New Beginnings in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf :: Whos Afraid Virginia Woolf

New Beginnings in Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf Edward Albees Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a disturbing and powerful work. Ironically, it is disturbing and powerful for many of the same reasons. As the audience watches George and Martha tear sav be only at each other with the knives of hurled words, alter on pain and aimed to draw blood, the way in which these two unrelentingly go at each other is awful to see, yet strangely familiar. Like wounded animals, they strike out at those closest to them, and reminds angiotensin-converting enzyme of scenes witnessed as a child between screaming p atomic number 18nts from a mild door when one is supposed to be in bed. In this age of psychoanalytic jargon, George and Martha are the quintessentially dysfunctional couple. Yet, with all their problems, Albee reveals that there is a incontrovertible core of feeling that unites these two troubled people and that helps them look beyond their self-created hell. The truth of their relations hip is exposed layer by layer as the play progresses, like the peeling of an onion, and though the pattern of this truth appears umbrageous at first, with each cycle of revelation, the pattern becomes more distinct, and the picture is full revealed in the final, cathartic scene. One of the most consistent themes of the play is the point of George and Marthas child, and all that this child, and children in general, symbolizes for them. The child seems not only a disposition for fecundity within their relationship, but also a projection by which they express many of their personal desires, needs, and problems, and, in this context, the childs subsequent death signifies a milestone in their understanding of their marriage and of themselves. By the end of play, later much suffering and flagellation, George and Martha appear ready to deal with their cognizes in a new way. George and Martha have a history. They are also emotionally trap by this history, especially that of their res pective childhoods. As a consequence, both are plagued by low self-image and self-doubt. The audience learns of this history slowly, in bits and pieces. Martha tells Nick and dulcify in Act 1 how she lost her mother early and grew up very close to her father. She was married briefly, but her father had the marriage annulled. She returned to live with her father after college, and met and fell in love with George.