Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee

First produced: 1962; first published, 1962

Type of work: Drama

Type of plot: Absurdist

Time of plot: Mid-twentieth century

Locale: New Carthage, New England

Principal Characters

• Martha, a large, boisterous, fifty-two-year-old woman
• George, her thin, graying, forty-six-year-old husband, a history professor
• Honey, a young, rather plain blond woman
• Nick, her blond, good-looking husband, a biology professor

The Story

Returning home at two a.m. from a party welcoming faculty, Martha, the college president’s daughter, and her husband, George, are squabbling. Martha echoes actor Bette Davis and calls the place a dump but cannot recall from which film the line originated. George suggests Chicago, but Martha rejects that title. George has disappointed her, failing to mix at the party. Despite the hour, Martha has invited another couple home. She demands liquor and recalls her delight when “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was sung instead of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” George was not amused.

When she asks for a kiss, he demurs, pleading that their guests might surprise them. As the chimes ring, he warns Martha not to mention a certain child, and she curses him. The guests, Honey and Nick, overhear and feel awkward.

After serving brandy to Honey and bourbon to Nick, Martha and George continue skirmishing. The guests agree that “Virginia Woolf” was funny, and they praise the president’s party, which served new faculty. George wonders how he grew rich. He regrets having married Martha, who pushes him to become her father’s successor. She claims other men would sacrifice an arm to marry a college president’s daughter, but George feels more private parts are forfeited.

Responding to Honey’s need for the bathroom, Martha shows her the house. While the women are gone, George confesses that he mistrusts biology. Slim-hipped Honey does not appear suited to having children, he observes. On returning, Honey unknowingly retaliates, expressing surprise that he fathered a son. Martha, provocatively dressed, remembers flooring George in a boxing match. Embarrassed, he finds a shotgun, aims, and pulls the trigger. An umbrella pops out. Terrified and stimulated, Martha asks for a kiss, but George refuses, ceding the palm of terror to Nick, since genetic engineers will alter humanity.

George doubts his paternity, Martha says, but he refutes this. When he leaves for more liquor, she confesses that, like Lady Chatterley, she once eloped with a gardener. “Revirginized” by annulment, she graduated from Miss Muff’s Academy, returned to her father, and married George, who showed promise. When George returns, she details his failures until he drowns her out with “Virginia Woolf.” Honey, nauseated, rushes off, followed by Nick and Martha.

Nick returns, and, though hostile, he exchanges intimate personal details with George such as the fact that Martha spent time in a rest home; that Honey vomits often; and that Nick married her when she “puffed up” and seemed pregnant (the condition passed). George remembers a classmate who accidentally killed his mother. When his prep-school pals visited a speakeasy, he delighted customers by ordering “bergin,” and the delighted management treated the boys to champagne. The lad felt lionized, but the following summer, while taking driving lessons, the boy swerved to avoid a porcupine and his father died in the crash. The boy was institutionalized—and remained so, George concluded. As for George’s child, he dismisses him as a beanbag. Nick wants an explanation, but Martha returns to announce that she and Honey are drinking coffee.

Alone again, the men talk of marriage. A false pregnancy led to Nick’s, but he and Honey, childhood friends, were expected to wed. The money of her preacher father, who built hospitals, churches, and his own wealth, also helped. Martha is wealthy, too, George observes, because her father’s second wife is rich.

Nick, coveting power, speaks of wanting to replace colleagues in courses, start his own, and provide sex to important wives. George warns him of quicksand, saying that college wives hiss like geese, like South American whores, but Nick dismisses him.

Martha blames Honey’s nausea on George, but Honey says she often throws up and that she suffers symptoms of disease without actually having the disease. Martha says George is to blame for their son’s vomiting, but he counters that it is the result of her overzealous mothering; she smells of alcohol and was always pawing the boy.

When Honey asks for brandy, George remembers that he loves brandy, but Martha recalls his taste for “bergin.” She mentions a novel George wrote but was unable to publish because of her father’s objections.

Honey, tipsy, wants to dance and urges Martha to dance with her, but George insists on playing Beethoven. Honey is undeterred, but Martha objects and, rejecting George’s suggestion that Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps (1913) would suit, chooses jazz. George offers to dance with Honey, alluding to her breasts as angelic, and Martha deflects Nick from confronting George by getting Nick to dance with her. When Honey notices their familiarity, George calls it a ritual, this time referring to Honey’s breasts as monkeylike.

Martha now launches into the game Humiliate the Host: George’s unpublished novel is autobiographical, she claims. As a boy, he accidentally killed his mother and father. When her father vetoed publication of the book, George argued that it was true.

Chagrined, George suggests that the next game involve sex with the host. Martha and Nick seem reluctant, so George substitutes one he calls Get the Guest. When he reveals his knowledge of the hysterical pregnancy, Honey, betrayed, rushes out. Nick follows, promising revenge. Martha upbraids George, but he says that she attacked first. Seething, she claims he married her to be humiliated. George threatens her for mentioning their son.

Nick returns for ice to relieve Honey’s headache, and Martha sends George to get it. She turns seductive, and Nick soon proves susceptible. George discreetly sings “Virginia Woolf” before he returns and announces that Honey is asleep. He resolves to read a book. Martha threatens to entertain herself with Nick if George ignores them, but the threat fails. When she and Nick leave together, George reads a few sentences about the decline of the West, then, furious, hurls the book at the chimes.

The noise awakens Honey, who dreamed that her covers were falling away. George deduces that she is pregnant and is intentionally aborting to avoid having children. He confesses that his son, too, is dead; Martha does not know, but he will tell her. Honey responds by getting sick again.

Alone, Martha feels abandoned and, while mixing a drink, invents cordial but improbable exchanges between herself and George. Reminded of “The Poker Night” from Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), she confesses to herself that they are miserable.

Nick believes himself the only sane person in the house. As she enters the bathroom with a liquor bottle from which she is peeling the label, Honey winks at him. Madness is refuge from the world’s lack of reality, Martha observes, reminding Nick that he failed her sexually. She sees herself as earth mother and men as impotent fools. The only one who satisfies her is George.

The chimes ring, and she orders Nick to the door; failing as a sexual partner, he can play houseboy now. George enters with snapdragons, offering flowers for the dead, another allusion to Williams that delights Martha. George pretends Nick is his son, but Martha prefers houseboys, misidentifying the snapdragons as her wedding bouquet—pansies, rosemary, and “Violence.”

George claims the moon lighted his flower gathering. If it went down as Martha asserted, it came up again. It happened to him before, on his family’s trip past Majorca after his graduation. Nick reminds George that he killed his parents earlier, but George declares that truth and illusion are intermixed. Even the question whether Nick is lover or houseboy is hard to resolve. George says they are all, like Honey, label peelers, except that they peel skin and muscle. They separate organs and bones to the marrow. Martha, he asserts, tried to bathe their son when he was sixteen, violating him.

When Martha accuses George of bungling, he counters that their son crashed into a tree while trying to avoid a porcupine. Martha denies the death, demanding to see a telegram, but Honey confirms that George ate it. When Nick asserts that the child is fiction, Martha acknowledges that the boy is dead, but she says, weeping, that George should not have killed him. After Nick and Honey leave, George concludes that the death was necessary. He sings “Virginia Woolf” and coaxes Martha into accepting their loss. Tentatively, she resolves to live without the fiction of a son.

Bibliography

Bigsby, C. W. E., ed. Edward Albee: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1975. Print.

Bottoms, Stephen J. Albee: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” New York: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print.

Cohn, Ruby. Edward Albee. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1969. Print.

Eby, Clare Virginia. "Fun and Games with George and Nick: Competitive Masculinity in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?." Mod. Drama 50.4 (2007): 601–19. Print.

Gilchrist, Jennifer. "'Right at the Meat of Things': Virginia Woolf in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?." Women's Studies 40.7 (2011): 853–72. Print.

Hoorvash, Mona. "Martha the Mimos: Femininity, Mimesis and Theatricality in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?." Atlantis 33.2 (Dec. 2011): 11–25. Print.

Kolin, Philip C., ed. Conversations with Edward Albee. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1988. Print.

Kolin, Philip C., and J. Madison Davis, eds. Critical Essays on Edward Albee. Boston: Hall, 1986. Print.

Konkle, Lincoln. "'Good, Better, Best, Bested': The Failure of American Psychology in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Edward Albee: A Casebook. Ed. Bruce J. Mann. New York: Routledge, 2003. Print.

Mahfouz, Safi Mahmoud. "The Presence of Absence: Catalytic and Omnipresent Offstage Character in Modern American Drama." Midwest Quarterly 53.4 (2012): 392–409. Print.

Paolucci, Anne. From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1972. Wilmington: Griffon House, 2000. Print.

Roudane, Matthew Charles.“Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Necessary Fictions, Terrifying Realities. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Print.

Theodore, Terry. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Magill's Survey of American Literature. Ed. Steven G. Kellman. Pasadena: Salem, 2006. Print.

Zinman, Toby. “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Edward Albee. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2008. Print.