who's afraid of virginia woolf essay questions

A Summary and Analysis of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is probably the most famous and widely studied American play associated with the Theatre of the Absurd, a movement prominent in the 1950s and 1960s. Edward Albee’s play is about the dysfunctional and self-destructive marriage between a history professor and his wife, witnessed over the course of one night (or, technically, one very early morning) following a party.

But how should we analyse Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? Before we come to the question of analysis, here’s a brief recap of the play’s absurdist plot.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf : plot summary

The setting for the play is a professor’s house on the campus of a New England university. At two o’clock in the morning, George, a professor of history, and his wife Martha return home after a party. Martha is the daughter of the president of the university where her husband teaches. Their first names suggest George and Martha Washington, the first President and First Lady of the United States.

George is in his late forties and his wife is six years older, in her early fifties. Where he is somewhat cynical and world-weary, she is fiery and vulgar. She has invited a young couple back with them: Nick, a twenty-something biology lecturer at the university, and his wife Honey, a plain-looking woman also in her twenties.

The first act, ‘Fun and Games’, sees Martha trying to seduce Nick while humiliating both her husband and, to an extent, Honey. As she gets more drunk, Honey grows bolder and asks George and Martha when their son will be coming home.

Doubts are raised over whether George is the biological father of the couple’s son, and Martha reveals that her father had discounted George as a potential candidate to succeed him as president of the university because he isn’t good enough. Honey rushes off to the toilet to be sick, as she has drunk too much.

The second act of the play is titled ‘Walpurgisnacht’, after the witches’ feast or sabbath. Nick confides to George that he only married Honey because she had a phantom pregnancy and he felt he had to do the honourable thing. The two men talk at length, before Nick makes a comment about getting Martha in a corner and ‘mounting’ her.

Martha then seeks to provoke maximum embarrassment in her husband by dancing suggestively with Nick and telling Nick and Honey that her father stopped George from publishing a novel he’d written, about a boy who murders his parents – a book which George insists was autobiographical.

George turns increasingly nasty, decreeing that they should play a party game he calls ‘Get the Guests’. He mockingly re-enacts Honey’s phantom pregnancy, using the information Nick confided in him to taunt them and sow conflict. In response, Martha tries to seduce Nick again, taking him off to the kitchen so they can ‘hump’ there. George confides that his and Martha’s son is, in fact, dead.

The third act, ‘The Exorcism’, begins with Martha alone; when Nick enters, she accuses him of being a ‘flop’ just like her husband. George tells them that there is one more game to play: ‘bringing up baby’.

He and Martha pay tribute to their son, on his twenty-first birthday, before George tells his wife that their son has died in a car crash. When she demands to see the telegram announcing this news, he claims he has eaten it. George sings a song, ‘Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf’, as the curtain falls.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf : analysis

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is often analysed as a response to a specific moment in US history: in 1962, when the play premiered, John F. Kennedy was President, and the United States had a confidence in itself as the leading world superpower. At the same time, tensions with the USSR, particularly over Cuba, led to uncertainty over the future.

American life and self-confidence, which had perhaps been at its peak in the 1960s, was beginning to look like a double-edged sword: cosy and comfortable on the outside, but playing host (as it were) to some darker and more worrying secrets and anxieties.

Albee’s play brilliantly dramatises these, reducing them to a domestic setting centred on middle-class America. The names of the two leads, George and Martha, take us back to the founding of the United States and its first President; this further supports the notion that the play should be read as being ‘about’ America, as well as the lives of individual middle-class Americans.

Edward Albee wrote in the New York Times in 1962 that he was ‘deeply offended’ when he learned he was becoming associated with the Theatre of the Absurd. As he argued in an essay, ‘Which Theatre is the Absurd One’, one could argue that absurdist theatre is actually more realist, and closer to reality, than so-called ‘naturalist’ or traditional theatre, which was reliant on conventions which failed to reflect actual life.

So whereas naturalist theatre offers itself as a ‘slice of life’, absurdist drama tends to use dream-like rituals and allegories; whereas naturalist drama follows the rational and logical chain of cause and effect (one character does something; another character reacts as one would expect), absurdist theatre does not have to subscribe to such a rational linearity of plot.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf , with its strange party games and rituals and its refusal to develop in terms of plot and character, is therefore an emblematic example of absurdism. The ritualistic element is even apparent in the pagan and religious titles given to the different acts of the play, e.g., ‘Exorcism’.

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the question of whether George and Martha actually have a son at all. Like Honey’s phantom pregnancy, the sense we’re left with, by the end of the play, is that he never existed at all: he, too, was a phantom, conjured by George and Martha as a focal point for their dysfunctional marriage.

And if we view Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as an absurdist allegory for America at a particular point in its history, the early 1960s, the son that doesn’t exist might be analysed as a symptom of the country’s anxieties over its future.

Just as the couple have no children yet their imaginary son is the heart and soul of their conflicted relationship, so America is looking to its future – the space race which Kennedy had begun the decade by championing – while ignoring the problems and challenges closer to home.

Edward Albee’s original title for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf was ‘Exorcism’, which he ended up using as the title for the final act of the play. The eventual title came from a bar which Albee frequented, where patrons would leave graffiti, written in soap, on a large mirror. Albee saw someone had riffed on ‘who’s afraid of the big bad wolf’ (from ‘ Little Red Riding Hood ’) and daubed ‘who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf’, a reference to the modernist writer, and Albee made a mental note of the phrase, thinking it would make a good title for a play.

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Home › Drama Criticism › Analysis of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Analysis of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on August 3, 2020 • ( 1 )

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is in many important respects a “first.” In addition to being the first of Albee’s full-length plays, it is also the first juxtaposition and integration of realism and abstract symbolism in what will remain the dramatic idiom of all the full-length plays. Albee’s experimentation in allegory, metaphorical clichés, grotesque parody, hysterical humor, brilliant wit, literary allusion, religious undercurrents, Freudian reversals, irony on irony, here for the first time appear as an organic whole in a mature and completely satisfying dramatic work. It is, in Albee’s repertory, what Long Day’s Journey into Night is in O’Neill’s; the aberrations, the horrors, the mysteries are woven into the fabric of a perfectly normal setting so as to create the illusion of total realism, against which the abnormal for the first time, the “third voice of poetry” comes through loud and strong with no trace of static.

—Anne Paolucci, From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of Edward Albee

The Broadway opening of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? on October 13, 1962, certainly qualifies as one of the key dates in American drama, comparable to March 31, 1945, and December 3, 1947 (the Broadway premieres of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire ), February 10, 1949 (the opening of Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman ), and November 7, 1956 (the first U.S. performance of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night ). A few months before it opened Albee published a scathing attack in the New York Times asserting that Broad-way was the true theater of the absurd because of its slavish devotion to the superficial and the unchallenging. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , Albee’s first full-length play and Broadway debut, was a direct assault on a lifeless and shallow commercial American theater, igniting a new excitement and vitality by its radical style and content. With this play American drama, as it had not had since the 1940s, regained its power and importance as an instrument of truth. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , in the words of critic Gilbert Debusscher, “immediately became the subject of the most impassioned controversies, the object of criticism and accusation which recall the storms over the first plays of Ibsen, and, closer to our own time, Beckett and Pinter.” Few other characters on the American stage had ever gone at one another so mercilessly nor exposed their psychological core in language that drama historian Ruby Cohn called “the most adroit dialogue ever heard on the American stage.” Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? propelled Albee into the front rank of American dramatists. He would go on to dominate American drama in the 1960s and 1970s, serving as the link between the previous generation of American dramatists—O’Neill, Williams, and Miller—and the next that followed him, including David Mamet, Sam Shepard, and Tony Kushner. President Bill Clinton at the Kennedy Center’s honors ceremony in 1996 aptly summarized Albee’s achievement by declaring to the playwright, “In your rebellion, the American theater was reborn.”

Abandoned shortly after his birth in 1928, Albee was adopted by Reed and Frances Albee, heirs to the Keith-Albee theater chain fortune, founded by the playwright’s adoptive grandfather and namesake, Edward Frances Albee. Growing up in a mansion in Westchester County, New York, the “lucky orphan,” as Albee described himself, was raised, as one magazine reported, in a “world of servants, tutors, riding lessons; winters in Miami, summers sailing on the Sound; there was a Rolls to bring him, smuggled in lap robes, to matinees in the city; an inexhaustible wardrobe housed in a closet big as a room.” Because of the family’s theatrical connections, actors, directors, and producers were frequent house guests. Albee attended performances from the age of six and wrote his first play, a sex farce, when he was 12. Enrolled in and expelled from a number of boarding schools as an undisciplined and indifferent student, Albee eventually graduated from Choate in 1946 where he had begun to distinguish himself by his writing, publishing poems, short stories, and a one-act play in the school literary magazine. After attending Trinity College briefly Albee left home in 1950 determined to pursue a writing career. Supported by a trust fund that provided him with $50 a week, Albee became, in his words, “probably the richest boy in Greenwich Village.” For the next decade, through his 20s, Albee worked in a succession of odd jobs—as an office-boy in an advertising agency, as a luncheonette counterman, writing music programs for a radio station, selling records and books, and delivering messages for Western Union. Most of the poetry and the long novel he wrote during this period have never been published. Searching for direction Albee was encouraged by Thornton Wilder to concentrate on drama. During his “Village decade,” Albee, as his roommate William Flanagan recalled, “was, to be sure, adrift and like most of the rest of us, he had arrived in town with an unsown wild oat or two. But from the beginning he was, in his outwardly impassive way, determined to write. . . . He adored the theatre from the beginning and there can’t have been anything of even mild importance that we didn’t see together.” Through the period, Flanagan remembered, Albee had a “thoroughly unfashionable admiration for the work of Tennessee Williams.” Other influences that would impact his initial dramatic work came from European dramatists of the absurd, such as Samuel Beckett and Eugène Ionesco.

On the eve of his 30th birthday, in despair over his inability to produce anything of importance and “as a sort of birthday present to myself,” Albee completed his first major play, The Zoo Story , a one-act, two-character drama in which two strangers—Jerry and Peter—meet in New York City’s Central Park. Jerry, lonely and desperate for meaningful contact with another, provokes Peter into a fight in which he impales himself, gratefully, on the knife he has given Peter. A tour de force of compression and intensity, The Zoo Story serves as a kind of overture to themes that would dominate Albee’s subsequent work, including the shattering of complacency, the connection between love and aggression, and the relationship between fantasy and reality. Initially rejected by American producers the play was first performed at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt in West Berlin in 1959. It debuted in the United States in 1960 at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village on a double bill with Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, establishing the connection between Beckett and Albee that marked the younger playwright as an American proponent of the theater of the absurd. The designation initially offended Albee, but he eventually accepted the association with a characteristic contrariness. “The Theatre of the Absurd,” he insisted, “. . . facing as it does man’s condition as it is, is the Realistic theatre of our time; and . . . supposed Realistic theatre . . . pander[ing] to the public need for self-congratulation and reassurance and present[ing] a false picture of ourselves to ourselves is . . . really and truly The Theatre of the Absurd.” He would later define the theater of the absurd as “an absorption-in-art of certain existentialist and post-existentialist philosophical concepts having to do, in the main, with man’s attempt to make sense for himself out of his senseless position in a world which makes no sense—which makes no sense because the moral, religious, political and social structures man has erected to ‘illusion’ himself have collapsed.” Albee’s next three plays ( The Sandbox, The American Dream, and The Death of Bessie Smith ), all produced in 1960–61, are scathing critiques of these collapsed illusions, exposing the absurdity of American family life and racial prejudice. Like The Zoo Story , they counter the dominant realistic mode of American drama with antirealistic techniques derived from the European modernist dramatic tradition.

Albee’s breakthrough drama, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? , synthesizes both naturalistic and absurdist theatrical elements such that the realistic American family drama, whose precedents include A Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, and Long Day’s Journey into Night , is infused with the methods and existential themes derived from European postwar drama. “Like European Absurdists,” Cohn argues, “Albee has tried to dramatize the reality of man’s condition, but whereas Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Genet, Ionesco, and Pinter present reality in all its alogical absurdity, Albee has been preoccupied with illusions that screen man from reality.” Asked to describe his work in progress that would become Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee called his play a “sort of grotesque comedy” concerning “the exorcism of a non-existent child” that deals with “the substitution of artificial for real values in this society of ours.” Albee initially called the play “The Exorcism” (the title later assigned to act 3) but arrived at Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? after discovering the phrase as graffiti in a Greenwich Village bar. Albee has explicated his title with its reference to a writer centrally concerned with the nature of reality, to mean “Who is afraid of facing life without illusions?” The question serves as the play’s repeated refrain and ultimatum. Set in the New England college town of New Carthage, in the living room of a history professor and his wife—George and Martha—the play depicts the boozy, late-night verbal warfare and lacerating revelations that emerge when they entertain a new faculty member and his wife, Nick and Honey.

Act 1, “Fun-and-Games,” introduces the four combatants. George is a 46-year-old associate professor who has failed to realize the expectations of his wife, the daughter of the college’s president, to succeed her father. Martha is “a large, boisterous woman, 52, looking somewhat younger. Ample, but not fleshly.” Their continual and escalating quarrelling, which George calls, “merely . . . exercising,” is rooted in their mutual dependency, frustrations, and guilt. Having returned late from a faculty party, Martha repeats the joke she has heard earlier in the evening in which “ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ” is sung to the tune of “Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush” while informing George that she has invited “what’s-their-names” over for a drink. Nick is a new young biology professor married to Honey, a “rather plain” blond, who arrive after George has warned Martha “don’t start in on the bit ’bout the kid” to which Martha responds with a decisive “Screw You!” The act then proceeds with George and Martha’s “exercising” in front of their guests. Warning Martha, who escorts Honey to the “euphemism,” not to talk about “you-know-what,” George evades Nick’s question about whether they have children by responding, “That’s for me to know and you to find out.” Honey, however, returns saying that “I didn’t know until just a minute ago that you had a son.” Martha follows, having changed into a more provocative outfit, and begins to flirt with Nick while disparaging George’s masculinity with a story about how she once boxed with him and knocked him into the huckleberry bushes. “It was funny, but it was awful,” she explains. “I think it’s colored our whole life. . . . It’s an excuse anyway. . . . It’s what he uses for being bogged down anyway.” George responds by retrieving a shotgun and aims it at the back of Martha’s head. As Honey screams, Martha turns to face George, and he pulls the trigger, fi ring a Chinese parasol. “You’re dead! Pow! You’re dead!” George exclaims. Martha, evidently pleased by his performance, demands a kiss, and when George refuses her advances in front of their guests, she shifts her attention back to Nick, saying “You don’t need any props, do you baby? . . . No fake Jap gun for you.” Martha’s taunting of her husband (“You see, George didn’t have much push . . . he wasn’t particularly . . . aggressive. In fact he was a sort of a FLOP!”) prompts George to drown out her needling with the “ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ” song. Honey becomes sick and retreats down the hall, pursued by Nick and Martha, as the act ends with George alone on stage, embodying defeat and hopelessness.

Act 2, “Walpurgisnacht”—the witches’ orgiastic Sabbath—both increases George’s torment and creates the conditions that make a recovery possible. Locked into their marital mutually assured destruction and sustained by the illusion of a son as an embodiment of their relationship, George and Martha move toward the recognition of painful truths. Proposing a new series of games—“Humiliate the Host,” “Hump the Hostess,” and “Get the Guests”—George begins with the last, betraying Nick’s confidence about his courtship and marriage to Honey motivated by her family fortune and a false pregnancy. Upset, Honey rushes out to pass out in the bathroom. As Nick and Martha dance and kiss, George ignores them by reading a book, but when they leave together, he flings the book hitting the door chimes. The noise rouses Honey who asks who is at the door. This gives George the idea that a messenger has come announcing the death of their son.

Analysis of Edward Albee’s Plays

Act 3, “Exorcism,” represents the play’s dramatic turn, the casting out of the various devils—jealousy, frustration, anger, and remorse—that have condemned George and Martha to their marital hell in which their mutual destruction has replaced self-recognition. Martha enters the living room upbraiding Nick, who she renames “Houseboy,” for his failed sexual performance. George arrives carrying a bouquet for Martha, echoing a scene from Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire (“ flores para los muertos ”) as a prelude to announcing the death of their son. He calls for one final game (“we’re going to play this one to the death”). As Martha rapturously talks about their “beautiful, beautiful boy,” George intones liturgical Latin before declaring “Our son is dead!” Martha reacts with horror, screaming “You cannot do that!” She demands to know why he has killed their imaginary child, and George answers that she has broken the rules by mentioning him to another. Martha responds: “I mentioned him . . . all right . . . but you didn’t have to push it over the EDGE. You didn’t have to . . . kill him.” To which George replies with the benediction from the mass and the words, “It will be dawn soon. I think the party’s over.”

After Nick and Honey have gone, George and Martha are left alone on stage. Martha persists in asking George “did you . . . have to.” He insists that “It was . . . time,” and that their lives will be better for the truth. Martha is doubtful.

Martha: Just . . . us? George: Yes. Martha: I don’t suppose, maybe, we could . . . George: No, Martha. Martha: Yes. No. George: Are you all right? Martha: Yes. No. George: [ Puts his hands gently on her shoulder, she puts her head back and he sings to her, very softy. ] Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf? Martha: I . . . am . . . George. . . . George: Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf. . . . Martha I . . . am . . . George. . . . I . . . am. . . . [ George nods, slowly. Silence, tableau. ]

Having divested themselves of the fantasies that have ruled and sustained them, George and Martha confront themselves and their reality with sorrow for their loss and uncertainty about their future. After the preceding Sturm und Drang, the play reaches a stunned silence, and George and Martha, who have played role after role in their marital battle, settle into a final resemblance: Adam and Eve after the fall, contemplating a life without illusions. Their brave new world of existential reality is matched by the new departure for American drama that Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? made possible, in which unrelentingly honest dialogue and characterization unite to explore key human and existential issues.

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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

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A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

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Discussion Questions

Why do you think Martha invites Nick and Honey over? What is her ulterior motive? Why do you think Nick and Honey stay?

How does alcohol function in the play? Choose one character and follow their relationship with alcohol throughout the night and explain how alcohol functions for them. Use details from the text.

Imagine that you are producing a contemporary production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? What issues in the play do you think are most relevant today and why?

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Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Introduction

Edward Albee was born in Washington, DC. At two weeks old, he was adopted by Reed and Frances Albee of New York. His name was changed from Edward Harvey to Edward Franklin Albee III. Little Edward's new name came from his adopted grandfather, E. F. Albee, who was a big time vaudeville producer. The family was very wealthy as a result of E. F. Albee's exploits. Edward was raised in Westchester, New York in the lap of luxury. His adopted mother, Frances, did her best to groom him into a respectable member of the upper class. Edward, however, had other plans. From a young age he resisted the upper class social circle he'd been brought up in. Eventually he dropped out of school and went to live the bohemian life in Greenwich Village. After working a bunch of odd jobs to stay afloat, he eventually scored big on Off Broadway with his first one act play The Zoo Story . With the Broadway premiere of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1962, Albee went from promising young playwright to great American dramatist, and was perceived by many as having joined the ranks of Eugene O'Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? didn't go off without controversy, though. Some audience members were shocked by its strong language and taboo sexual references. If you put the play on HBO today, it would probably seem tame, but in the early '60s it was accused of being perverse and dirty minded. The script won the vote for the Pulitzer Prize, but some thought it was just too controversial to be given the prestigious award. It was said that the play didn't present a wholesome image of America. As a result of the controversy, no one received the Pulitzer for Drama that year. This struck half of the Pulitzer panel as being so wrong that they resigned in protest.

No need to feel sorry for Mr. Albee, however. The play was a gigantic commercial success. Even though the play didn't receive its well-deserved Pulitzer, it was awarded the NY Drama Critics Circle Award and the Tony Award for best play. In later years, Albee went on to win three Pulitzers: A Delicate Balance (1967), Seascape (1975), and Three Tall Women (1994). Thus, Edward Albee has the distinction of winning more Pulitzer Prizes than any other playwright besides Eugene O'Neill. In 1996 Albee received the Kennedy Center 's National Medal of Arts, and is considered by many to be America's greatest living playwright.

What is Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? About and Why Should I Care?

As the theme song to The Love Boat reminds us, love can be a very special emotion, full of soaring highs that make the world and everything in it a beautiful wonder to behold. Such splendor has been celebrated in literature since time immemorial, as writers everywhere have sought to capture this uniquely splendid sensation.

This ain't that kinda story. To quote another old song: " What goes up, must come down. " As high as the highs of love can be, the lows can be downright brutal. And ugly. And petty. And cringe-inducing. Yup, this play has that territory covered—in full. So, why would anyone want to subject themselves to watching couples fight all night long?

Well, the first, saddest answer is that human beings love a good conflict, boy. How else do you explain the one-time success of Jerry Springer ? There's a certain voyeuristic quality to this play, which allows us to peep in on the most intimate details of a marriage on the rocks. In part, this explains the play's huge commercial success.

But it's more than that. You should care about this play because it's a stark portrayal of just how bad things can get when love goes wrong. And by wrong, we mean corrupted—by bitterness, resentment, competition, and deceit. Albee's play is practically a blueprint for how to have an unhappy marriage. It's a detailed character study of how two people, formerly in love, can inflict irreparable emotional damage on one another. And what's the great prize for this ability? Why, it's just sadness and isolation of course .

So the next time your significant other leaves the toilet seat up, or tosses out your favorite t-shirt, pick up this play. You'll be reminded of where you absolutely don't want to end up in your relationship. Thanks to this worst-case scenario, you'll have a stark reminder that it's better to kiss and make-up, rather than cheat and tear down.

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W hy's T his F unny?

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

By edward albee, who's afraid of virginia woolf quiz 1.

• 1 In what town does this play take place? New Carthage New Sparta New London New Haven
• 2 How old are protagonists George and Martha, respectively? 46 and 40 52 and 46 46 and 52 40 and 46
• 3 What is George's position at the college? President of the College. Interim Head of the History Department. Head of the History Department. Associate Professor of History.
• 4 What actress does Martha quote at the opening of the play? Barbara Stanwyck Gloria Swanson Elizabeth Taylor Bette Davis
• 5 Where did their guests, Nick and Honey, move from? California The midwest Europe New York
• 6 In what department does Nick teach? Philosophy Math Biology History
• 7 When describing the college town to Nick, to which mythological/literary place does George not compare it? Penguin Island Gomorrah Ilyria Hades
• 8 What is Honey's drink of choice? Whiskey Bourbon Brandy She doesn't drink.
• 9 How does George repeatedly describe Honey? "Mouse-like." "Pretty as a picture." "Slim-hipped." "Frail."
• 10 How old does Martha tell Honey her son will turn tomorrow? 25 21 12 16
• 11 What happens when George points a rifle at Martha and pulls the trigger? The gun jams. He purposefully shoots above her head. A parasol pops out of the gun. Nothing happens.
• 12 To what animal does George liken his father-in-law? A red-eyed white mouse. An albino squirrel. A wise old owl. A slippery snake.
• 13 What novel does Martha reference in the story of her college affair with the gardener? The House of Mirth Romeo and Juliet Tess of the D'Urbervilles Lady Chatterly's Lover
• 14 What ultimately leads George to smash a liquor bottle and begin singing "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" at the end of Act One? Martha's story of George's unpublished autobiographical novel. Martha's blatant attempts at seducing Nick in front of him. Martha's insistence on calling him a failure for remaining an associate professor. Martha's refusal to stop talking about their son.
• 15 How does Honey respond to George's rendition of "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" at the end of Act One? She bursts into tears. She asks Nick if they can leave. She says, "I am." She runs to the bathroom to be sick.
• 16 At the beginning of Act Two, why does Nick tell George he married Honey? She was the daughter of the president of the college where he used to work. He believed he was in love with her. She was experiencing a hysterical pregnancy. She was sick.
• 17 How does George characterize the story about the boy who ordered "bergin"? An illusion of happiness to cover the real pain. Just a funny story. The happiest day of his life. The most embarrassing experience ever.
• 18 In George's story, why did the boy crash into a tree? He was trying to kill his father. He was swerving to avoid a porcupine. He was swerving to avoid a dog. He was trying to kill himself.
• 19 What does Albee request in the stage directions after George's speech about the boy who accidentally killed his parents? A five-second pause. Immediate laughter from Nick. Closed curtains. A blackout.
• 20 To what child's toy does George compare his and Martha's son? A teddy bear. A bean bag. A rocking horse. A doll.
• 21 According to George, why does he call the son "the apple of our three eyes?" Martha is a Cyclops. George is blind in one eye. George isn't sure the "apple" grew from his tree. Martha pays attention to the son half the time.
• 22 In what language do Martha and George exchange rapid-fire insults that translate to "monster," "pig," "beast," "scoundrel," and "whore?" German French Latin Greek
• 23 How, according to Nick, did Honey's father get rich? He was a poor preacher who inherited it from his second wife. He was a famous preacher who stole the church's money. He was a famous preacher who saved his own money. He published an autobiographical novel about his experiences as a preacher.
• 24 Which of the following is not part of Nick's plan to get ahead at the college? Seducing faculty wives. Blackmailing the college president. Looking for weak spots. Taking over some courses from older professors.
• 25 What song that she "understands" does George say Martha will put on to dance to? L'Orfeo Dies Irae Symphonie Fantastique Le Sacre du Printemps

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What is the dramatic significance of Martha's father?

Martha's father, though never seen, is a definite influence on the other characters in the play. He represents power and superiority, thus making George seem weak. Because Martha looks up to her father... even worships him, her relationship with...

Virginia Woolf

Honey is sick with morning sickness... she is expecting a baby.

What does Honey learn from her exposure to George and Martha?

Honey learns about the importance of family..... the blessings of children.

Study Guide for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf study guide contains a biography of Edward Albee, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf Summary
• Character List
• Act One Summary and Analysis

Essays for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee.

• The Hidden Wish of Words: Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Three Tall Women
• Truth or Illusion?
• The War of the Women
• Appearance Versus Reality in Three Contemporary American Novels
• Keeping Up With the American Family; Analyzing the Superficial Pursuit of the American Dream in Edward Albee’s Work

Lesson Plan for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf

• Introduction
• Plot summary
• Inspirations
• Production history

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

Edward albee, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.