86 pages • 2 hours read
Edward AlbeeWho's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Edward AlbeeFiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1962A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Character Analysis
Martha
The text describes Martha as “a large boisterous woman, 52, looking somewhat younger. Ample, but not fleshy” (1). She is college-educated and intelligent, able to match wits with everyone present, but her dominating personality and headstrong nature have been liabilities rather than assets for her as a woman. Martha is hurt when George mocks her for “braying” (7) at the party, because she it is an attack on her femininity.
Martha’s father is the president of the university, and she loves and admires him as a powerful man, although George comments that he doesn’t really care about her. In a different time, Martha would have been her father’s heir apparent to eventually run the university, but as a woman in the early 1960s, the possibility doesn’t even come up. She decides to do the next best thing and marry someone who can become her father and is disappointed when George, who she did legitimately fall in love with, is not as driven as she is.
Martha tortures and emasculates George for his lackluster ambition and career. The illusion of their son has turned into a delusion for Martha, and she looks for her son’s affection and love in her husband and then Nick to legitimize herself as a woman. When George kills the illusion, she feels afraid and vulnerable.
George
Described as, “her husband, 46. Thin; hair going gray” (1), George is six years younger than Martha and struggles to assert his masculinity. George is a history professor who has maintained his job through academic nepotism while simultaneously blaming his lack of success on his marriage to the daughter of the university president. George laments that he spent four years as the head of the department during the war, but because no one died, the position was taken away when the war ended, though if George had been an effective leader, four years would have been enough of a precedent to justify keeping him in the role.
George lashes out at Martha for making him feel like less of a man, although he often fights her by making her feel like less of a woman. George may have accidentally killed his mother with a shotgun and his father in a car accident. Martha suggests that it may have been intentional, if it happened at all, although the play doesn’t distinguish fully between truth and lies about their lives. When George attributes the story to an old friend, he says that the teen (16 at the time of the accident) spent the next 30 years in a mental hospital, which would make him the same age as George. George may not be in a literal hospital, but he is in a warped, delusional construction of a life. He decides to kill off their fake son as one more strike in the ongoing war of his marriage, but the removal of that illusion brings them back to reality, as terrified as they both are of it.
Honey
Honey is “26, a petite blond girl, rather plain” (1). She comes off as a bland, anxious person with a malleable personality. Even her name suggests an overly saccharine sweetness without substance, a nickname that replaces her unknown real name and redefines her as a wife instead of an individual person. However, she reveals a manipulative steeliness throughout the text.
The subject of children is a contentious point in Honey and Nick’s marriage. They married because of a hysterical pregnancy, which means that the illusion of pregnancy was so strong that she developed symptoms that disappeared once they were married, and she no longer needed the imaginary pregnancy. In fact, Honey admits to George that she doesn’t want children. It’s unclear whether Nick knows this or if she has been, as George accuses, giving herself secret home abortions (abortion was illegal in 1962). Honey gets drunk, vomits, and then goes back for more. The revelation of the truth threatens to break apart her marriage, but Honey chooses instead to propagate the illusion, even to the point of declaring that she does want to have a baby.
Nick
Nick, 30, is Honey’s husband: “Blond, well put-together, good looking.” He is also a new professor in the university’s Biology Department. Martha sees him as a paragon of potential. She invites Nick and Honey over after the faculty party, despite the late hour, under the guise of her father’s request that Martha be nice to the new couple. What seems more likely, however, is that Martha, who felt the relationship “snap” at the party while watching her husband amid the young men present, chose the most ideal specimen of manhood so she could rub him in her husband’s face.
Martha seduces Nick to show George that she could be with a man who meets her standards if she chose. Nick, however, is overly confident and has allowed the predictions of his potential to inflate his ego. He has even based his research on a methodology that would ultimately allow the creation of more people just like himself, e.g., eugenics.
Nick allows himself to be seduced, not only because Martha is sexier and more exciting than his wife, but also because he sees Martha as an opportunity to advance his career. This backfires immediately, however. Martha’s respect for him disappears, and George revels in the emasculation. Nick leaves with Honey, who has decided to pretend that the evening never happened, which is his best hope of suppressing the devastating revelations that came forward over the course of the night.
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By Edward Albee
