Edward Albee’s Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?: a play on fear
Carlos
Rubio Alcalá
Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? is
probably the best known play by Edward Albee. As with most great literary
pieces, we can approach this book from many different points of view, from many
perspectives. Among these approaches, one of the most interesting is, in my
opinion, that of fear. Not only is the theme of fear important in the way the
author treats it, but a true comprehension of the play requires some
consideration on this point. Even the title itself gives us the first word related
to fear we shall encounter: afraid. The
author cleverly plays with the frightening sense he can provoke to the audience
or the reader, and undoubtely, the characters act and react in lots of times
because they are afraid of something. We shall distinguish three different
kinds of fear we shall follow throughout the three acts: social fear, fear
among the characters and fear to the audience.
Social fear
This first type is the
most important in the first act. Social fear is the one that forces Nick and
Honey to go to Martha and George’s appartment despite being very late in
the night, because Nick wants to cause a
good impression on George at the beginning. It is social fear again what makes
George incapable of facing another meeting the same night he has been with his
father-in-law and all the other professors. We can find some examples from the
text: “GUESTS! [...]. Why in God’s name
are they coming over here now?” (p. 13-14). We see social fear in the way
George has reacted to the song “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf”, true leitmotiv
of the play: he does not seem to like it very much, but he has thought that he
must at least smile.
It is important not to
confuse social fear with politeness. The way Albee presents these reactions of
his characters has, I think, something disturbing that makes the whole subject
more important, and deeper than a simple question of being rude or polite.
Honey gives us a good example of this:
We
had to make our own way... I had to go up to wives... in the library, or at the
supermarket... and say “Hello, I’m new here... you must be Mrs So-and-so,
Doctor So-and-so’s wife”. It really wasn’t very nice at all. (p. 23)
It is a
matter of survival, of being accepted in a hostile social world the do not even
want to live in.
A scene in which fear is
almost tangible is that in which Honey and Nick arrive at George and Martha’s
home: “Perhaps we shouldn’t have come”,
“It is late”, “I told you we shouldn’t have come” (p. 20). It is as though they,
specially Nick, were foreseeing the terrible night to come.
Each character shows in
a different way to be socially frightened. They form a kind of scale in which
we find Honey in the first place. She is the shyest, the best-tempered, the one
who cannot stand alcohol for long, and the one who hides her fear with
politness: “Oh, isn’t this lovely!”,
“Ohhhhhhhhh! He’s a wonderful man”
(p. 23). The next one in this scale would probably be Nick, whose good manners
are actually hypocrisy. At the same time, or precisely because of that, he
becomes a different person when he gets rid of his hypocrisy, of his social
fear (a point we shall discuss later): he turns to be a proud, almost violent
man. George has got a lot to be afraid of. He does not want his guests to know
about his “son” and his eerie past. In fact, there is no reason why his guests
should be aware of those facts, but Martha might tell them. For the character
George fears the most is, finally, his wife. The way George uses to express his
social fear is violence and sarcasm. The way he makes fun of Nick (“How about... uh... a quietly noisy relaxed
intensity”, p. 21) is actually, as we discover afterward, fear for what the
young man represents as a scientist, a member of the universitary community and
even a threat to his marriage. The most extreme character in this sense is
Martha, wickedly amused with all those “Fun and Games” that give name to the
first act. Perhaps she is the one least concerned by this social fear, as well
as Honey, who is not very aware of the situation. Men are here the main
contenders. Who’s afraid of Virginia
Woolf? is a play in which every characters feels very lonely, because they
are so different, and social fear is the way they best express that loneliness.
Another important point
in which we may study fear in Who’s
afraid of Virginia Woolf are stage directions, given by the writer as a
guide for actors and stage managers. We shall consider them, because it is
through their gestures and tones of voice where we may find the largest number
of indications about fear. Examples are countless: “ostensibly a pleased recognition of HONEY and NICK, but really
satisfactionat having MARTHA’s explosion overheard” (p. 19), “without expression”, “perfunctorily”, “to save the situation” (p. 20), “Not enough enthusiasm” (p. 23), “with an edge in his voice” (p. 26), “feigned awe” (p. 27), and so on.
The last point
concerning social fear is its dissapearance. This fact is closely related to
the ingestion of liquors. The more alcohol goes in, the less social fear
remains to go out. At the end of the first act, characters have fought and said
so many horrible things to each other that being polite or being afraid of
doing or saying something wrong is something of the past. As we have pointed
out, Nick changes a lot at this point, and so does his wife. In the last
moments, with the last revelations made by Martha, the returning of the song
“Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?”, and the imminent sickness of Honey, social
fear is replaced by other kinds of it.
Fear among characters
Characters in Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf? threaten
each other, use fear as a mean to achieve their objectives and make fun of
seeing the others fall in terror.
The first of these
scenes happens when the women left the men alone. Suddendly, George’s attitude
towards Nick changes, making him look like an almost threatening presence that
insults Nick to get him angry: “You just
finished saying that the things that motivated you were the things that motivated
me” (p. 26), “I’m very mistrustful”
(p. 29), “Your wife doesn’t have any hips”
(p. 30). Nick’s reaction is anger, as expected: “All right... what do you want me to say? Do you want me to say it’s
funny, so you can contradict me and say it’s sad? [...]. You can play that damn
little game any way you want to” (p. 26).
One of the greatest
moments of fear in the play is when George takes out a shotgun and fires it
against Martha’s head. In fact it is only a toy gun, but it creates a climate
of horror in the anticipation of the terrible act. This part of the play is
rich in vocabulary related to fear and fright: “I’ve never been so frightened... never” (p. 41), “You’ve got quite a... terrifying husband”
(p. 43), “I know when I’m being
threatened” (p. 47). The strained environment makes Nick lose his nerves: “I’m going to be a personal screwing machine!”
(p. 47), “CAN... IT... MISTER” (p.
59). We reach the end of the first act with a new source of fear: Martha, who
finally frightens her husband with the story of their son, creating an
impressive climax. Honey is the only character who cannot provoke fear to the
others, but once she recovers from her drunken state, she suffers it more than
the rest of them.
It is in the second act,
“Walpurgisnacht”, when the confrontation between these four people reaches its
maximum. The title of this second act is not casual, of course. The Night of
Walpurgis, usually celebrated on April 30th, is the most important celebration
in witchcraft, a night in which wraiths, demons or ghosts are thought to be
specially powerful. It is clear then that the dramatist guides us again into a
world of fear.
The “fun and games” have
become a “Walpurgisnacht” because of the cruel game Martha and George have
played, as Nicks says: “I just don’t see
why you feel you have to sibject other people to it.” (p. 59). There is a
truce in the dialogue between George and Nick in which social relationships
seem to go back to an apparent normality; however, the situation cannot last
for long: when Martha and Honey return from the bathroom, the Walpurgisnacht
continues. It is George now who starts talking about his son, accusing Martha
of having forced their child to leave. We shall not extract every moment in
which the text uses words from the lexical field of fear and violence, but
there are many more examples in the following pages: “threateningly” (p. 79), “I’LL
KILL YOU” (p. 83), and specially the stage directions: “some terror” (p. 88), “hysteria”, “outlandish horror” (p. 89).
As we have already
pointed out how the different characters act and react with the fear that
appears among them, we shall just resume the subject with some quotations from
the play. In the case of Honey, once she recovers from her sickness, terror
goes on, harder than ever. Apart from the phrases above, there are at least a
couple more: “confused and frightened”
(p. 104), “... and it FRIGHTENED ME!”
(p. 105). Martha and George threaten each other about their imaginary son and
Nick gets alternatively violent, sick or somebody to be afraid of.
In the third act, “The
Exorcism”, fear is less importnat, as it is substituted by madness,
disappointment, and the final explanations, which bring a true relief for the
audience or the reader. Thus, this “fear among characters” we have been explaining
disappears at the end. The main fear scene in the third act is Martha’s
reaction to the overwhelming revelation made by her husband that, as she has
broken the rule about not speaking about him, their son must be dead at last: “[quivering with rage and loss]: NO! NO! YOU
CANNOT DO THAT! YOU CAN’T DECIDE THAT FOR YOURSELF! I WILL NOT LET YOU DO THAT”
(p. 135). Nick also reacts with horror to the fact that the son he has been
hearing about the whole night does not physically exist on the one hand
(although it might be argued that he is quite real for his “parents”), and that
his death can be used in such a terrible way to attack Martha: “[violently]: JESUS CHRIST I THINK I
UNDERSTAND THIS!” (p. 137).
The title of the third
act is not chosen by chance, either. With the disappearance of the son and his
sinister presence between George and Martha, and over Nick and Honey, the
exorcism is now complete, the Walpurgisnacht has finally come to an end (“It will be dawn soon”, p. 138), and with
the Latin prayer (“Requiem aeternam dona
eis, Domine. [...] Et lux perpetua luceat eis”, p. 138), ghosts are casted out,
and fear ends at last.
Fear to the audience
This kind of fear is not
as significative as the other two. It refers to the moments in which the
audience may feel afraid of what happens on stage. It depends on each person’s
sensitivity to the play, identification with the characters, or on how good the
staging is. In general, fear intended to the audience matches either social
fear or fear among characters. Some moments in which this type of fear is
produced are the shotgun scene in the first act, the song “Who’s afraid of
Virginia Woolf” in climatic moments of the play, and the behaviour the characters
show after the death of the boy.
All this exposition has
led us to support our starting point of view that understanding Who’s afarid of Virginia Woolf? means
understanding that the origin of the tension the play provokes is very
concerned with fear. The tension is
undeniable given the real relief we feel to see Martha and George go to bed at
the end. Besides, through the study of fear, we have met other important
aspects of the play, such as subjects of the plot or linguistic ones, what may
have given us a glimpse of the many themes and features we can find in this
play by Edward Albee.