86 pages • 2 hours read
Edward AlbeeWho's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1962A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”
The title of the play is referenced in the first moments, when Martha sings, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (12) to the tune of the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” from Disney’s adaptation of The Three Little Pigs. This title is reminiscent of Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950), an important play in the absurdist movement. Of the title, Ionesco said, “One of the reasons [for the] title is that no prima donna, with or without hair, appears in the play. This detail should suffice.” Similarly, there is no discussion of Virginia Woolf in the play, and none of the characters express interest in literature. Albee saw the phrase scrawled on a mirror in soap at a bar in New York, making the title the literary version of found art. And at the time, it struck him as “a rather typical university intellectual joke.”
The most common explanation for the title joke is that Virginia Woolf wrote in a stream-of-consciousness style that leaves little space to hide behind the illusions or pretenses that hold the characters’ lives together. The joke comes up at the faculty party from which George and Martha are returning, and it isn’t clear who sang the song to George. George laughed at the party and not when Martha sings it, suggesting that the laugh was a face-saving attempt to cover that he didn’t understand it. At home, George can drop the mask and doesn’t have to fake-laugh at pretentious jokes. Notably, when Martha sings it for Nick and Honey, they both pretend to find it funny. In an interview with the Paris Review, Albee confirmed, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf…who’s afraid of living life without false illusions.”
At the end of the play, it is Martha who admits that she is afraid of having to face the truth of life without pretending. The song also connects to the idea of childhood by using a well-known song from a children’s movie. It’s corrupted from the simplicity of its original lyrics, which any child can understand, into an obtuse academic joke with dubious meaning. This mirrors the way Martha and George created an imaginary baby who can be whoever his parents want. Even still, they manage to corrupt their imaginary child with their own conflicts, even driving the fake boy away until they had a reason to explain his perpetual absence that also allowed them to blame each other.
Religious Ritual
In the second act, Martha tells George that earlier in the evening while they were at the party Martha watched George as he was surrounded by younger men who still had promise for the future, and something in their marriage snapped. Martha sees the night as different from regular nights, and it becomes a sacred ritual as much as a marriage ceremony, a baptism, or a funeral. The stages are the ritual are the names of the acts: “Fun and Games,” “Walpurgisnacht,” and “The Exorcism.” Nick and Honey are a combination of witness and sacrifice, the necessary completion of a sacred circle. Brandy and bourbon sit in for communion wine or even blood. George and Martha will either cast out their demons or destroy each other. In the second act, when George chokes Martha, it almost becomes the latter, but by the end of the play, George and Martha have exorcised their demons (which may have taken up residence in Nick and Honey).
The religious symbolism in the play is a mixture of pagan ritual and Catholicism, and George frequently quotes historical religious texts and references religious practices. The play takes place in the early hours of a Sunday, which is the Christian sabbath. The first act, “Fun and Games,” initiates the new couple into the ritual. George and Martha ply Nick and Honey with liquor. They split up along gender lines and perform the secret social rituals between women and men, about which George notes that he has no idea what women talk about. By the end of Act I, the prelude to the ritual has built to something more primal as Martha begins to seduce Nick, and Honey runs off to vomit. “Walpurgisnacht,” the title of the second act, is a festival that is a mixture of Christian and pagan traditions, occurring on the eve of May Day, or after midnight on May 1. It’s a celebration of the start of spring and fertility rituals that became enmeshed with the celebration of Walpurga, a Catholic saint. In the 1500s, mythology spread across Europe that Walpurgisnacht was the night that witches gather on the highest peak of the Harz Mountains in northern Germany to light a bonfire and dance naked, mingle with the devil, and have sex with goats.
Fertility is central in the play. Martha’s desperation to make her imaginary son real is a prayer for retroactive fertility. If Martha is the witch who orchestrates the ritual, then George becomes the priest who exorcises the spirit that has possessed their marriage: the illusion of a son. The imagery that conflates parents and children throughout the play, such as Martha’s baby voice and the car accident that kills both George’s father and his son, is reminiscent of the holy trinity, in which the father, the son, and the holy ghost are separate but the same. Their son, like Jesus in Christian mythology, becomes the bearer of Martha and George’s marital sins. In the third act, “The Exorcism,” the sacrifice of the son is the major event that must happen to expel the demons of their marriage. Because this is a realist play with absurdist elements, rather than a medieval mystery play, none of the characters are elevated into a life of religious ecstasy. Instead, they have only each other, and must live without illusions and beliefs about a savior son. The absurdist argument, however, would be that embracing meaninglessness is liberatory. Martha and George can now accept their lives and marriage as they are instead of allowing imaginary meaning and expectations to make them feel inadequate.
Games and the Cold War
The first act of the play is titled “Fun and Games,” but the psychological games the characters play have high-stakes. Nick and Honey become players in the power struggle between George and Martha. Their conflict is like the Cold War, which was a major feature of life in the 1960s. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were stockpiling nuclear weapons and threatening to use them. Human atrocity had reached a potential scale and efficiency that was previously unthinkable. The Cold War was a struggle of endurance, like George and Martha’s marriage, which meant living under the constant threat of unexpected annihilation. In the first act, when George points the fake rifle at Martha’s head, Honey’s immediate terror demonstrates that with escalating tensions, violence can erupt at any moment.
The motif of games relates to the play’s focus on absent children. George and Martha play their games as a replacement for the happier games that they might have (or imagine they might have) played with a child. Unlike a game with a child, in which the main object is to have fun regardless of the outcome, the main object of these games is humiliation. George and Martha’s ongoing battle has been a war of words and egos, not actions. Even the act of violence that Martha describes, the punch in the boxing arena that was accidentally too hard, is much more painful to George as an embarrassing memory.
The Cuban Missile Crisis occurred only three days after Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? opened on Broadway in 1962, which means that although the play didn’t knowingly reflect it, the tone does suggest the fever pitch of mounting pressure in the world. Like Nick and Honey, other countries (including Vietnam) were caught in the crossfire of what were often posturing displays of geopolitical domination.
Like global superpowers, George and Martha stockpile weapons against each other because they are both terrified of finding themselves unarmed and vulnerable when the other decides it’s time to take them out. Unlike the hostilities between the Soviets and the United States, however, the cold war between Martha and George finally reaches a breaking point and, thus, catharsis. George drops the metaphorical nuclear bomb when he kills their son, after which they are both still afraid of the future, but they find themselves living in a new world order.
Related Titles
By Edward Albee
