New Beginnings in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf :: Whos Afraid Virginia Woolf

New Beginnings in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf Edward Albees Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a disturbing and sizeable work. Ironic every(prenominal)y, it is disturbing and powerful for many of the same reasons. As the audience watches George and Martha tear savagely at each opposite with the knives of hurled words, sharpened on pain and aimed to draw blood, the style in which these two relentlessly go at each other is awful to see, yet strangely familiar. Like wounded animals, they strike erupt at those closest to them, and reminds one of scenes witnessed as a child betwixt screaming p bents from a cracked door when one is supposed to be in bed. In this age of psychoanalytic jargon, George and Martha are the quintessentially dysfunctional couple. Yet, with all their problems, Albee reveals that there is a positive core of feeling that unites these two roiled people and that helps them look beyond their self-created hell. The truth of their relationship is exposed bed by lay er as the play progresses, like the peeling of an onion, and though the pose of this truth appears vague at first, with each cycle of revelation, the pattern becomes more distinct, and the picture is fully revealed in the final, cathartic scene. One of the intimately consistent themes of the play is the question of George and Marthas child, and all that this child, and children in general, symbolizes for them. The child seems not only a desire for fecundity within their relationship, hardly in any case a projection through which they express many of their personal desires, needs, and problems, and, in this context, the childs subsequent death signifies a milestone in their understanding of their uniting and of themselves. By the end of play, after much suffering and flagellation, George and Martha appear take to deal with their lives in a new way. George and Martha have a narration. They are also emotionally trapped by this history, especially that of their respective childh oods. As a consequence, both are plagued by low self-image and self-doubt. The audience learns of this history slowly, in bits and pieces. Martha tells Nick and Honey in Act 1 how she anomic her mother early and grew up very close to her father. She was married briefly, but her father had the marriage annulled. She returned to live with her father after college, and met and fell in love with George.