"Cliff Notes - Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

^^^^^^^^^^WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: MARTHA

Martha is the daughter of the college president, and one of the great conflicts of her life is that while she reveres her father, he seems to have no great love for her.

Intelligent, well-read, and perceptive, Martha hides her intellectual gifts beneath a brassy, aggressive, and vulgar exterior. She tries to dominate and control her husband for two reasons: she resents his inability to fill her father's role, both professionally and psychologically; and George seems to enjoy the role of victim to her torturer.

Martha battles almost continuously with George as an act of attempted communication. Faced with lives filled with self-loathing, they punish each other at the same time they wish to connect. Both drink heavily, and Martha seduces a number of younger men. A self-styled "earth mother," Martha admits that these encounters are unsatisfying; the only man who has given her true satisfaction is George. But it's one of the tragic ironies of the play that their mutual need can never be expressed to each other.

Only when George successfully ends their fantasy of having a child does Martha admit a vulnerability and a fear of the future that she has not revealed before, but what lies ahead for her and George remains ambiguous.

Like George, Martha's name is perhaps meant to evoke Martha Washington, the wife of George Washington. Together they can be seen as offering a wry commentary on the "perfect American couple."

^^^^^^^^^^WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: NICK

One of George and Martha's guests, Nick is young (30), attractive, and physically fit. A biology professor, new to the faculty, Nick seems the ideal man, but he eventually reveals himself to have a hollow center. He is amoral, shallow, coldly ambitious. His plans to get ahead at the college include sleeping with "pertinent" faculty wives.

His willingness to be seduced by Martha, despite the presence of his wife and George, is evidence of his cynicism and lack of morals. But underneath the macho exterior is a weak and crass human being. He is impotent in his sexual encounter with Martha, and he admits to having married Honey because he thought she was pregnant and because her father was wealthy.

Nick's profession as a biologist is contrasted to George's as a historian. Biology in the play is viewed as the science whose practitioners are determined to toy with human genetics in order to create a race of perfect human beings. Nick therefore suggests the results of these experiments, the "wave of the future"--attractive on the outside, empty within.

Nick is the one character who comes to understand that George and Martha's son is an imaginary creation, and his half hearted attempt to help ("I'd like to...") suggests to some that the evening spent with George and Martha has changed him. But Albee gives no further clues as to what the future holds for Nick and Honey.

Nick's name may suggest an old-fashioned term for the devil ("Old Nick"). Whether he's meant to represent a literal evil that invades George and Martha's household, or perhaps the evil of the future, is open to debate. Some readers believe his name refers to Nikita Khrushchev, the premier of the Soviet Union at the time the play was written. Thus, Nick's confrontations with George may suggest East vs. West, the energetic threat of Communism in contrast to decaying American ideals.

^^^^^^^^^^WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: HONEY

Nick's wife, Honey, 26, is, on the surface, sweet, gentle, eager to make a good impression, and prudish. She is also unable to handle her liquor, so her contributions to the conversation are minor at best. Her mindlessness turns out to reveal an inability to cope with reality.

Honey shows herself on one level to be the eternal child. She defers to her husband, is easily offended, gives in to frequent bouts of vomiting. Yet, in the course of the play she also reveals complex emotions. The daughter of a moderately famous preacher who left her a sizable amount of money, Honey was apparently pregnant when she married Nick, but the pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm. Since then she has skillfully concealed from Nick her efforts to prevent a pregnancy. Her use of secret birth control devices reveals a deep-seated fear of having a child--and a fear of growing up. Martha's beautiful descriptions of her own "son" bring out Honey's maternal instincts, but whether these desires are fleeting or permanent cannot be determined within the context of the play.

Honey's name suggests the cloying sweetness that is her exterior--and also the sense that a little of her goes a long way. Some readers feel that "Honey" is not her real name, but merely the affectionate and condescending tag Nick has given her.


^^^^^^^^^^WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: SETTING

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is set in the fictitious New England college town of New Carthage. The name of the town suggests the ancient civilization of Carthage, which for nearly 1,500 years (from the 8th century B.C. to the 7th century A.D.) was the most important settlement west of Egypt on the northern coast of Africa. Carthage was settled by the Phoenicians, a people known for their seafaring and commerce, in the 9th century B.C. Over the next several centuries, Carthage was able to hold its own in battles with Greece, but a series of conflicts with Rome in the third and second centuries B.C., known as the Punic Wars, proved to be the downfall of the Carthaginians. The Romans permanently conquered Carthage in 146 B.C. and, as was their custom, sowed the vanquished's land with salt, to prevent fertile growth for years to come.

Albee's decision to name the play's college town after a vanished civilization (which was known for its artistic achievement as well as its military power) clearly invites parallels to our own contemporary civilization. America may not be destroyed by another country, as Carthage was (although that possibility exists), but it may meet its downfall through internal corruption and spiritual emptiness. That Carthage was made literally sterile by Roman salt also links that ancient city symbolically with New Carthage, a city made figuratively sterile by shoddy morals and hollow values. (New Carthage also is the home of George and Martha, sterile because they can have no children.)

Placing New Carthage in New England ironically links the setting of the play to one of its themes, "American values." New England was a birthplace of America's freedom and has long been considered a stronghold of solid American values. By setting a play that analyzes the corruption of some of these values in an area long identified with them, Albee emphasizes the difference between what these values were and what they have become.

Further irony is to be found in Albee's choice of an academic setting for the play. One would think that a college town would be a place of learning, achievement, and sophisticated culture. Instead, Albee shows us a hotbed of lust, deception, and sadness, with people who are motivated in large part by greed and self-interest.

Confirming the play's setting to one room (the living room of George and Martha) establishes an enclosed, claustrophobic feeling, as if the characters are trapped with each other. Even when they leave to go to another room, they return to this arena where the battles of the play rage.

When Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was originally produced on Broadway, the set was described by the play's director, Alan Schneider, as follows: "It seems real... but it's not real. It has all kinds of angles and planes that you wouldn't ordinarily have, and strong distortions." Schneider said, and others have agreed, that the play could be done on an abstract (nonrealistic) set, such as an all-white space. Such a set would heighten the sense that the play is not strictly realistic, but has overtones of the Theater of the Absurd.

^^^^^^^^^^WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?: THEMES

Here are some of the major and minor themes of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The themes often overlap and support one another in ways that make the play complex and richly textured.