This entire presentation is copyright © 1968 and © 1999 by William Allin Storrer. Phd. For permission to quote, contact Dr. Storrer at mindalive@storrer.com
"This country hasn't lived up to its beginnings."1
---Edward Albee
The specific factors developed in the preceding three chapters now come to focus as an indictment of contemporary America for having failed to bring about the American dream of our forefathers. The synthesis of the interpretive jigsaw puzzle suggests a comprehensive challenge to the very basis of our existence and the threat of extinction to the American way of life.
George is a history teacher, keeper of the traditions Americans cherish. He and his wife Martha have lived with illusions for most of their married life. Their most cherished illusion, a son who is coming of age tomorrow, is exorcised as part of the tragic downfall of George. The pattern represented in his downfall may produce a feeling of pity for George, but hardly affects the viewer with terror, the other essential of catharsis. This happens only when we realize that the roots of our existence are challenged much as are the roots of George's existence, which was built on an illusion, challenged and destroyed. Only in the destruction of the illusion, his child, our American dream, can a future be assured.
The first part of the preceding summary is clearly present in the development of Chapters II through IV. Chapter V is concerned with their synthesis in a view of Stagwoolf as "The Smashing of the American Dream:"
<Does he not entitle his characters George and Martha (the parents of our nation)? Does he not put them in the setting of New Carthage University (built on the ruins of the old world)? Is not their child, the dream they share between them, the new country, the beautiful green hills and the brown fields that they both describe so well? Is not George's boyhood memory of the killing of his mother (mother England) and the feeling of exhilaration and drinking, the rebellion exercised by a young nation?>2
Paul Tannenbaum of Hofstra University argues that Stagwoolf is about "The conflicting ideas of building a new nation."3 He is not alone in his position. L. E. Chabrowe states that "the main characters of Martha and George are meant to suggest Mr. and Mrs. America . . . . The American Dream which is theirs is allowed to die . . . . The play is political out-and-out . . . ."4 Albee admits that the play is about the decline of Western civilization,5 a point he has George express near the end of Act Two: "'And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and burdened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events must . . . eventually . . . fall.'"(174)6
Such a view rests largely upon the significance of the names of the elder couples; Martha and George. In Albee's earlier plays, specifically The American Dream and The Sandbox, the married couple were called "Mommy" and "Daddy." Here, for the first time in an Albee play, they are given concrete first names, and the first names are those of the Mommy and Daddy of the United States of America, Martha and George Washington, the first president of the United States and the first first lady of the nation. This could, of course, have happened purely by chance, in which case one would expect the names of others in the play to have no significance of the same sort. Yet placed in the context of America's generation of founding fathers versus the modern generation of technology, and the name "Nick" suggests Nikita Kruschev, "father" of his country at the time Stagwoolf was written. Nick's wife's real name is never revealed; she is always called by her nickname, "Honey." That Martha and George are the Washingtons and Nick is Kruschev, symbolically, Albee has admitted.7 Yet the admission is of little significance unless the value of these symbolic names can be demonstrated.
Nick and Honey represent the technologically minded present-generation. The "son" represents the generation Martha and George think they have created; he is but five years younger than Honey, seven than Nick. But the son is imaginary, as imaginary as the "American Dream" that has never come to fruition.
Lee Baxandall sets the framework necessary for expanding upon this conflict of generations, in what he calls "The Albee Family America:"
<Three generations comprise Albee's archetypal family: Then, the epoch of a still-dynamic national ethic and vision; Now, a phase which breaks down into several tangents of decay; Nowhere, a darkly prophesied future generation. Only two characters are left over from Then: Grandma, and a Pater-familias or patriarch who is occasionally mentioned but never appears.>8
Baxandall then traces each of these generations in all of Albee's plays up to and including Tiny Alice. In Stagwoolf, the patriarch is Martha's father, the College President, who reflects "an American ethos [that] is vanishing, an ethos that was purposive and energetic," and whose "announced values were real."9 The Now generation is represented by Martha and George. Martha "has the essential Mommy traits but her character is more complex."10 Since "Mommy has taken over the male prerogatives . . . the variants of his type are defined by whether they oppose the present passively or with active negation."11 George is Daddy in Stagwoolf. Mommy is usually the activist, and Daddy somewhat passive, and this active/passive polarity is seen in the Nowhere generation in the identical twins of The American Dream, only the passive one of which appears on the stage, and in Jerry and Peter of The Zoo Story.12 In Stagwoolf "Nick is a forecast of triumph for the IBM male."13 Honey was the first of Albee's third generation females, and with the example of Martha before her, she does not want children; "She will not further this vector of history!"14 This is the Albee Family America, as Lee Baxandall sees it. Between his view of past, present and future, and the view of Martha and George as symbolic of the Washingtons, it may be possible to grasp a view of Albee's America.
In any view, Nick, Honey and the imaginary son, who are all in their twenties, represent the future that is beyond George and Martha. In such a context, Martha and George represent both past and present, for they represent what the past has become in the present. Daddy, the College President, represents the spirit of the American pioneer. Martha and George once had that spirit, but no longer, just as Nick and Honey have it, but will lose it.
Parallels between the two couples imply that the younger couple will end up like their elders. Martha and George
<. . . know youth a time of joy and propose. George . . . wed a girl with money and influence, the daughter of the college president. Martha . . . rejoiced in her rapport with her father, and she enjoyed her courtship with George, going into bars and ordering exotic drinks. She married him and had great hopes for his future . . . .>15
<Nick and Honey have the same memories and ambitions. He was an impressive student . . . has a loving wife, one with money, and he is in biology, the coming science. His rise within the college seems an "inevitability.">16
Nick and Honey will be defeated by life as have been Martha and George. Martha and George, the Washingtons, have produced no children, only an illusion of a child. Their dream for America has not come to fruition. What has developed instead is Nick, "a descendant of Albee's disemboweled young man in The American Dream, willing to do anything to get ahead,"17 representing "the science of the future and the technology,"18 and Honey, "the inheritor of the church and its money."19 This younger couple seems to be symbolic of the Kruschevs in contemporary Russia, with the church existing only by permission of the state, its wealth being used to support the needs of a new technology.
Martha and George are what has become of the Washingtons today. They gave birth to a son who stands for "the revolutionary principles of this country that we haven't lived up to yet,"20 for the son is imaginary, as is the "American Dream" much of contemporary society believes to be the America of today. Martha and George are childless, and so is American society. All we have today are Nick and Honey, whose future is rather bleak. Albee's picture is one of total sterility in a contemporary society with no future, facing extinction.
<The campus setting . . . represents a place dedicated to the pursuit of truth but headed for complete annihilation instead. It is not a coincidence that the ancient city state of Carthage founded by the Phoenicians and eventually destroyed by the Romans, is the name given to this college. The title insinuates inevitable doom for whatever place this campus really represents.>21
The campus represents America.
This level of international politics is played out in dialogue by George about history, his field of competence, and quite specifically with the United States' "prime opponent," Nick Kruschev. George depicts his opponent as altering chromosomes to achieve a race of incubator-born men(65) with the sterility of the imperfect being assured by "millions of tiny little slicing operations."(66) He knows that he is being threatened by Nick,(68) and is unsure of "national boundaries, the level of the ocean, political allegiances"(72) and such, and wonders if we will sur-vive.(106) George has taken "the trouble to construct a civilization . . . to . . . to build a society based on the principles of . . . of principle."(117) Nick is allied to the church represented by Honey, however shaky the arrangement, and George suggests he rearrange his alliances.(149) Shortly thereafter he makes a specific offer;
. . . ice for the lamps of China, Manchuria thrown in. (To NICK) You better watch those yellow bastards, my love . . . they aren't amused. Why don't you come on over to our side, and we'll blow the hell out of 'em. Then we can split up the money between us and be on Easy Street. What d'ya say.(166)
This rather obvious reference to the Sino-Soviet difficulties of the early sixties can hardly be overlooked in its implication that the poles of America and Russia are being represented in George and Nick.
This offer made, George then reads from a book Albee's prediction for the future, quoted earlier; "And the west, encumbered by crippling alliances, and burdened with a morality too rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of events, must . . . eventually . . . fall."(174) Again, the prediction of doom.
That the inter-relations of various levels of symbolism is not perfectly consistent (e.g., Martha and George representing either or both the founders of America and What is left of those founders and their pioneering spirit today) does not make the symbols any less important in a consideration of what the play is able to communicate. Albee has said "I don't like symbolism that hits you over the heads" and "A symbol should not be a cymbal."22 Thus his symbols in most of his plays have a tendency to obscure, rather than immediately clarify, his intentions.
Is Albee's prediction of doom, doom for the western materialistic society as symbolized in Nick, doom for an American society that has failed to live up to its pioneer ideals as symbolized in George, doom for America both at the hands of western materialism and technology and rising oriental cultures, doom because all the west has produced is infertile cultures incapable of sustaining a valid humanity, is this prediction of doom necessary to his drama? Thomas Markus demonstrates why the answer must be affirmative, not only for Albee's tragedies, but for tragedy in the twentieth century.23
Though in Chapter III a structural basis for tragedy was developed, the principle was not extended to show why any specific order of events could bring about tragic catharsis, that feeling of pity and fear which tragic performance must purge. Markus notes that
<For the Greek accepting the Olympian deities, as Aristotle presumably did, and for the Elizabethan accepting Shakespeare's world picture, Oedipus and Lear became more than intellectual analogies; the characters became, through theatrical magic or mimesis, the same as themselves. This is why, finally, all Elizabethan and Greek tragedy does not engage us. We do not share common concerns with the heroes and their problems are ours only in intellectual analogy. That is, we can pity but we cannot fear their plight.>24
For tragedy to be effective, it must produce "a feeling (not an understanding)!"25 of terror which reaches to the roots of our essential selves. We must be threatened with "genuine extinction. We must fear for our very being, and our fear must spring from the very problem which we are coping with intellectually."26
The doom Albee predicts and demonstrates through George and his three antagonists, is the extinction with which we are threatened. That it is somewhat obscured by inconsistent symbolism, may be the reason some critics have found the play lacking in effect, yet it may be the very intellectual obscurity that makes it work for others, that challenges them to seek a solution to its apparent problems; the predicted doom is felt in the actions experienced by George, rather than logically reasoned from the symbolism. The symbols work subliminally as symbols, not as cymbals.
Commenting on the naming of George and Martha, Albee elaborated his feelings thusly; "It all starts out terribly private. Then somewhere along the line you realize you're talking about general matters. If it stays private, it's no good."27 So what began on a small New England college campus is now expanded to encompass American, and perhaps all western, society. What began as tragedy in form, now encompasses the tragedy of our very being. The illusion that was but a child, is now the entire American Dream that has failed to materialize in the twentieth century, and Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is all of these.
1. John Skow, "Broadway's Hottest Playwright, Edward Albee," Saturday Evening Post, CCXXXVII (January 18, 1964), p. 33. Skow is quoting Albee.
2. Paul H. Tannenbaum, "Smashing the Dream," Letter to the Editor, New York Times (July 24, 1966), p. 18D.
3. Ibid.
4. L. E. Chabrowe, "The Pains of Being Demystified~" Kenyon Review, XXXV (Winter, 1963), p. 145.
5. Thomas L. Morgan "Angry Playwright in a soft Spells" Life, LXII (May 26, 19675, p. 93.
6. Albee has George read from Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West.
7. Michael E. Rutenberg, "Edward Albee: Social Critic," (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Yale University, New Haven, June, 1965), p. 149. Rutenberg refers to an interview he held with Albee March 17, 1965.
8. Lee Baxandall, "The Theatre of Edward Albee," Tulane Drama Review, IX (Summer, 1965), p. 20.
9. Ibid., p. 21.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., p. 23.
12. Ibid., pp. 23-34.
13. Ibid., p. 24.
14. Ibid., p. 25.
15. Daniel McDonald, "Truth and Illusion in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?," Renascence, XVII (Winter, 1964), p. 64.
16. Ibid.
17. Rutenberg, op. cit., p. 91.
18. Tannenbaum, loc. cit.
19. Ibid.
20. Rutenberg, op. cit., p. 114. Rutenberg is quoting Albee from a personal interview, March 17, 1965.
21. Ibid., p. 96
22. Paul Gardner, "'Tiny Alice' Mystifies Albee, Too," New York Times (January 21, 1965), p. 22.
23. Thomas B. Markus, "Tiny Alice and Tragic Catharsis," Educational Theatre Journal, XVII (October, 1965), pp. 225-233.
24. Ibid., p. 232.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. Skow, loc. cit.