Our last Woolf class before Spring Break, and - apart from Orlando, reserved for an upcoming and special occasion - we've reached Between the Acts. One thing that we became fascinated by in today's discussion is the amount of misquotation that the text contains: sometimes by characters who know that they're offering an imperfect jab at some half-remembered lines; sometimes by people who don't realize that their memory is a bit off; sometimes an ort, scrap or fragment turns up, unacknowledged, in the middle of a sentence. All of this goes up to create a picture of a national culture that is both important, and sustaining, and yet very wobbly, and subject to personal emendation. My personal contribution to this debate is this Landseer picture. When Mrs Swithin shows William Dodge the nursery, there's a picture from a Christmas Annual of a Newfoundland Dog pinned to the wall. "Good Friends," the picture is - in William's recollection, it would seem - called. But - and I could very well be wrong - I can't find any Victorian/early C20th pictures including a Newfoundland Dog that are called "Good Friends." On the other hand, there's this very, very famous Landseer picture of a Newfoundland ... OK, maybe I don't convince myself, but I still think that this is worth a try; a contribution to a catalogue of half-remembered cultural illusions.
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