Review of themes in Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolfe by Edward Albee

Martha:  “Your potential’s fine. It’s fine. (wiggles her eyebrows). Absolutely dandy. I haven’t seen such a dandy potential in a long time. Oh, but, baby, you sure are a flop.”

For me, this is the key line of the play because it focuses on potential. This is the primary existential statement of the play and puts my focus, at least, on in its most crass and humiliating part, at the beginning of act III. The cuckhold and cuckquean have been made and Martha laments that her efforts to lure Nick into bed have been successful in a way, but ultimately sterile, just as all four characters are sterile. The damage to two marriages is done, but the desired fruit from this infidelity is ultimately spoiled or lifeless.

The celebrated illusion, which most critics highlight in this play, is the fantastic narrative surrounding the birth of George and Martha’s fictitious son.  The two, for undisclosed reasons, are infertile, and compensate for this impotence by manufacturing a false child. [One might assume that this infertility is self-imposed, like the other failures mentioned in the play – a 1990 version of the play directed by Albee toyed around with a line about Martha having secretly taken birth control pills during their marriage] This fake-out, the send up of the ideal family, stands in for reality.  The theme of children is strong in this play beyond the central narrative, infertility, that each couple has at the root of their relationship. Nick and Honey are brought together by an imagined pregnancy to wed, while George and Martha seem to be separated by stopping short of fully consummate their marriage with offspring. Instead they spend their time imagining a birth that never happened. This becomes the what-if suggested by how they refuse to live their lives.

This analogy continues with George’s failure to deliver on many fronts. He cannot get his book manuscript published, largely because of the explicitly stated interference of Martha’s father, however, his inability to assert himself, his lack of vigor at the crucial moment of his career, means that he abandons the plan to publish entirely, and is, therefore, a flop. Much like Nick’s failure while the audience is at intermission between acts II and III, George becomes a houseboy for lacking the potency to deliver on this crucial function of his career as an academic, publishing. This is the only clear evidence that we are given that Nick falls short as a professor, but it is a substantial insight into the illusion he presents to the world through his career. His identity is therefore fraud.

All the characters talk a brilliant game. At the beginning of the evening we see them as they present themselves to the world. The alcoholic haze that they sink into as the play progresses begins to work a secondary role as an acid on the false narratives the characters put forth. By the end of the play they are simultaneously wretched and honest. As the play ends they are revealed as frauds and charlatans, but the last embrace by George and Martha is different. It is the most honest embrace we have observed.

One can’t help but consider the contrast and the similarities between the two couples. George and Martha are slipping out of their youth while Nick and Honey have just become adults. The younger couple has great ambition and great naivety. They shun the impolite over-sharing of the older couple as an embarrassment. The older couple is calcified and hostile. What the older couple exposes the younger couple to is brutal honesty about the failure of marriage; looking back they condemn their younger selves to the misery of lost love and the futility of romance to sustain a marriage.  The older couple remembers marriage as a lost love slowly eroded over time. The younger couple lampoons the older for failing to use their connections, their failed plans to become important in their community, and their general impotence. Nick’s character asserts that he will succeed where older men have failed and Honey wraps herself in romantic pretense.  Her non-existent tolerance for alcohol, her slim waistline, her naiveté all are attributes of youth and superficial beauty.  Nick rejects this in relating having played doctor with Honey as a child,

“I wouldn’t say there was any….particular passion between us, even at the beginning…of our marriage, I mean”

George confirms in the next line,

“Well, certainly no surprise, no earth shaking discoveries, after Doctor, and all.”

The younger couple is looking at the future as a strategic alliance where love, absent now, will grow in time.

These two perspectives of life hide the love of marriage behind some temporary excuses for doing the harder task, recognizing its presence at any given moment.

Nick and Honey are becoming George and Martha, but they don’t yet know it. They are trading one set of excuses for another. Each has contempt for the other, but it is not until Nick’s line: “I think I understand this.” at the end of Act III that Nick and George become one character which triggers the exit of Nick and Honey from the dump of a living room.  George confesses in Act II that , “Martha is a naive, at heart…” linking her to Honey. [Although, it is harder to imagine Martha 20 years previously throwing up after two glasses of brandy.] Honey becomes Martha when she completely breaks down screaming, or when she begins to peel the labels off the brandy bottle. When reality sets in at the end of the requiem mass in Act III, Nick and Honey exist the stage and leave us with nothing but the older couple, alone, in the wee hours of the morning contemplating life, importantly together as a couple, their series of flops in life. The fact that this pain drives them together suggests Albee's ultimate structure, what the acid of three acts does not erode. 

Albee, in this way, gives us his existentialist take on marriage. He walks us out to the end of the ledge and gives us all plenty of reasons to jump, but then challenges us, by showing us the mistakes one makes in life to shuffle off our own impotence and choose to act (and he gives an assortment of suggestions of useful action).

Albee’s production moves us, and this is the subtext of the crisis he presents us. We are told that we can create books, plays, careers, love, marriages, and even children by turning away from the mistakes of this couple. The themes continue to build in scope as we examine the play, even at a few points to encompass the whole of western civilization as George, the George Washington to Nick’s Nikita Khrushchev contemplates the false potential of romantic socialism to the cold reality of erecting a productive society made from less-than-ideal individuals. George contemplates the misery of a dystopian future of eugenics and the fall of civilization. We are told that humanity is doomed to repeat its mistakes from history, which in other presentations would seem like a lament, but in this play it validates humanity's own imperfect existence.

Overall, the play leaves one wanting to escape the living room where they have spent three hours not wanting to celebrate or revel in past successes, but rather, to create something of value. The moral of the story is to recognize the triviality of lost opportunities to make something of oneself

Where I come out in support of Snake-Oil Salesmen, Moon Landing Deniers, and YES anti-vaxxers:

What did he just say?  I was sitting in the 14th row of a 300-person class when the professor defiantly said the words, “the optimal amount of pollution in the world is non-zero.” I looked around the room of groggy faces; this was the University of Alabama on a Friday morning at 9AM. No reactions from anyone behind me and I couldn’t see the faces of the students in the front row.  For me, something clicked.

It was that moment when I knew I was at home in economics. The role of the economist, it seemed, was to point out the PAINFULLY obvious, that you can’t get anything you want without also getting something that you don’t want along side it. The question was not, can we get rid of pollution all together, but it was a question of how to get the most out of the pollution that was necessarily being created.

Since that time I wrote a dissertation on the Political Economy of Repugnance, where I took seriously the issue of change in society and the role economists have played in discussing and describing this change.  A key feature of this was the technical feasibility of things that deeply disturbed people. People have intuitive reactions to change that must be revised based on a rational discussion. A sample salvo: Markets in Organs anyone?

The story is not all sunshine and roses, after-all, what about snake-oil salesmen. Not all snake oil is created equal, for instance a popular concoction in the late 19th and early 20th century included turpentine (something close to kerosene). Drinking this would certainly make you feel like you had taken medicine, and it might even make you hallucinate, I don’t know, I haven’t tried. What we seem to forget, though, is that before the days of the FDA and massive testing, unregulated experiments with different medicines is the process which gave us Aspirin and many antacids, many have claimed that these would fail to pass the regulated approval process today. While this doesn’t justify selling turpentine to strangers, the existence of such high-risk markets seems to be, to me, more than simply a market failure.

Starting to think of these problems in terms of repugnance, I realized a whole lifetime of fascination with conspiracy theory. Now, I am a moderate conspiracy theorist, I don’t go in for 9/11 hoax stuff, but I am absolutely fascinated by the conversation surrounding the moon landing. I think this is because such a feat is too big to simply take in in one bite. I don’t deny the actual existence of man-made objects on the moon, but this doesn’t mean that I fail to appreciate the necessity of a conversation around the landing. What is happening here is bigger than simply a factual statement. What is happening is the re-orientation of a mass of people to technological capabilities. The conversation is therapeutic in some way. To have the conversation is to discuss what such a change means for humanity. We have to hit the reset button on many of our intuitions. To deny the moon landing, in some sense, is to re-affirm some consistency in the nature of man. I don’t say the conversation is rational, I say it is therapeutic.  This might be one step prior to rationality. Recall my initial analogy, this “pollution” (anti-rational thought) is not desirable in itself, but it is a byproduct of the process of innovation and technological change. The real question is how much?

Now, I have seen quite a few people expressing their repugnance for anti-vaxxers, whose grasp of science leaves something to be desired even in the eyes of a 1st grade teacher. But, I will not simply condemn this group to hell simply because they are wrong. Instead, I want to think about how many anti-vaxxers are needed for society to function well. There is some number of radically fearful parents who cause problems for the medical establishment and produce positive externalities. These snake-oil salesmen either accidentally or deliberately sell medicine that actually works. One of the great outcomes of the anti-vaxxer campaign is that many parents I have met actually understand what the vaccine is doing to their children in a much more complete way than they ever did before. This is a great outcome. I love that people have to sort through information and mis-information, this is an important skill.

It is good for us to question hegemony. Medicine is not the result of a flawless process of monotonic progress. The problem only comes when repugnance becomes systematic. Whole communities of anti-vaxxers live together in community and share snake-oil science, OK, that is bad and it is also threatening herd immunity in various areas of the country. These are problems, and can be addressed. But again, it is not true that the correct level of pollution in society is zero. Things do seem to improve over time. In the 1980s there was massive PM10 pollution in the mountain basin around LA (as well as other cities), changes occurred and the pollution problem has shifted to the less visibly offensive PM2.5. Our repugnance for visible pollution is driving us to reorganize, rationally.

My final analogy, therefore, is to talk about pollution directly. Lets be sure that in the process of trying to reduce visible pollution (PM10) doesn’t make you forget the pollution that is less visible (PM2.5). This less visible pollutant makes life very hard for the young, the elderly, and those with asthma. For this group of people, the lesson of PM2.5 is very clear. What I worry about with much of the anti-vaxxer repugnance going on is that rather than creating information about pollution, we are simply treating the seen and not the unseen. We should be focusing on understanding the problem of pollution, not simply responding enthusiastically to its more visible forms. This means educating parents about the role of medicine in their children’s lives.


This seems to be the real problem that the existence of anti-vaxxers points to. Parents are frightened because they don’t understand what is happening to their kids. Even those of us that are very informed can relate to that fear. Sure, there is a need to educate people about the absurdity of being an anti-vaxxer, but we also should educate people about what the vaccines are intended to do and what we can do to inform parents about the health care of their children. We don’t need to just tell them that the needles, the procedures, the special lab coats make doctors experts that can be trusted, maybe it is possible to involve parents and help them understand what is going on with the health of their children. The way to fight this problem is not with our repugnance of the ignorant, it is rather with voracious defense of rationality. Only through rational science can we sort out snake oil from medicine.