them together under one place and one time to experience the beauty of each. The idyllic and pastoral setting of the evening creates a nostalgia for the beauty found in the “inactive part that their clothes give them,” a “part” rooted in pre-war England. Birds and flowers in particular are remembered in Mrs. Dalloway in conjunction with nostalgic thoughts. The depth of Clarissa Dalloway's emotion for Peter Walsh as she watches him "spend all this time" (p. 37) is compared to a bird that "touches a branch, rises and flies away" (p. 37). The emotion is fleeting and sweet, recalled in natural terms that remain “all this time.” Clarissa's happiest memory contains scattered flowers, reflecting the positive connotations they can have. This summit, “the most exquisite moment of his entire life,” followed “the passing of a stone urn containing flowers.” Sally stopped; picked a flower; kissed him on the lips” (p. 30). The flowers are the catalysts and witnesses, placed in Sally Seton's hand during Clarissa's "most exquisite moment."Despite all the magnitude of this moment, it is the presence of the flowers that takes precedence, emphasizing their lasting power. Clarissa in particular loves the flower that is arguably England's symbol of continuity, slowly and firmly rooting itself into the ground: the rose. She finds them “absolutely adorable” (p. 101) and cares about more than international politics, like the Armenians in the aftermath of their genocide during the First World War: “she cared much more about her roses than about the Armenians” (p. 102). However, they are also strangely “the only flowers she could bear to see cut” (p. 102). This contradicts both his affection for them and their status as symbols of continuity, but instead hints at an emerging corruption of traditional natural imagery in the face of the horrors of war. By comparing humans to birds, often in sinister ways, Woolf begins to corrupt pastoral imagery, tainting it with the actions of humans. In Between the Acts, Isa and Rupert Haines are trapped swans, “its snow-white breasts surrounded by a tangle of dirty duckweed; and she too, in her webbed feet, was entangled by her husband” (p. 2). “Snow White” is polluted, and it is difficult to separate the “dirty duckweed” that imprisons them both with connotations of barbed wire, entangling, cutting and trapping those on the war front. People are constantly portrayed negatively as animals, Mrs. Haines with her "swallowing goose eyes" (p. 3), Clarissa with "a ridiculous little face, with a beak like a bird's" (p. 9 ). Mrs. Dalloway's beggar is a sinister bird, "a looming form, a shadow form" (p. 70), immersed in uncertain darkness, she possessed "the birdlike freshness of the very old, she was always chirping" (p. 70). The “bird-like coolness” is juxtaposed with “the very old,” uniting the two and implying that the birds now have ominous echoes of decay and death. The aggressive language Lucrezia uses to describe her husband Septimus Smith further distorts the symbol of the bird, bringing them closer to the monstrosities of war. Her first impression of him was that of a "young hawk" (p. 124), a bird of prey but not yet aggressive, until Septimus became "a hawk or a raven, wicked and great destroyer of crops" (p. 126). The hawk that circles, “malicious” and “great destroyer of crops”, is reminiscent of military planes that circle, threatening to destroy what nourishes and fuels a country. These Woolfian comparisons between birds and humans corrupt natural imagery on several different levels. First, the actions of humans – those of war, perhaps even urbanization – have repercussions so great that they affect the perception of the natural world, the one that was meant to remain and continue. Second, one could even suggest a transposition of human and animal roles, where humans would now be prey on each other and, like birds for game, would be afraid of being hunted. Additionally, humans are like the birds in Woolf's novels because the birds create a birdsong, but by mirroring and merging with humans, it becomes a war song. The pastoral requires birdsong and there is plenty of it in Woolf's novels, but what was once a chorus of idyllic chirping is distorted into sinister, and ultimately war chorus. Septimus, victim of shell shock, hears a sparrow chirping his name "four or five times and continues, drawing out its notes to sing fresh, piercing Greek words...joined by another sparrow, they sing in a prolonged voice » (p.21). Birds singing with Greek voices were not a foreign notion to Woolf, who in February 1904 suffered her first full mental breakdown after hearing birds speaking in Greek. The voices of birds are now an indicator of madness, a corruption of nature. The birdsong is tormenting and “prolonged”, the voices are invasive and piercing like the sounds of bombs, drones, gunshots and screams – painful memories for a shocked Septimus. However, in Between the Acts, a novel published in 1941, these links to the war are made even more explicit. The birds are represented just as “piercing”, constantly preventing the characters from sleeping: “she had been awakened by the birds. How they sang! At the onset of dawn…', 'the random ribbons of birds' voices woke her' (p. 127). The language used begins to resemble that of wartime, "attacking" in the morning and appearing randomly in "ribbons" of sound. Like air raids, birds constitute an aerial assault, resounding and preventing humans from sleeping and resting. The swallows dancing to the music of the show are similar, “retreating and advancing…yes, they have forbidden the music, gathered and hoarded” (p. 113). The birds "retreat and advance" like soldiers on the field in multitude, except the music of England's happier past in the room with the song of the present and the near future, a song at this point only Woolf knows how to be a war song. The distortion of nature therefore signals a loss of the hope and nostalgia characteristic of the pastoral and indicates resignation to another world war, the second that Woolf has experienced. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf, and the characters are still recovering from World War I, but there is the slightest glimmer of hope: "the plane flew straight, looped, ran, sank, is high, and whatever he did, wherever he went, a thick bar of white smoke floated behind him” (p. 17). The plane here is intended for safe commercial use, "writing letters in the sky" (p. 17), and in its description resembles a swan. The plane "ran, sank, rose" in the same way a swan would in water, and this image is reinforced by the "thick ruffled bar of white smoke", like the white feathers ruffled hair of the bird. In its comparison to a swan, the plane adopts a naturalness that reflects optimism about the return of the positive undercurrents of the pastoral. This, however, contributes to the historical placement and publication of Mrs. Dalloway, nestled seven years after the First World War without the Second in sight. However, between acts this begins to change. Planes are still compared to birds: “twelve planes in perfect formation like a flock of wild ducks passed overhead” (p. 119) and ducks are still thought of in their unison and harmony, “perfect formation” . Despite this, when applied to aircraft, the imagined aerial arrangement takes on an ominous hue, indicating that war is near. Eventually the reverse comparison of birds to airplanes is made, as the starlings become aerial forces attacking a tree, "the whole tree buzzed with the whistling sound they made, as if each bird were tearing out a thread." A hissing, a buzzing rose from the buzzing tree, vibrating and blackened by birds” (p. 130). The starlings are now mechanics with whistles and wires, no longer birds but merciless machines. Translated into a tricolon of the birds' actions, the tree is overwhelmed and helpless because they do not want to "stop devouring the tree" (p. 130). There is no such thing as “training.