• Brief Intro from I-Biblio
• Intro to Woolf's Psychiatric History

• prominent woman writer,
• known for stream-of-consciousness writing
• also known to have killed herself and to have been hospitalized for mental instability (like Martha?)
• in the 60's known mostly only to academics
• seen as British, hence pretentious
• status as a major Modernist, feminist, and social critic not established until late 70's

• When I teach Albee's play to college students, one  aspect of the title I emphasize is the connotations of the name "Virignia Woolf."  Who is afraid of the duality of being human, of the capacity for innocence and violence that we all hold within ourselves?

• George and Martha are named after the father and mother of  the United States-- the Washingtons.  Does "VirginiaWoolf" also evoke the contrast between civilization and wilderness? (The Leslie Fiedler explanation)

 
• A couple of times in the play there are references to time Martha has spent in a "rest home."  Is Martha like Virginia in that she also periodically goes mad?

Also, when Albee wrote the play in 1964, Woolf was still seen as the epitome of academic etiolation-- an example of some obscure author who hardly anyone but English majors knew about.  And about all the general public did know was that she had gone mad and committed suicide. So the title makes fun of intellectual pretension at the same time as it evokes myths of  the dangers of female creativity.
 
• It's very interesting that another book written the same year (1964), Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, presents a similarly misogynistic image of  a woman whose power has to be curtailedby heroic men.  Think about the similarities between Martha and Big Nurse-- aren't they both castrating women (wolves) who have to be made vulnerable females again (Virginias)?  I don't think it's any coincidencethat 1964 is also the year that Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique came out. That book documents the systematic post-war misogyny that sent women back to the home but simultaneously blamed over-powerful mother figures for  everything from juvenile delinquency to homosexuality.

 In Susan Edmiston's book LITERARY NEW YORK, she reports Albee entered a
bathroom in a bar and saw WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? written across the
mirror in soap. She mentions that this bar "is now [early 70s] The Ninth
Circle"; she doesn't mention that The Ninth Circle was one of the most
well-known bars in gay NY. In the 1970s, it was favored by gay teens; I used
to go there a lot.

Some of the "interpreting" of the title of Albee's play listed on this serv
just astounds me. Just because one can "read" something into a work doesn't
mean that "reading" has any validity or utility. The Albee play title is an
absurd joke, like Orton's WHAT THE BUTLER SAW (there is no butler in Orton's
comedy), or like Albee's own THE AMERICAN DREAM (written just before VIRGINIA
WOOLF). It has nothingto do with Woolf herself, but is meant to be the kind
of bad academic joke someone like Martha (Albee's heroine) would find more
funny than it actually is. At the end of the play, when the drama is done and
George sings the line again and Martha answers "I am George. I am..." it
becomes an ironic joke,and a somewhat threatening one; the meaning remains
deliberately ambigious.

There was almost no biographical information about Woolf available when Albee
wrote his play. The title scrawled on the mirror in The Ninth Circle was
almost certainly inspired not by Virginia Woolf, but Barbra Streisand. In
those days, down the blockfrom The Ninth Circle, the teenage Barbra was
making her early name by playing in several gay and straight nightclubs in
the West Village. One of her early hits was her own version (with Peter Matz,
her longtime arranger) of "Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Woolf?" a broadly
campy rendition that sounds more like early Bette Midler than the more
intense, hypertheatrical,superstar Streisand. (A live recording, unpublished
for nearly thirty years, is on the first disk of Streisand's FOR THE RECORD
collection.) This number was a big hit in the Village. Bars had pianos then,
and all over the bar belt people sang along to "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad
Wolf?" over and over (I am told by someone who was there). The pun on
"Virginia Woolf" and "Big Bad Wolf" is probably a soundalike joke somebody
made, somebody else told to somebody else, and eventually wound up as the
title of one of America's greatest plays.

Woolf was an almost-forgotten figure in America then (even in many
universities), so she certainly was not a figure anybody was afraid of. I
still don't think she is.

Patrick Giles

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Last update: 7/27/97