Martha/Virginia Woolf Fleeing the Big Bad Wolf:

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 scenario involved some commentary on the threatening nature of Virginia Woolf.

Why would Virginia Woolf be associated with the Big Bad Wolf, even humorously? To answer that, one must take into consideration not only Woolf herself but also the societal surroundings in which the play is set. In 1962, when the play was first staged, American society was on the cusp of the Sexual Revolution. Women had experienced new personal and professional opportunities while the men were away fighting during World War II, and during the decades that followed they began questioning the traditional role of women as housewives and mothers.

Virginia Woolf was an early figurehead for this movement, even though she drowned herself twenty years before the revolution reached its stride. While she did marry, she never had children, she prospered professionally, and she famously tested the limits of her sexuality by engaging in relationships with other women (Encyclopaedia Britannica). The female characters in her novels stubbornly resisted stereotypes, and often struggled with the confining expectations of the male-dominated world around them. All of this served to make her a powerful voice for the liberated woman of the 1960s, even if from the grave.

This would not have set well with the traditional academics in the small New England college town where George and Martha play out their tragedy. The college's president, Martha's father, was evidently the traditional sort, given Martha's deferential attitude towards him. Even though she is 52 years old, she still calls him "Daddy" and proudly claims that "Daddy knows how to run things" (27). Academia was still a bastion of male dominance at the time. The joking song was probably laughed at a little too loudly at the faculty party, because chances are that everyone in the room was afraid of Virginia Woolf, or at least of what she stood for.

As the play unfolds, however, we find that it is Martha who is the most afraid of the liberated sexual identity embodied in Virginia Woolf. This does not seem to be the case at the beginning of the play. When we first meet Martha, she is brash and assertive, even demanding, while her husband appears weak and browbeaten -- hardly the ideal of traditional gender roles. We soon find, however, that this dominant tendency in Martha is perhaps not indicative of her true views about herself or women. As mentioned before, her reverence and submissive attitude towards her "Daddy" indicates that she was raised in a world of traditional gender expectations. And she seems genuinely frustrated with George's inability to fill the role of the dominant male. During one particularly nasty exchange, she claims "I wear the pants in this house because somebody's got to, but I am not a monster" (158).