Title:Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' (Play by Dramatist Edward Albee)

Title:Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' (play by dramatist Edward Albee)

Author(s):Steven Carter

Source:The Explicator.56.4 (Summer 1998): p215.

Document Type:Article

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/00144940.asp

Full Text:

Critics have long recognized the symbolic significance of the flowers that Ophelia brings on stage in act 4, scene 5 of Hamlet. Of particular thematic importance to Shakespeare's play are rosemary, pansies, and violets; other figurative flowers, plants, and herbs in Hamlet include daisies, columbines, fennel, and rue.

Three of these Shakespearean flowers also play symbolic roles in Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? In act 3, George, who has momentarily left the house, suddenly reappears at the front door carrying a bunch of snapdragons. Martha exults: "Pansies! Rosemary! Violence! My wedding bouquet !" (196). Martha's "Violence ? is a clear pun on "violets," and echoes Honey's "Violence!" in act 2 - an excited response to George's physical assault on Martha at the conclusion of Humiliate the Host, the first of four games in the play (137). What is the connection between violets and violence? And what are the symbolic functions of the other flowers in Albee's drama?

Like Ophelia's bouquet in Hamlet, Albee's floral arrangement of pansies, rosemary, and violets constitutes a sign language. Even the snapdragons, the only actual flowers to appear in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are symbolic. Because they are commonly believed in Western folklore to ward off evil,(1) the appearance of snapdragons in act 3, entitled The Exorcism, is most appropriate. The evil that must be exorcised, of course, is George and Martha's son who, like Martha's wedding bouquet, is purely imaginary. George must kill him off nonetheless to salvage what's left of their deeply troubled marriage.

The imaginary wedding bouquet is of central importance to the play's overall thematic structure. To begin with, folkloric pansies are feminine in gender, signifying love divination as well as thoughts (compare the French pensees). From one perspective, that Martha should associate pansies with her wedding is richly ironic, since it is George's sterile intellectualizing that widens the gap between them in the first two acts of the play. On the other hand, as traditional folk medicines, pansies are also considered "abortifacients . . . or . . . inducers of menstruation" (Persoon 70). This secondary role played by pansies is also directly applicable to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:

George. How do you make the secret little murders stud-boy doesn't know about? Hunh? Pills? PILLS? You got a secret supply of pills? Or what? Apple jelly? WILL POWER? (177)

Honey has been performing her "secret little murders" because she is afraid to have a child.

Like pansies, rosemary functions as an abortifacient in traditional Western folklore (Persoon 70). In Albee's play, its primary symbolic connotation, that of remembrance, is exquisitely ironic as well:

Martha. I can't remember his name, for God's sake. . . . (5)

Well, I can't be expected to remember everything. (63)

I FORGET! Sometimes . . . sometimes when it's night, when it's late, and . . . everyone else is . . . talking . . . I forget. . . . (237)

Martha's forgetfulness is symptomatic of a fear of the past and a fear of getting old. The past she fears is one with an authoritarian father who has controlled her life since she was a young girl: a father who, in George's words, "really doesn't give a damn whether she lives or dies" (225).

Martha's fear of aging takes the form of infantilism:

Martha. (Imitating a tiny child) I'm firsty. (16)

Martha's father also has an iron grip on George's remembrance of things past, since it is George's therapeutic "memory book" that the old man suppresses by brutally intimidating his son-in-law:

Martha. And Daddy said . . . Look here, kid, you don't think for a second I'm going to let you publish this crap, do you? Not on your life, baby. . . . (135)

Like Honey, George is afraid to "give birth" - to publish the book wherein he faces up to, and perhaps exorcises, guilt over the death of his parents.

Violets, like rosemary, are commonly associated with pansies, which are also known as garden violets and horse violets Thus, Martha's wedding bouquet is all of a symbolic piece. As the last link in this signifying chain, the pun on violets and violence introduces the audience to Albee's most complex use of symbolic irony in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Violets traditionally signify faithfulness, but - as in Hamlet - they also connote sexual passion. As Nigel Alexander has written, in Shakespeare's play "The violet is an image which links the play's sexuality to the graveyard . . . Laertes hopes that violets may spring from [Ophelia's] dead body" (132). In Hamlet, the link between sexuality and violence is forged both by Ophelia's self-destructive behavior and by the struggle between the "rivals" Hamlet and Laertes in Ophelia's open grave.

In act 1 of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? George "kills" Martha with a toy gun. This act of imaginary violence arouses her:

George. Did you like that? Martha. (Giggling) You bastard. George. (Leaning over Martha) You liked that, didn't you? Martha. Yeah. . . .That was pretty good. (Softer) C' mon . . . give me a kiss. (58)

Albee's Martha and Shakespeare's Ophelia have much in common Both are passionate women; both are daughters of aggressive fathers who don't "give a damn" about them; both suffer cruel treatment at the hands of the men they love; both sing songs laced with bitter irony; both experience a death, one actual, the other imaginary. In Hamlet, however, Ophelia's legacy is the redemptive remembrance of the graveyard. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? once the snapdragons have done their duty, both Martha and George must learn to forget their imaginary child

- STEVEN CARTER, California State University, Bakersfield

NOTE

1. For a thorough discussion of the mythic and folkloric symbolism of snapdragons, pansies, rosemary, violets, and other flowers, see Scott Cunningham, Cunningham's Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1985). See also Scott Cunningham, Magical Herbalism: the Secret of the Wise (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1985), Clare Kowalchik, Rodale's Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs (Emmaus, PA: Rodale, 1987), and Anthony S. Mercatante, The Magic Garden: the Myth and Folklore of Flowers, Plants, Trees and Herbs (New York: Harper, 1976).

WORKS CITED

Albee, Edward. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? New York: New American Library, 1962.

Alexander, Nigel. Poison, Play, and Duel: A Study in Hamlet. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1971.

Persoon, James. "Shakespeare's Hamlet." The Explicator 55 (winter 1997): 70-71.

Abstract:

Rosemary, pansies and violets have an especially thematic importance in the plays of dramatist William Shakespeare and figure significantly in dramatist Edward Albee's play 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' Albee's floral arrangement of pansies, rosemary and violets constitutes a sign language. Even the only actual flowers to appear in Albee's play, which are the snapdragons, are symbolic. The symbolic functions of flowers in 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf' are analyzed.

Source Citation (MLA 7thEdition)

Carter, Steven. "Albee's 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?' (play by dramatist Edward Albee)."The Explicator56.4 (1998): 215+.Academic OneFile. Web. 26 Mar. 2014.

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