Still image from 1966 movie.

• Play Title: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf 
• Author: Edward Albee 
• First performed:  1962 
• Page count: 102 

Summary 

Who’s afraid of … domestic Armageddon? Edward Albee’s first big theatrical success was a withering portrayal of a dysfunctional marriage, teeming with lies, gurgling in alcohol, and ready to SNAP! It is all set in the town of New Carthage, a sort of modern-day Gomorrah. One evening, after an ice-breaker event for new staff at the local college, George and Martha invite the younger, newer couple named Nick and Honey back to theirs for some (more) drinks. Let the games begin! Martha is well inured to all-out drinking binges and the inevitable follow-on fights with George – a husband who apparently flops at every manly hurdle. The fresh-faced Nick and his “mousey” wife get dragged into this maelstrom of marital bitterness, including secrets that are either viscerally raw or just shameless fabrications. As spectators, Albee pulls us into an arena so toxic that it needs an old-fashioned exorcism to cleanse it during the final scene. The topics addressed in this work include infidelity, infertility, masculinity, and the truth.

Ways to access the text: reading/listening/watching 

The playscript of Virginia Woolf (abbr.) is widely available for free on the internet. The script is quite reader-friendly, but I would still recommend an audio version or the movie.

The Internet Archive lists at least 3 available versions in audio file formats. There is the original production starring Uta Hagan from 1962; the soundtrack from the 1967 movie starring Elizabeth Taylor (an adaptation for the screen); and a 2004 version with Juliet Stevenson.

The 1966 movie version, also entitled Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, stars Elizabeth Taylor and her then-husband, Richard Burton. Directed by Mike Nichols, the movie has a run time of 2h 11m and has an IMDB score of 8. At the age of 32, Taylor was arguably far too young to play the role of 52-year-old Martha, but she gives a bravura performance. Bette Davis had lobbied hard to get the role but ultimately failed. The combination of Taylor and Burton was a bigger box office attraction in the mid sixties.

Why read/listen to/watch Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? 

Albee gives an insight into a complicated, conflict-burdened marriage. George and Martha are the type of couple who put on a damn good show of amiability in public and then swiftly tear each other to bloodied tatters behind closed doors.

“In Conversations with Edward Albee, Patricia De La Fuente quotes Albee’s comment on a playwright’s purpose, “I don’t think you should frighten [audiences], I think you should terrify them.” (Luere 50) 

Indeed, Albee manages to terrify us with the truth that a spouse can be the worst enemy in the world – bar none. Luckily, in the case of George and Martha, one sees that there is also a strange glue that holds them together despite the acrimony. The play is an account of trench warfare in a marriage, and it is riveting to watch.  

Post-reading discussion/interpretation 

_{Fearless Cuckoldry!} 

To begin, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is an intriguing play title. Edward Albee’s work dates from 1962, some 21 years after the death by suicide of the real Virginia Woolf. She had filled her pockets with stones before wading into the River Ouse to meet her death. In Albee’s play, we quickly become a little bit afraid of the lead character named Martha: the sharp-tongued, no-holds-barred, matriarch of her domain. However, is there any true connection between the two women? Well, Woolf was a gifted intellectual, feminist, and writer who succeeded despite all the obstacles women faced in her time. She argued for women’s rights to financial and artistic freedoms. As WWII progressed, Woolf became more intimidated by the threat of Germany, a force she understood as being excessively masculine. This imminent threat, combined with her lifelong problems with mental illness, led to her suicide. In contrast, Martha seeks to ruthlessly dismantle the primary masculine presence in her life, namely her husband, George. She is his intellectual equal, and also a better boxer and drinker than him. In short, Martha is a formidable woman who is capable of far more than the meagre role society has allocated to her – a professor’s wife and homemaker. So, who is afraid of Virginia Woolf? Well, any man afraid of strong, smart, deeply unhappy women. Yes, the links between Martha and Virginia are tenuous but still not irrelevant.

Luckily, Albee explained his own play title somewhat differently. He told an interviewer from Paris Review about his inspiration. It all began in a Greenwich Village bar.

““I was in there having a beer one night, and I saw “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” scrawled in soap, I suppose, on this mirror. When I started to write the play, it cropped up in my mind again. And of course, who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf . . . who’s afraid of living life without false illusions. And it did strike me as being a rather typical, university intellectual joke” (Flanagan)

One can rephrase Albee’s question and ask – who isn’t afraid of living life without false illusions? To put it differently – Yes, the three little pigs from the children’s story were correct to fear the big bad wolf. After all, unsupportable ideas aka illusions are what lull many people into a false sense of security. For George and Martha, their imaginary son is the illusory glue of their relationship, plus the blue-eyed boy is also their illusion of a brighter future to which they have contributed. When this illusion is shattered, just like when the little piggies’ houses of straw and twigs are demolished, then they need to rely on what is real and true. This specific topic of illusion versus reality as presented in the play has already been explored and delineated by many writers.  

What interests me is the idea that certain illusory structures need to be mercilessly challenged to assess their strengths or weaknesses, their validity or falseness. In Virginia Woolf, Albee shows how Martha, a modern-day ‘wolfish’ woman, sets about dismantling her husband’s masculinity – the facade of strength behind which he hides. Men may wear masculinity just as easily as the little pigs may sit smugly inside structures made of straw or twigs. Society awards the descriptor of male along with an immediate connotation of masculinity to all biological men. It is only when a challenge materialises that one learns if George is indeed a man or a wimp. Martha serves up this sexist challenge, daily. This may be an outdated, gendered stereotype of bygone years but it is still one of Albee’s core questions. The play really does appear to put masculinity on trial. Forrest E. Hazard summed up the work as follows. 

“Virginia Woolf is a modern parable about an age-old problem: the delicate relationship that must bind the symbolically masculine and feminine principles of creation together if life is to progress.” (Hazard 10)   

From the outset, George is presented as a cuckold and, therefore, not a real man at all. He is an ineffectual, mildly effete intellectual who not only fails to advance his career but is also a flop in the bedroom. So, his wife ‘rightfully’ resorts to sleeping with younger, more virile men who can satisfy her womanly needs. She might even get pregnant if it was not for her now advanced age of 52. Yes, Albee wants to attack the core topic of illusion not simply by revealing that their son is a fairytale construction, but also by testing how much of a man George really is! The playwright begins with a relationship clearly out of kilter, best summed up by Martha screaming “FUCK YOU!” (13) at her husband as he opens the door to their guests, Nick and Honey. From this point onward, the play charts the course of their battle to reinstall some sort of healthy equilibrium in their marital relationship.  

What is masculinity? That is a tricky question. Or more to the point, what is American masculinity? Michael S. Kimmel looked at this question in an essay entitled “The Cult of Masculinity.” In the following excerpt, he quotes Margaret Mead when elaborating on the topics of masculinity and one of its key attributes, namely the use of aggression.  

“American aggression is peculiar, wrote anthropologist Margaret Mead, because it is “seen as a response rather than as primary behavior” (1965, p. 151). In And Keep Your Powder Dry (1944, revised in 1965), Mead explained that ours is an “aggressiveness which can never be shown except when the other fellow starts it . . . which is so unsure of itself that it had to be proved” (p. 157).” (Kimmel 93) 

In Virginia Woolf, it is Martha who is the primary, unrelenting aggressor. One waits for George’s responses, but they appear only as a succession of muted, swallowed, bottled emotions. For much of the play, he fails to prove himself even though the ‘other fellow’ certainly started it (yes, Martha). This wife makes jibes about her husband at every opportunity. Ironically, one could posit that Martha is the one responding to her husband’s inability to fulfil his masculine role in the marriage! Thus, she would be an example of American masculinity in her willingness to fight back in response to unfairness. Either way, it is George who is lacking. 

The play’s opening scene covertly foreshadows all that we need to know about George and Martha’s relationship. Martha quotes a famous line from a Bette Davis movie – “What a dump!” (7) – before berating her husband who cannot promptly recall the name of the movie. The actual movie is called Beyond the Forest, which depicts Bette Davis as a discontented wife who cheats on her husband with a more masculine man from Chicago, a man who then also gets her pregnant. Davis’s character treats her husband like a patsy; she first leaves him and then returns to him when her lover rejects her, only to leave her husband a 2nd time. Typically, the macho guy from Chicago, who just happens to have a manly facial scar too, is unimpressed with her devotion. This only makes her keener. It is as if Albee has secretly revealed the aberrant inequality between George and Martha in the opening lines of the play. All yin but little or no yang.  

By inviting Nick, Martha wishes to up the ante. George and Nick appear as binary opposites regarding the traditional ideals of masculinity. Kimmel quotes psychologist Robert Brannon who “identified four components of the dominant traditional male sex role in the rules that define how a man is supposed to behave” (94). They are as follows.  

“No sissy stuff” (no behaviour that seems feminine)  

“Be a big wheel” (be successful and high-status oriented) 

“Be a sturdy oak” (be tough, confident, and self-reliant) 

“Give ’em hell” (be ready to show aggression and daring) 

 (Kimmel 94) 

Martha dismissively refers to her husband George as a “simp” (11). A man who cannot even provide properly for her, so they end up living in a dump. In contrast, Martha’s father is the president of the university and “quite a guy” (16). Despite the obvious advantages of being the old man’s “heir apparent,” George even fails to get promoted to head of his department. At 46, George is nothing other than “A great … big … fat … FLOP!” (40). One assumes that the negative sexual connotations of the word flop also apply since they are Martha’s venomous words. George possesses none of the attributes of a dominant male, as outlined above by Robert Brannon. However, when one turns one’s attention to Nick then it is a different story. This young man is both intellectually and physically impressive: a man who boxes, played football at school, and attained his master’s degree at just 19 years old (25-26). He still has an impressive body, which Martha notices (27), and this adds to his masculine allure. This virile young man needs “no fake jap gun” (30) (a reference to George’s fake gun). He even joins in on the joke about genetic engineering by re-christening himself “a personal fucking-machine!” (34). Such men would be able to populate the world with perfect specimens of manhood. The two men highlight the dichotomy between the revered masculine man and the shameful wimp.  

Just like Bette Davis’s simp of a husband in Beyond the Forest, George will accept any indiscretions by Martha. Indiscretions refer to both revelations of family secrets and extramarital affairs. Thus, the emasculated man, George, becomes a cuckold. This figure has been variously described throughout the centuries.  

“The cuckold is a stock comic figure of medieval ribaldry, shown in fabliaux and their reworkings in Chaucer and Boccaccio. Here, the husband cuts a ridiculous figure, being deceived by his young wife, and a similarly youthful lover.” (Millington 3) 

The Cuckold: “The humor of his plight lies in the fact that he is excluded: we know more than he does about something he should know more about than we do, his most intimate domestic affairs. We laugh at him, not with him, seeking to distance ourselves as much as possible from him and the anxieties he represents.” (McEachern 610) 

However, Albee chooses to depict cuckoldry in an atypical manner. George is too aware, too painfully conscious of the figurative cuckold’s horns that he wears upon his head. We are not dealing with a senile, elderly man or even the victim of a clever, devious wife. No, George is practically forced to witness his wife’s salacious behaviour; it is part of his torture. Thus, the play depicts the grinding down of marital illusions until they are finally obliterated. This primary illusion is the one of marital bliss founded on fidelity. The situation is chiefly a testing ground for George’s masculinity, or what remains of it. Yet, he does little more than make barbed responses to his wife’s words and actions. He warns her not to get drunk and end up wearing her skirt up over her head, as usual! (13). There is also talk of “musical beds” regarding the now familiar promiscuity of the staff on the university campus. Oblivious to all warnings, Martha boasts of getting to the “meat of things” (31) as she sits cosily with Nick on the sofa. When Martha and Nick dance together, George tells Honey that “It’s a familiar dance … a very old [mating] ritual” (59). George witnessing the way his wife gradually seduces another man adds to the overall humiliation inherent in the scene.  

Martha will later confess that she disgusts herself with her “totally pointless infidelities” (78). There is an absurdity to the situation, a certain in-built sterility because neither Martha nor George seem capable of eliciting the response they so desperately need. She needs him to put a stop to her shameless cavorting, but he steadfastly plays the role of cuckold just to spite her. It is a perverse game that escalates to a crescendo.  

Mark I. Millington explains that there are two chief ways in which one can depict a cheated-upon husband. 

“There are two models or paradigms for the portrayal of the offended husband: either he is mocked for the situation he finds himself in, or he is admired for his attitude and action in the face of his wife’s infidelity.” (Millington 1) 

Albee chooses neither. One cannot readily mock George since Martha’s behaviour is so grotesque that it turns one against her. Nor is George admirable since he appears to do nothing in response to the exaggerated assaults on his manhood. The core reason for his stoical accommodation of his wife’s behaviour is that they share a special bond. George and Martha have created/birthed an illusory son. In Act I, Martha raises the ugly spectre that George doubts if he is the father of their son: a claim which he swiftly and confidently rebuts. He also knows that his wife loves him or at least loved him at first (39). Armed with these defences, George endures some intense assaults. For example, when Nick talks about seducing some faculty wives to advance his career, George goes along with the joke, up to the point when Nick says – “Well, now, I’d just better get her [Martha] off in a corner and mount her like a goddamn dog, eh? (53). George answers in the affirmative, but the game is now out of control. Later, George sees Martha and Nick in flagrante on the sofa, but he quickly exists and then makes a warning noise before re-entering the room (71). An exasperated Martha finally threatens that she is going to bring Nick upstairs, but George remains unresponsive. He says he will read a book to keep him occupied. George’s power is not expressed as traditional masculinity but instead as a seething, vengeful indifference. Only his faith in the special bond with his wife, a bond incomprehensible to their guests, allows him to endure her absurd levels of boundary overstepping and insults.  

Although George is not conventionally masculine, he does eventually retaliate against his wife and Nick, and even against Honey for good measure. He is astute enough to realise that he cannot match Nick in youthful strength or good looks, nor match Martha in base behaviour, but he can play a mean game. Indeed, it is sheer gamesmanship that will eventually allow George to win the battle with his wife. His slow and agonising ritualistic castration at the hands of Martha must be stopped at last. Instead of a career-launching opportunity, George now views his youthful marriage to the University president’s daughter as his introductory dismemberment – “the sacrifice is usually of a somewhat more private portion of the anatomy” (17). He views his wife as part of his father-in-law’s appendage; instead of a right-hand man, Martha is her father’s “right ball” (24). Faced with the potent, masculine power wielded by a wife who “wears the pants” (69), and a father-in-law who stops George publishing his book – a “bean bag” (46) of a son is George’s only consolation. A bean bag is common slang for the male scrotum and, therefore, symbolic of George’s imagined manhood (still intact). Since his prowess is based on an elaborate intellectual game he plays with his wife, he can only remain a full man within that illusory world. Martha is currently dismantling that world with drunken vengefulness. George participates in a series of games that will eventually help him win back his true sense of manhood, but only via the killing of the imaginary son upon which his false sense of manhood has for far too long been based.  

Martha appreciates that her husband, George, “keeps learning the games we play as quickly as I can change the rules” (79). These are games of wit where the stakes are often very personal. Jeane Luere notes the following dynamic between the pair.  

“In Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the interchange of George and Martha occurs on a plateau of hostility. Their bickering is incessant and shows an undeviating pattern of recrimination and one-upmanship. Yet their interchange appears successful” (Luere 51) 

Interchange is the perfect word because the couple are not only challenged, emotionally drained, and often insulted by one another, but they are also nourished, energized, and intoxicated by the games. For example, take Martha’s decision to humiliate George regarding the time she sucker punched him just after he wimped out of boxing her father (27-29). He retaliates by returning to the room with a shotgun, which he aims directly at her head before proceeding to pull the trigger. As C. W. Bigsby points out, “George and Martha uninhibitedly play out a personal ritual of violence and abuse which seems to stimulate them although it embarrasses their guests” (258). Indeed, George’s show of prowess makes Martha quite giddy and suddenly amorous towards him. Martha extracts reactions from her husband confident in the knowledge that she is setting the rules of engagement. However, this dynamic, which is so familiar and comforting to her, flips as the evening progresses.  

Three games are played over the course of the evening: “Humiliate the host,” followed by “Hump the Hostess,” and finally “Get the Guests.” George moves positions on the board of play from his first position as a reactive target, then moving on to being an indolent observer, and finally to assuming the crucial role of the active game master. His interactions with Nick reveal that he can expertly outmanoeuvre his opponent.  

George: “You realize, of course, that I’ve been drawing you [Nick] out on this stuff, not because I’m interested in your terrible lifehood, but only because you represent a direct and pertinent threat to my lifehood, and I want to get the goods on you.” (Albee 51).  

George uses all the sordid details about Honey’s pregnancy and her inherited wealth as a means of attacking Nick and putting the young stud back in his place. When Nick fails to perform sexually with Martha then he is further demoted from stud to gelding and finally to the humiliating role of houseboy. George’s up-until-then controlled masculine aggressiveness is unleashed when Martha mentions the book regarding his own parents’ tragic deaths, and his inability to get it published. He grabs her by the throat and proceeds to throttle her while calling her a “Satanic Bitch!” (61). The physical attack is shown to be futile because Nick quickly overpowers the older man into quiet submission. No, the older man must assert dominance in a different manner and show his assembled audience that it is his house and his rules. This is the denouement of the story, the wrapping up of loose ends that will herald a rebirth within the marriage.  

Albee highlights how the art of storytelling can be powerfully cathartic. As the story of Martha and George unfolds, one becomes progressively more unsure of the line between reality and fiction. For instance, George’s fantastic tale about the 16-year-old who accidentally shoots his mother and then kills his father in a car accident a year later (44-45). George quips “Truth and illusion. Who knows the difference, eh,” (83). The only certainty is that George and Martha had a private story about an incredibly special boy, their son, and Martha accidentally broke the golden rule of keeping him a secret. Bigsby writes that the final act of the play deals “with the ritualistic exorcism of all illusion” (260). George ‘kills’ their son as a necessary sacrifice because without the comfort of this illusion – their marriage is merely a sewer of infidelity, insults, and alcoholism. Cleansing their lives of unreality allows the shackles of pretence to dissolve. George no longer wears the cuckold’s horns since he has subjugated his guests and his wife. His masculinity is predominantly intellectual: the one who can outwit, out-talk, and outlast his enemies.  

Bigsby writes that according to Albee “far from facilitating human contact, illusions rather alienate individuals from one another and serve to emphasize their separation” (259). The play is, at its core, about making connections. Martha intuits that instead of hating her constant taunts, George needs them – “You can stand it!! You married me for it!! … My arm has gotten tired whipping you” (67). Martha calls forth the more dominant, territorial aspect of George’s personality – the spouse who will confidently lay claim to his wife. George displays masculinity in his own distinctive manner, but it is no less potent or effective. He sheds the horns of the cuckold as the couple finally retires to their bedroom, alone at last. Like the little piggies of the children’s story who found that houses of straw and sticks built only illusions of safety and that a brick house offered protection, George and Martha find solace only in their constant bond.  

Works Cited 

Albee, Edward. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Dramatists Play Service Inc., 2005.  

Bigsby, C. W. “‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ Edward Albee’s Morality Play.” Journal of American Studies, vol. 1, no. 2, 1967, pp. 257–68. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27552789. 

Flanagan, William. “The Art of Theater No. Edward Albee.” The Paris Review, Fall issue, 1966

Kimmel, Michael S. “The Cult of Masculinity: American Social Character and the Legacy of the Cowboy.” The History of Men, New York Press, 2005.

Luere, Jeane. “Terror and Violence in Edward Albee: From ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ To ‘Marriage Play.’” South Central Review, vol. 7, no. 1, 1990, pp. 50–58. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3189213.  

McEachern, Claire. “Why Do Cuckolds Have Horns?” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 4, 2008, pp. 607–31. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.1525/hlq.2008.71.4.607. 

Millington, Mark I., and Alison S. Sinclair. “The Honourable Cuckold: Models of Masculine Defence.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 29, no. 1, 1992, pp. 1–19. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40246813.