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What Is The Role Of Communication In Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf

2629 Words11 Pages

“Fun and games” constitute the central issue of Edward Albee’s play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? They are important both form the thematic and the structural point of view. Through the games Albee attacks American society’s most cherished assumptions “that the marriage bond is a source of communion, that the business failure is a weakling, that fertility is a blessing…”1 In fact the play is a satiric indictment of American manners and mores and the cultural assumptions that shape them. According to Albee the essential problem that is covered over by manners and mores is the break-down of real communion between individuals. The protagonist of The Zoo Story (1958) says: “We neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other.” George and Martha’s difficulties arise from this problem of lack of real contact. …show more content…

He does not decide whether man can communicate or whether communication is worthwhile; through the games in the play, “he does attack the manners and attitudes of society that keep man from communication.”3 Explicitly, Albee does not seem to offer any systematic replacement for these attitudes. “Nonetheless, he does invoke, implicitly, a “moral-norm” -- Virginia Woolf demands that the spectator recognize that societal standards can become defenses that the individual uses to avoid the pain of facing reality. The title is a riddle whose answer enunciates this norm. The threat that is “Virginia Woolf” is the world of fantasy that the attitudes of society can

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In two passages, Virginia Woolf compares meals she was served at a men’s and at a women’s college. The contrasting meals reveal Woolf’s frustration at the inferior treatment that women face. The first meal at the men’s college is elegant, enjoyable, and satisfying while the second is plain, cheap, and bland. This clearly juxtaposes the expense and luxury afforded to the men with the “penny-pinching” nature of the women’s in order to show Woolf’s underlying attitude of dissatisfaction against the inequality that women are not granted the same privileges and investment as men.

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The diction and tone in Woolf’s essay affects her message as it was melancholy and calm. The diction was clear and understandable to ensure that the audience could understand her message, rather than try and decipher large incoherent words. Woolf also uses many words with negative connotations, but takes a neutral attitude to the subject. At the beginning of the essay Woolf 's tone is very hopeful, but as the essay progresses it turns dark and somber. At the beginning Woolf used phrasing such as “ Pleasant morning” (Woolf 5) and “enormous energy of the world”(Woolf 24) .

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This can be exhibited when she states “..that a highly gifted girl who had tried to use her gift for poetry would have been so thwarted and hindered by other people, so tortured and pulled asunder by her own contrary instincts, that she must have lost her health and sanity to a certainty.” Woolf desires to validate the idea that “woman cannot write the plays of Shakespeare” but intends to clarify that this is not due to a lack of talent or ability equal to that of men, but simply because the societal structures at the time rendered it impossible for them to be equally successful. In the development of her argument, Woolf starts out by exposing the belief that it was impossible for women to “have the genius of Shakespeare” and she contextualises the reader with some basic information, given by an authority figure “Professor Trevelyan” about women’s conditions during the era. Woolf then provides the reader with a hypothetical situation to ponder on: What if Shakespeare had had a sister — that is, a female sibling of

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