y, on the other hand, lacks the awareness of her husband and has no idea what is going on most of the evening. She does not see the meaning of the jokes told or understand the double meanings that George and Martha toy with, but by the end of the evening she has been changed as she has come to question herself and to doubt Nick as she never wanted to do.
In the beginning, Nick and Honey are shocked by George and Martha's funny, profound, and often cruel "fun and games." They begin to participate as they drink more and so loosen up, though Nick has a better understanding of the way the evening is progressing than does his naive and less intellectual wife. The couple is contrasted in several ways. George is older, and as a professor of history, he is always looking to the past for answers. He admits this himself: "I am preoccupied with history" (Albee 50). He delves deeply into his and Martha's past, for instance, and always keeps the past alive, never letting old slights disappear completely. Nick is a biology teacher and so has a more preset-oriented perspective, always looking for the good opportunity that will help him with his ambition. He sees George as the Old Guard to be knocked off in some sense so he and his generation can take their place. The wives differ in their degree of experience and their desire for dominance--Martha wants to be the Queen of the Campus (and of the household, as she notes: "I wear the pants in this house" [Albee 157]), while Honey is content to stand behind her husband so long as she trusts and supports him and he protects her from the sort of intellectual barbs Martha is now hurling her way. Martha is described as an amply-endowed woman, an earth-mother with only her husband to oversee, a man she refers to as "the shadow of a man flickering around the edges of a house" (Albee 226). Honey, on the other hand, is slight and somewhat indistinct, quite the opposite of Martha and not the dominant...