Martha/Virginia Woolf
Fleeing the Big Bad Wolf:
Martha's Fear of Female Power in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf exposes the underbelly of a dysfunctional marriage that has reached the point of viciousness. George and Martha, the two main characters, are crippled with disappointment, both with themselves and with each other. Martha in particular has reached a point of utter despair, though it often masquerades as a boozy swagger. As the play reaches its climax, we find that Martha's despair is in fact fear -- fear of falling short of traditional femininity, fear of being trapped by traditional femininity, and fear most of all of the sad truth that hides beneath the veneer of her womanhood.
This fear is hinted at in the very title of the play. The title comes from a joke told at a faculty party at the college where George teaches and where Martha's father is the president. We do not hear the entirety of the joke, but we do hear Martha singing "Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf" and remarking what a clever joke it was: "I thought it was a scream…a real scream" (Albee 12). Though the joke might not be familiar to readers now, the audience in the theatre when the play was first produced in 1962 would have recognized it as a play on words based on the Disney song from the 1930s, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf." We don't get the context in which the joke was first said, but considering that it occurred at an academic party, one could imagine that the...
It would take an entire paper just to explicate all of the roles that women play today and how society has changed as a result. The point is that it has changed and that women play a much different role in literature today than they did even just a century ago during Woolf's time. Woolf saw just a glimpse into the social turn that has led to the present
Virginia Wolf and "To the Lighthouse" Biographical Information Virginia Woolf is noted as one of the most influential female novelists of the twentieth century. She is often correlated to the American writer Willa Cather not because they were raised similarly or for any other reason than the style of their writing and their early feminist approach to the craft. Woolf, unlike Cather, was born to privilege, and was "ideally situated to appreciate
Mr. Forster, it seems, has a strong impulse to belong to both camps at once. He has many of the instincts and aptitudes of the pure artist (to adopt the old classification) -- an exquisite prose style, an acute sense of comedy, a power of creating characters in a few strokes which live in an atmosphere of their own; but he is at the same time highly conscious of
Virginia Woolf's "A Room of Her Own": War, Independence, and Identity "[a]s a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world" -Virginia Woolf The Chinese character for "crisis" is a combination of the words "danger" and "opportunity." It is often the case that when people are faced with hardship, they experience inward, mental, changes as a coping strategy to
Virginia Woolf to the Light House Biography of the author Virginia Woolf, the British author who made efforts towards making an original contribution to the structure of the novel, was an eminent writer of feminist essays, a critic writer in The Times Lierary Supplement and the prominent person in the Bloomsbury group. Virginia Woolf was born as the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen and Julia Jackson Duckworth in London. Her father, Sir
Virginia Woolf's Final Novel -- and George Orwell Virginia Woolf's novel, Between The Acts was her final published work, and it would be reasonable for a reader who knows how she chose to end her life (by drowning herself in the River Ouse on March 28, 1941), to suspect that she committed suicide in part because she was in great despair over the frightening possibility of the Nazis being successful in
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