Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? may be viewed as a criticism of American society in the 1960s. Edward Albee saw ‘the responsibility of the writer…to be a sort of demonic social critic’: thus the play became a reaction against the illusionary plays of its time. Two lines from the play are directly lifted from the works which Albee is mocking: ‘Flores para los muertos’ is from A Streetcar named Desire and Martha’s speech – ‘Awww, tis the refuge we take…’ – is from a play by Eugene O’Neill. Both of these playwrights sanction illusion in the face of reality; Virginia Woolf is said to be an elaborate metaphor for the ‘willing substitution of fantasy for reality, the destructive and dangerous infantilising of the imagination and the moral being by fear.’ Albee saw society as too willing to conform and adjust itself morally in order to benefit and succeed. George’s attempts to escape from such a society result in his hiding in history and thus him and Nick are no better than each other. George has to resist the totalitarian – ‘defend Berlin’ – in Nick but his attempts to defend Western civilisation ‘against its sex- and success-orientated assailants…are too closely centred on his scrotum.’
The setting – New Carthage – of the alcohol-sodden gathering is significant in itself. The original Carthage was founded in the ninth century BC and it was razed to the ground in 146AD, when it collapsed under the weight of its own power. It is thus being likened to the America of the 1960s where, again, money and power provided the principal axels for behaviour and superseded the values of culture. As Nick and Martha attempt to commit adultery in the kitchen, George reads that ‘the west must…eventually fall’ while he himself likens New Carthage to other devastated cities: Gomorrah and Penguin Island (a mythic island destroyed by its own inhuman capitalism, created by Anatole France). The repeated apocalyptic references to sterility and destruction have immediate relevance, considering the time in which the play was written – during the Cold War.
Nick and Honey act as a sounding board and audience for Martha and George’s elaborate games, but on a more sinister level, as a representation of the new robotic generation in society. Nick is confident of inevitable success and is willing to adapt his morality to the demands of expediency. The name is itself a symbol of totalitarianism in reference to Nikita Khrushchev, the president of the Soviet Union at the time of Virginia Woolf’s first performance. While their presence is initially consoling (they represent the audience’s shock and alienation in the face of George and Martha’s relationship) they become increasingly more ominous once the extent of their characters is revealed. Nick admits that his marriage has stemmed, not out of any real love for Honey, but out of the necessity created by her ‘hysterical pregnancy’ and her father’s inheritance. Though George and Martha’s marriage is as full of myths and imagination as Nick and Honey’s (she is secretly preventing conception due to her fear of pain and ultimately life) at least the former’s deception began after they married and was a joint venture. Honey runs away from contact (hiding her fear behind simulated amusement and lying on bathroom tiles), while her husband preserves ‘a scientific detachment in the face of life’: he responds to George’s attempts at communication with a dismissive ‘UP YOURS!’
Martha uses fantasy and theatrics to create a parody of the play within the play; she and George mock the concept of drama by overplaying themselves. They refuse to pass up any opportunity for distraction and quickly resort into childish insult exchanges: ‘Monstre! / Cochon! / Bte! / Canaille! / Putain!’ Thus Albee attacks a highly articulate but essentially lazy society, which is willing to replace courage and compassion for games and make-believe. Martha’s taunts about their son have over the years reduced him to a ‘beanbag’ that George has refused to rise to until now. Her betrayal of their secret to outsiders has freed him to attack her just as viciously. Both enjoy ‘slashing away everything in sight, scarring up half the world’ but deny the truth in themselves. However, each time that they fight they react by chanting together. The two of them, created the child probably originating as a game; but once mentioned, the son must die. Martha’s fear at the close is understandable. Their beanbag is dead and their illusion exorcised, and thus Martha’s refuge is destroyed. Martha is afraid of Virginia Woolf (that is, life without false illusions) and the short monosyllabic close of the play echoes ‘the sense of communion’ and thus the uncomplicated state to which their marriage is returned.
George has recognised the plight of society, but instead of standing up to the conformity, has decided to hide in his history books. As he himself admits, “When people can’t abide things as they are,…they do one of two things…either they turn to a contemplation of the past, as I have done, or they set about to…alter the future.” For George therefore, history has become a protection from reality and an escape from conformism. His position has given him the illusion of vitality and necessary existence, but underneath, he remains impotent and dispensable. The word playing and games of George and Martha are an attempt to simulate some form of meaningful activity. It is precisely George’s initial failure to face the ‘reality of the world’ that gives a greater truth to Martha’s description of George as “a blank, a cipher…a zero.” His true feelings of the society which he is hiding from are revealed in Act 2 in his discussion with Nick: society is based on principles and despite the attempts to moralize immoral minds and ‘make government and art’ (note that the latter is made rather than created or evolved: the concepts of art being the same as the power driven sinews of government is quite depressing) there would be something to lose if it fell completely. Though George’s attempts at work are sensible, they are not what are required. The Dies Irae dismissed the years of hard graft and society’s evolution with ‘UP YOURS!’ Nick is part of a society of sensible workers trying to continue their type-cast existence ignorant of the beauty of art and the ills of government while George recognises the effort gone into making society but is powerless to destroy his sensible nature for the spontaneity he craves. This speech is George’s attempt to ‘give you [Nick] a survival kit’ but Nick is too set in his ways to adhere to criticisms of him or his lifestyle.
While society crumbles around them, George and Martha epitomise the fall of the American dream (exaggerated by their namesakes: the first – childless – President and First Lady of America: just as George Washington couldn’t tell a lie, the son is murdered in the name of Truth) which has progressively moved further away from the quest for truth and closer to illusion: George describes their son as “our own little all-American something-or-other”. Martha and George are an example of what is required before all the myths – their son – collapse under their own weight: a slow and steady stripping of fantasy. As the close of the play shows, by facing reality there is an opportunity for catharsis. Martha is scared and Honey and Nick’s marriage is on the brink of ruin, but at least that is more positive than pretences of perfection. Martha and George illustrate that illusion can reverse and become destructive when it forms the basis of a relationship. The similarities between the two couples (syllabic names, illusionary marriages) are not accidental: the older become a warning and proof of the need for prevention of future recurrence.
Many critics have seen the ending of Virginia Woolf as overly sentimental (this was Albee’s criticism of the film version) but the fragility of the new structure inhibits this. Nothing is certain anymore for either couple, except the knowledge that they can never fall into such a strategy of self-delusion again. The play is a protest against the unquestioning conformity and the lack of individuality and morality of 1960s American or even Western culture. Albee is attempting to do for America what Cato did for Carthage. Virginia Woolf is call for a lessening of alienation between public and private and to close the gap between individuals. George and Martha’s battles are a metaphor for those of society and politics. Albee once said that there is a need for the writer to capture the reality of his age. For him, the only response to the present reality was direct confrontation. Albee’s play is an attack on a highly articulate but illusionary way of which willingly substitutes games for real life; an attack on the illusion of contemporary drama but also of society in America and Western Civilisation in the period.
Albee utilises a number of dramatic and linguistic techniques to form his attack on society. By referring to well known contemporary texts, Albee mocks the attitudes that their works sanction. The characters are created as before and after pictures of the results of relationships based in delusion, with clear links to moments in history acting as sounding boards for each others thoughts. Their intoxicated states allow, for the first time in a long while, for their true feelings and motives to be revealed, and for all the secrets and lies that have formed the keystones to their marriages to be removed finally allowing a true test of their strength. Unsurprisingly, what is left very quickly collapses: a warning to others and a wake-up-call to society. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is an outcry against the thoughtlessness and conforming nature of Western culture and an attack on those who not only live, but sanction, such a lifestyle.