Virginia Woolf
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In his play, The American Dream, Edward Albee unveils a tortured family that is symbolic of the reality beneath the illusion where the American dream is concerned. In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Albee takes a more traditional approach than the theater of the absurd, and his language is more natural, but he returns to this theme with a vengeance. For in all of drama there are few plays about domestic relationships that are as caustic, violent and as poisoned with the milk of human bitterness, cynicism and pessimism as is Woolf. The story regards George and Martha a married couple (he a history professor and she the University President’s daughter). Verbally and emotionally George and Martha are as skilled at cutting each other without going for the final kill as much as a professional torturer trained to prolong his victim’s agony. Into this volley of abuse come Nick and Honey, a young couple who also share a vision of the “American dream,” but Albee portrays Nick as the victor in his battles with George because George is of the old school and Nick has already been indoctrinated into the new American culture of capitalism for its own sake. The theme of the play, other than touching on the disillusionment of the American dream for the younger generation, and a robotic-like acceptance of the evolved “capitalized” version by the older generation, is that each of the characters in the play, like each of us in real life,
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n to George’s side of things. Bore yourself to death.
George: Monstre!
Martha: Cochon!
(Albee 101)
The insults continue to fly until Martha leaves the room telling George to clean up his mess (literally and the figurative psychological mess she hopes she has made as she fights her own demons). The son represents the failure of George and Martha to achieve a solid communion and it is the means by which Martha continuously emasculates, manipulates and enrages George “Of course, this state, this perfection…couldn’t last. Not with George…not with George around” (Albee 223). The illusion of the son raised by George and Martha is an attempt to create a bond between the pair, a bond that marriage and words have failed to produce “He walked evenly between us…a hand out to each of us for what we could offer by way of support, affection, teaching, even love…and these hands, still, to hold us off a bit, for mutual protection, to protect us all from George’s…weakness…any my…necessary greater strength…to protect himself…and us” (Albee 221-222).
There are many attempts to discover truth versus illusion in the play, one of its main themes. It is difficult to do so because it is nearly impossible to determine what, exactly, is truth
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Approximate Word count = 1931
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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