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Right at the Meat of

Things: Virginia Woolf in
Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?
JENNIFER GILCHRIST

Hunter College of The City University of New York,

New York, USA
Available online: 21 Sep 2011

To cite this article: JENNIFER GILCHRIST (2011): Right at the Meat of Things:
Virginia Woolf in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , Women's Studies, 40:7, 853-872
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00497878.2011.603609

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Womens Studies, 40:853872, 2011

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 0049-7878 print / 1547-7045 online
DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2011.603609

RIGHT AT THE MEAT OF THINGS: VIRGINIA WOOLF IN

WHOS AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
JENNIFER GILCHRIST

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Hunter College of The City University of New York, New York

MARTHA (Sings, conducts with her drink in her hand. HONEY joins in toward
the end): Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf,
Virginia Woolf,
Virginia Woolf,
Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf. . . .
(MARTHA and HONEY laugh; Nick smiles)
HONEY: Oh wasnt that funny? That was so funny. . . .
NICK (snapping to): Yes . . . yes, it was.
MARTHA: I thought Id bust a gut; I really did. . . . I really thought Id bust
a gut laughing. George didnt like it. . . . George didnt think it was funny
at all. (25)

In this exchange from Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the women

very much enjoy the academic joke that comes to be associated
with Martha, Nick responds politely to it, and George resists it. The
gender split in reactionsMarthas bust[ing] a gut laughing
at the song and Georges not think[ing] it was funny at all
exemplify both the sex war depicted in Whos Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? and Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as an entry in the sex
war imagined outside of the play. Central to this battle is Virginia
Woolf herself. Edward Albee rewrites and expands Woolfs minor
short story Lappin and Lapinova from the dominant male point
of view, ultimately restoring reason and the phallus to Woolfs
vision of female imagination. As Albee pits sane male rationality against neurotic female fantasy, he counters his conception
of a feminized, corrupt, European modernism with a masculinized American neo-realism. Albee uses wordplay and fantasy in
Virginia Woolf to present as madness the female imagination that
Address correspondence to Jennifer Gilchrist, 311 Hancock St., Brooklyn, NY 11216.
E-mail: jengilchrist@gmail.com

853

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in Lappin and Lapinova is the jouissance of female empowerment. In doing so, Albee creates an unsettling work of art out of
feminine-associated semiotics, which he subverts with rigid, maledominated moralityor what Julia Kristeva and Hln Cixous call
the Law of the Father. Male representations of truth battle female
erotic fantasy, and the result is a fierce power struggle: GEORGE:
Total War? MARTHA: Total (159).
Scholars have long recognized Albees use of Lappin and
Lapinova. In 1967, Martha J. Johnson argued that the short story
provided the framework for Albees play. Two years later, Gretl K.
Fischer noted the similarities between short story and play, which
she uses as a springboard for her comparison of Virginia Woolf
and To the Lighthouse. Jenijoy La Belle, in 1976, pointed out the
connection in Explicator . In 1995, Bonnie Blumenthal Finkelstein
compared play and short story to draw the most striking parallel between Albees Martha and Woolfs Rosalind, that both are
childless women trapped in the traditional housewife role, with
nothing to do all day. In this intertextuality Finkelstein reads so
much authorial sympathy for Martha that she concludes, Perhaps
Albee is suggesting that if Martha were to pattern her life on
the productivity of Woolfs own, more than on Woolfs characters, she would no longer have to fear Virginia Woolf at all (66).
Of these critics, only Jerre Collins and Raymond Wilson III view
Albee as responding in contention to Woolf. Including Lappin
in their 1993 discussion of various literary sources for the play,
Collins and Wilson assert, we see Albees originality in the intensity of his reply to previous texts, especially to Woolfs, for he
does not passively reuse or recast her storys ideas of a couple
who substituted fantasy for intimacy, and of a male partner who
destroys the illusionary world by fantasy killing. Instead, Albee
replies. Albees reply transforms the killing off of the imaginary
character from a destructive act to a redemptive movement toward
possible intimacy (67). Like Collins and Wilson, I read Albees
project in Virginia Woolf as attempting a corrective to Lappin and
Lapinovabut the possible intimacy the play engenders comes
at the cost of both Martha and the second-wave feminist worldview
she, and Virginia Woolf, come to represent.
Albees play and Woolfs short story are not evenly matched:
Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) is Albees first full-length
play and his first to be performed on Broadway; Lappin and

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Lapinova (1938) is a minor, overlooked short story. Both Virginia

Woolf and Lappin center on marriages, which have private, fantasy lives that become psychologically important to the wives. In
both works, the husbands are reserved and practical, and the wives
are passionate and emotional.1 Both short story and play request
empathy for the character who shares the authors gender, and
this implicit readerprotagonist affinity is predicated on outsider
status: in Lappin, Rosalind is an orphan; in Virginia Woolf , the
orphan is George. The husband in each work kills the fantasy
between him and his wife. In Lappin, however, the marriage
does not survive the killing of the fantasy; in Virginia Woolf , the
act is an exorcism that allows the marriage to save itself, with
the wife brought under the husbands newfound control. Both
Rosalind and George seem to ascribe to what Sophie Marret calls
the myth of the existence of an all-powerful other (97). For
Rosalind, the all-powerful other is her husband Ernest with his
patriarchal birthrights of lineage and phallus (Campbell 77),
albeit a phallus that is ultimately sex-denying; for George, the allpowerful other is his wife Martha with her privileged academic
position as the daughter of the president of the college and with
her voracious and demanding sexual appetite. Sex and power are
the crux of the matter in both works: whether sex supports or
subverts the dominant power structure and what constitutes that
dominant power structure are points of contention between the
texts.
The plays artistry arises from the tension between the semiotic and symbolic modalities of language, which Albee, anticipating Julia Kristevas psycho-linguistic theories, depicts as gendered.
In Revolution in Poetic Language, 1974, Kristevas dissertationturned-work-of-psycho-linguistic-cultural-theory, Kristeva bases the
semiotic chora on the mothers body and calls the symbolic
the phallic function (Revolution 47). The semiotic chora generates no meaning between sign and signifier but is instead
the articulation of oral and anal drives. Developing after the
1
Although Stephen J. Bottoms asserts that the best performances of Virginia Woolf
share an avoidance of the gender-stereotyped dialectic between over-emotional female and
over-rational, calculating male, he nevertheless begrudgingly quotes Albee (presumably
from a private interview with Bottoms) as saying, Marthas always intuitive and instinctual, and George is always more controlled and intellectual. Everybody plays it that way.
You have to. Thats the way its written. (Qtd in Bottoms 143).

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semiotic in the speaking subject, the symbolic produces grammatical rules. The two modalities coexist in dynamic tension through
the thetic, or deepest structure of the possibility of enunciation
(Revolution 44). Every speaking subject, whether male or female,
uses both modalities of the semiotic and symbolic. Yet gendered,
the semiotic and symbolic are drawn from persistent stereotypes
of wild, erratic women vs. a masculine rationality that has always
privileged reason, order, unity and lucidity (Moi 159).2 The gender stereotypes that inform Kristevas ideas of the semiotic and
symbolic mirror the gender politics of Whos Afraid of Virginia
Woolf? However, Kristevas dissertation and Albees play have very
different political ends: Kristeva champions the feminine semiotic and the modernist art that reveals its ruptures, whereas Albee
uses the boundary-breaking of the semiotic to give his play transgressive power while ultimately privileging symbolic realism. This
tension explains why, as Bottoms notes, Albees play on one hand
was seen in some quarters as a threat to traditional, patriarchally
ordered gender roles and by other critics as wish-fulfillment for
the authors fear and hatred of women (100101). Kristevas psychoanalytic linguistic theories reveal textual strategies in Virginia
Woolf because playwright and theorist appear to share certain
assumptions about the relationships between men, women, language, and art found, in the 1960s and early 1970s, respectively, in
both rear-guard sexism and second-wave feminism.
In one sense the dynamic between the semiotic and the
symbolic reflects the sex war between Martha and Georgewith
Martha as the dominant semiotic and George as the symbolic
struggling to reassert itself. Georges psychological journey in
the play is compatible with David Savrans understanding of the
besieged hero in Arthur Millers dramatic world: Relentlessly, it

2
These gender stereotypes are exactly what Moi argues Kristeva is not proposing: to
Moi, Kristevas linguistic stress on the semiotic is liberating for women not because it
unleashes the irrationality, chaos and fragmentation that has come to represent femininity (159), but because it erases gender differentiation: Any strengthening of the semiotic,
which knows no sexual difference, must therefore lead to a weakening of traditional gender divisions, not at all to a reinforcement of traditional notions of femininity (164). Moi
refers to the fact that the semiotic is psycho-developmentally pre-Oedipal. But nonetheless,
as in Kristevas inheritance of Freuds penis envy and castration theories, Kristeva appears
to me as being of her time in accepting and inadvertently promoting psycho-developmental
gender differences.

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[Millers work] associates the persecuted hero, fighting for victory against a battalion of suffocating and destructive forces, with
an embattled virility (26). In this view, Martha is the creativedestruction force of Acts I and II, which George conquers in
Act III.
In another sense, the semiotic-symbolic tension mirrors the
relationship between the tight, labeled, three-part, symbolic structure of the play and the semiotic sexual and violent drives represented within the acts contents. Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
thematically reproduces the war between the semiotic and the
symbolic that underlies all occurrences of language: the threepart structure, organized with act titles that name the action
Fun and Games, Walpurigsnacht, and The Exorcismreflects
symbolic, logo-centric control. Together, the first two acts reproduce what Kristeva calls the semiotics breach of the symbolic in so-called poetic practice (Revolution 62). The title of
Act II reflects this breach: Walpurigsnacht, denotes a Witches
Sabbath and connotes nightmarish wildness. Marthas ascendance
in Walpurignacht thus corresponds to Kristevas understanding
of the definition of female in male-dominated societies: woman
is a specialist in the unconscious, a witch, a baccanalian, taking
her jouissance in an anti-Apollonian, Dionysian orgy (Chinese
Women 154). Kristeva argues that the Western artist needs this
image of woman as the unconscious, subterranean truth outside of
the patriarchy in order to create the art that subsumes that truth
into the Truth of patriarchal, linear order. This process of wildfemale representation and absorption characterizes the trajectory
of Albees play, although the title of the third act is somewhat inaccurate: Georges Exorcism, as we will see, does not exorcise this
Dionysian spirit as much as his ritual re-represses it.
Threats of dissolution drive Acts I and II of Virginia Woolf.
Rhythms and repetition subvert logo-centric control. The song of
the title, sung six times to the tune of Whos Afraid of the Big,
Bad Wolf? and Marthas invocation of a English nursery rhyme
when she calls George Poor Georgie-Porgie, put-upon-pie! (12)
serve as examples of what Julia Kristeva calls the chora, [which] as
rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality and temporality (Revolution 26). The incessant
drinking represented in the play further lends itself to the degeneration of logical order. Kristeva notes that the Dionysian festivals

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in Greece are the most striking example of this deluge of the signifier, which so inundates the symbolic order that it portends the
latters dissolution in a dancing, singing, and poetic animality
(79). Alcohol then as a conduit to the pre-language chora has a
long literary lineage, from which Albee draws. A dancing, singing,
and poetic animality sums up Acts I and II. Taken as a whole, the
dominance of the semiotic in the first two acts of the play mirrors the predominant narrative technique of Woolfs later works.
Makiko Minow-Pinkney thus describes the relationship between
the semiotic and the symbolic found in Woolfs Between the Acts,
1941: The text is a litter of word-plays, of recollected fragments
of poems, snatches of nursery rhymes which [. . .] cannot shape
themselves into any kind of elegant whole. [. . .] The symbolic
function of language is subordinated to the semiotic, to a more
primitive play and pleasure of the signifier (174). In Fun and
Games and Walpurgisnacht, Albees replication of Woolfs style
maintains its chaotic, transgressive power.
As a caricature of Woolf, Martha uses language vaguely,
reflecting the semiotic, while predicating her dominance on an
assumed phallic power: prior to the start of the play, she took,
and landed, a swing on Georges jaw that knocked him over; she
can drink [George] under any goddamn table (16); and, by her
own assessment, she wears the pants in this house because somebodys got to (157). In Freudian terms, Martha acts like the girl
who may refuse to accept the fact of being castrated, may harden
herself in the conviction that she does possess a penis and may
subsequently be compelled to behave as though she were a man
(Freud 188). Neither Woolf nor Martha understands her gender
as necessitating her deference or submission. In Kristevan terms,
Martha is a woman who displays a resistance to the discovery of
castration (thereby maintaining the phallic mother who usurps
the place of the Other) (Revolution 63). I am the Earth Mother,
and youre all flops (189), Martha announces to Nick. Its a funny
linethe Earth Mother, in almost anyones conception of her,
would not need or be able to name herselfand it points to the
cross-purposes of Marthas sexual and castrating powers.
In her strength and her destruction, Martha embodies a traditional, albeit complicated, male fear of women. Griselda Pollock
writes of twin images of what will later be linguistically fixed
as woman (as difference). One is the compensatory fantasy of

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the pre-oedipal mother, still all-powerful, phallic; the other is

the fantasy of woman not only as damaged, but as damage itself,
castrated and the symbol of castration (139). Accepting this preoedipal, phallic mother/castrated psychopath dichotomy, Kristeva
sees the relationship between them as psycho-linguistic. Resisting
the discovery of castration, in Kristevas words, obstruct[s] the
thetic phase of the signifying process (Revolution 63), which is
necessary for coherence and meaning. If the obstruction is successful, the result is psychosis. Accordingly, George makes the
question of Marthas sanity an ongoing issue in the play. He
describes an abstract painting as a pictorial representation of
the order of Marthas mind (23), thereby linking modernism,
women, and madness; and after Nick calls out the inaccuracy
of Georges statement that Martha spends time in a rest home,
George replies, No, no, she doesnt . . . I would; I mean if I
were . . . her . . . she . . . I would (90). Aligning himself with the
symbolic, George carefully chooses his syntax in casting aspersions
on his wifes mental health. However, Marthas refusal to accept
that she does not have a penis does not prevent the constitution of the symbolic, which would usher in psychosis. Instead, her
denial returns in and through [the symbolic] position, [a process
which] give[s] rise to fantasies (Revolution 63). Twenty-one years
prior to the temporality of the play, Martha created the fantasy of
their imaginary son.3
Both Martha and George use their imaginary son as a weapon
against the other. Martha claims their son would vomit at the
sight of George; George counters that Martha sexually abused
him. George characterizes him as a son who would not disown
his father, who came to him for advice, for information, for love
3

In Act III, George indicates Martha was the creator of the son-myth with the lines,
You labored . . . how you labored (217). Earlier, in Act I, George declares, the one thing
in this whole stinking world that I am sure of is my partnership, my chromosomological
partnership in the . . . creation of our . . . blond-eyed, blue-haired . . . son (72), but we
may take Georges declaration of co-authorship of the son-myth as part of the fun and
games. Marthas approving responseThat was a very pretty speech, George. [. . .] You
rose to the occasion . . . good. Real good.indicates that here George is playing along
with Marthas game rather than shedding any true light on the genesis of the son-myth.
In a 1990 interview, Albee reductively linked the son-myth to Martha through biology:
Neither of them literally believes it, but Martha slips into believing it probably because
shes a woman. Women and their relationship to children, their wombs, the whole thing
(Qtd in Solomon 101).

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that wasnt mixed with sicknessand you know what I mean,

Martha!who could not tolerate the slashing, braying residue
that called itself his MOTHER. MOTHER? HAH!! Martha retorts
with the image of a son who was so ashamed of his father he
once asked me if itpossiblywasnt true, as he had heard, from
some cruel boys, maybe, that he was not our child; who could not
tolerate the shabby failure his father had become (225). Martha
and George agree that the child would not bring his girl friends
to the house, but George claims this reticence is due to shame
of his mother and Martha says it is because of shame of his
father (226). The parents concur that the son spends his summers away . . . away from his family . . . ON ANY PRETEXT, but
Martha contends it is because he cant stand the shadow of a man
flickering around the edge of a house and George posits the idea
that it is because there isnt any room for him in a house full of
empty bottles, lies, strange men, and a harridan (226). George
depicts Martha in line with Savrans characterization of Mother
in Millers After the Fall, that is, the epitome of the destructive,
smothering Momism that, during the 1940s and 1950s, was often
blamed for turning sons into weaklings, criminals, Communists,
and perverts (64). The fantasy of Martha and Georges only
child reflects the difference of each parent back to him and her.
The fantasy cannot bridge the differences.
In contrast, in Lappin and Lapinova, the fantasy of the
rabbit and the hare represent mutually beneficial difference.
Rosalind, on her honeymoon, remains unsure she wants to be
Mrs. Ernest Anybody (68). In order to squelch stuffy associations she inadvertently makes between Ernest and his mothers
formal dining room, she likens her husband to a rabbit, a wild
rabbit, [. . .] a hunting rabbit; a King Rabbit; a rabbit that makes
laws for all the other rabbits (69). Ernest returns the favor with
a mate for Lappin, a white hare named Lapinova, based on the
real Rosalind. The fantasy the couple spins is based on difference:
He ruled over the busy world of rabbits; her world was a desolate, mysterious place, which she ranged mostly by moonlight.
He controls the day, shes in charge of night, and their territories touch[]. Their private world is erotic and, as a joyful sex
life, it fosters intimacy: It made them feel, even more than most
young married couples, in league together against the rest of the
world (71).

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Rosalind and Ernests combined creative endeavor exemplifies Woolfs ideas of fertilized woman-manly or man-womanly
writing, a marriage of opposites consummated in the act
of creation (Room 104). To Ann Gibaldi Campbell, Rosalinds
fantasy is patriarchal. Campbell argues that the dualities that
Rosalind establishes in her fantasy: king/queen; rabbit/hare;
bold/wary; determined/undependable; big/small; one among
many/one alone [. . .] are subsumed under the controlling pair:
male/female (73). Certainly the roles of Lappin and Lapinova, as
well as those of Rosalind and Ernest, fit traditional gender stereotypes. In Kristevan terms, the fantasy is a thetic balance between
the symbolic and the semiotic. Lapin makes symbolic laws, while
the multiplicity of rabbits and their mythology as hypersexual and
fecund suggest a feminine, erotic jouissance of the imagination. In
keeping with the semiotic, Campbell observes the absence of language in Rosalinds world (74). Instead of words, a stream that
corresponds to the chora runs through Rosalinds mental landscape. As a whole, the fantasy is a fairly obvious metaphor for their
marital sex life, which necessitates both participants.
In changing the rabbits to a son, Albee gives Martha a
Freudian diagnosis: part of the move towards femininity in
Freudian theory means the young girl gives up her wish for a
penis and puts in place of it a wish for a child: and with this purpose in view she takes her father as a love-object (Freud 191).
Martha appears stuck in this developmental phase, which the play
indicates with stage directions: Martha pretends to have made a
mistake by putting her hand over her mouth in a little girl gesture
(123) and asks for a drink by imitating a tiny child and saying
Im firsty (16). Harold P. Blum argues, The illusory baby whose
existence is affirmed and denied is in many respects comparable to the treatment accorded to the fetish or female phallus
and to the disavowal of object loss (893). Instead of the fantasy as a mutually beneficial, erotic point of adult communion
between man and wife, as in Lappin, Martha and Georges
imaginary son stands in for the phallus whose absence Martha
cannot accept. Anne Paolucci characterizes Marthas imaginary
son as the symbol of potency and virility, the imaginative embodiment of all the masculine roles idealized and idolized (158). As
such, the son-myth perversely fuels Marthas love for her father
rather than for her husband. In contrast to George, who is, in

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Marthas estimation, A great . . . big . . . fat . . . FLOP! (84),

Marthas father has the historically patriarchal power of management and governance: Well, Daddy knows how to run things,
Martha informs Honey (27).
George and Martha have interpretations of both fantasy and
reality that cannot coexist, and the play interrogates this problem of what is true and what is false. Kristeva sees the fluidity
between truth and falsehood as a product of semiotic dominance:
All transgressions of the thetic are a crossing of the boundary
between true and falsemaintained, inevitably whenever signification is maintained, and shaken, irremediably, by the flow of the
semiotic into the symbolic (Revolution 58). This understanding of
poetic semiotics as disruptive of conventionally organized reality
reflects Woolfs discussion of the loss of romance in poetry in A
Room of Ones Own (1929). Hypothesizing that romance was killed
by the exposure of the stupidity of male European leaders during
WWI, Woolf muses, Why, if it was an illusion, not praise the catastrophe, whatever it was, that destroyed illusion and put truth in its
place? [. . .] Yes indeed, which was truth and which was illusion,
I asked myself (15). This question, of what is truth and what is
illusion, is repeated in Virginia Woolf to the degree that Emil Roy
calls differentiating the difference between truth and reality the
crucial central game of the play (33).
Unlike Woolfs difficulty in discerning truth from illusion due
to perceptual relativity, in Virginia Woolf , objective reality is singular and knowable to those with the requisite courage. Referring
to whether or not he killed his parents, George says to Nick,
Truth and illusion. Who knows the difference, eh, toots? (201).
After George demands to know whether Nick and Martha consummated their dalliance in the kitchen, Martha lies in suggesting
they did and then indicates George should not believe her with
the statement, Truth and illusion, George; you dont know the
difference (202). When George does not register the desired
response, Martha pleads, Truth or illusion, George. Doesnt it
matter to you . . . at all? (204). The irony, of course, is that while
Martha begs George to distinguish truth from illusion in terms of
her extramarital sexual activity, George is planning to kill off their
mutual fantasy of a son. The truth is George either did or did not
kill his parents, Martha and Nick did not copulate, and George
and Martha have no children.

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The female imagination that in Lappin indicates a healthy

and pleasurable psychological escape for Rosalind from the harsh
reality of (in-law) familial obligations and hide-bound, hierarchical tradition becomes in Virginia Woolf female perversion and
madness: as George tells Martha, youve moved bag and baggage
into your own fantasy world now, and youve started playing variations on your own distortions (155). To restore order and health,
George can either have [her] committed (156) or kill off the
fantasy that is poisoning his marriage. Winfred Fluck views this sort
of focus on tough realities as lending authenticity and authority
to a gratifying [male] fantasy of moral superiority and resistance
(76) evident in American neo-realism.
That the onus is on George to wrest his marriage under a
rubric of ethics likewise is consistent with Freudian psychoanalytic
theory. In Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical
Distinction Between the Sexes (1925), Sigmund Freud claims
that women are psychologically incapable of moral ethics, as it is
commonly understood among men:
for women the level of what is ethically normal is different from what it is
in men. [. . .] Character traits which critics of every epoch have brought
up against womenthat they show less sense of justice than men, that they
are less ready to submit to the great necessities of life, that they are more
often influenced in their judgments by feelings of affection or hostility
all of these would be accounted for by the modification in the formation
of their superego. (193)

According to Freud, womens psychology is biologically determined. Because girls do not have penises, they do not experience
the Oedipal complex, and thus do not form healthy superegos.
Instead, they are perpetually in the grip of passing whims and
emotions. Correspondingly, Martha exhibits no moral compass.
George repeatedly brings the gender difference of Martha
back to anatomy. Although overwhelmed by the semiotic dominance of the first and second acts, George creates semiotic
wordplay, which Kristeva understands as the transgressive work
of jouissance: In cracking the socio-symbolic order, splitting it
open, changing vocabulary, syntax, the word itself and releasing
from beneath them the drives borne by vocalic or kinetic differences, jouissance works its way into the social and symbolic
(Revolution 7980). Working off Marthas clichs, George uncovers

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the sexual drives behind conventional language by tying her words

to genitalia through puns and double entendre. When Martha
tells George, sarcastically, You have a poetic nature, George . . . a
Dylan Thomas-y quality that gets me right where I live, George
responds with, Vulgar girl! With the guests here! (24). He
thereby shifts the vagueness of where [Martha] live[s] from her
heart to her vagina. In each of Georges references to Marthas
genitalia, he changes the meaning of Marthas words to suggest she is referencing her own genitals. When Martha tries to
make George jealous with Nick and finds him unflappable, she
says, Why, you miserable . . . Ill show you, and George retorts,
No . . . show him, Martha . . . he hasnt seen it (172). Georges
willful misinterpretations of Marthas words expose her motives
through imagined, and imaginative, genital exposure.
Only once does George invoke his own sex organs. When
George complains of the pressure that comes with being the husband of the university presidents daughter, Martha declares Some
men would give their right arm for the chance! and George
mutters, Alas, Martha, in reality it works out that the sacrifice
is usually of a somewhat more private portion of the anatomy
(28). That Georges only allusion to his penis is one of castration,
in contrast to his rendering of Marthas genitalia as immodestly
prominent, underscores the depiction of a sex war that Martha
is temporarily winning. Thus while George has, as Ruth Meyer
points out, a logo-centric meticulous and exaggerated insistence
on the right word (63), he contributes to the jouissance of the first
two acts through masterful wordplay about his loss of control: as
George describes his life to Nick, Good, better, best, bested [. . .]
How do you like that for a declension, young man, eh? (32).
Walpurgisnacht ends with Georges epiphany of how to
reverse the semiotic trajectory of the play, a discovery that is conservatively tied to the female reproductive system. Albee deleted
this association from the script for the 2005 Broadway revival,
thereby ending the Act with George reading aloud from Oswald
Spenglers The Decline of the West: And the west, encumbered by
crippling alliances, and burdened with a morality too rigid to
accommodate itself to the swing of events, must . . . eventually,
fall (2005 191). In the original version, however, this very masculine sentence, as Woolf would put it, which links Georges marital
failure both to morality and to Western Civilization, is followed

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by the discovery of Honeys secret: she does not want to bear

children.4
With Honey, Albee lampoons Rosalind from Lappin and
Lapinova. Honey has Rosalinds physical petiteness, her timidity,
and her neurotic fear. Most pointedly, Albee gives her an identification with an imaginary rabbit. Immediately before George
begins his exorcism, Honey pretends she is a bunny rabbit. Her
playacting has none of Rosalinds very real, very vivid, very amusing creativity (Lappin 70). Instead, it spoofs Honey as that
classic, American, misogynist stereotype, the drunk, ditzy blonde:
HONEY:
NICK:
HONEY:
GEORGE:
HONEY:
NICK:
MARTHA:
GEORGE:

(Cheerfully): Hip, hop. Hip, hop.

You a bunny, Honey? (She laughs greatly, sits)
Im a bunny, Honey.
(To HONEY) Well, now; hows the bunny?
Bunny funny! (She laughs again)
(Under his breath): Jesus!
Come on, George!
(To MARTHA): Honey Funny Bunny! (Honey screams
with laughter ) (210)

Albees characterization of Honey also seems to draw from

Rosalinds adverse reaction to an exclamation she overhears at
Ernests family estate: But they breed so! The Thorburns
yes; they breed so, she echoed; looking at all the round red
faces that seemed doubled in the giddiness that overcame
her (Lappin and Lapinova 7374). Honey, too, has an
aversion to procreation. While her husband and Martha play

4
This deletion is Albees second known reduction of dialogue between Honey and
George. Bottoms vouches for the existence of nine pages of a scene between them at the
beginning of Act III, which Albee cut during rehearsals in 1962. As Bottoms summarizes,
the abandoned scene, which had somewhat laboriously revealed Honeys decision to blank
out her memory of events at the end of Act II, over-emphasized both her apparent vacuousness and Georges cruel dismissiveness (3233). We have to take his word for it, since,
although the first drafts of Virginia Woolf are housed in the New York Public Library, one
needs Albees permission to see them. Even without the specifics, however, the fact that
Albee has censored himself repeatedly concerning the role in the play of Honeys family
planning and of Georges hostile reaction to it suggests Albees evolving concern about
audience reactions in 1962 and then in 2005. His decision to delete it entirely may have
been an acknowledgement that cultural sensitivities had shifted enough by the twenty-first
century that audiences would perceive Georges treatment of Honey along the lines of
sexual harassment.

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Hump the Hostess in the kitchen, Honey recalls a sexual

nightmare for George. In remembering it, she seems to
relive it: imagining herself naked, with someone approaching, she cries, NO! . . . I DONT WANT ANY . . . I DONT
WANT THEM . . . GO WAY . . . (Begins to cry) I DONT
WANT . . . ANY . . . CHILDREN . . . I . . . dont . . . want . . . any . . .
children. Im afraid! I dont want to be hurt. . . . PLEASE! (176).
Honey expresses a fear of sex, which she associates with the pain
of childbearing.
Although Honey exhibits frigidity in her nightmare (and
Nick confesses to George that his and Honeys marriage never
had particular passion, 105), George nonetheless jumps to the
unsubstantiated conclusion that Honey, rather than practicing
abstinence, terminates pregnancies: I should have known . . . the
whole business . . . the headaches . . . the whining [. . .] How you
do it? Hunh? How do you make your secret little murders studboy doesnt know about, hunh? Pills? PILLS? You got a secret
supply of pills? Or what? Apple jelly? WILL POWER? (176177).
George reacts to Honeys secret, which she never actually confirms, with disturbing, and disturbed, hostility. He calls her a
simpering bitch because she does not want children (178).
Honey tells him to leave her alone and asks who rang the bell,
referring to the noise made when George angrily threw his history book into the door chimes. Honeys birth control, which
George assumes is abortion, combined with her misimpression
that someone has come to the door, gives George the idea to
connect a strangers arrival with child-killing: IVE GOT IT! IVE
GOT IT, MARTHA . . .! Somebody with a message . . . and the
message was . . . our son . . . OUR SON! (almost whispered) It was
a message . . . the bells rang and it was a message, and it was
about . . . our son . . . and the message . . . was . . . and the message
was . . . our . . . son . . . is . . . DEAD! (180). Honeys response is
to experience a resurgence of nausea and to state, Im going to
die, to which George answers, Good . . . good . . . you go right
ahead (181). Honey will later corroborate Georges story out of
fear. Here, she physically experiences Georges planned attack on
Martha as an attack on herself, as indeed it is. Her decision to
forestall motherhood without the knowledge of her husband associates her in Georges mind with the out-of-control behavior of
Martha and the Walpurgisnacht.

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George makes a human sacrifice of his imaginary child, an

action that will end the Walpurgisnacht of Act II and impose normalcy or symbolic order. Kristeva sees such sacrifice as one of two
types of events in the social order, the other being art, that
parallel the thetic moment instituting symbolism in linguistics:
Sacrifice sets up the symbol and the symbolic order at the same
time, and this first symbol, the victim of murder, merely represents the structural violence of languages irruption as the murder
of soma, the transformation of the body, the captation of drives
(Revolution 75). By sacrificing their imaginary child, George presumably ends Marthas semiotic, body-oriented, marital violence
of infidelity. He thereby assumes the power, as Savran argues
of Millers masculine heroes, to master and regulate womens
promiscuous desires and to stem the vomit, to keep the female
body from spilling over and, like a sewer, contaminating the
self-controlled, self-contained, and self-reliant male subject (39).
George is the necessarily male priest exorcizing the evil spirit or,
in Kristevan terms, the Biblical-maternal abomination,
an autonomous force that can be threatening for divine agency[,] rooted
[. . .] in the cathexis of the maternal functionmother, women, reproduction. But the biblical test [. . .] performs the tremendous forcing that
consists in subordinating maternal power (whether historical of phantasmatic, natural or reproductive) to symbolic order as pure logical order
regulating social performance, as divine Law attended to in the Temple.
(Biblical Abomination 91)

George even uses the word abomination to describe his wife

in the beginning of Act I: Martha, I gave you the prize years
ago. . . . There isnt an abomination award going that you . . .
(16). To George, Martha behaves like Kristevas autonomous,
phantasmic-maternal force, which must be subordinated to his
symbolic order.
George is able to reassert the symbolic not through physical
violence, which is semiotic in its connection to physical drives, but
through symbolic violence. During the course of the play, George
verbally threatens Martha with death, pretends to shoot her, and
then tries to strangle heran act which parallels Rosalinds feeling
in Lappin, while she is waiting for Ernest to take on his rabbit character, of a load on the back of her neck, as if somebody
were about to wring it (Lappin 7576). It is only when George

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uses the symbolic violence of sacrifice, which, in Kristevan terms,

shows how representing that violence is enough to stop it and to
concatenate an order (Revolution 75), that he succeeds in conquering Martha. George sacrifices their imaginary son with the
words Martha (Long pause) . . . our son is dead (231). The death
George gives him is the same as the patricide he gave both the boy
in the story he told Nick and the protagonist of his unpublished
novel, and which Martha attributed to Georges back story: on a
country road, with his learners permit in his pocket, he swerved,
to avoid a porcupine, and drove straight into a [. . .] large tree
(231). Replacing patricide with filicide gives George strength, in
that he is no longer cut off from the patriarchy.
Simultaneously, and more pointedly, killing the son-myth is a
castration of Martha. Without the imaginary child, which Freud
equated with female-castration denial, Martha is helpless in the
face of the reality that George forces on her: she has no phallic power. She initially protests with NO! NO! YOU CANNOT
DO THAT! YOU CANT DECIDE FOR YOURSELF! I WILL
NOT LET YOU DO THAT! (232). In an act of governance
and legislative control, George takes it upon himself to provide
boundaries and punishment for Martha. Like a reasonable father
enforcing discipline, George explains to Martha her transgression,
You broke our rule, baby. You mentioned him . . . you mentioned him to someone else (236), which Martha begrudgingly
accepts. Lappin and Lapinova similarly ends with a sacrifice.
When Ernest tells Rosalind that Lapinova has been caught in
a trap. [. . .] Killed, he kills off a metaphor of their sex life
and tries to trap Rosalind in a loveless marriage. The narrator,
however, indicates Rosalinds subsequent escape with the curt
line, So that was the end of that marriage (78). In contrast,
at the end of Virginia Woolf , George sings a fragment of jouissance, Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which Martha can no
longer enjoy. Her defiant pleasure has become fear: Marthas
replies to the question of who is afraid of Virginia Woolf with,
I . . . am . . . George. . . . I . . . am. . . . (242). She now fears
the power sheand Virginia Woolfhad possessed. Marthas
submission to the symbolic order, her feminization, is complete.
Through his sacrifice of the child-myth, George sets himself against what Kristeva sees as the transgressive function of
art: Whereas sacrifice assigns jouissance its productive limit in

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the social and symbolic order, art specifies the meansthe

only meansthat jouissance harbors for infiltrating that order
(Revolution 79). Because art in its reliance on imagination subverts
social fixity, the sacrifice that restores symbolic order cannot arrive
before the end of the play. Like Catherine Belseys characterization of Classic Realism, Virginia Woolf s narrative arc
turns on the creation of enigma through the precipitation of disorder
which throws into disarray the conventional cultural and signifying systems. [. . .] But the story moves inevitably towards closure which is also
disclosure, the dissolution of enigma through the re-establishment of
order, recognizable as a reinstatement or a development of the order
which is understood to have preceded the events of the story itself.
(Belsey 53)

The son-myth is the enigma that creates the driving disorder;

singular, masculine Truth emerges as the enigma is cleared up.
Georges act of sacrificial murder secures order at the expense
of Martha and art. His symbolic victory asserts his phallic power,
while smothering female imagination. As the semiotic chora is
repressed, the curtain drops.
Albees move to restore the phallus through a specifically
American literary realism reflects a gradual change in national
mood. Winfried Fluck traces the shift in critical discussions of
the 1930s through 1960s of American realism from genteel, malefemale interdependence to a redefinition of realism as masculine
strength. He lays out the American realist reaction to more complicated, and subtler, feminine literary techniques, such as modernism: In this view, masculine writing suggests a specifically
American energy; it is seen as a mode of writing that convinces by
its power, not its structural control, which, in other words, is free
from female handiwork (75). This conception of American letters drives Sinclair Lewiss address to the Swedish Academy on the
occasion of winning the 1930 Nobel Prize in Literature. In it, Lewis
presents William Dean Howells literary output as the incarnation
of Americas misguided deference to England and to a feminine
temperament, which he sees as almost one and the same. Surly
and authentic realism, Lewis argues, captures the spirit of the
U.S.: young, bold, and male.
Post-war American realism kept this masculinized rawness
while shifting from a literature that blasts the roads to freedom

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(Lewis 22) to a literature of containment. As Suzanne Clark summarizes George Kennans long telegram of 1947: The west must
choose reason over emotionthe same courage, detachment,
objectivity, and same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it, with which doctor studies unruly and
unreasonable individualand health over disease (35). This
containment is Georges quest in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
against, as Savran writes of the female body in Arthur Millers
plays, a corporal femininity that is unstable and unfixed, its
boundaries always in dispute, its interiorconstituted indifferently of speech, sexual desire or partially digested foodalways
threatening to erupt and engulf men in a sea of laughter, chaos
and stink (38). Like Millers male protagonists, George fights
against female transgression for his idea of American culture and
for the Truth as it supports patriarchal power. In 1962, however,
Albee might have perceived this battle as something of a last
stand.
Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? anticipates an opponent in a
second-wave feminist movement that is stirring but not yet born
and, simultaneously, resurrects an old modernism/realism debate
between two deceased writers. In 1920, Arnold Bennett published
his book, Our Women: Chapters on the Sex-Discord, whose purpose Eve
Sorum summarizes as to question womens ability to write great
literature (140). Thus began a polemical literary debate between
Woolf and Bennett over ability and aesthetics that would last until
Bennetts death in 1931. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown, which
Woolf republished four times in differing versions, achieved its
place in literary history as a modernist manifesto that set experimental novelists such as James, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, and
Woolf against purveyors of conventional Edwardian realism, but
Sorum and Beth Rigel Daugherty reveal its feminist stakes. If
Woolf responds to Bennett as [. . .] the father as internalized
tyrant telling her how to write [or that] she really need not write
at all (Daugherty 282283), Albee reacts to Woolf as if she were
the maternal bitch goddess he must slay in order to take his place
in the canon. Woolfs is one of the deaths Cixous sees necessitated by phallocentric opposition, hierarchizing exchange, [and]
struggle for mastery (893). Whos afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Twenty-two years after her suicide, the answer seems to have been
Edward Albee.

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