Between The Acts

Content Warning: This section of the guide depicts characters with colonial, racist, patriarchal, and anti-gay attitudes.

In the 1930s, English society had strictly enforced social mores about gender and behavior. While many characters in Between the Acts follow these roles and expectations, some find the roles stifling, unnecessary, or impossible to follow. The novel focuses on the different ways Isa, Mrs. Swithin, Mrs. Manresa, and Miss La Trobe confront societal expectations regarding women’s roles and behavior. The novel also focuses on the gender expectations English society places on men through the characters of Giles, Bartholomew, William, and George.

The main female characters in the novel have varying reactions to English society’s expectations of women; however, they all question patriarchal rules about women’s behavior, though some of them do so more directly than others. Isa finds her domestic life stifling, detesting “the domestic, the possessive, the maternal” (14)—she wishes to escape her unhappy marriage and her suffocating life. She also has little patience for Bart teasing George when the child cries, standing up for her son and declaring that he is not a coward or a “cry-baby.” In addition, she sees Giles’s bloodying of his shoes as a pitiful show of his masculine insecurity and calls him a “silly boy, with blood on his boots” (58).