Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf Analysis

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Edward Albee’s “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, seeks to portray the reality hidden beneath the social exterior of the ‘happy American Family’ of the 1950s, and aims to expose the dysfunctional relationships, often concealed behind an outwardly happy marriage. Albee has created a plot where his characters are immersed in peeling the veneers of pretension off one another and where truth and illusion are engaged in a continuous battle. The eponymous jingle, which is repeated many times in the play, is a parody of a children’s ditty and seeks to convey the fear associated with confronting the difference between illusion and reality. The name of the modernist author “Virginia Woolf” replaces the original reference to the big bad wolf as Albee wishes to find out “who’s afraid of living life without illusions” (Flanagan). Being an Absurdist, Albee believed that illusions often generate a false content for a person’s life and hence, should be abandoned ("Edward Albee: Who 's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"). The reference to Woolf is probably aimed at evoking the darkness and chaos, hidden behind seemingly stable relationships as depicted by Woolf in her novels and Albee also wants to convey that there are always different versions of reality. Albee’s jingle is significant in each character’s life and portrays the deep fear that each of them has in confronting the harsh realities in their lives. Honey, the seemingly devoted wife of Nick, is one such character that is terrified of