Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

“I like your anger. I think that’s what I like about you most… your anger. You’re such a…such a simp! You don’t even have the…the what?...”

George helpfully completes Martha’s sentence for her by offering, “guts?” (14). Martha’s insult is strange, calling him both angry and cowardly. George’s pleasant assistance in offering the correct word is a part of the anger that Martha appreciates. He often responds to her aggression with a passive feigned cooperation that enrages her. At first, it makes Martha look like the abuser in the relationship, but over time, it becomes clear that they are locked in an equal battle. Martha likes to push him until he lashes out. George likes to withhold that release from her, and fury has become a replacement for excitement and passion.

“I swear…if you existed I’d divorce you.”

Martha aims her insults like poison arrows. The aggression between her and George is like endless foreplay that never results in anything that is pleasurable or releases tension. This insult targets the terrible thing that George is afraid of becoming. Being nothing is worse than being a failure. At least when Martha sees him and insults him, he is still real.

“Martha, won’t you show her where we keep the…euphemism?”

George’s joke responds to Honey’s polite requests for the bathroom in which she is too embarrassed to say the word. It’s also ironic, because part of the experience of the evening will be a lowering of inhibitions that will be much more humiliating and intimate than admitting to having bodily functions. Soon, Honey will be repeatedly rushing off to the toilet to vomit. This joke about her conservative modesty foreshadows the way George and Martha will cause her to unravel.

“That what you were drinking over at Parnassus?”

George refers to the earlier party thrown by Martha’s father as Parnassus, an allusion to Ancient Greek mythology and the mountain located in central Greece which was believed to be the sacred home of the muses. Therefore, Parnassus is the home of all art, literature, science, history, and essentially every other academic discipline. He makes the joke ironically, because he makes it clear that he doesn’t hold the university or academia in that type of sacred regard, but he also says it because he knows—correctly—that Nick will not understand the joke. George is subtly flexing what he sees as his intellectual superiority to tear Nick down.

“What? Oh…yes. Ever since I married…uh, What’s-her-name…uh, Martha. Even before that. (Pause) Forever. (To himself) Dashed hopes, and good intentions. Good, better, best, bested. (Back to Nick) How do you like that for a declension, young man? Eh?”

George is drawing Nick into an elusive battle of wits, but on his own home turf. He asks Nick why he started teaching, and Nick turns the question back on George. Then Nick digs into a sore spot by saying that George has been at the university a long time, stammering as he realizes that it might be taken badly. Since George is attempting to display dominance over the younger man, he first dismisses his wife, who Nick certainly sees as being more powerful. He confronts Nick with what ought to be a rhetorical question and flusters him by demanding an answer.

“If you were married to Martha you would know what it means. (Pause) But then, if I were married to your wife I would know what that means, too…wouldn’t I?”

George has made statement about the two women using vague pronouns, eliciting a confused response from Nick. George’s vague assertion about knowing what it means to be married to either woman contains a lot of unspoken baggage that will be unpacked and tossed around soon. It also suggests that there is some baggage in Nick’s marriage to Honey, and that George intends to find it and rifle through it. The conflation of the two wives also implies that they are the same, and that with enough years of marriage, Nick and Honey will become George and Martha.

“Martha is seldom mistaken…maybe you should be in the Math Department, or something.”

George is not nearly as cowed by his wife as he seems to be at the start of the play. At the start of their marriage, Martha chose him and decided who he would be as her husband and in the university. She was mistaken, and it shaped the rest of her life. But her irked response when she learns that she was wrong shows that Martha indeed feels that she is seldom mistaken and doesn’t appreciate it when she is, and George delights in being the one to tell her.

“Hm? Oh, yes…yes…by all means. Drink away…you’ll need it as the years go on.”

The moment that Nick starts to make himself at home in Martha and George’s house and pour his own drink is symbolic. George sees Nick as his past self. He still has promise and potential. Nick doesn’t understand that he could become George, because their marriage seems to be in such an advanced stage of decay.

“The Biology Department…of course. I seem preoccupied with history. Oh! What a remark.”

George keeps conflating Nick with himself, accidentally (or presumably by accident) placing him in the History Department. George is preoccupied with history, not only in terms of his chosen discipline, but the history of his life, and the way his decisions – or the decisions that he was pushed to make – and his accidents brought him to his current depraved state of being.

“No…there are limits. I mean, man can put up with only so much without he descends a rung or two on the old evolutionary ladder…(Now a quick aside to Nick) which is up your line…(Then back to Martha)…sinks, Martha, and it’s a funny ladder…you can’t reverse yourself…start back up once you’re descending.”

Martha has just insulted George and called him a swamp. She calls him, “Hey, SWAMPY!” (50), as if that’s his name. George, in his passive-aggressive feigned politeness, asks if he can do something for Martha, and Martha asks him to light her cigarette. But George decides that being degraded is causing him to devolve, making it clear that Nick’s field of biology is a pertinent symbol in the battle for domination that is taking place. As a punishment for Martha’s behavior, George calmly takes away one of his habits that she enjoys, blaming her for making him less human.

“The most profound indication of a social malignancy…no sense of humor. None of the monoliths could take a joke. Read history. I know something about history…”

George backs Nick into a corner by comparing him and his genetic experiments with the Nazis (without explicitly saying it), and then when Nick is properly riled up and Honey is upset at him, George indicates that it was a joke. And Nick’s inability to laugh at a joke aimed at him only proves, according to George, that he is something like a Nazi. Nick’s weakness is that he takes himself too seriously and can’t admit what he doesn’t know. Therefore, this is the line through which George aims his attack.

“Some people feed on the calamities of others.”

Martha says this to Honey as an explanation for why George hates Martha’s father. She knows that Honey will respond with horror, because Honey is invested in her show of propriety. It’s also a meta joke toward an audience that is watching and feeding on the calamities of others. Later, in the second act, Honey will get drunker and show that she does this as well.

“The saddest thing about men…Well, no, one of the saddest things about men is the way they age… some of them. Do you know what it is with insane people? Do you?…the quiet ones? […] They don’t change…they don’t grow old.”

George tells Nick the story about the boy who killed his parents, who he claims ends up in a mental hospital and never speaks again. George’s age is his greatest insecurity, because he feels his age in the things that he never did and never will do. But if Martha is telling the truth, George is the boy, and he didn’t go insane—or at least not enough to land in an institution. George seems oddly envious of this imaginary boy, whose fate seems so pathetic.

“All right…I want to know about your wife’s money because…well, because I’m fascinated by the methodology…by the pragmatic accommodation by which you wave-of-the-future boys are going to take us over.”

George has managed to get Nick to divulge the hysterical pregnancy, but that is Honey’s embarrassment. In that situation, Nick is the gallant one. But his other reason for marrying Honey, her money, is embarrassing for him. It’s also a way that his mousey little wife has more real power in the marriage. George prods him to tell by reassuring him that he sees Nick as dominant over him, although George’s real goal is to knock Nick down.

“Unh-unh. You’ve got history on your side…I’ve got biology on mine. History, biology.”

Nick is arrogant. He sees history as an inferior field and isn’t interested in understanding why having history on his side is an assurance of his success. Nick has biology on his side in more ways than one. It’s a field of study that is more lauded and respected than history, and Nick is young, healthy, and attractive. Young scholars are infinitely more likely to do important work than those who are older and have yet to do anything important. Nick doesn’t see George as competition at all, so his arrogance becomes his vulnerability.

“All right…OK. You want to play it by ear, right? Everything’s going to work out anyway, because the timetable’s history, right?”

George tries to give Nick a piece of genuine advice, by telling him that “there’s quicksand here” (115)—meaning the university, or perhaps his house at that moment—and Nick replies with condescension. This moment is significant because George takes pity on Nick and briefly tries to help him. But when Nick isn’t interested, George’s statement has double meaning. Nick takes it to mean that his future is already set, and he’s going to succeed. George knows, however, that if Nick is arrogant and unself-aware now, he will follow the same timetable as George.

“Violence! Violence!”

When Honey arrives, she is mild-mannered and delicate, overly concerned with propriety. George’s fake rifle makes her upset for a while. By the time they reach the second act and George physically attacks Martha, however, Honey has devolved considerably. Part of the evening’s activities was the work of destroying social niceties and exposing the ugliness underneath.

“I’ll make you sorry you made me want to marry you.”

Martha’s wording betrays her real angst about her marriage. She is angry at herself for falling in love with George, and for still being in love with George, even though he hasn’t become what she believed she deserved. Martha has been trying to make George sorry he married her for a long time. But she really wants to hold him responsible and blame him for her own vulnerability.

“It’s very simple…When people can’t abide things as they are, when they can’t abide the present, they do one of two things…either they…either they turn to a contemplation of the past, as I have done, or they set about to alter the future. And when you want to change something…YOU BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!”

George has realized that his preoccupation with the past is only keeping him stuck, and it will take a drastic action to change his future. George has decided to kill their fake son, but notably, the “son” dies in a car accident, and George makes a gun sound. The only real gun mentioned in the play is the one that killed (presumably) his mother, suggesting that Martha might be correct in claiming that it may not have been an accident. It may have been George’s attempt to change a life that he couldn’t abide. And perhaps, that is why he never ended up in a mental hospital.

“I cry all the time too, Daddy. I cry allll the time; but deep inside, so no one can see me. I cry all the time. And Georgie cries all the time, too. We both cry all the time, and then, what we do, we cry, and we take our tears, and we put ‘em in the ice box, in the goddamn ice trays (Begins to laugh) until they’re all frozen (Laughs even more) and then…we put them…in our…drinks.”

In her monologue at the beginning of Act III, Martha is momentarily vulnerable while she is alone. She acts out an imaginary interaction with George that is kind and respectful. And she starts to baby-talk when she imagines talking to her father, instead of talking to George as we see in the play. Martha shows that George is right about her father withholding his love and approval. Martha made plans to marry a successful professor because she thought that she would win her father’s affection, and she blames George because it didn’t happen. Their anger and aggression toward each other are really sadness, and they freeze their tears and messy emotions and cover them with alcohol.

“Relax; sink into it; you’re no better than anybody else.”

Martha says this to Nick after he calls her crazy. Nick replies, “I think I am” (188). As she tried to seduce Nick, she was trying to arouse anger and passion in her husband. Martha didn’t really intend to go through with it. Now that she has seen him naked and vulnerable, she understands that Nick isn’t better than George. When Martha reveals that she found Nick to be a disappointment sexually, he is taken aback. Nick genuinely thought he was better, and this shakes him.

“George, who is out somewhere there in the dark…George who is good to me, and whom I revile; who understands me, and whom I push off; who can make me laugh, and I choke it back in my throat; who can hold me, at night, so that it’s warm, and whom I will bite so there’s blood; who keeps learning the games we play as quickly as I can change the rules; who can make me happy and I do not wish to be happy, and yes I do wish to be happy. […] …whom I will not forgive for having come to rest; for having seen me and having said: yes, this will do; who has made the hideous, the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving me and must be punished for it. George and Martha: sad, sad, sad.”

Martha confesses to Nick how much she has created the turmoil in her marriage, and that she is angry because she loves George, and no other man can make her happy. Her display of seducing Nick was a game, meant to show George that the reason that their marriage is stuck, and they are unsuccessful is him, because she could have someone like Nick. But all the experience does is show her that her anger is absurd.

“Truth and illusion. Who knows the difference, eh, toots?”

George admits to Nick that the lies that he and Martha tell each other are deliberate, and that they have chosen to get lost in illusion. Because their illusions start to feel real over time, just as Martha forgot for a moment that their son wasn’t real and told Honey. In absurdism, the illusion is that life has meaning or a greater purpose. The freedom is in letting go of those illusions and accepting life for what it is.