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.
Themes
The Nuclear Family
Popular representations of the family on American television in the 1950s and early 60s depicted masculine men who put on suits and went to work to support the family, attractive but conservative young housewives who cooked, cleaned, and raised approximately two happy, well-fed children, who sometimes got into wholesome scrapes but loved their parents. This vision models a family unit that sustains the structures of capitalism, consumerism, and whiteness. However, the culturally popularized vision of the sanitized nuclear family is a fiction that sets the standards for the public display of family and purposefully obscures domestic struggle and disputes. George and Martha presumably perform differently in public than they do at home. By inviting Honey and Nick into the privacy of their home, George and Martha are inviting them to witness the private dysfunction of their marriage.
The play suggests that that the idealized nuclear family is imaginary. Those who seem to outwardly conform to its structure are simply better at concealing their secrets. George and Martha are plagued by the disappointments of their life together and the ways that they have failed to rise to the expected standards of the nuclear family. Neither fits the strict gender roles that they are supposed to fulfill. George has hit the ceiling of his career, which is lower than either of them had hoped, making him an inadequate breadwinner. Martha grew up with a powerful father as her only parent, and she is direct and headstrong woman who decided that the closest she could get to becoming her father was to marry someone who could become her father. She fell in love with George, who will never be her father, and she will never be the perfect housewife. Finally, they were unable to have children. Notably, neither blames the other for infertility. Instead, they blame each other for the imaginary actions that have driven their imaginary child away. They still use their pretend child as a weapon against each other, seeming to have come to an agreement to treat fantasy as reality.
Unlike George and Martha, Nick and Honey don’t have passion or desire in their marriage, but they are certainly more polite to each other. They seem on the surface to be what George and Martha were unable to attain, or to at least have the potential to become the model family. They are also childless, but they are still young enough to have the potential for children. Nick is in an early stage of his career, but his ideas are already turning heads. Martha invites them over to make George feel inadequate, but they end up unraveling and showing that they are dysfunctional too. The importance of the nuclear family is what led to their marriage in the first place. Under the belief that Honey was pregnant, Nick had the choice of either marrying her or creating a child outside of marriage who would forever destroy his chances to have a nuclear family with someone else. His marriage is for appearances and offers very little obstacle to Nick cheating with Martha, or eventually perhaps even more faculty wives. The play indicates that the pursuit of the ideal family is absurd because it’s an empty gesture to appeal to social norms, which are ultimately meaningless.
The Tension Between Generations
Martha invites Nick and Honey over for drinks after the party to remind George of the ways he falls short. Martha sees George as someone who is past his prime, both personally and professionally, and she blames him for her lost youth as well. Nick, unlike George, is the kind of man who her father takes an interest in. Martha describes George as “bogged down in the History Department” and mocks him as “an old bog” (50). She is calling him and his discipline stagnant and outmoded. In contrast, Martha is only complimentary once she learns that Nick is in the Biology Department (not Math, as she previously believed). As much as Martha hates to be wrong, she immediately pleased and says, “Biology is even better…it’s right at the meat of things” (63). George sees Nick as a danger, someone who is young and arrogant, threatening to change the world for the worse because he is ignorant of history. Nick, on the other hand, sees George as irrelevant because Nick believes the people who tell him he is the wave of the future. George and Nick represent a clash between the old and the new, a clash that people in the United States were dealing with on a much larger scale in the early 1960s.
The atomic bombs that ended World War II in 1945 were a mark of scientific advancement with horrific consequences. Around 200,000 people died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the United States dropped the bombs, most of them civilians. At the time of the play, in 1962, the United States had lived under the threat of the Cold War and nuclear annihilation for nearly two decades. George is well-educated, and he may not have made the prominent career for himself that Martha wants, but he is not faking his expertise in history. Nick’s idea for chromosomal manipulation has superficial appeal but immediately calls to mind the eugenicist projects of the Third Reich, history with which George would have been familiar.
George’s fears aren’t rooted in nuclear anxiety or eugenics, however. He fears being edged out by people who are younger and shinier. This is why it’s such an effective threat for Martha to make in their marriage. George sees himself being relegated to history, replaced by Nick, a younger, healthier specimen. This calls to mind the play’s Oedipal allusions: the father figure George fears the son figure Nick who is sexually drawn to the mother figure Martha.
Blurring Lines Between Truth and Illusion
George tells Nick, “Truth and illusion. Who knows the difference, eh, toots?” (201) George and Martha have been living by the adage that there is no difference between truth and illusion, and they treat the illusions that they have constructed as significant and substantial as real life. Truth and illusion merge until it’s impossible to be sure which is which. For instance, George and Martha’s names are allusions to George and Martha Washington. The use of their names in the play suggest that Albee is using his absurd domestic drama to subtly interrogate the founding myths of the United States.
George’s story about the boy who accidentally kills his parents may or may not be his own, but it’s never entirely clear. He disassociates himself from the incidents by attributing them first to an old friend and then to characters in a novel. George is mortified when Martha insists on telling their guests that it happened to him. Furthermore, alcohol is a constant presence, adding another layer of distortion by altering the characters’ perceptions, emotions, and reactions.
Both couples have experienced an imaginary child. For Honey, it was a hysterical pregnancy. For Honey, this proves to be less a manifestation of the desire for a child than of the urgent need to appear to. Honey and Nick are invested in lying to themselves and each other. In the third act, despite her earlier confession to George that she doesn’t want kids, Honey announces that she does want a child, which will allow her to preserve the illusion of her marriage.
George and Martha’s imaginary son is an illusion that they can only maintain by keeping it a secret. It’s unclear how long ago they created the fantasy, which has only exacerbated Martha’s longing to be a mother. The lines have blurred between reality and fantasy until they each become the parent and a substitute for the child simultaneously, no matter how this alcohol-enhanced haziness creates an unhealthy and borderline incestuous dynamic. Martha reverts to baby-talk to get what she wants from George. George describes her alcohol-soaked attempts to force affection on their fake son, which are most likely moments that he has experienced. George muddles this even more when he addresses Nick as their son after Martha has just (maybe or maybe not) had sex with him. Additionally, they project their own problems with each other onto their son. George’s failures and Martha’s drunkenness are corroborated by a fake child. And George’s fake death for the boy echoes his own possibly real story of the car crash that killed his father. But because the line between illusion and truth has been purposely blurred, an imaginary death is just as painful as a real one.
Unlock all 86 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Edward Albee
