Different Shapes of Anarchy in Edward Albee’s Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Abstract

Edward Albee’s Who is Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1961) starts with chaos and anarchy, subverting the traditionally strict gender roles and cultural prescriptions and expectations. Albee’s play has revolutionized dramatic writing by opening the play with a deep male identity crisis. The repressive and oppressive gender roles are mimicked. This paper will try to demonstrate that Albee’s play is a one pervaded by different levels anarchy, instability of meanings and both verbal and structural turbulence. The play’s title indicates two instances of anarchy and sources of fear: the female and the mad. This paper will demonstrate how the reversal of gender roles operates in the play: the husband is feminized while the wife is masculinized, the wife plays an emasculating and unfeminine role while the husband is dominated and in a submissive position. The play’s anti-realistic and post-modern structure conveys ideas of improvisation, structural anarchy. It is unbound, fluid and both regressive and digressive. If anything, the play’s structure is anarchically unstable, defying the traditional realistic strictures. It is written in a grotesque and comic way that subverts the conventions of the comic genre. The disruptive verbal energy and dueling in the play aims at displaying disrespect for some of the main American values and institutions: family, marriage and academia are constantly debunked. The play stages a state of anarchy beneath the happy and tranquil surface of these institutions. This paper will also attempt to show how the play of anarchy has eventually to be stopped in order for the social order to be restored and vindicated.