[In the essay below, Taylor analyzes Albee's use of language in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, contending: "Through his use of apparently simple naturalistic language which closer examination proves complexly metaphoric and allusive, Albee brings at least George and perhaps all of the characters to a realization that to refuse to recognize, either wilfully or through avoidable ignorance, the complexities of life, to attempt to live in the simpler world of childhood is dangerous and finally unproductive, sterile. "]

I

Almost all of the critics who have written about Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf agree on one point: the play is immensely powerful. Further than this, the critics are less unanimous; the play has been described as realistic, naturalistic, absurdist, or some blend of these three.¹ There is almost as much disagreement about whether it is optimistic or pessimistic and whether George's killing of the phantom child is the supreme example of one-ups-manship or an indication of compassion.² A fruitful approach to the play, it seems to me, can be made through a careful analysis of Albee's use of language, especially of his imagery and allusion. Such analysis suggests that Albee takes George and Martha through a kind of rite of passage into full adulthood. Survival of this rite does not make them invincible, but it offers the only chance they have.

Albee's coming-of-age theme can be seen by analyzing the three ways in which the language of the play is remarkable: thematically of least importance, for its so-called naturalistic quality; more importantly, for its use of childish language and its references to children's games; and for some highly significant passages of an almost lyric nature in which Albee makes heavy use of allusion, metaphor, or both. Unfortunately, many critics have assumed that the play is essentially a new example of realism or naturalism; if they discuss Albee's language at all, they consequently focus on the naturalistic aspect of it. Such an assumption, though partially valid, is dangerously limiting. The beginnings of an analysis of Albee's rich and allusive language have been undertaken by Arthur K. Oberg and by Ruth Meyer;³ but Albee's techniques are more sophisticated than either of these critics suggest and neither one goes on to explore fully the relationship between Albee's language and his theme. Ruth Meyer, for example, notes that the ambiguity of the language is one of the reasons for the disagreement among critics about the interpretation of the play, but suggests that Albee "comes closer to presenting unambiguous truth through the use of clichés than in any other instance in the play."⁴ Albee's use of cliché is somewhat more complex than such a statement suggests. He uses not so much ordi-nary clichés, but rather modified or distorted ones which call attention both to the original and to the implications of his revised version. Martha, trying to seduce Nick, answers his half-objection that George might come back with "Besides, who would object to a friendly little kiss? It's all in the faculty."⁵ If we are immediately amused by the apt use of the modified cliché, the implications which it opens are a perversion of the original. The cliché calls to mind the traditional concept of the family as a closely-knit, loyal island of strength, especially in confrontation with non-family. And Martha's modification of "family" to "faculty" reminds one that Daddy, as president of the college, apparently sees himself as a patriarchal figure for whom the college serves as a kind of family business or estate. But Albee has already made us aware of the grossly different reality of George and Martha's family life and of the distance between the concept of "all in the family" and the reality of the faculty. His use of cliché, then, is more complex than the naturalistic, implied comment on the sterility and banality of American society which a more conventional use of cliché's might have presented.

Albee's language has been praised for accuracy of reflection and for virtuosity of styles; but, like the language of Resto-ration plays with which it has been compared,⁶ it is more than a repeating of overheard cocktail party conversation and, like Restoration comic playwrights, Albee uses carefully tailored speech patterns for each character to indicate a great deal more about the characters and their relationships than is ever formally stated. Albee's language is apparently naturalistic in its use of slang, profanity, and interruptions. Yet consider the complex effect of his curious and careful use of the word, "hunh," which appears thirty-eight times during the play. Only once does Albee use the more common spelling, "huh" (III, 192). All three of the characters who use it (Honey does not and Nick, only once), use it not as a vocalized question mark or to mean "isn't that the case, don't you agree with me?" which is its more expected use. Rather, in growing intensity, its unpleasantly nasal quality makes it a taunting sound suggesting that the speaker strongly disagrees with the statement. Compare Martha's one use of "huh" answering Nick's comment that he doesn't think George has a vertebra intact, "You don't huh? You don't think so. Oh, little boy, you got yourself hunched over that microphone of yours …"with her phrase five speeches later, "Oh … you know so little. And you're going to take over the world, hunh?" (III, 192). The latter, which is typical of Albee's use of the device, helps to suggest that the person spoken to is, in Martha's phrase,"such a cluck" (I, 3) that it is highly unlikely any observation of his could ever be correct; it is, consequently, a highly useful device in antagonizing or excoriating another. Martha uses the word primarily in the first act, and her use steadily decreases during the play; George does not use it at all in the first act but uses it twelve times in the second act (primarily after his own humiliation and as part of his counter-attack) and seven times in the third act. The sound becomes a useful emotional barometer, indicating the intensity and the movement of power.

Albee also occasionally uses the sophisticated techniques of the naturalistic playwrights, such as Chekhov's use of parallel conversations which comment on each other. Albee uses extended parallel speeches once in each act: when George tries to drown out Martha by singing her song "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" at the end of the first act (I, 85); when George and Nick discuss their respective marriages without really listening to each other (II, 103-104); and when George recites part of the Burial Service while Martha is finishing the recitation of "Our son" (III, 227). In the last two of these sets the conversations certainly comment on each other; the first set probably functions in the same way though the relationship is less obvious. But if aspects of Albee's language are similar to naturalistic writing, the total effect of his language is more ambitious; as George says of his second novel, "Well, it's an allegory, really—probably—but it can be read as straight, cozy prose …" (II, 142). The confusions about theme which are left uncertain if we consider only the naturalism of Albee's language are resolved, however, when we move on to his use of other kinds of language.

II

One of the major ways in which Albee presents the comingof-age theme is his heavy use of childish language and of references to children's games. At a naturalistic level this might appear to be only the habit of speech of some childless couples, but Albee's use of this device carries symbolic suggestion. He continues his habit of modification in the use of four nursery rhymes: "Georgie Porgie," "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?," "Pop Goes the Weasel," and "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush." Three of these are used in modified form and the unmodified one is already highly suggestive; all of them have symbolic importance in the coming-of-age theme. When George is sulking before the guests arrive, Martha calls him "Poor Georgie-Porgie, put-upon-pie" (I, 12). If his and his wife's names are used to suggest the founders of the country and thus to make them serve as representatives of American society, George's name is also, here, linked with the protagonist of the nursery rhyme who torments the girls by kissing them, but runs away from the boys; George's behavior, at least through this point in his life, seems to have followed this pattern. Martha constantly accuses him of being a weakling, and his academic career seems to have been shaped by his lack of ability to join with or stand up to other men. He apparently submitted to Daddy's demand that he withdraw the manu-script of his novel (II, 135), and it is interesting that he was left behind to serve as chairman of his department during the war (I, 38). His relations with women are troubled and showed by an apparent need to hurt, as evidenced in the play by his actions toward both Martha and Honey; and if we assume that George is the boy who (accidentally or not) killed his mother, his troubled relationship can be traced further back in his life. Though he feels threatened by Nick (the chromosome quarrel is the most overt example of his hostility), he backs off from a direct confrontation with Nick on several occasions and turns his most direct fire on Honey. That he has damaged Nick's self-esteem by this maneuver is an unexpected bonus for him (II, 149). But George, in the progress of the night, outgrows his little-boy need to torment the girls and may be able to allow the more mature part of his nature—suggested by his hints of real affection for Martha—to have full play.

The importance of one of the images suggested in the second nursery rhyme has been noted by Ruby Cohn in her insistence on the importance of the word "snap": "In the destruction of illusion, which may lead to truth, 'snap' becomes a stage metaphor—sound, word, and gesture."⁷ She emphasizes the importance of the single word and links the image with the St. George legend. But "snap" comes from another of Albee's modified nursery rhymes, this time "Pop Goes the Weasel." It, like the other rhymes, helps to suggest the abnormal, childish natures of George and Martha and their consequent need to come of age. The snap sound, of course, comes into prominence even before this scene; in Act II, Martha insisted that the "whole arrangement" snapped (for her) at Daddy's party. But the image of Act II is only destructive. And while Cohn sees the image as insisting on the reduction of stature in modern life, "St. George slew the dragon; Albee's George slays with snapdragons,"⁸ the implications of the imagery of this scene are more complex. Into the "Snap go the dragons" refrain, George introduces still another nursery rhyme, "Here we go round the Mulberry Bush" (III, 202-203). This is the only rhyme which appears unmodified, but it is, of course, reminiscent of Eliot's well-known modification of the line "Here we go round the prickly pear" (in "The Hollow Men"). Albee's reversed modification (back to the original) seems to be drawing on the rich and appropriate suggestion of Eliot's poem. George and Martha have been hollow men whose shouting matches are their whispers of communication and whose activity is as sterile and as purposeless as Eliot's hollow men. But through this last battle, if George can act, the maiden may yet be saved and she and George can live "happily ever after." Their creation, embodied concretely in their imaginary son, is only words and only with words can it be killed. The battle is not the less potentially deadly for being fought with words, nor is the dragon less real for being their illusion.

The fourth, and perhaps the most important, of the nursery rhymes is the basis of Albee's title song, "Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?". It comes from the Disney version of the three little pigs story, and while the melody of "Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush" was substituted in the stage version (because of copyright problems), one must consider the suggestions implicit in Albee's choice of this rhyme. In Disney's version of the story, the first two little pigs, who laugh at their brother for his seriousness and his refusal to have fun, come out rather poorly in their confrontations with the wolf; they do, however, escape with their lives (unlike the first two pigs in the most common versions of the nursery tale), and through the efforts of the third little pig, who behaves in a more mature fashion, they are able to turn the tables on their persecutor. Albee's choice of this rhyme, then, would tend to reinforce the theme of the play, that only through giving up the childish quest for fun and games can one hope to survive. Yet Albee's characters are not the simpler three little pigs, but two children who have aged but never become fully adult, and so he substitutes Virginia Woolf for the earlier Big Bad Wolf. Cohn suggests that the substitution represents a fear of madness which can lead to suicide,⁹ but while this is one of the suggestions raised by the change, it seems to me that the allusion is richer than a simple reference to the end of Virginia Woolf's life. In her novels, Virginia Woolf is much concerned with the nature of reality and of personality; she seems to suggest, like a good many other modern novelists, that it is impossible to know reality fully or to be able to define another person.¹⁰ Yet she, like George, also suggests that though it is probably impossible to know the difference between truth and illusion, as George says, "we must carry on as though we did" (III, 202). If there is some suggestion of madness associated with Martha (and George does speak of having her committed), the substituted phrase has richer suggestions, implying not only the fear of madness and death, but also the fear of the fully-committed, adult life represented by Woolf's novels. Martha's acknowledgment of her fear of what Virginia Woolf represents at the end of the play is not quite so dark, then, as it would be if one considered only Woolf as a person; Martha is afraid of adult life in its full implications, but in that acknowledgement lies some hope. Martha, throughout the play, sees herself (falsely) as a great earth mother—both supremely maternal and irresistibly feminine. But the reality of her life, as we see it in the play and as she describes it, presents a contrasting picture of Martha as a sterile mother and an incomplete sex symbol. Only if she gives up playing her present role (in which she must dominate George) is there a hope that they may come to full adult life.

III

Albee offers his strongest statement of his coming-of-age theme and his clearest revelation of the intricacies of character in richly suggestive passages which occur in all three acts. In these he frequently depends not simply on the metaphoric impact of the words themselves but also clusters around them allusive backgrounds which open a wider context and increase the richness of the passages.

The first act is dominated by one such cluster of images and allusions. Albee first introduces the motif when George, rather unwarrantedly, attacks Nick as part of a group (or perhaps the moving force in it) who are "making everyone the same, rearranging the chromozones, or whatever it is" (I, 37); several speeches later he comments that "I read somewhere that science fiction is really not fiction at all …" and rather quickly veers off into other conversation. Albee has thus suggested his allusion to the most famous account of controlled birth and development, Huxley's Brave New World; and, through George's question, "Do you believe that people learn nothing from history? Not that there is nothing to learn, mind you, but that people learn nothing?" (I, 37), has also posed his own question for his audience. Albee begins his major exploration of the motif later in the act when (having found out more about Nick and having been further provoked by Martha's telling Honey about the child) George re-opens the attack on Nick as biologist. Commenting that he finds him terrifying, George claims that Nick is working on a plan to re-order the chromosomic pattern of the sperm cell; one could thus arrange for the survival of desired qualities, could create a race of men "test-tube-bred … incubator-born … superb and sublime" (I, 65). Such a system, he contends, will have dis-advantages: a necessity for sterilization of those considered unfit for breeding and a certain lack of diversity of the new civilization. George suspects that not much will be left of the arts but that there will be a race of scientists and mathematicians who will make an ordered and stable uni-verse. He, of course, is opposed to this and laments that history "will lose its glorious variety and unpredictability. I, and with me the … the surprise, the multiplexity, and sea-changing rhythm of … history, will be eliminated. There will be order and constancy … and I am unalterably op-posed to it. I will not give up Berlin!" (I, 67).

The contrived opposition which George has been setting up between himself and Nick has generally been taken as a symbolic confrontation between the humanities and science (with possible overtones of democracy versus totalitarianism). But the Huxley allusion (with its enclosed allusion to Shakespeare's The Tempest) opens a somewhat different and a finally more coherent interpretation. In the seventeenth chapter of Brave New World, the Savage and Mustapha Mond, the Controller for Western Europe, have probably the central discussion of Huxley's novel. Here the Savage discovers that not only is art, especially literature, simplified and ordered to suit the new morality (Shakespeare is banned as smutty) and in his opinion drained of aesthetic and moral value, but also that science is strictly limited and controlled. The opposition between science and humanities, in Huxley's terms, turns out to be illusory. Mond argues that happiness and ordered stability can only be achieved by abandoning the search for truth and beauty. Implicit in the Savage's demands for a society with God, poetry, real danger, freedom, goodness, and sin is, as they both acknowledge, "the right to be unhappy."¹¹ At the end of the chapter, Mond is still willing to accept his plastic society and to leave the Savage to his own notions. Albee, in the passage quoted above, is drawing on Huxley's summing up of the two societies.

When Honey protests that she does not understand George's Berlin reference, George amplifies his refusal to give up Berlin by commenting that "There is a saloon in West Berlin where the barstools are five feet high. And the earth … the floor … is so … far … below you. I will not give up things like that" (I, 67-68). Thus Berlin initially seems to be a symbol of the freedom to create pleasant but unfunctional things, a concrete, if trivial, embodiment of the sea-changing rhythm; but there is a darker strain in this complex melody. If Berlin has many positive associations for twentieth century man, it is also indissolubly linked with the madness of Hitler and the Third Reich. And Hitler also refused, in the closing days of the war, to give up Berlin.¹² George's use of Berlin as a symbol of the world he supports carries both positive and negative overtones. His world will have—-in addition to its five-foot-high barstools—its Hitlers, its possibility of madness, of suicide. George, like the Savage, rejects the comfortable but sterile brave new world pictured by Huxley. Albee here forecasts George's decision to enter the difficult world of adult life—a decision which necessitates the abandonment of relatively comfortable illusion and a commitment to the difficult, continuing search for truth. It is a mistake, then, to limit George and Nick to symbolic representatives of humanities and science, of democracy and totalitarianism;¹³ they may be this, but their op-position, like most of the oppositions of the play, turns out to be an illusion. As Huxley points out the unbreakable link between humanities and science, so Albee, by the end of the play, suggests that both George and Nick have accepted the unpleasantness of truth in preference to the sterile world of illusion.

In the second act, "Walpurgisnacht," Albee turns to a rather more penetrating analysis of the present and past of his characters. Here, again, language which seems naturalistic turns out to have metaphoric overtones. One of the primary indications of George's character is contained in his story which ostensibly is about a drinking episode in his youth. Here he describes the boy who killed his mother and was responsible for the death of his father. George says the accident with the father happened when the boy was sixteen; the boy was taken off to an asylum where for thirty years he has not uttered one word (II, 96). Forty-six, is, of course, George's present age. There are other links between George and the unnamed boy. The boy killed his mother with a shotgun (II, 94) and George, in his first symbolic act of violence against Martha, "shoots" her with a "short-barreled shotgun" (I, 57). This action perhaps also serves as the first foreshadowing of his destruction of her role as mother. While Martha frequently refers to herself as Mummy, George neither calls himself nor is referred to by anyone else as Daddy. He affirms his "partnership in the … creation of our … blond-eyed, blue-haired … son," (I, 72) but he seems less concerned with fatherhood than is Martha with her role as mother. In his story, George insists that the boy killed his mother "accidentally, completely accidentally, without even an unconscious motivation, I have no doubt, no doubt at all—" (II, 94). But George still suffers from a sense of guilt about his mother's death, a guilt on which Martha plays (e.g., II, 138); he must resolve this childhood trauma if he is to survive and built a mature, adult relation-ship with his wife. George's account of the death of the father (killed in an accident caused by the boy's swerving to avoid a porcupine and hitting a large tree) is curious; there is a quality of unreality about it which makes one wonder if this is a factual account. One suspects not; it seems possible, in view of George's strong and continuing reaction to his mother's death, that the story masks a suicide attempt which, ironically, killed the wrong person. Still another link between the boy and George is his description of the fifteen-year-old boy:"blond and he had the face of a cherub" (II, 95); thus the boy seems to resemble not only George and Martha's phantom child but also Nick, whom George will later pretend to mistake for their son (III, 195-6). George ends the first part of the story with the comment that the "bergin" day was "the grandest day of my … youth" (II, 95), a point he does not amplify. What seems to be suggested here is that for once George had a feeling of acceptance, of being part of a group. But with the death of his father, George has retired into a shell which he has not left for thirty years. Finally, one must consider George's comments about the contrast between normal aging and that of the quietly insane, that they do not age in the normal way, that "They maintain a … a firm-skinne d serenity … the … the under-use of everything leaves them … quite whole" (II, 97) as a comment on himself. As George admits later in the act, in the progress of his twenty-three year marriage to Martha, he has simply learned to endure her, to shut her out (II, 155). Their conflicts are surface ones rather than indications of attempts to come together; hiding behind their vicious childish games, George has refused to come to terms with adult relationships, and only Martha's increasing pressure succeeds in forcing him from this protective shell.

Walpurgisnacht, in Teutonic folklore, is a witches' sabbath celebrated with revelry and dancing. Appropriately, Albee has a dance motif at the center of this act: when Honey insists on dancing, George puts on a record—the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. Such action is, of course, a means of provoking Martha, but Albee also uses it to expand our knowledge of these two characters. Though most of the Seventh Symphony is quite cheerful—Richard Wagner has called it "the apotheosis of dance"¹⁴—the second movement has elements of poignancy and tragedy. Selden Rodman and James Kearns, in The Heart of Beethoven, speak of the power and depth of this movement. "Who can say … what emotion the grave Allegretto of the Seventh projects? Is its sombre yet buoyant march rhythm indicative of sorrow or joy? It includes both, and simultaneously."¹⁵ Such music, then, is entirely appropriate for their almost demonic gathering. When Martha insists on changing the record, George remarks "Martha's going to put on some rhythm she understands … Sacre du Printemps, maybe," (II, 129). George here seems to be identifying himself with the rather more cerebral, almost metaphysical music of Beethoven while he identifies Martha with the complex but pagan and sensual ballet music of Stravinsky.

Towards the end of the second act as the demonic revelry grows more and more frantic, Albee's use of apparently naturalistic language becomes more allusive and metaphoric. A close reading of the end of the act makes one realize that George, calling what he recognizes as Martha's bluff (her provocative flirtation with Nick), challenges her to make an adult commitment—either to himself or Nick (II, 169-173). But George, in spite of his manipulation, cares far more for Martha than he admits, a point of which she is well aware even if others are not. This becomes clear after Martha has left the room when George reads aloud from Spengler: "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" (II, 174). The quotation is an accurate reflection of George's position; he is burdened with crippling alliances and he has a morality which can no longer accommodate itself to the kind of life he has been leading. But, here again, the language becomes heavily allusive as the action takes on symbolic overtones. With a cry that is "part growl, part howl, " George hurls the book at the door chimes which have al-ready sounded twice previously (when Martha bumped into them). As the third chiming of the bell during the Mass signals the approaching moment of transformation, George is about to undergo his own transformation, a change which will bring the chance of salvation for them all. Honey wanders in asking about the "Poe-bells" which have awakened her. In Poe's poem, the first section describes sleigh bells, the second wedding bells, the third alarm bells (for a fire), and the final section the tolling of funeral bells; Albee, then, is forecasting George's decision to kill the child, the symbol of their retreat from reality. Implicit in this decision, though not yet revealed, is George's positive commitment to enter the adult world. Significantly, it is during this section that Albee reveals to George (and to the audience) the truth about Nick and Honey's childless marriage; like George and Martha, but in a more literal way, Honey and Nick are childless because at least one and probably both partners in the marriage have refused to enter the adult world of responsibility. This linking of the two couples helps to expand the tentative optimism of the ending of the play, since Nick and Honey, if they cease acting as children and accept adult roles, can have a real child.

In the last act, "The Exorcism," Albee's language becomes even more suggestive if not symbolic as the thematic motifs of the first act and the explorations of character of the second act are brought together into a full statement of the theme. Martha opens the act in a soliloquy which begins with complaint about her abandonment and loneliness in terms of the immediate situation but which moves swiftly into a metaphoric and allusive exploration of her essential loneliness. That she has not yet thrown off her childish ways is evident by her references to the children's game, "Hide and Go Seek," "i'll give all you bastards five to come out from where you're hiding!!" (III, 186). She says that, like Daddy, she and George cry all the time, and "we take our tears, and we put 'em in the ice box, in the goddam ice trays (Begins to laugh) until they're all frozen (Laughs even more) and then … we put them … in our … drinks. (More laughter, which is something else, too)" (III, 186). Their unhappiness, instead of being put to creative use, is frozen and used as an ingredient in their unsuccessful search for forgetfulness and comradeship. They drink together, but that is their only communion. She continues (after a "sobering silence ") "Up the drain, down the spout, dead, gone and forgotten.… Up the spout, not down the spout: Up the spout: the poker night. Up the spout …" (III, 186). Part of what Albee is suggesting here is the reversal of the sexually-charged dissolution cliché; thus Martha insists on her change to "up" rather than "down." "THE POKER NIGHT," in addition to its sexual connotations, is an allusion to Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire. In the stage directions for Scene Three (subtitled "The Poker Night"), Williams emphasizes a combination of adult and childhood images.¹⁶ Williams' scene is dominated by the violence between Stanley and Stella which is their expression of love even as Martha and George's more sophisticated violence is an expression of their need and love. Williams ends his scene with Blanche calling for kindness from Mitch; George and Martha also need kindness in their relations with each other, but what is at issue in the play is whether they have the strength, unlike Blanche, to break out of their childish and now nightmarish illusion.

In the almost antiphonal recitation which follows her soliloquy, Martha speaks of her relationship with George and indicates that she has a fuller understanding of herself and of him than might have been suspected. George is the only one, she says, who has ever made her happy (III, 189-190); this statement, as Nick assumes, has immediate sexual implications, but Martha means a good deal more by it. The two of them need each other but she cannot forgive him for having "made the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving me" (III, 191). Notwithstanding all her claims of superiority (which she will renew later in the act), she suffers from a strong sense of inferiority; she has never come to terms with herself any more than George has. Thus, the child is a symbol of their full lack of self-acceptance; he is the only means they have of coming together, even if only to quarrel, like children over an imaginary playmate.

Later in the scene Albee includes a direct quotation from Williams when George enters with the snapdragons and begins his final attack with the words, "Flores; flores para los muertos. Flores" (III, 195). In Scene Nine of Streetcar, when Blanche's illusionary world is first shattered by Mitch's rejection of her, a blind Mexican vendor woman comes to the door and offers tin flowers to Blanche with these words. Albee uses the allusion here partially as another of the elements foreshadowing the death of the child; but the contrast between the two struggles in illusory worlds, comfortable and safe but finally sterile, also enriches and strengthens the characters of Martha and George.

Having pretended to mistake Nick for their son, George switches to another role; putting on an accent and parodying the inarticulate, bashful suitor, he stammers that he's brought her flowers. Martha's reply, "Pansies! Rosemary! Violence! My wedding bouquet!" (III, 196) is an indirect allusion to Ophelia's bouquets in her mad scene in Hamlet. Martha's transformation of violets to violence probably harks back to Honey's cries of "Violence" in Act II (137, 195). Yet if Ophelia's mad use of the flowers indicates her escape into illusion when reality, with its violence, became too painful, Martha's wedding bouquet is a transformation of the idea. Ophelia escapes from violence, Martha to violence, but they are both escapes. Additionally Martha's speech serves as an ironic commentary on her marriage—composed of thoughts, remembrance, and violence.

George and Martha get into an argument about whether the moon was up or down when he picked the flowers and whether, if the moon does go down, it can come back up—an argument which leaves Nick baffled. But closer examination of the passage (see III, 199-201) clarifies the terms of the argument somewhat; they are, in fact, still talking primarily about whether or not Nick "made it in the sack" (III, 202). George insists on his own fidelity and on Martha's; in his answer to her statement that the moon has gone down, "That may very well be, Chastity; the moon may very well have gone down … but it came back up" (III, 199), he is arguing that while she might think about being unfaithful, having considered it she would, like the moon, come back up. Once one remembers that Diana, the moon goddess, is also the patron of chastity, one begins to see the terms of their game. The difference between "truth and illusion" and "truth or illusion" (see III, 201-204) provides further insight; their stories are sometimes distorted truth ("truth and illusion"), sometimes complete, but wished for and possible fantasy ("truth or illusion"). When Martha lyingly confirms Nick's statement that he is not a houseboy (III, 202), George accepts the statement and begins his dragonkilling, commenting that it no longer matters to him (III, 204); that is, he is now firmly committed to destroying the illusory basis of their relationship and is ready to proceed to the final game, "Bringing Up Baby."

George goads Martha into the recitation of "Our son" (III, 217-224) and allows her to get well started on the description of the childhood of the boy who kept his rubber-cupped arrows under his bed "for fear, Just that: for fear" (III, 219). The boy is, of course, partially a symbol of their marriage—a marriage in which they are united in their need to stave off their fears about themselves. Their attacks, like the boy's rubber-cupped arrows, are part of the games they play in an effort to mask their fears. As Martha continues, George begins to recite, correctly, the Tract from the service for the burial of the dead. After the story of how the boy broke his arm, George inserts the first line of the hymn usually sung as the coffin is moved out of the church after the burial service, and then goes on to recite the second sentence of the Gradual, which normally precedes the Tract. If the recitation is, in part, another of the atmospheric foreshadowings of the announcement of death, it is also specifically relevant. Here, after Martha's statement that the boy "walked evenly between us … (She spreads her hands) … a hand out to each of us for what we could offer by way of support, affection, teaching, even love … and these hands, still, to hold us off a bit, for mutual protection, to protect us all from George's … weakness … and my … necessary greater strength … to protect himself … and us" (III, 221-222), George says (in Latin) "The righteous person shall be in everlasting remembrance; he shall not fear evil tidings." The child, then, is no longer to be the buffer or barrier between them; they will now have to offer support, affection, teaching, even love directly. Later, as Martha protests that she has tried "to protect, to raise above the mire of this vile, crushing marriage; the one light in all this hopeless darkness … our SON," George recites the final prayer for the dead, normally said at the foot of the coffin at the end of the service (III, 227). He is now ready to announce the death of the boy, and his description of their son's death is the description, only slightly modified, of the death of the father of the boy who killed his mother. Their son, then, is not only a symbol of the childishly unresolved guilts and of their lack of acceptance of themselves. He was the phantom playmate of the two "vicious children, with their oh-so-sad games, hopscotching their way through life, etcetera, etcetera" (III, 197); the time has now come to put away childish things and to emerge as mature adults. As Nick and Honey (who have finally come to an understanding of the situation and perhaps to an understanding of themselves) exit, the scene closes on the remaining couple. In their last interchanges, Albee sketches their condition briefly but clearly. George, now completely broken free from his shell-retreat and firmly in control, will not let them lapse back into childhood and Martha's acknowledgment of her fear of Virginia Woolf is both optimistic and subtly threatening; through her acknowledgment, the way is opened for salvation, but the very image which suggests her now acknowledged fear of reality also suggests the terrible dangers which lie ahead.

IV

Looking at the play as a whole and keeping in mind the suggestions presented through Albee's sophisticated use of language, one comes to recognize that exorcism of the crippling ghosts of their pasts, symbolized by the phantom child, is necessary for George and Martha's coming of age and perhaps for their survival. Identifying these ghosts and their effects on the characters, one must recognize that what George and Martha say about their respective pasts is essentially true though not necessarily factual—a device of half-communication with which they are both quite familiar through their game-playing. The full picture of Martha emerges through hints given in speeches which ostensibly present almost the opposite picture. Not having been loved as a child, Martha has come to see herself as unlovable; consequently she must achieve domination as a tacit acknowledgment of her value. Her speeches describing what she sees as her extraordinary rapport with her father, however, reveal fathoms of self-doubt beneath her confident surface: "Mommy died early, see, and I sort of grew up with Daddy. (Pause—thinks) … I went away to school, and stuff, but I more or less grew up with him. Jesus, I admired that guy! I worshipped him.… I absolutely worshipped him. I still do. And he was pretty fond of me, too … you know? We had a real … rapport going … a real rapport" (I, 77). While worship may be one of the attitudes a young child has for its father, through Martha's overstated insistence on her continuing worship of her father, Albee delineates what is basically a one-way relationship. Further, George's comment at the end of the play, that her father "really doesn't give a damn whether she lives or dies, who couldn't care less what happens to his only daughter" (III, 225), confirms the suggestions of her speech as well as indicating George's clear-sighted perception of Martha's nature. But in spite of her sense of inferiority, Martha loves George as much as she can permit herself to love any real person. Her description of herself planning to marry the heir-apparent and then falling for George (see I, 81-83) suggests this; even the boxing incident reveals a hidden affection and love for George. For all the fact that she now tells the story to humiliate him, she still insists that her knocking him down was an accident, that George was undoubtedly "off balance" (I, 56).

George's ghosts—his guilt feelings about the deaths of his parents—have already been identified. And if Martha married for love, there are also indications in George's language that he loves her; when George and Nick are talking about their wives, George starts to make a significant distinction between himself and Nick: "Things are simpler with you … you marry a woman because she's all blown up … while I, in my clumsy, old-fashioned way …" (II, 102). Later, speaking of their present relationship, he insists that "Now, on the surface of it… it looks to be a kind of knock-about, drag-out affair, on the surface of it … but some-where back there, at the beginning of it, right when I first came to New Carthage, back then …" (II, 103-104). Further, his reaction in the moments when he thinks that Martha may be unfaithful to him (especially at the end of Act II) seems unusually strong for a man who doesn't care about his wife. Finally, his behavior at the end of the play, especially as indicated in the stage directions, is full of a tenderness that is inexplicable unless he still cares for Martha. In dealing with Albee's multi-faceted characters, one must go beneath the surface of their language if one is to recognize the truth behind their protective masks of illusion. In spite of their attacks on each other (which are really defensive rather than offensive), they are still in love. Their marriage has been strained to the snapping point, and an exorcism of their childhood ghosts is clearly imperative.

Albee constructs the play carefully, slowly increasing the tempo and the intensity. In the first act, "Fun and Games," the conflicts are only slightly enlarged from reality. And even in this act, as has been noted, Albee indicates through the language that the play is, like most of the great naturalistic plays, more than simply a photograph of society. The conflicts between George and Nick and between George and Martha serve as a prelude, an introduction of themes which thunder forth in the more explicit character revelation of the second act. There, as the revelry grows wilder, George's violence towards Martha ceases to be symbolic, as with the toy gun, and becomes actual, in the attempt to throttle her. The need to prove herself attractive drives Martha beyond her flirtation of the first act as she tries increasingly desperate measures to awaken a response from George. Nick, who early in the act had joked about the best way to further his career, finds himself attempting to act out his joke while Honey retreats to the bathroom to curl up in a foetal position. The last act functions as an exorcism of their childish guilts and illusions while it also suggests that George, and perhaps all the characters, take on new knowledge and responsibilities. The truth or illusion game no longer interests George; he recognizes that one must act as though reality could be defined. On the death of the phantom son, the embodiment of their ghosts, they must put the past away and, in the uncertain light of dawn, face reality.

That Albee has been concerned with something more than surface realism, that his plays have been his vision of reality presented symbolically, is evident even in his earlier work. An examination of the language of this play suggests that the real world has always been more complex than any of Albee's characters (except perhaps George) realized, and even he attempted to ignore important distinctions because they complicated his life. Through his use of apparently simple naturalistic language which closer examination proves complexly metaphoric and allusive, Albee brings at least George and perhaps all of the characters to a realization that to refuse to recognize, either wilfully or through avoidable ignorance, the complexities of life, to attempt to live in the simpler world of childhood is dangerous and finally unproductive, sterile. One must, as Eliot suggested in "The Hollow Men" and as Huxley suggested in Brave New World, accept the full range of possibilities—both good and evil—if one is to have a chance of succeeding; otherwise one exists in the large bottle of deadness, whether induced by alcohol or soma, but one does not accomplish anything except the creation of a phantom child. New Carthage, with its allusion to its more famous ancestor's history of passionate love, is the appropriate residence of all Albee's characters in this play. Like Aeneas and Augustine, who took up their mature, adult roles only after leaving Carthage, Albee's characters must leave their juvenile residence and move into the adult world. Nick and Honey's coming of age is sketched less fully, but Albee suggests it by her announcement that she wants a child and by his finally beginning to understand what is going on. For George and Martha, Albee demonstrates, the acceptance of themselves as adults is dangerous but necessary for their immediate survival and, insofar as they are the spiritual parents of us all, for the continuation of the race.

Notes

¹ For a representative sampling of opinion on this point see Anthony C. Hilfer, "George and Martha: Sad, Sad, Sad," in Seven Contemporary Authors: Essays on Cozzens, Miller, West, Golding, Heller, Albee and Powers, ed. Thomas B. Whitbread (Austin, 1966), pp. 121-139; Joy Flasch, "Games People Play in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", Modern Drama, 10 (1967), 280-288; Michael E. Rutenberg, Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest (New York, 1969) pp. 95-115; Henry Knepler, "Edward Albee: Conflict of Tradition," Modern Drama, 10 (1967), 274-279; C. W. E. Bigsby, Albee (Edinburgh, 1969); and Anne Paolucci, From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee (Carbondale, 1972), pp. 45-63.

² See Max Halperan, "What Happens in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" in Modern American Drama: Essays in Criticism, ed. William Edward Taylor (Deland, Florida, 1968); Gilbert Debusscher, Edward Albee: Tradition and Renewal (Brussels, 1967); and Emil Roy, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the Tradition," Bucknell Review, 13 (1965), 27-36.

³ Arthur K. Oberg, "Edward Albee: His Language and Imagination," Prairie Schooner, 40 (1966), 139-146; Ruth Meyer, "Language: Truth and Illusion in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", ETJ, 20 (1968), 60-69.

⁴ Meyer, p. 56.

⁵ Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (New York, 1966), p. 163. Further references to the play will be made parenthetically in the text.

⁶ Oberg, p. 139.

⁷Edward Albee (Minneapolis, 1969), p. 121.

⁸Ibid., p. 21.

⁹Ibid, p. 22.

¹⁰ This seems to be especially true in Jacob's Room and Mrs. Dalloway.

¹¹ (New York, 1932), p. 288. The preliminary material of this discussion occurs in chapter sixteen.

¹² See the account of Hitler's radio speech promising that he "would stay in Berlin and defend it to the end," in William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York, 1960), p. 1113.

¹³ See Roy, p. 35 and Rutenberg, p. 100.

¹⁴Richard Wagner's Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, (New York, 1966), I, 124.

¹⁵ (New York, 1962), p. 80.

¹⁶ "There is a picture of Van Gogh's of a billiard-parlor at night. The kitchen now suggests that sort of lurid nocturnal brilliance, the raw colors of childhood's spectrum." (New York, 1947), p. 46.