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This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

RITUAL STRUCTURE AND ROMANTIC VISION
IN EDWARD ALBEE'S DRAMA: A STUDY
OF THREE PLAYS

presented by

Mary Cas tiglie Anderson

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

Ph.D. . English
degree in

 

Major pr? fessor

13...ng

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RITUAL STRUCTURE AND ROMANTIC VISION
IN EDWARD ALBEE'S DRAMA: A STUDY
OF THREE PLAYS

BY

Mary Castiglie Anderson

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1981

ABSTRACT
RITUAL STRUCTURE AND ROMANTIC VISION

IN EDWARD ALBEE'S DRAMA: A STUDY
OF THREE PLAYS

BY

Mary Castiglie Anderson

Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia

 

 

Woolf?, and Tiny Alice contain a ritual structure, specifi-

 

cally an initiation ritual, which helps to explain the
presence of violence and confusion within the plays, helps
to interpret the ambiguous conclusions, and helps to place
Albee within the Romantic tradition.

Each play shares with primitive initiation ceremonies
a "novice" mid-way between childhood dependency and maturity.
Peter, George, and Julian have all chosen passivity as a
way of holding onto the security and external definition of
a patriarchal institution; nevertheless, some inner psychic
balance in each tries to assert itself and bring control to
the individual. Peter's bench, George's imaginary son, and
Julian's role as lay brother show them to be neither recon-
ciled to authoritarian structure nor fully committed to
freedom.

In response to the crisis, seductive females and/or
male doubles appear, similar to the frightening agents who

are the priests of primitive initiations. These antagonists

Mary Castiglie Anderson
represent the emotional,carnal, aggressive, irrational,
"dark" impulses which the protagonists fear in themselves,
and they suggest a tension between female nature symbols
and male social structures. Their presence demands a con-
frontation which polarizes the main characters' contra-
dictory inclinations.

The polarization is then resolved in a moment of andro-
genous union connected with a death. As in primitive rites,
the initiate experiences simultaneous obliteration and
unification. The violent, terrifying experience not
only symbolizes the change in identity—-it causes it.
Similar to the initiate's "rebirth" Albee's characters
exhibit primal gestures and dialogue at the conclusions of
the plays. Unlike primitive initiations, however, Albee's
initiation is not into society but into autonomy, into the
maturity to resist surrender to absolute systems of belief,
external sources of self—definition. Albee is not nihil—
istic, nor are his plays simply descriptive of the problems
of modern society; they prescribe a process of personal and

social renewal.

For Laura and Alexandra
and especially
for David

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Long before I completed this project I began to
realize that the task was gathering around itself a di—
verse community of individuals who not only provided me
with the tools I needed to deal with my topic but who also
helped shape the sensibility I brought to it. These indi-
viduals contributed various combinations of professional
guidance, emotional support, and practical assistance both
to the immediate task and to the years of training leading
up to it. To the members of this community which, by vir-
tue of this finished work I claim as my own, I express my
gratitude.

First, I would especially like to thank my director,
Dr. Arthur Athanason. His comprehensive knowledge of
modern drama, combined as it is with his dedication to
teaching and his love of the theater, gave me the basic
materials from which my interest in Albee could grow.
Along with this, I remain grateful for his faith in me.

Among the graduate faculty I particularly thank
Dr. Barry Gross, Dr. Randal Robinson, and Dr. Sam Baskett;
their support of my early graduate work gave me the cour-
age to begin this task and see it through to completion.

Dr. Gross renewed his support in his careful reading of

iii

the text and in his important stylistic suggestions.

Dr. Robinson challenged me to refine and clarify my ideas
to the overall advantage of my writing and my understanding
of Albee's drama.

Dr. James McClintock, my friend and colleague at Lyman
Briggs College, listened patiently to my ideas and to
chapters of my work, offered advice, lent me enormously
helpful books and articles, and engaged with me in many
enlightening and enlivening literary discussions.

There are many women to whom I feel special gratitude
and much affection. Some have been role models and
teachers: Dr. Linda Wagner of Michigan State's English
faculty, Dr. Kristin Lauer of the English faculty of Ford-
ham University's College at Lincoln Center, Dr. Ann Hanson
of Fordham's Classics Department (who, more than any other
person, gave direction to my intellectual development).
Some are friends whose ideas and ideals have enriched and
sustained me and who often understand past words: Dr.
Marilyn Atlas, Lynn Wasserman Scott, Dr. Sara Culver,
Antionette Castiglie.

I owe thanks as well to Margaret Cervone Castiglie,
my mother, who first gave me books and who showed me the
importance of earning one's way even if it hurts one's
back; to my father, Joseph Castiglie,who indefatigably
encouraged my education and gave me dreams to go on; and
to my extended family who raised me on discussion, deep
concerns, and sensitivity to feelings and nuance.

iv

I am grateful as well to those friends, neighbors,
and relatives (including Myrtle and Louis Anderson) who
cared for my children and who extended their offices and
their dining room tables to help me in my constant pur-
suit of space and time.

Finally, I thank my husband, David Anderson, who has
assisted me in all my labors. No single person is as much
a partner in this work as he. He has been an intelligent
and tough debator, an intellectual conspirator, an exas-
perating but invaluable editor, a patient and loving friend.
Besides all this, his own personal integrity continues to

be my mainstay.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

Introduction. . . . .
Chapter
I The Zoo Story . . . . . . . .
II Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
III Tiny Alice. .
Conclusion. . . . . . . .
Notes .
Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . .

vi

Page

24
57

102

126
154

161

 

INTRODUCTION

Edward Albee's dramatically vital early plays, par-

ticularly Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), have

 

sustained the playwright's distinction and credibility as
a significant voice in modern American theater, despite
critical disagreement as to the moral and philosophic posi-
tions he takes. Albee's theater has been explained vari—
ously as a spiritual tract of Christian salvation, as a
nihilistic homage to Supreme Nothingness, and as a cheer—
less existentialist portrait of heroic survival in the face
of hopeless futility. Portraits of Albee himself are those
of an angry young man of a lost generation, a beatnik, a
talented trickster whose flair for dramatic dialogue and
theatrical technique veils a central hollowness, a minor
talent adept at borrowing from greater artists, past and
present, and a committed social critic. His most demanding
works have been proclaimed as both courageous and cowardly,
profound and trivial, revelatory and gratuitously obscure.
Critical investigation on Albee, in short, fails to
yield a consistent, convincing picture of the playwright as
a prophet of hope, a prophet of despair, or a false prophet,
nor does it conclude whether the closing scenes of The Zoo

Story (1958), Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Tiny

 

 

2
Alice (1964) should be played with elation, despair, resig-
nation, or anger. The absence of even the most general
framework for Albee's dramatic intentions seriously jeopar—
dizes the legitimacy of his art, especially given the
diminishing success of his later career. At their best his
plays shock, offend, and intrigue. Since these qualities
diminish in his later works in proportion to their failure
to convey the energy and import of the earlier plays, the
question arises as to whether Albee's reputation was formed
on sentimentality and sensationalism, or on substance.
Should Albee's contribution to modern theater end with

this evaluation, not only would an injustice be done to his
artistic integrity but American letters would be deprived
of his important artistic vision. C. W. E. Bigsby, one of
the most astute scholars of Albee's works, comes closest to
defining the moral imperative of the playwright's message.
He writes:

Albee finds little attraction in the contempo-

rary cant of alienation and despair; and, if

he recognizes the crises of identity through

which man is passing, he does not confuse this

with an enervating determinism. For to Albee

the absurd does not lie in the discrepancy be-

tween the aspirations of the human spirit and

the incapacity of the world to satisfy them,

but in man's resolute adherence to distrac-

tions and illusion in the face of a desperate

need to acknowledge reality.

Using three Albee plays-—The Zoo Story, Who's Afraid

 

of Virginia Woolf?, and Tiny Alice-—this study intends to

 

find the structural basis for this assertion. Albee's

vision is, as Bigsby suggests it is, apocalyptic in an

 

3
affirmative sense because the mythic pattern of initiation
ritual underlying most of his major works implies not only
death but renewal. In these particular plays, more so than
in subsequent ones, this structure engages the audience (as
well as the characters) to experience a search for defini—
tive, absolute meaning as the ultimate universal illusion.
The only satisfactory conclusion the plays indicate is of
reality as an activity whereby humans, individually and
collectively, create and develop themselves, hence the pro—
cess of death or destruction and rebirth or re—creation.
Form links inseparably with content in Albee's early
achievements, moreover, to frustrate reductive critical

intentions.

The Zoo Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and

 

Tiny Alice form a unit. The Zoo Story, on its most
naturalistic level, targets modern society's socio—economic
stratification and leans toward social statement, while
Tiny Alice both attacks institutional religion and makes
explicit Albee's metaphysical concerns. Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? with its decadent intellectual milieu and
its religious parodies combines the two. Beneath these
complimentary perspectives all three dramas employ a
similar form to similar ends.

The beginning point for understanding this structure

is Albee's characters' passivity, the by-product of their

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4
confinement within a large, authoritarian, historically
grounded system. In each play the system acts as a dis-
placed father figure: society in The Zoo Story, the uni-
versity run by George's father—in—law in Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf?, God the Father in Tiny Alice; and each is
maintained by a female, or, in the last case, a feminine
symbol: Peter's wife, Martha, and Mother Church.

The general malaise enveloping Albee's characters (a
malaise characteristic of the tone of post—industrial
dramatic literature) is symptomatic of their acquiesence
to these authorities. Each character seems intent on
effacing himself. Julian (Tiny Alice) raises "to serve and
be forgotten" to a life's goal, but both Peter and George
also deny themselves the privilege of self-assertion and
therefore of identity. Martha, in fact, calls George a
"cipher, a zero," and Peter "is not in the habit of talking
about himself much." All this precludes all relationships
except those which function symbiotically, as in the case
of George and Martha.

When we look at the characters closely we find they
consistently, almost conscientiously, avoid conflict. This

is even true of George in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,

 

who always stops his bickerings with Martha just short of
full scale confrontation. Pieced together with all the in-
formation we are given about Peter, George, and Julian, the
avoidance seems to suggest their fear of "losing control,"

that is, of lowering cultural restraints. The fear of

 

5

gross social trangression is, of course, the fear of expul—
sion from the defining and differentiating support system.
Social structures may be confining, but they are, after
all, also defining; they confer on Albee's characters a
sense of who each is relative to his fellow creatures and
relative to the institution itself. Their only available
alternative would appear to be isolation and obliteration

(or loss of social identity).

We can say, therefore, that fear of abandonment and
obliteration (both come up as themes in the play-—the lat—
ter is expressed through preoccupations with insanity) keep
Peter, George, and Julian on the defensive against any in-
trusive agents who might appear to threaten the psychologi—
cally complex operation they've set up.

The operation is very complex, because each character
balances his fear against what must be a persistent, char-
acteristically Dionysian and Romantic urge toward freedom.
To appease the impulse and to nurture (however meagerly)
the individuality that spawns it, the characters maintain a
compromise. Peter has his bench to assert his separate
identity from his social group and to protect him from
wandering too far from its watchful eye. George vilifies
his father-in-law privately but remains publically loyal
to his rule. George and Martha's childlessness asserts
their freedom from the historical lineage of the intellec-

tual machine; their fictional son soothes the panic of

 

what that freedom might mean. Julian is neither "of the
world" nor "of the Church." He holds to the teaching of
the traditional institution but, like George, is dissatis-
fied with the father figure in whose name the institution
functions.

However, the characters' compromise between passivity
and personal will, between group identity and individual
identity, between security and freedom, encompasses a con-
tradiction. The situations Peter, George, and Julian have
assumed in order to protect themselves from alienation and
from which they borrow identities, are, in fact, alienating
these characters from others and from themselves. Albee
projects through each character an embodiment of this con—
tradiction: Peter, the archetypal middle or organization
man, isolates himself on a lonely park bench; George, the
history professor expounding lessons on historical inevit-
ability, defies historical succession by renouncing his
past (whether we take the allegory of the young boy liter-
ally or symbolically) and by having no progeny to invest in
the future; Julian adhers to the dress and restrictions of
the cleric without taking on the offices of the role. Each
character is, on the one hand, merely a mouthpiece for the
larger authority, though each, on the other hand, intu-
itively resists the tendency to accept this external
referent as implacable reality.

We can make a reasonable assumption, therefore, that

Albee intends each play to open at the character's point

 

7
of psychological exhaustion, the result of sustaining a
mid—point position for many years. Each is at a juncture
between change and absorption into the stronger will. In
Lawyer's terminology (Tiny Alice) Julian "can be pushed"
over to "the Truth"——and it is the intention of this study
to investigate what message Albee wants to convey by that
term; change is certainly an important component of it--or
"back to the asylums," that is, to the loss of conscious
will and ego.

In each play an agent or agents appear to generate con-
flict and eventually to push the character before he or
she gives in to oblivion. Aside from The Zoo Story, however,
in which Jerry clearly appears as Peter's opposite, the
agents for change vary relative to the characters they come
up against. Martha acts in opposition to George, and Vice
versa, but George and Martha together act in opposition to
the intellectual community and to Nick and Honey. Lawyer
and Miss Alice act in opposition to Julian, but, also in
Tiny Alice, Alice (or Nature) acts in opposition to God
the Father.

Peter, George, Nick and Honey, Julian, and God, there-
fore, are corresponding characters aligned with principles
of order, control, rationality, spirituality, a-sexuality,
causation, and objective detachment. All these personages
reflect these characteristics in one form or another and
are therefore polarized against Jerry, Martha, George and

Martha, Lawyer and Miss Alice, and Alice respectively.

 

 

8

The characters in this latter group, it must be noted,
are either seductive females or versions of the "dark twin,"
that inscrutable social outcast. Alice or Mother Nature,
of course, is, like God, the matrix symbol from which the
others emanate. Each antagonist plays a variation on
themes of rebellion, randomness, sexuality, intuition, a-
rationality, capriciousness, and subjectivity. The protag-
onists (by which, for want of a better word, I mean the
characters in the first group—-protagonists and antagonists
in Albee's plays are interchangeable) tend to be motivated
by the impulse to by-pass natural processes as a means of
avoiding biological inevitability (i.e. death) and so dedi—
cate themselves (on one level) to upholding the social norms
that assert priority over nature. Their fear of death is
certainly associated with the primal fears of obliteration
and abandonment I've already mentioned. The fear motivates
the suppression of certain personal impulses (especially
sexual and aggressive ones) which the characters then
objectify, that is, see as belonging to a realm outside of
themselves. This objectification, in turn, indicates their
failure to come to terms with these "darker qualities."

Albee's antagonists are personifications of the "dark
forces" which reassert themselves as the female or male
"Other" and demand to be identified and reincorporated.
The process leading to the reidentification--and I would
call it a reidentification with nature since Albee, in

Tiny Alice, gathers all the qualities of the Other into

 

 

 

that one central symbol, Alice, who is not immediately
recognized because so long denied—-involves propelling the
characters from their ambivalence into conflict. The con-
flict allows for the polarization which defines the dichot-
omy between Spirit and Matter, Father and Mother, the patri—
archal, man-made construct and nature, and so on. Once the
polarization is recognized and named (and this occurs in
various displaced verions in each play) the conflict re-
solves into synthesis. The Other is recognized, then lost,
and the general framework of the characters' lives, which
previously had been maintained by a delicate balancing of
distinctions, falters.

For instance, Peter progresses from ambivalence toward
Jerry, to clearly polarized debate, to the point at which
he holds the knife Jerry impales himself on, signifying
their union and Peter's loss of a certain protective inno—
cence. George and Martha escalate from a steady stream of
disagreements ("petty revenges" Martha calls them) to open
battle over their son, to his loss and their loss of Daddy
and Mommy gender roles. Julian explicitly accepts God the
Father and Mother Alice simultaneously, at which point
Albee renounces metaphor and makes his character's death
explicit, or, perhaps, uses death as an explicit metaphor.

In any case, the procedure in these early plays of
Albee's is clearly dialecticand always ends with an andro-
genous image, leveling away the most fundamental distinc—

tion: gender. The playwright, however, just barely brings

 

10
us to the point beyond the synthesis, leaving us with the
question of how we are to interpret the dramatic process.
Ritual structure becomes a useful tool, at this point, with

which to search for meaning.

II

Analysis of the steps contained in the dramatic situ-
ations of The Zoo Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and Tiny Alice reveals a format almost identical to rituals
of initiation. Because the similarities are so pervasive,
and because the initiation pattern inherently contains cer-
tain thematic implications, we can conclude that the read-
ings of these plays are built right into their structures.
A search for meaning in Albee's work must therefore begin
with an understanding of primitive ritual.

Primitive rites of initiation are modelled upon funda—
mental material phenomena: the death-rebirth cycle of nature
and human birth and death. These basic experiences, signi—
fying as they do a change from one state to another, become
the prototype of the emotional, psychological, and physio-
logical alterations influencing human consciousness.

Rites of passage isolate the movement from childhood
dependency to adult responsibility as the central human
experience. The rites do not so much celebrate this trans-
ition as cause it by creating an event intense enough to
insure a fundamental alteration in the initiate's person-

ality, tantamount to a new, expanded identity.

 

11
The following is a description of a typical initiation
rite, still current in certain primitive cultures:

On the first night boys sit by firelight,
transfixed. Figures shrouded in rustling leaves
and masked in hideous mud-caked gourds snake
through the crowd, hissing. Men steal up behind
the boys and put stone axes to their throats,
while the monsters lunge. . .and are stopped short.
Revealed behind them are men playing flutes.

To the boys this is a big revelation indeed.
All their lives they have heard those wondrous
sounds, and been told they come from fabulous
birds, hidden from women but associating with men.

The sounds fade, and the instructor, a Big
Man, speaks:

"It is not a bird, as you can see. Men, and
not other creatures, make these sounds. The flutes
once belonged to the women, but we men took them
away forever. We tricked them. If_y3u go blabbing
to your mothers or sisters, we will kill you!"

The monsters hiss, the axes touch the boys'
throats. . .

Day after day the rituals continued for the
boys, until one noon they emerged dazed--borne on
the shoulders of soot-blackened warriors, each
boy gleaming red from head to toe. The red was an
oil pressed from the seeds of a pandanus nut, to
stimulate the blood of birth. Feathers bobbed on
their heads-—bright red ones from parrots and
golden plumes from birds of paradise. Decisively
separated from their mothers, the boys gad been
symbolically reborn as independent men.

This particular procedure points out several important
aspects of rites of passage: 1) the appearance of fearsome
and mysterious figures who are actually the priests of the
initiation ceremony; 2) the threat of death; 3) the sugges—
tion that on the "other side" of death is a new, harmonious
world; 4) a revelation that the powers once though to be
mysterious and unattainable fall within the realm of human
possibility (i.e. men themselves are the purported "fabulous

creatures"); 5) the imposition of a code of secrecy

 

 

12

separating the initiates from the uninitiated by means of
privileged information; 6) the assumption that the rite
will cause a change in identity radical enough to require
the external sign of birth. In primitive terms this re-
birth signifies being born as a man, a fellow tribesman
with adult responsibility and identity in the tribe. In
withstanding a formidable experience, the initiate symboli—
cally vindicates his own will against the dominance of
maternal influence, nature, and physical frailty.

The initiation rite plays out, therefore, humanity's
View of itself relative to the natural world. Modern psy-
chology identifies the pattern as representative of indi-
vidual and collective psychological development. Men have
seen themselves as attracted to both oblivion and self-
reflection, as capable of identification with and conse-
quent subjugation to a will greater than their own (per-
sonified as nature and the mother) and differentiation from
that will toward self—creation. They are compelled to
acknowledge human physical subjugation to disease and decay,
but are impelled to assert human consciousness and spirit
by applying their power to manipulate and control their
environment. They swing between irrationality and ration—
ality; they are pulled one way toward fate, and the other
way toward will.

Myth, folktale, and religion, as well as literature,
express variations on this dilemma; influences from these

sources pervade Albee's imagination. The religious,

 

l3
ritualistic spirit the playwright absorbs into his dramas,
in emphasizing the renunciation of the immature dependence
on external authority, constitutes a triumph for human pro—
gress. Since, however, Albee deals with a post—technolog—
ized world inhabited by culturally refined humans, long
insulated against the palpable terrors of nature, newly
possessed of a psychological sophistication which assumes
the perogative of individual choice, increasingly surrounded
by testimonies to the ascendancy of human will and reason,
and consequently blind to the trap set by their own achieve-
ments, the playwright's use of ritual patterns assumes new
complexities.

Albee's early plays--in fact, all his major plays-—
rest on certain assumptions uniquely applicable to modern
society, beginning with the understanding that the values
and myths of civilization are evolving and arbitrary, not,
as his characters seem to confuse them to be, static and

absolute.

In each of the three Albee plays which concern us here
the increasingly sophisticated social, intellectual, reli-
gious, and technological manifestations of human ingenuity,
have, ironically, begun to deprive the characters of their
creative abilities, their capacities to involve themselves
emotionally with one another, and their will to determine

their own destiny. Because of a characteristically modern

 

l4
moral laziness one psychologist calls the "human malaise,"
the characters find themselves overwhelmed by their own
ideological, bureaucratic, and technological constructs.
Forgetting that they fashion their own reality they regress
to dependency on external definition. As Albee has put it,
"People would rather sleep through life than stay awake for
it."3 He obviously means to express through his characters,
then, his concern over a collective identity grown so encom—
passing it begins to recreate the original infantile reli-
ance on a parent figure, becoming, in fact, a dangerously
stifling force.

Though "gods" of domination and security, therefore,
pervade these plays in the form of grotesque female figures,
seen and unseen (representing an original narcissism and
dependency on the mother), these "gods" also appear as
patriarchal institutions and ideologies. Albee's char-
acters seem to have exchanged the mother's domination for
the equally pervasive authority of the father; rather than
coming to terms with the original fixation they succumb to
it in different forms.

We find these characters, furthermore (and again we
must take each to be representative of Albee's View of the
contemporary individual), at the zero hour. They can still
shape the course of their destiny through a forceful asser-
tion of will. The alternative would assign them victim to
their own creations, as George and Martha's relationship

to their fictional son attests.

 

15

However, the key to understanding Albee's message and
his use of ritual is that his characters can progress only
by first going backward. That is, they reclaim the will
to create by temporarily recovering their dormant "uncivil—
ized" impulses, thereby renouncing the misapprehension that
they are strictly rational and self—controlled.

The ritual regression or remembrance, paralleling the
initiate's symbolic death, approximates a state outside
temporal space and time. When Albee's characters go through
this ritual all the structures that confer them with iden-
tity and provide them with a source of meaning for their
lives disintegrate. They face the obliteration and with
it the death they fear. At the same time, they move out—
side of all frameworks, and once they do that they cannot
any longer confuse their own subjective individuality with
an external structure or symbol, and so they face aliena—
tion as well. They are then back to a kind of primal
beginning. From here they can, figuratively speaking,
recommence the evolutionary climb, now applying conscious-
ness and deliberate reason to direct the course of the pro—
gression. Or, put another way, they would, at this point,
be constrained to reassert themselves by creating a new
reality and actively shaping a new future.

Within the course of each play, primal impulses, re-
awakened, become the means to more elevated, subtle expres-
sions of human inter-relatedness. Kindness and cruelty

combined,as Jerry says in The Zoo Story, are the teaching

 

l6
emotion. To the degree that the characters confront and
name the "animal" in themselves, they implicitly retrieve
the ability to reassign meaning and purpose to human
empathy.

These ideas relate directly to the ritual structure of
Albee's plays, since ritual, in its purest form, reclaims
a lost unity between the isolated individual and everything
and everyone that is not himself. Jane Harrison, in Ancient
Art and Ritual, points out that originally humans simply
celebrated "participation, unity, and community" with the
natural world. Once consciousness began to evolve, however,
ritual became the means to invoke the "old sense of partici—
pation and oneness by conscious imitation."4 Thus, when
Jerry stresses his need to unify himself with people, when
George and Martha struggle desperately with the full force
of their need for each other, when Julian seeks an appre—
hension of some ultimate, abstract reality as intangible
as it is unnameable, they all are articulating the impulse
guiding ritual, an impulse toward synthesis.

These plays, furthermore, combine frenzied elation with
somber pessimism because the act transcending human aliena—
tion simultaneously gives testimony to that alienation; with-
out this testimony, that is, unless the characters face their
fears, they cannot create anything, they are arrested. In
this sense, "Consciousness is pain," as Julian says, and
the "gain" of understanding is also the "loss" of innocence

as Jerry implies; and humanity's privilege to mold its

 

17
environment and shape its destiny is also its fate.

In light of this, Albee's remarks about George and
Martha indicate his intention to depict, through these
characters, the existential dilemma. According to the
playwright, the couple are never deluded that their son is
anything more than a symbol, the offspring of their educa-
tion, sensitivity, and intelligence. They become "only
occasionally . . .confused, when the awful loss and lack

that made the creation of the symbol essential becomes over-

whelming." They are, therefore, always aware they are play—
ing a game: "Except," Albee says, "it's the most serious
game in the world."5 They struggle, in other words, during

the night of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with the temp—

 

tation to surrender to their creation as to some static
meaning, and to stop playing the most serious game which is
finally their life. After them, and after Julian in Tiny
Alice, Albee's efforts to create such heroic strugglers who
opt for change against security, diminishes considerably.

The life force contained in characters such as Jerry, George,
and Julian is so strikingly absent from more recent plays
that critical commentary on Albee's growing "mellowness"
seems ironic.

The urgency emanating from each of these characters
inter—relates with the play's capacity to function as a
dramatic experience for the audience as well as for the
characters. Albee's artistic intention has been to over-

come what he sees as people's preference for "vicarious

 

18
experience rather than real experience," their dislike of
being "affected for themselves," and their willingness to
substitute "the illusion of being affected by something“
for "the real thing."6

The playwright delivers "the real thing" in an initi-
ation ritual intended as much for his audience as for his
principal characters. Therefore, the gothic, abrasive,
perplexing theatrical devices characteristic of his early
career target the audience's intellectual detachment in
order to force them back upon their intuitive and emotional
faculties. Albee creates characters with uncertain motiva-
tions and unclear intentions, the distinction between
protagonist and antagonist is ambiguous, meanings of
symbols shift, language becomes simple embellishment, and
surrealistic elements intrude upon naturalistic settings,
all to consistently frustrate attempts at logical deduction.
Thus, the tension building in the drama reflects the audi-
ence's growing confusion. The viewer's experience at the
point at which language becomes too unreliable to convey
meaning and reason becomes inoperative, should correspond
to the representational death occurring on stage.

Albee's early plays, however, neither renounce natu-
ralism so completely as to lose the audience's emotional
and intellectual involvement nor do they celebrate chaos
for its own sake. Rather, he breaks down systems of logic
and empathy to create a radical image of what existence

would be without these higher human faculties as a reminder

19
to his audience that they have these capacities and as a
challenge to them to use them.

The definition of reality in Albee's plays finally
comes down to a continual series of "illusions" which are
the products of human creativity. Illusions are only de—
ceptive (even dangerously so) when they are allowed to be-
come static and when they are mistaken as absolute and un-
alterable. The strongest achievement of The Zoo Story,

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Tiny Alice, therefore,

 

is also their most frustrating, namely, that the structure
of the plays, in not yielding their meaning in one central
message in fact contains the message of meaning as process.
The format of the initiation rite with its death-rebirth
motif also emphasizes the endless process of creation and
recreation by which humanity defines and expresses itself.
Albee's characters, most notably George and Martha and
Julian, reclaim this perogative in the annihilation of all
their sustaining illusions. Their final revelation is
that, in coming to the end of everything, they must begin
again, but differently, by deliberately imposing human

consciousness onto an intangible fluid reality.
IV

After Tiny Alice Albee's drama takes a different
direction; though he maintains the same structure and works
with much the same ideas, his application of these shifts

significantly enough to allow us to view his later works

 

 

20
as contrasting rather than expanding upon his original
intentions.
Albee himself gives us useful categories for this
contrast in a remark he has repeated again and again. "I

find," he says (most recently in reference to The Lady From

 

Dubuque), "that most plays that interest me are concerned

with life and death."7

The Zoo Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tiny

 

Alice give us some understanding of what Albee means by
"life." The protagonists in these plays all become heroic
by accepting confrontation, danger, confusion, upheaval,
actual or symbolic death, and alteration. "Death,“ then,
would be, conversely, psychological and emotional death;
that is, the condition of the comfortable and the unchal-
lenged-—"Death," for Albee's characters means to remain in
safety, order, security, predictability, protection. It
means never to renounce their objective detachment or exer-
cises in logical analysis. It is, finally, their ability
to adjust, their ability to COpe, their ability to "make
do." The temptation to take this route, held out to all
Albee's characters, divides them by whether or not they
can surmount it.

Philosophically, the plays have a Romantic perspec-
tive. As a Romantic Albee extols the importance of spir-
itual revolution, emotional anarchy, and psychological
upheaval. As a Romantic he sees the comfort of an unex-

amined life to be an individual and a collective threat.

21
As a Romantic his central focus is on how metaphysical
issues bear directly on the more practical social, ethical,
and material matters governing human existence. As a
Romantic he isolates the powers of creation and redemption
in human beings, who, as center of their own universe, must
renounce dependence on created gods and accept responsi-
bility for their own lives. At the same time, also as a
Romantic, he draws upon mysterious, supra—rational per-
sonages and forces to guide the individual in his or her

quest for identity.
In these definitions of life and death we can also

find reasons for the dramatic success of Albee's earlier

career relative to later works such as A Delicate Balance

 

(1966), All Over (1971), Seascape (1975), and The Lady From
Dubuque (1979). The earlier works symbolically represent
the urgency to choose, the difficulty of the choice, all
the violent emotional resistances the characters put up
against it, and the terrible pain the choice for life in-
volves. In these plays, moreover, Albee dramatizes that
precise moment at which the characters must make their
decision.

Though A Declicate Balance achieves a comparably im—

 

pressive unity of style and theme, the lost dynamism results
from the characters' choice for "sleep," the metaphor for
death in the play. In All Over the choice for death has

already been made (by the playwright as well as by the

22
characters) before the play begins; the dramatization is of
the consequences of the choice. Seascape, more like the
earlier plays, brings the characters to a moment of crisis,
but, here, too, as the set certainly suggests, the choice
for life is a foregone conclusion, depriving the play of
dramatic tension and avoiding the dark and terrifying im—
plications of renouncing old illusions and the comfort of
familiar securities.

Even up to The Lady From Dubuque Albee continues to

 

enrich the theme of the life vs. death struggle, proving
how central the subject is for him, even though, in his in-
creasing tendency to name his intentions and call attention
to his devices, the playwright deflects the theatrical
energy needed to involve his audience. The emotional death
the character Jo must confront in the process of redefining
her identity is introduced so early in the play and is made
so literal as to risk all symbolic nuances. The play also
articulates what has been an increasing disillusionment and
pessimism in Albee's perspective: Sam, the main character
and the prototype of the American male, so completely re-
flects his culture that he has no capacity to confront the
terror of change; even more important, no force appears in
this play strong enough and willing enough to lead him to
the conflict and confrontation necessary for his own salva-
tion as it is necessary for the play's dramatic vitality.
The premonition given of the kind of actual death this

character can expect indicates the moral of all Albee's work:

23
Such silence. And then it began; the eastern
horizon was lighted by an explosion, hundreds
of miles away-~no sound! And within seconds
they were everywhere, always at a great dis-
tance--the flash of light, and silence. . . .
We knew what we were watching, and there was
no time to be afraid. The silence was. . .
beautiful as the silent bombs went off. Per-
haps we were dead already; perhaps that was
why there was no sound.

Albee's continuing theme intends to remind modern soci-
ety of the problematic human perogative to build its own
reality and guide its own destiny. When Albee's characters
abdicate the responsibility to choose the death prerequisite
for rebirth they exchange that perogative for passivity and
oblivion. Their choice to remain observers rather than par-
ticipants in their own lives foreordains that their deaths
will be external personifications of those same creations
which they have made, maintained, and succumbed to. The

prognosis for modern culture is that like Sam and like

Tobias (in A Delicate Balance he will only wait for "the

 

fatal mushroom") humanity, already "living death," will be
the passive spectator at its own destruction when the indi-
vidual failure becomes the cosmic doom.

The option presented in The Zoo Story, Who's Afraid of

 

Virginia Woolf?, and Tiny Alice should provide a focus for

 

 

understanding Albee's theater and a new sensitivity for the
motivations of his characters and the tone of his conclu-
sions. These plays indicate, as well, Albee's efforts to
reinvolve art as an instructive medium and a cultural

influence.

 

CHAPTER I

The Zoo Story

The critical controversy surrounding The Zoo Story

 

since its first United States opening (January, 1960) re-
mains unresolved. Rose Zimbardo, for instance, reads the
play as a modern Christian allegory of salvation, while
Michael Rutenberg sees a socio-political message in Peter's
"denial" of sympathy and empathy to Jerry. Along with
Ronald Hayman, these critics seem to feel Albee intends to
deliver a moral statement.l

Mary M. Nilan, on the other hand, disclaims Jerry's
credibility as a spokesman for human understanding. In her
View, Albee creates in this character a "universal symbol
of alienated modern man" through whom the playwright sug-
gests that the only "love" possible in the modern world is
that which has been perverted into violence.2 Early re-
viewers also focused on the play's apparent pessimism.
Gilbert Debusscher, Martin Esslin, and Anne Paolucci further
expound on this view by attempting to establish Albee within
a tradition of absurdist and nihilist theater.4

That all of these critics contribute valuable insights
about the play even though they cannot agree on Albee's
ultimate intention indicates the problems of interpretation

24

 

 

 

25
which Albee's style and form poses for critics. In each

case, the critic has excluded the elements of The Zoo Story

 

which are not consistent with her or his thesis. It is
almost as if each is saying that, were Albee a better play-
wright, he would not have included the contradictory de-
tails. However, if one assumes that Albee is in control of
his art, the critical burden is to encompass the contradic-
tions rather than deny them. To focus only on the appar—
ently nihilistic and absurdist aspects of the drama, for
instance, is necessarily to accuse Albee (as Dr. Paolucci
in fact does) of precisely that reliance on an absolute
system (in this case the system of negation or nothingness)
that his play seems to protest. In order for this critical
approach to work, however, LEE system must be superimposed
onto the play. Similarly, to reduce the ambiguity in
Jerry's death by denying the unmistakable elation which
contends with the despair is to attempt to reduce the play
to simple, didactic statement.

Still other critics, such as Ruby Cohn, C. W. E.
Bigsby, and Robert Bennett, avoid this reductionism by
implying that the play's intention is to pose a dilemma
and to ask a question, not supply an answer.5 While this
is closer to the spirit of the play, Albee's own statement
about his work suggests that he is trying to do something
more.6 A close examination of the structure of The Zoo
Stggy and the interpretations generally implicit in

related cultural structures (such as initiation rites,

 

26
the romantic tradition in literature, and modern psycho—

analytic theories) strongly suggests that Albee's drama

 

p-‘m

 

is an affirmation of life, and a model of the process by

flwWw—r —MW,_.—— .Mufimlflm ‘-' 11‘.—

 

which some modern people must seek it.

«LA-u»- -77 h‘mw'-

This model reveals that, according to the terms of

Albee's art, life should not be a fixed code of behaviors

K57

 

_.__..._.._..__._____‘...___1..———--"'_'*-—--

 

 

 

or beliefs but a commitment to self knowledgeyflayconstant

mewwnw“. I-H—‘l We..-” «no—-

 

testing of the intellectual environment for validity, and

.——-——.-...a- —-_

 

 

 

an..- -.—.--.au. _

the acceptance of change, evaluation, synthesis, and re-

"'— Wr—fiwm‘. v»- am. _

newed challenge. The ZOo Story gives us Peter as an

,1r~'-“

 

example of how a human being can relinquish enormous power

\-

 

 

Fr“-

 

 

-m-
‘—‘—-—.—._.—-I-'-" '

 

haw-”N .._,.

to. ideals and 1nst1tut1ons out51de of himself and nearly

-—-~_._—0-:..—.v- -..,.__ 1 Fu-v‘fi- -—...1._

__._, 71--..k1J,_..____1; ‘1...“an ..._..____-_.

obliterate his own identity in the process. The play

..___,._._,- v-.‘— > .Wé‘flc.
«W— .

points out as well how these ideals and institutions can

be substitute parent figures. Thus, Peter appears subject
to the male patriarchal social structure which seems to be
maintained by his wife. The drama itself then becomes a
rite of exorcism to move Peter toward maturity and autonomy
by wrenching him from the external influences he has kept
himself under.

Jerry is the agent who will pgghyPeter_away from his
dependency. The process Jerry sets in motion has several
phases. Peter first mustconfront the 'Other," that is,
t5?m££b.<2§ir3§.93< ingerrw ,, 0f. @1119??? sb_er,§,.¢te£.i§§_i9§_-he
has designated_asbeing antithetical to him. He EhQEMEUSF-
maritime this. PEhera “realizing were. is r30~ £9219”-

ference between them, at which point he will lose Jerry.

 

27

This last phase leads into Peter's confrontation with him-
self, for, when he loses the idea that there are clear and
absolute distinctions between himself and those he has
always considered radically different from him, he must
confront the possibility that these conflicting tensions
exist inside him, to be resolved in that way.

In explaining exactly how this works in Albee's play,
I will refer to two literary conventions present in The Zoo
Story: the literary convention of the double (which eluci-
dates some of the more confusing aspects of Jerry's per-
sonality and behavior) and the pattern of primitive rites
of initiation (which explains exactly how Peter's experience
is meant to move him toward greater maturity and personal
autonomy).

In order to understand why Albee's play employs these

conventions, however, we must understand Peter's personality

 

 

“‘1-“—

...-.-u.._;_...
pan-’- “'1‘ ‘1“: n..-hupu—-.—

and his motivations. Albee's stage directions indicate

1)..

 

immediately that themman_is unremarkable in personal ap:_
pearance: "neither fat nor gaunt, neither handsdme nor
homely."7 Peter's age (he is in his early forties), his
physical characteristics, and his attitudes qualify him as

the perfect symbol of the man in the middle, given to

neither excesses nor distinguishing features of any kind.

,-

1"

Albee did not create his character in a vacuum. As
Michael Rutenberg has pointed out, the playwright seems
to have modelled Peter on what William Whyte Jr. referred

to as "the organization man," in his 1956 book of that

 

 

28

title. Whyte describes the type archly as the "wise young
man" who

is going to enjoy himself-~plenty of time

with the kids, some good hobbies, and later

on he'll certainly go in for more reading

and music and stuff like that. He will,

in sum, be the apotheosis of the well—

rounded man; obtrusive in no particular,

excessive in no zeal. He will be the man

in the middle.8

Albee's concern with the phenomenon of the organiza-

tion man, furthermore, is consistent not only with Whyte's
evaluation but with the feelings of other journalists of
the time.9 Their implications are similar to the play—
wright's: when a belief system becomes too rigid and
automatic it begins to work against itself. Most seriously
threatened by this ultimately is not the social outcast
but those, like Peter, who have become so enmeshed in the
framework of the social organization that they no longer
are able to see themselves or it objectively, no longer
able to sustain and balance the tension between self and
system because within the pervasive security of the system

the self has been obliterated.

This tendency is most apparent in Peter's self-

effacing poses. "I'm. . .I'm normally. . .uh. . .reticent,"
he tells Jerry, and "I. . .I don't express myself too well,
sometimes" (19). He conveys neither creativity nor initi:

patingflheytends to "react" to Jerry (as we might suspect
he reacts to all external stimulus), Albee tells us, "by

 

 

29
However, we also realize within the first scene of
the play, that Peter,wat least in regard to this one aspect

of his life—~the time he spends on his bench—-can exhibit“

 

_§Qme assertiveness, albeitmpassiyely. From the moment
Jerry approaches him, Peter resists the other man: PEEWEB:_II
Vdirectly, trying first to ignore him and then to "politely"
rebuff him. Jerry's appearanceyffigfi§§§1§-mggggfigfxyffyug'
gleyyithin_Peter between self—assertion and acquiesence;
Resets fear 9:” conflict is apparently se,,9.r99£.,1ah,at._.,h_e
succumbs to Jerry's overtures and violates his own need for
solitude.

From the various clues Albee gives us we can piece to—
gether the motivation for Peter's passivity. The most
obvious clue is Jerry's question about the dividing line
between upper-middle-middle class and lower-upper-middle
class (201 Presumably, the distinguishing characteristics
of those belonging to each distinct social group, like the
distinguishing characteristics of animals in a zoo, are
the principal means humans have of differentiating them-
selves. That is, Peter can know that he belongs to a cer-
tain group only by exhibiting certain external features:
he must dress a certain way-—"He wears tweeds, smokes a
pipe, carries horn-rimmed glasses"-—live a certain place—-
"between Lexington and Third Avenue, on Seventy-fourth
Street"--have a certain kind of job-—"an executive position
with a. . .small publishing house"--and adhere to certain

social mores—-being "a nice married man with two daughters."

 

 

30

Certain personality traits also belong to this group,
traits Peter has learned so well he repeats them by reflex.
Politeness is certainly one of these; deference to others
and personal reticence are others.

These external identifying characteristics afford
Peter the security of knowing where he belongs, what his
place in life is. He seems to have made a pact with him-
self, as does anyone who wishes to be associated with a
certain group, to refuse to deviate from social norms,
even insofar as to test the validity of those norms.
Rather than defining his own values he has assumed the
values of his social class; anyone who falls outside those
values is automatically different, or "Other." Peter de-
rives a sense of who he is as a human being by Virtue of
his identification with those of his own group, his will—
ingness to repeat the examples of those who have preceded
him, and his disassociation from those different from him.

It is understandable, therefore, that Peter would wish
to remain within the confines of his own social class. To
violate its patterns is to risk expulsion and possibly to
experience isolation, abandonment, and loss of identity.
Philosopher Mary Daly provides an insight into just how
threatening this would be. She writes of the need to

realize "there is an existential conflict between the self

and structures that have given. . .crippling security";
this, however, "requires confronting the shock of non—
being with the courage to be." "It means," says Daly,

 

 

31
"facing the nameless anxieties of fate, health, and even
life itself."10

Jerry, orphaned and socially outcast, is to Peter the
shocking image of life outside the security of the social
structure. As such, he personifies to Peter his own
"Nameless anxieties." We must wonder, therefore, whether
Jerry projects the only viable option to Peter's life or a
fantasy of Peter's deepest fears. Before continuing along
this line, however, we must examine how Peter comes to be
vulnerable to Jerry at all.

As I've already suggested, to identify with an external
structure to the extent that Peter has is to risk losing
one's own individual identity to the group identity. Peter,
however, in what has perhaps been an unconscious impulse to
assert some personal distinction and individuality, has
devised a small plan. He defines the plan late in the play:

I sit on this bench almost every Sunday after-
noon, in good weather. It's secluded here;
there's never anyone sitting here, so I have
it all to myself (41).

The gesture, though small, is crucial, for it violates
Peter's role as the group man. It defies the dictum of
"our" in favor of "mine," and so is the one way Peter de—
taches himself from the larger group.

Once he steps outside the parameters of his group, how—
ever, Peter risks isolation (immediately suggested by the
image of a man sitting alone at a bench in the middle of a

large city), calling attention to himself (becoming

 

32
"obtrusive"), and being approached by someone outside his
usual milieu. Peter draws back from these risks; he wants
to assert some individuality without wandering so far from
his familiar realm that he'll be lost. He is attracted to
independence and self-expression; he is afraid of isolation
and loss of identity. The bench is a symbol of both the
desire for individuality and the crutch Peter clings to in
an attempt to go just so far but no further.

Peter must keep his bench, therefore, in order to main-
tain his half-way state, until Jerry appears to force him
to make a choice. Since Peter has maintained this compro-
mise "for many years" Jerry also appears as a signal for
change. Considering the individuality Peter has invested
in this symbol, if he renounces it to Jerry he will be
forced to renounce his own tiny claim to personal identity
and succumb completely to the role of "group man." Put
another way, his passivity will triumph.

If, on the other hand, Peter asserts himself, and in-
sists that Jerry leave, he must renounce his passivity,
the one personality trait that most keeps him safe within
the authority of social order. Peter is therefore caught
between complete loss of will (and hence of identity) and
confrontation. The confrontation would force him to
acknowledge both the reality of his own will and the exist-
ence of contradictory realities. Peter's goal is to keep
his bench but avoid asserting a claim to it, a goal which

is itself contradictory and which Jerry further makes

 

33
impossible.

The contradiction Peter has been sustaining for so
long itself makes him susceptible to Jerry, both physi—
cally (he is isolated on a lonely park bench) and emotion-
ally (he can neither remove himself from Jerry's presence
nor ask the other man to leave). In many ways it is as if
Peter's own psyche has reached a point of exhaustion and
is asking him to make a decision to renounce the delicate
balance of his compromise in order to force a commitment.
The real danger is that Peter's gesture of individuality,
if not further acted upon, will prove ineffective against
his strong need for security, and Peter will lose his
identity completely. He is, therefore, in a crisis between
further growth (or a movement toward life) and further re—
treat into emotional oblivion (or psychological death).

It is with the understanding of this crisis that we can
approach Jerry's role as Peter's double.

The double in literature tends, if fact, to emerge at
the moment of crisis in the consciousness of the first self
(in this case Peter) for the purpose of affecting some
major change. In this sense Jerry is a call for renewal
generated by Peter's own psyche.

The physical differences of the characters immediately
and visually defines them as polar and complementary.
Peter, for instance, although "moving into middle age"

dresses and acts in a way to "suggest a man younger, while

Jerry, though actually younger, has fallen from physical

 

 

34

grace and has a "great weariness" suggesting age. Peter in
his innocence and Jerry in his "over—sanity" (Albee's term)
both lack completeness, and so it is plausible that they
should be drawn together in a desire for unity.

Jerry is elusive, uncanny, and mysterious. With his
first lines ("I've been to the zoo"), which he repeats
with increasing urgency ("Hey, mister, I've been to the
zoo"), he creates the impression that there is a puzzle here
to be solved, and so sets the tone for the whole drama.

Jerry's frustrating complexity further surfaces in his
ability to move freely between irony and moral righteous—
ness. Although he possesses almost diabolic character-
istics he also speaks to legitimate feelings of frustration,
alienation, and loneliness. In him, moreover, Albee cre-
ates a character who is both realistic and understandable
and surrealistic and obscure. Jerry is, simultaneously,
dream-like, forboding, benevolent, educative, cynical, and
sentimental.

All this is consistent with the literary double, usu-
ally an ambiguous figure. C. F. Keppler, in his book The

Literature of the Second Self, finds the source of this

 

ambiguity in the fact that the double is both a part of and
yet not a part of the first self. Applying Keppler's defin-
itions to Albee's play we can say that between Peter and
Jerry there is a "simultaneous distinction and identity";
they are "an inescapable two that are at the same time an

indisputable one."ll

35

More specifically, we can say that Jerry is, on the
one hand, always external or part of the objective, out-
side world of Peter: "He is always 'there,‘ a self in his
own right, never translatable into a product of mental
aberration" (Keppler, 10). This is important, for Peter,
as I've already pointed out, is severely controlled by the
authoritarian forces from which he draws his identity. In
order to keep himself in line within his social group he
creates an image for himself of the consequences of social
deviation, an image which he looks for outside of himself
in the form of other people. Yet this image is in fact so
threatening to him (as it must be in order to counteract
his restlessness) that Peter pretends these other people
(those radically different from himself) do not exist. He
not only hides from himself by externalizing his own com-
plexities and conflicts, he hides from his externalizations
as well.

Peter, consequently, must confront Jerry; that is, he
must see and acknowledge the loneliness and lack of social
identity he so fears first as something outside himself,
before he can make the next step which is to experience
these fears and desires as his own.

Because these fears and desires age his own, Jerry is,
on the other hand, a subjective projection of Peter. "He
is always 'here' as well, his psyche intergrown by intrace-
able, shared tendrils with that of his counterpart, and so

never translatable into a purely external fellow being"

 

 

36
(Keppler, 10).

This subjective aspect of Jerry's role helps to ex-
plain why he appears so disoriented; why, for instance, he
introduces himself as someone who is lost, though he is
apparently a native of the city. Or why, though he at
first makes quite a point about having been to the zoo, he
later cannot recall anything about it:

Peter: Look here; is this something about
the zoo?

Jerry: (Distantly) The what?

Peter: The zoo, the zoo. Something about
the zoo?

Jerry: The zoo?

Peter: You've mentioned it several times.

Jerry: (Still distant, but returning abruptly)
The zoo? Oh, yes; the zoo. I was
there before I came here. I told you
that (19-20).

This is more than just a ploy Jerry uses, as the stage
directions verify. The scene is only one of several when
he must "return" as from a great distance. Another is when
Peter asks him why he lives in the roominghouse; Jerry re-
sponds "From a distance again," not that he has no choice,
but that he doesn't know. There are times, as well, when
Jerry seems to be communicating on a level completely re-
moved from everyday, social reality, such as when he seems
unable to apprehend that Peter has a wife, even after the
other man has established that he is married.

All this creates a shadowy and disturbing impression
of Jerry that works dramatically apart from intellectual-

ization of theme and motive. The expectations toward

realism the play encourages make Jerry's bizarre qualities

 

37
as jarring and confusing to the audience as they are to
Peter.

Keppler's definition of the second self fits the char-
acter perfectly:

The second self is the shadowed self, sur—
rounded by an aura of the uncanny that some—
times makes him seem to belong to a different
order of reality from that of the world in
which he moves. . .A part of this uncanniness
is that the second self tends to be the pos-
sessor of secrets that the first self can
never quite fathom and thus in being the
stranger is also the stronger, always tending
to be a real control of the relationship
(Keppler, 11).

Jerry is, in fact, both the stranger and the stronger
of the two characters, in that he orchestrates the inter-
actions between them. Most related to Keppler's definition,
however, is Jerry's role as intruder, for, from the opening
lines of the play he invades Peter's solitude, his personal
affairs, and, finally, his bench.

Jerry, furthermore, possesses secrets about Peter; he
always has a disconcerting perception of the areas in which
Peter is most vulnerable. He knows when to play on the
man's "sense of decency," when to cultivate his sympathy,
when to appear genuine and friendly, when to act distant,
cold, or hurt, when to create a sense of mystery to entrap
Peter's curiosity, and when to be straightforward and lucid.
Peter himself encourages the impression that Jerry is privy
to some secret information about him, "Why did you say

that?" he demands after Jerry makes the assumption that

Peter and his wife will have no more children. "How would

 

38
you know about that?" Jerry, in fact, is so much in con-
trol of the situation that when Peter half-jokingly alludes
to himself as Jerry's "guinea pig for today" (17) he under—
scores an already implicit analogy to a controlled experi-
ment.

Perhaps the key question about Jerry, however, and the
one most relevant to his role as "second self" is whether
each step in his interaction with Peter builds logically
and sequentially to a climax, or whether that outcome was
preestablished in Jerry's mind, waiting only for the oppor—
tunity for him to manipulate the circumstances to effect
his end. At least twice in the play he seems to prophesy
events that will eventually be fulfilled:

Jerry: I've been to the zoo.
Peter: Yes, I think you said so. . .didn't you?
Jerry: You'll read about it in the papers to-
morrow, if you don't see it on your T.V.
tonight (15).
He often explains his strange behavior to Peter as if he
is directing himself in a role:
Peter: Why do you just stand there?
Jerry: I'll start walking around in a little
while, and eventually I'll sit down.
(Recalling) Wait until you see the
expression on his face (20).
In retrospect the audience will know that Jerry here refers
to his own face, so that this statement would appear to be
a statement of intention. Yet Jerry himself is not clear
on this: "Could I have planned all this? No. . .no, I

couldn't have. But I think I did" (48).

Jerry's words implant the suspicion that though the

 

39
surface reality of his meeting with Peter seems accidental
(it is part of the literary convention that the encounters
between doubles usually do) the event itself was somehow
preordained, following some mandate beyond ordinary time
and logic.

Since the first self is not conscious of this process,
the situation affecting change seems to "just happen." The
meeting, however, is actually the reverse of accident; the
second self comes, rather, just at that crucial juncture
when the first self "however reluctantly" is ready for him,
"because of his vulnerability to and need for the influence
that only the second self can bring" (Keppler, 196).

Psychologist Carl G. Jung's terminology in defining
the double——he calls him "the immortal within the mortal
man" and "the long expected friend of the sou1"12——
interestingly echoes Jerry's intimation that, on some level
at least, Peter was expecting him:

Jerry: Peter, do I annoy you, or confuse you?

Peter: (lightly) Well, I must confess that
this wasn't the kind of afternoon I'd
anticipated.

Jerry: You mean I wasn't the gentleman you
were expecting.
Peter: I wasn't expecting anybody.
Jerry: No, I don't imagine you were. But
I'm here, and I'm not leaving (37-8).
Jerry appears in response to Peter's unacknowledged
desire for liberation and self assertion, expressed through
his isolation on the bench. The rationale for the second

self presupposes a natural psychic equilibrium (in the

individual and in the culture generally of which Peter is a

40
symbol) which will always try to reassert itself, and,
rather than threatening the possibility of free choice, the
unconscious double provides the basis for it.

Yet, it is inevitable that Jerry would appear threaten-
ing to Peter. Peter is a product of years of social train-
ing; Jerry exists outside any social framwork and projects
a-social and a—rational attitudes which are, by their very
nature, antithetical to the requirements of civilized
society. Together, the two characters present an age-old
dilemma between the unrestricted, completely self—defined,
instinctive, natural individual and the cultured, social
being. For Peter, then, Jerry must represent conflicting
feelings: an attractive freedom from externally imposed
limitations and the consequent punishment for that freedom--
isolation and lack of definition. This last is indicated
by the fact that Jerry exists without any historical or
biological roots; he is without the influence of all
authoritarian parent figures, but also without the protec-
tion they afford.

This dilemma between lonely freedom and restraint has
at least three metaphors in the play. One is Jerry's
empty picture frames (which, incidentally, Peter signals
out as worthy of emphasis). In being empty, these depict
freedom from limitations on the one hand and loss of
identity (or facelessness) on the other. Jerry, moreover,
in having no one to relate to, exists in a vacuum.

A similar metaphor is the cages in the zoo which

41

separate the animals from each other, and the people from
the animals. Again, these are both a restriction (indi-
cating Peter's desire to step outside his group) and a
definition (indicating the definition he derives from the
group). Like Peter's daughters' caged parakeets these
animals are spared the risk of harm from their natural
predators by being denied their natural freedom. Peter
cannot be aware that he has made the same compromise until
he confronts his alternative self. However, it is impor-
tant to keep in mind that Peter and Jerry are polarizations;
neither has chosen a healthy solution. Because they are so
obviously opposites on so many levels they together contain
the theme of separation. Their relationship is still
another metaphor expressing the tension between society
and nature, deliberation and impulse, rationality and the
unconscious, a tension which is the externalization of
Peter's own internal conflict.

As the second self, Jerry is also a shaman conducting
a rite, the purpose of which is to temper these dichotomies
by externalizing Peter's internal crisis, first through a
symbolically parallel story of his experience with the dog,
and then by the argument he introduces over the bench.13

The argument forces Peter to acknowledge the existence
of his "other half"; what has been virtually a continuous
monologue by Jerry becomes, at last, a clearly polarized
debate, prerequisite for resolution.

Jerry's actions are ritualistic because he is, in

42

fact, conducting a rite to initiate Peter from innocence
("You are possessed of a truly enviable innocence" he tells
Peter early in the play) to experience. This experience
will be the natural outcome of Peter's acknowledgement of
differences, his loss of absolute identification with the
external social authority, and the resulting loss of its
protection.

All drama's connection to ritual is implicit; in The
Zoo Story!however, Albee calls attention to the connection.
That is, Jerry's actions when he catalogues his possessions,
and when he relates the parable of the dog "as if reading
from a billboard," ending with an incantation that is a kind
of litany and invocation, are explicitly ritualistic.
Periodically throughout the play Jerry also employs Biblical
language, combining it with a speech pattern otherwise so
vernacular that the juxtaposition becomes one more emphasis
on the dichotomy between sacred and profane, spiritual and
temporal. More ritualistic aspects of the play are conveyed
through its setting ("a place apart" which, should Peter
yell, no one would hear him) and in Albee's suggestion of
how Jerry should use space on stage: "The following long
speech, it seems to me, should be done with a great deal
of action, to achieve a hypnotic effect on Peter, and on
the audience, too" (29). Jerry tends to direct his own
actions during his long monologue as if following a dance
or ritualistic scheme: "I'll start walking around in a

little while, and eventually I'll sit down" (19).14

43

The key element of Jerry's ritual, the story of him-
self and the dog, is also one of the more confusing aspects
of the play. The story has a basic fairytale or myth plot-
line. The hero (Jerry) needs to gain admittance to a cer-
tain place which has associations with the underworld. He
is prevented first by an old crone (his landlady); once he
gets past her by repeating the right formula, he is accosted
by a "raging beast" (the dog) which he must either tame or
kill. Having undergone these ordeals he can resume his
place in the real or everyday world with the possession of
some new knowledge and understanding. Jerry defines this
as "something to do with how sometimes it's necessary to go
a long distance out of the way in order to come back a
short distance correctly" (21).

Jerry's roominghouse-—the tabooed place into which he
must fight to gain entrance-—does, of course, on one level
function as a poignant example of the kind of social strati—
fication alluded to several times in the play. Not only
are different classes of people divided by the difference
between "an apartment in the east 70's" and a "four story
brownstone roominghouse on the upper West Side," but the
people within that house are separated and unknown to each
other as well.

The place, however, also has symbolic associations
with the underworld; it is a place full of obvious outcasts,
people somehow "dead" to most of society, as Peter admits:

"It's so. . .unthinkable. I find it hard to believe that

 

 

44

people such as that really age." It has further associa-
tions with the unconscious, contents of which Jerry is
aware, as he "knows" some of the people who live in the
place, contents of which he is only dimly aware, as the
woman who cries unseen behind the closed door, and contents
of which he has never been in contact with at all: "there's
somebody lives there, but I don't know who it is. I've
never seen who it is. Never. Never ever" (22).

Jerry's roominghouse in Albee's first play functions

much like Miss Alice's house does in Tiny Alice--as a

 

dream-like center of mystery. As with Miss Alice's house
it is a place with many rooms and levels, having four
stories. Jerry lives on the top floor, the place close to
consciousness. The rooms are all "laughably small," sepa—
rate from each other, and "better as you go down, floor by
floor" into unknown territory. Jerry carefully points out
he does not know "any of the people on the third and second
floors." (22,27).

The term initiation means to enter into and implies an
inward journey of some sort. In primitive initiation rites
the novice was often led into a house representing a micro-
cxsm of society and his symbolic installation at the center
of the universe. Anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep in Rites

of Passage defines the first step in initiation as the rite

 

of separation.15 In mythology the hero must encounter the
labyrinth separating him from his former life. The entrance

into new life is symbolized as passing through a door, for

 

45

to cross a threshold is to unite oneself with a new world.
Jerry draws specific attention to his place of confronta-

tion with the dog:

And where better, where better to communicate

one single, simple-minded idea than in an

entrance hall? Where? It would be a START!

Where better to make a beginning. . .to

understand and just possibly be understood
.(italics mind) (35).

 

 

The landlady and her dog are guardians of the thres-
hold, and, as in the traditional quest format, they must
be honored and appeased. The landlady, a displaced sybil-
figure, combines the personages of seductress and witch.
Jerry describes her as the "fat, ugly, mean, stupid, un-
washed, misanthropic, cheap, drunken bag of garbage who
comes after him with her sweaty lust" (28). Usually this
figure tries to prevent the seeker's entrance into the
place which is the source of knowledge. If the person
has the right information, such as the knowledge of the
labyrinth design, the right password, or if he makes the
right request he finds his road easily; if not, the woman
devours him.l6

Jerry has found the formula to undercut her power:

But I have found a way to keep her off.
When she presses herself to my body and
mumbles about her room and how I should
come there, I merely say: but, Love;
wasn't yesterday enough for you, and the
day before? (28).

The dog is an extension of the landlady; in fact, they
look alike: "She had forgotten her bewildered lust, and

her eyes were wide open for the first time. They looked

 

46
like the dog's eyes" (32). Dogs have been associated in
mythology with the priesthood of Great Mother figures:
"male votaries of the Great Goddess who prostituted them-

selves in her name."17 The dog in The Zoo Story is an-

 

other displaced mythic symbol and also tries to devour
Jerry:
. . .this dog wasn't indifferent. From the
very beginning he'd snarl and then go for
me, to get one of my legs. Not like he
was rabid you know; he was sort of a
stumbly dog, but he wasn't half-assed
either. It was a good stumbly run; but
I always got away. He got a piece of my
trouser leg,. . .but, I kicked free and got
upstairs fast, so that was that. (Puzzles)
I still don't know to this day how the other
roomers manage it, but you know what I think:
I think it had to do only with me (30).

Because of Jerry's attempt to kill him, the dog goes
through a "death" and "rebirth" mirroring Jerry's subliminal
experience and foreshadowing Peter's. The possibility of
the dog's recovery creates in Jerry the expectation of a
transformation: "I wanted the dog to live so that I could
see what our new relationship might come to" (33). The
transformation, however, is more poignantly a personal one
for Jerry, uncovering in him a felt need for relatedness
with the external world he had never before realized. The
transformation occurs because of the momentary communion
he and the dog achieve: "during that twenty seconds or
two hours that we looked into each other's faces, we made

contact" (34).

From his words it seems that Jerry has breached a

47
separation with the dog that, in making time irrelevant,
must have a meaning beyond time. That such a breach is
possible in his revelation, but along with it comes the
awareness of the separation itself.

In this story Jerry focuses on his alienation from an
animal. Since he also speaks in the play about the zoo,
we can assume that this sense of separation from the animal
world is crucial to him. In fact, Jerry, by means of his
own initiation rite, arrives at the understanding that as
a sentient human being he is subject to more than biologi-
cal needs and impulses. The understanding immediately
alienates him from nature by virtue of his rationality,
his ability to be self-reflective, and his capacity to in-
vent, create, and thereby shape his environment. He at
once realizes his power and his aloneness. Jerry's "loss

of innocence,‘ therefore, is just the reverse of Peter's,
since Peter has been subsummed by a man-made culture from
which he is eventually severed by a reawakening of his
biological impulses.

In the format of primitive rites of initiation, the
ordeal for the novice has three basic components leading to
his rebirth as a new, mature individual: separation from
his mother and from his counterparts, confrontation with
danger and death, and hallucination or loss of conscious-
ness. Jerry's encounter with the dog (like his encounter

with Peter) proceeds along similar lines, from conflict,

to identification, to loss. The momentary identification

48

is like a loss of consciousness; it is the achievement of
synthesis beyond any superimposed defining framework in a

reality which, in the words of British scholar, Tony Tanner,

"18

"lies forever outside our names for it. Inevitably,

therefore, Jerry and the dog reenter time and space:

When the dog and I see each other we both
stop where we are. We regard each other

with a mixture of sadness and suspicion,

and then we feign indifference. We walk

past each other safely; we have an under—
standing. It's very sad, but you have to
admit it's an understanding (35).

This understanding--Jerry's revelation--has been sum-
marized in an analysis of the human situation by Ortega y
Gasset:

In the vacuum arising after he has left be-
hind his animal life he [man] devotes himself
to a series of nonbiological occupations which
are not imposed by nature but invented by him-
self. This invented life-—invented as a novel
or a play is invented--man calls human life,
well being. It is not given to man as its
fall is given to a stone or the stock of its
organic acts--eating, flying, nesting--to an
animal. He makes it himself, beginning by
inventing it.19

Albee's preoccupation is, as his character's becomes,
with the phenomena of these fictions—~he creates a rever-
beration of fictions in his play——not the least of which
is the fictional construct of language. Jerry perceives
that by isolating and dividing elements of total experience
the experience itself is falsified and limited: "I have
learned that neither kindness nor cruelty by themselves,

independent of each other, creates any effect beyond them-

selves; and I have learned that the two combined, together,

 

49

at the same time, are the teaching emotion" (35-6).

What he means by "the teaching emotion" remains am-
biguous in the play, but we can make a reasonable guess
that the term has something to do with dissolution of all
the opposing distinctions which people usually use to de-
fine life. Jerry immediately adds: "And what is gained
is loss." In using paradox (which conveys meaning by
trying to transcend it) Albee attempts to express the ten-
sion between necessary definitions and the experience of
reality. Jerry is frustrated with the inadequacy of langu-
age to express reality: "And was trying to reach the dog
an act of love? And, perhaps, was the dog's attempt to
bite me not an act of love? If we can so misunderstand,
well then, why have we invented the word love in the first
place?"20

Jerry's words amplify his connection to the mythic
hero who, in his individual adventure, typifies the collec-
tive experience. The fall from innocence is the fall into
knowledge; the fall from undifferentiated unity into the
dialectic world is the understanding of the loss of total
relatedness and the beginning of the continuous dialogue
between the conflicting human impulses toward good and ill.
The gain is knowledge, progress, and experience; the loss
is harmony and unity. Human beings, according to Albee in
The Zoo Story, have a continuously problematic relationship
between their conflicting desires.

Because Jerry has apparently had an experience in

50
which these conflicts were temporarily resolved he is in
Joseph Campbell's words, "the master of two worlds" whose
task involves "rendering back into the light-world the
speech defying pronouncements of the dark."21 He is dis-
oriented throughout the play because he moves back and
forth between these two worlds, which can also be the
realms of consciousness and unconsciousness. As the hero
he must, according to Campbell, represent "on a two-dimen-
sional surface a three-dimensional form, or in a three-
dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning" or (again
using Campbell's definitions) he must "perceive eternity
in time while capturing eternity through time" (Campbell,
218).

The end of Jerry's initiation becomes the beginning
of Peter's. Peter's need for communication with Jerry is
essential because of his rigid adherence to the conventions
of the social collective which tends to encourage conser-
vatism, repression of natural impulses, and suspicion of
change.

Peter's rupture from the security of the social col—
lective is symbolized by the severance from his bench and
by the confrontation he has with death. When Jerry takes

out and clicks open an "ugly looking knife,‘ the realiza-
tion of his mortality and the apparently arbitrary impera-
tives that exist beyond rationality dawns on Peter: "You
are mad! You're stark raving mad. YOU'RE GOING TO KILL

ME!" (46).

51
The violence that Jerry employs at this point in the
play emphatically moves the characters toward the inter-
changeability that reinforces their relationship as
doubles, whose very opposition presupposes their unity.

In fact, the violence in The Zoo Story is one more piece

 

in the tightly interlocking structure of the play. The
confrontation Jerry initiates over the bench isolates and
focuses the sharp yet arbitrary differences between Peter
and Jerry that, when broken down, reveal an essential
sameness.

According to Rene Girard in Violence and the Sacred,

 

violence is precisely that aspect of human behavior which,
if given full vent, will break down all societal differen-
tiation.22 Jerry's expressed need for Peter's bench is
only an incidental symbol for his real need to possess
Peter's being, or, in his own words, to "get through to"
the other man, to "make contact."

Jerry's focus on the bench is realistic since the more
Peter is threatened with its loss the more he associates it
with himself, linking it to his adulthood, his manhood, and
his sense of responsibility:

I've come here for years; I have hours of
great pleasure, great satisfaction, right
here. And that's important to a man. I'm
a responsible person, and I'm a GROWNUP.
This is my bench and you have no right to
take it from me (45).

Peter's words reinforce Girard's view:

It is not some vulgar trophy or second-rate
divinity the adversaries are trying to wrest

52

from each other's grasp, but their very

souls, their vital force, their being.

Each finds this being reflected in the

other's violence, because their mimetic

desires have converged on one and the same

object (Girard, 154).
The desire is mimetic because the impulse toward imitation
of the other grows out of the felt loss of connectedness
with the objective world. When Peter and Jerry diverge
over the bench, the tensions which have existed between
them all through the play erupt, revealing them as unmis—
takable antagonists. Their conflict is simultaneously a
convergence, making their implicit relationship as likes
explicit; in reflecting each other's violent behavior they
dissolve the original difference between them and become
equals. The violence growing out of difference destroys
difference.

Jerry brings Peter past the social structures dividing
them—-structures which make Peter unable to accept the ori-
ginal brotherhood Jerry offers-—by provoking him to a level
of interaction at which they can share experience, that
level outside society which Jerry calls animal. As they
approach this level, differences between them dissolve;
when Jerry rushes to grab Peter by the collar Albee's stage
directions indicate that their faces must almost touch (46).

At this point Peter calls Jerry a monster, echoing
Jerry's description of the dog as "a black monster of a
beast”(30). According to Girard, the monster and the

double are closely related. Violence, in rendering

 

53
differences confused and intermingled, dissolves the famil—
ial, the cultural, the biological, and the natural distinc-
tions upon which society is constructed and so creates a
formless and grotesque mixture of things that are normally
separate" (Girard, 160). Peter sees himself reflected in
Jerry and, especially as the image is one his ego has
struggled to keep at bay, it appears to him as a monstros-
ity.

The unity and reciprocity which violence effects is
perfectly depicted in The Zoo Story in the climactic tab—
leau scene (47). There, for all their initial differences,
Peter and Jerry unite beyond all definition, structure,
and language--even the line between victim and Victimizer
becomes blurred. In that moment, too, the act leading to
Jerry's death loses its distinction as either suicide or
murder. This nondifferentiated union, moreover, mandates
Jerry's sacrifice-death: the cultural crisis culminating
in the characters' violent interaction over the bench must
find an outlet upon which to spend itself; otherwise their
distinction (and, by extension, the social order) cannot be
restored.

In his death Jerry also realizes the practical aspect \
dividing ritual from art. In so doing he links real life
and art, experience and object, for in the moment he im-
pales himself on the knife Peter holds he is AT ONE with
the other man——the synthesis toward which the drama has

been moving is realized. In Jerry, with his power to fade

 

54
the boundaries of the individual and create some unity
with the collective, Albee portrays a romantic, Dionysian
hero as that hero has been described by Nietzsche:
No longer the artist, he has himself become
a work of art; the productive power of the
whole universe is now manifest in his trans-
port, to the glorious satisfaction of the
primordial ONE. 3

The Dionysian elements in Jerry's character, moreover,
correspond to that god's title of Master of Magical Illu-
sions.24 The illusionist, like the artist, points out to
society the fact of illusion in its assumption, the masks
they all conspire to wear, and the fictions they engage in.
This is Jerry's role in regard to Peter, as it has continu-
ally been Albee's purpose in almost all of his drama.

Albee, consistent with his aesthetic of process,
makes no attempt to resolve the paradox between fiction and
fact, imposed meaning and discovered meaning. Jerry's final
invocation of God, uttered with "a combination of scornful
mimicry and supplication" (49), typifies the ambiguous
feelings of human beings in regard to their position in the
universe, feelings somewhere between genuine belief and
simple imitation of convention.

The playwright presents the prevailing social struc—
ture as a major force to be reckoned with, since it, too,
has contradictory meaning; it is, on the one hand, the form
that, in bringing order to the confusions of fluid experi—
ence, allows for meaningful actions and human progress.

Yet (as Albee illustrates through Peter), the form can too

 

55
easily become fossilized and, if left unchallenged, can
result in entropy.

Jerry is a fearsome character: he does move toward
the destruction and breakdown of the prevailing order, he
does wish to break through patterns we (the audience as
well as Peter) rely on for meaning, he does try to reach
Peter in some metaphysical, undifferentiated way, and he
does, finally, bring violence to both express and effect
his end.

On the other hand, Jerry by his death incorporates
the principle he represents back into society, an idea
amplified by his contention that Peter will see Jerry's
face on television—-the reflector of modern America's
experiences and self-images. His death, also, restores
order--not cyclically, but with the crucial difference
implied that Peter must restructure his life (without his
bench, hence with lost security) around a new understand-
ing and must consciously create for himself an ordered
reality. This new system should be different, Albee's play
seems to suggest, in that it will be self-consciously
formed.

There is the strong message in The Zoo Story, as there

 

is in later Albee plays, that inherited patterns are un-
tested patterns. Yet, in reaching beyond them Jerry and

Peter come to what the Lawyer in Tiny Alice calls "the

 

edge of the abyss" to face the two most primal fears:

abandonment and loss of personal identity. Put another

 

 

56'

way, the characters temporarily escape all limits, encounter
formlessness, and, if the pattern of their initiation holds
true, strike their own bargain with reality and experience.
The idea that humans are positioned on a delicate
balance between opposites was present in Albee's work long
before he titled his fourth play. The idea surfaces as

early as The Zoo Story when Jerry "proves" that all humans

 

teeter on that line between freedom and circumscription,
choice and destiny. Albee's characters are initiated into
the understanding that all patterns are created fictions,
fictions which are necessary nonetheless, since they are the
only means through which experience can be made comprehen-
sible. The tableau scene in which Peter and Jerry transcend
these fictions is necessarily one with silence. Synthesis
is a metaphor for death in Albee's plays, and vice versa,
and death becomes synonomous with beginning again.

Albee's point is that because humans create their fic-
tions they can both control and change them. He presents
the idea through Peter that the disintegration of an old /
identity (an identity "borrowed" from identification with
external authority) along with the panic such disintegra—
tion provokes may provide the possibility for a new, more
consciously formed personality. The message is, then, that
life patterns must be self-created and continuously reformed,
and so never mistaken as absolute and implaccable. The
playwright continues this theme through the characters of

George and Martha in his next and most highly acclaimed play.

Chapter II

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

 

In comparison to The Zoo Story, there has, in gen-

 

eral, been more critical agreement as to both the dramatic

merit of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and its theme.

 

The centrality of the illusion and reality motif is usu-
ally agreed upon, making George and Martha's imaginary son
the hinge to all the dramatic conflict.1 The destruction
of the symbolic son is the play's climax; the subsequent
denouement in which George and Martha, reduced to mono-
syllables, reveal their existential fear, has been seen
by most critics, at least tentatively, as an affirmative
resolution.

The most tentative in this reading tend to interpret
the existential message as being oppressive. Reality,
which is finally the confrontation with "the absurdity and

cruelty of existence,‘ remains, in a world divested of
absolutes, unrelieved by the absolution the characters
must inevitably crave.2

In contrast, Foster Hirsch in Who's Afraid of Edward

 

Albee? somewhat breezily explains the "suggestion of moral
redemption" at the end of the play as Albee's inability
"to accept the notion of absolute meaninglessness or

57

 

58

finality."3 Those critics, however, who truly explore
the existential message underlying the play, find a sounder
basis for a positive ending. In the words of Duane R.
Carr, once George and Martha "experience the nothingness of
human existence, they are also able to see, as only George
did before, the necessity of going on, of creating new
illusions." This reading coincides, in spirit, with
Charlene M. Taylor's interpretation of the play as a rite
of passage into adulthood through which the characters
must accept the complexities of life including "the full
range of human potential for both good and evil"; and it
leads logically into Thomas Adler's contention that the
play's focus is less on the destruction of old illusions
than on the creation of new realities.4

These last interpretations of the existential message
of Albee's first full length play are more accurately cor-
respondent with the thematic demands of its structure. As
in The Zoo Story, the underlying structure of Who's Afraid

of Virginia Woolf? is the ritual of initiation involving

 

death and renewal. This rite has several phases; it is
triggered, first of all, by a crisis. In social terms

this crisis is indicated by a condition of stasis in which
no forward progress is possible. In psychological terms
the individual ego or self—determining function is becoming
annihilated by external forces to which it has relinquished
power. The change that is consequently needed can be

brought about only by the confrontation of the ego (or the

59
culture) with its most violently destructive side. This
is simultaneously a confrontation with death since it in-
volves a renunciation of all the old, relied—upon rational-
izations and familiar frameworks for meaning. The process
can be seen, therefore, as involving a return to cosmic
chaos on the collective level and a return to infancy on
the individual level. The implication of the ritual of
initiation is that in order for the individual and/or the
group will to reassert itself after this "death" it must
form new, consciously chosen meanings. The movement is in
effect one from determinism to self-determination, from non-
consciousness to consciousness, from the relinquishment of
responsibility and individual autonomy to their acceptance.
As Mircea Eliade describes the primitive ritual in The

Sacred and the Profane:

 

Initiatory death reiterates the paradig-
matic return to chaos, in order to make
possible a repetition of the cosmogeny——
that is, to prepare the new birth. . . .
This psychic chaos is the sign that the
profane man is undergoing dissolution and
that a new personality is on the verge of
birth.5

When one applies this to Who's Afraid of Virginia

 

Woolf? the stagnation of George and Martha's lives at once
indicates a repressed crisis. The crisis is indicated
first by their moral and emotional inertia, an inertia to
which they are in danger of succumbing completely; and
second by the surfacing of a satanic cruelty which suggests

that their destructive impulses are not being tempered by

60
reason or morality and so remain non-creative. This situ-
ation has come about because they have come to rely too
fully on their self-created myth--their "son"—-and because
their rituals--their "games"-—have become too automatic and
trivial. What is established early in the play, therefore,
is George and Martha's need for a new myth and new rituals,
and a shift from compulsive, "reflex" (and therefore non—
conscious) behavior to deliberate, willed action.

In order for this to happen, the destructive, chaotic
principle in the couple's personalities (which early in the
play is only hinted at) must be fully and forcefully un-
leashed and confronted so that the creative potential in
this destructive principle can become effective. George
and Martha must establish complete anarchy in order to allow

themselves to form new "laws.' Death must be faced in order
for new life to begin. This "return to cosmic chaos," an
integral part of the initiation rite, will culminate,
appropriately enough, in the murder ritual enacted by George.
The play consistently supplies evidence that the
characters (and, by extension, the culture they represent)
are in a social, psychological, and moral decline. George,
for example, seems to have a great weariness; he refers to
himself as being "tired," which Martha calls a lack of
action and motivation: "I don't know what you're so tired
about. . .you haven't done anything all day."6 She also

refers to him as "a blank," a "cipher" (17), suggesting

that perfect zero out of which no growth is possible.

 

 

61

George and Martha, intelligent, educated, articulate
members of the upper middle class have deteriorated into a
kind of mental morass. Their constant, continual drinking
is the most evident example of the dissolution to which
they have succumbed and is further supported by their
apparently meaningless dialogue, habitual bickering, pro—
fanities, and sexual distortions. That there is "something
wrong" between them is so blatant that Nick and Honey,
greeted by Martha's "SCREW YOU!" meant for George as he
opens the door to admit them, immediately sense that they
"shouldn't have come" (20). Martha and George, moreover,
are middle-aged; Albee reinforces the metaphor of a couple
in their declining years by setting the play in autumn.

Throughout the play, the verbal confusions perpetrated
by the couple express and contribute to their own confu—
sions. George is particularly adept at these, usually tar—
geting Nick, whose propriety he seems inclined to undermine:

George: How much do you weigh?
Nick: I. . . .

George: Hundred and fifty-five, sixty. . .
something like that? Do you play

handball?

Nick: Well, yes. . .no. . .I mean, not
very well.

George: Well, then. . .we shall play some time.
Martha is a hundred and eight. . .years

old. She weighs somewhat more than
that. How old is your wife?

 

Nick: (A little bewildered) She's twenty-six.

George: Martha is a remarkable woman. I would
imagine she weighs about a hundred and
ten.

Nick: You're. . .wife. . .weighs. . .?

George: No, no, my boy. Yours! Your wife.

My wife is Martha.
Nick: Yes. . .I know.

 

62
George: If you were married to Martha you
would know what that means. (Pause)
But then, if I were married to you're
wife I would know what that means,
too. . .wouldn't I?

The interchange, like others, has an "Alice—in-Wonder-
land" quality that defies logical sequence, levels all dis-
tinctions, and undercuts all seriousness. When the couple's
childlessness and Martha's contention that George is a
"bog" in the history department are included, the portrait
emerges of a couple in crisis of culture, reason, language,
education, tradition, and family. Their situation is sum-

med up by George in Act Two: "I've been trying for years

to clean up the mess I made" (102) and by Nick's definition

of Martha's strategy in Act Three: "Aimless. . . .butchery.
Pointless. . . .Aimless. . .wanton. . .pointless. . ." (193-
194). All indications are that George and Martha are locked

into repetitive, self-destructive patterns and that any
efforts to "clean up the mess" further compound it.

As ineffective as their solutions are, however, Albee
indicates that no viable alternatives will present them—
selves from within the existing culture. History, about
which George talks a great deal, is, of course, a central
motif in the play. The setting is New England, a place
rich in cultural history and tradition, and a college,
bastion of the society's cultural heritage. Rather than
providing enlightenment, however, history is presented as
an obstructive authority and a deterministic force.

George's statement that he is "preoccupied with history"

63
(50) amounts to an admission that, though he has not sur—
rendered to it--he is "in the History Department as opposed
to being the History Department"—-he has been dominated by
it. This becomes particularly evident when seen in terms
of one of the chief metaphors for history in the play:
Martha's father.

"Daddy," as Martha calls him, is the symbolic, unseen,
patriarchal "god." George ironically associates him with
Parnassus (30) and Martha credits him with a "sense of his-
tory. . .of. . .continuation" (79). George, as Martha ex—
plains, was meant to be the chosen "son" to continue this
patriarchal line of succession: "A succession. . .you know
what I mean?. . .which is natural enough. When you've made
something, you want to pass it on, to somebody" (79).

However, George's failure to "go anywhere" in the
department denotes something more than just stasis. If
Martha's father represents permanence, planning, order, and
tradition--Martha brags that "He is the college. The
college Ts him" (77-78)--George is in defiance of that
order. Significantly, "Daddy" also represents stasis. He
is the larger-than—life structure that has grown to over-
whelm the individual, seeking, in fact, to stamp out indi—
viduality completely. According to George: "Martha's
father expects loyalty and devotion out of his. . .staff

. .I was going to use another word. . .expects his
staff. . .to cling to the walls of this place, like ivy.

to come here and grow old. . .to fall [surely there is a

64
double meaning intended here] in the line of service" (41).
The "other word" George intended was most likely "slaves."
Martha's father symbolizes a psychological dependence to
which individuals become slaves. In terms of the timeless,
continual aspect of this need, George's estimation that
"the old man" is "over two hundred years old" and "is not
going to die" is a psychological reality.

Martha's father personifies a structure that provides
safety, purpose, definition, boundaries, and the ultimate
annihilation of the self—determining ego. The patriarchal
god of law first arises in consciousness as a response to
the ego's effort to differentiate itself from, in Freud's
terms, the "blissful repose" of "non-being" or the pre-
conscious state. In time, however, this "god" comes to
assume the same pervasive proportions as the Earth Mother
goddess it replaces, and is equally attractive and detri-
mental to the ego.

George and Martha try to come to terms with their sub-
jugation in ways typical of humans' response to their gods:

Martha through devotion and dedication--"Jesus, I admired

that guy! I worshipped him" (77)-- and George through
resentment: "The S.O.B. [George] hates my father. You
know that?" (76). Neither can surmount the fear and avoid—

ance for which Daddy is simply an excuse. As the histori-
cal god of western, patriarchal culture, he is simply
another cause of moral and psychological impasse.

In contrast, Nick and Honey, who Martha refers to as

65

"the kids" (20), as new faculty arriving at the start of a
new academic year announce the possibility of a new gener-
ation, and consequently of a new beginning. Yet, as the
play progresses, the fact becomes more and more clear that,
rather than representing an alternate direction, Nick and
Honey seem destined to repeat fixed patterns. They "fall
into" the same inebriation as the elder couple, are simi-
larly childless, and have apparently been equally success-
ful in avoiding self—confrontation.

Eventually, Nick's "confessions" reveal even more
similarities to George and Martha's model, especially in
that Honey's father, too, was a dominating force in their
lives, if not a god, then a "minister of god" (109), a
"church mouse" (110). Nick and Honey do not possess the
epic dimensions of George and Martha; their similarities
are in a miniature; they have not had time to solidify
their mistakes as completely, and perhaps do not have the
creative energy to raise them to quite the same overwhelm-
ing proportions. But George's advice to Nick in Act Two
indicates that, given an acceptance of the cultural and
personal norms which demand as "the order of things"
"accommodation, malleability, adjustment," the younger man
is in the same danger of becoming "bogged down":

George: I' m giving you good advice, now.

Nick: Good God. .

George: There's quicksand here, and you'll
be dragged down, just as. .

Nick: Oh boy!

George: . . .before you know it. . .sucked
down. . . . (115)

66

Not even the scientific possibilities of the future,
represented by Nick's profession, are depicted as a viable
means for change. In fact, George visualizes a scientized
future which will artificially create a state of static
perfection that, in eliminating randomness and chaos, will
ensure a "perfection" disastrous to the human will:

I read somewhere that science fiction is really
not fiction at all. . .that you people are re-
arranging my genes, so that everyone will be
like everyone else. Now, I won't have that!

It would be a. . .shame (37).

The institutionalized sameness, or lack of differentia-
tion, suggested by his description is the most perfect
symbol for the crisis and inevitable downfall of western
culture. George is so taken with the horrific implications
of this possiblity that he brings it up again:

Martha, this young man is working on a system
whereby chromosomes can be altered. . . .the
genetic makeup of a sperm cell changed, re-
ordered. . .ts order, actually. . .for hair
and eye color, stature, potency. . .I imagine
. . .hairiness, features, health. . .and mind.
Most important. . .Mind. All imbalances will '
be corrected, sifted out. . .propensity for
various diseases will be gone, longevity
assured. We will have a race of men. . .test—
tube bred. . .incubator-born. . .superb and
sublime. . . . BUT! Everyone will tend to be
rather the same. . . . Alike (65).

George's reaction suggests that the issue is a meta-
phor for his personal psychic fears, but he is also con-
cerned for the culture, and he suggests that, in elimin-
ating dissimilarity, the future might also eliminate change;

-the result of progress, therefore, will be the end of pro-

gress--stasis. This ultimate order would be the

67

solidification and implementation of the same historic
ideals personified by Martha's father. The point is there-
fore made that the future can offer no solution to the past
if it is maintained as part of the same continuum. George's
preoccupation with "historic inevitability," and the impli-
cation that Nick, from his position in biology, "can take
over the History Department" (64) are not simply nonsensical
allusions. Nor is Nick's half—ironic self-assessment:

.what I thought I'd do is. . .I'd sort

of insinuate myself generally, play around
for a while, find all the weak spots, shore

'em up. . .become sort of a fact, and then
turn into a. . .a what. . .?
George: An inevitability.
Nick: Exactly. . . .an inevitability (112).

These examples all point out that the possibilities of
the future grow out of the cultural value assumptions,
myths, and ideologies of the past--1ater in the play this
will have significance in terms of George and Martha's
mythic son as well. The future, furthermore, will possess
the technology to convert these into tangible forms. That
the problem lies less in the technological expertise itself
than in the historical ideologies that support it is im-
plicit in George's remark that, "[the genetic business] is
very upsetting. . . .but history is a great deal more dis—
appointing" (38).

The one remaining solution, therefore, seems to be the
destruction of the historical/cultural context--which in
the particular circumstances of the play is symbolically

equated with George and Martha's marriage-—within which

 

68

all these "alternatives" are contained, and the subsequent
establishment of new mythologies and new ideologies to re-
place the old. George implies as much in his comment to an
uncomprehending Honey in Act Two:

It's very simple. . .When people can't abide

things as they are, when they can't abide

the present. . .either they turn to a con-

templation of the past, as I have done, or

they set about to. . .alter the future.

And when you want to change something. . .

you BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! (178).
The hint of destruction and upheaval inherent in George's
last words, juxtaposed with the social order to history and
science, isolatesthe two opposing factions in the play, fac-
tions which are represented in the human psyche and in the
cultural group as the Dionysian impulse and the Apollonian
standard.

The Apollonian ideal, that is, the principles of rea-
son, social order, law, cultural differentiation and linear
thought, tempers the chaotic, instinctual elements of the
human mind and channels them into creative use. George as
much as defines this ideal in a speech he makes to Nick in
Act Two:

"you [i.e. society] endeavor to make communi—
cable sense out of a natural order, morality
out of the unnatural disorder of the human
mind. . . (117).
However, if the Apollonian factor becomes too rigid, it can
also disallow all creative progress; it can become the

"larger system" which, like Martha's father and the college

and, in some cases, society itself, dwarfs the individual

69
will. George also alludes to this danger in Act Two when
he reads from one of his books:
And the west, encumbered by crippling alli-
ances, and burdened with a morality too
rigid to accommodate itself to the swing of
events, must. . .eventually. . .fall (174).

The Dionysian principle, in contrast, moves the indi-
vidual and the group toward undifferentiation, that is, to-
ward the demolition of all the usual cultural distinctions,
norms for behavior, frameworks for meaning, and discursive,
discriminating functions of reason. However, the random
and chaotic qualities that characterize this principle have
a creative function as well since, to eliminate it, as
George also points out, would be to relegate society to

a race of scientists and mathematicians,

each dedicated to and working for the greater
glory of the super-civilization. . . .There
will be a certain. . .loss of liberty, I
imagine, as a result of this experiment. . .
but diversity of mind will no longer be the
goal. Cultures and races will eventually
vanish. . .the ants will take over the

world. . . [History] will lose its glorious
variety and unpredictability. I, and with

me the. . .the surprise, the multiplicity, the
sea-changing rhythm of. . .history. will be
eliminated. There will be order and constancy
. . .and I am unalterably opposed to it. I
will not give up Berlin! (67).

As this impassioned speech points out, the Dionysian
impulse, at its most positive, stands for human freedom,
cultural diversity, variety, and change and, as such, vies
for power with the order, permanence, and predictability

of the rational impulse. In aligning himself with the

Dionysian side of culture, George implicitly defines

 

 

70
himself as the romantic hero, like Jerry before him. As
such, however, he is also subject to the dark side of the
element, for, when the chaotic impulses in man are re—
pressed and are denied all the tempering effects of reason
they become primitive and gratuitously destructive, under-
mining all the efforts of the individual to gain control
over his or her life.

The doubling of the characters in The Zoo Story clearly
established their separate adherence to the opposing prin—
ciples, their obvious polarization, and their need for in-
corporation. In his rigid allegiance to order and struc-
ture, Peter disowned and suppressed the irrational and
variable aspects of his personality to such an extent that
these aspects presented themselves in external form, split-
off from him in the person of Jerry. The double, Jerry,
brings Peter to accept him by accepting his own violent and
destructive impulses: i.e. his "dark side." Since the pro-
cess undermines all Peter's most cherished assumptions
about himself and the world this amounts to a debacle for
him--summed up in George's "BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG!"
theory——though the destruction inherently contains new
possibilities.

The doubling of the characters in The Zoo Story gives
way to the much more complex marital union of Who's Afraid

of Virginia Woolf? George and Martha as a unit both exhibit

 

a tendency to be dominated and suppressed by systems which

they have blown up to be larger than themselves. Daddy and

71
the college (the past), as indicated, are two of these;
their mythic son (the potential future), as we shall see,
is another. Yet, because they are in obvious rebellion
against the usual social norms of order and permanence and
because of the obvious chaos of their lives, they are more
closely aligned with the destructive impulse. Their inter-
actions with each other and with Nick and Honey suggest,
moreover, Jerry's Dionysian drive to disallow all sustain-
ing fictions. For instance, George in Act Two encourages
Nick to "confess" his ambitious pragmatism and the mutual
deceit and subterfuge surrounding his and Honey's marriage,
and by Act Three the younger couple's overly polite, syrupy
solicitousness toward each other gives way, under George
and Martha's influence, to encroaching testiness.

However, George and Martha have consciously and
actively faced neither their potential for destruction nor
their mutual sexual and emotional need for each other.

From the first scene of the play they exhibit a careful,
delicately balanced interaction between hostility and love.
The potential anger in the scene is deflected into

Martha's whining complaint on the one hand and a gentler
mutuality between the couple on the other. When the play-
fulness leads to Martha's sexual overture, however, George
avoids that as well. Here, as throughout most of the play,
George and Martha channel their real hostility toward each
other into bickering and complaining and their real emo-

tional need for each other into teasing.

 

72
Similarly, their rebellion against convention and
their exclusion from the larger social system is based only
indirectly on the intention to subvert those conventions;
more immediate is their fear of their own inadequacies, a

fear which, as noted, they have externalized onto existing

external structures. They themselves make this fear ex—
plicit:
Martha: George hates Daddy. . .not for any—
thing Daddy's done to him, but for
his own. . .
George: (Nodding. . .finishing it for her)
. . .inadequacies.
Martha: (Cheerfully) That's right. You hit

1t. . .right on the snout.
This is also an excellent illustration of the degeneration
of language and the defusing of psychological insight which
Albee associates with modern society. Unlike Peter in Ths
Zoo Story whose verbal abilities were nascent ("I don't
express myself very well"), George and Martha use words as
tools divorced from their potential meanings. That is,
though they are self—aware and articulate enough to voice
their "unconscious" motivations, they can, at the same time,
avoid internalizing the implications behind the words. They
exhibit, therefore, a modern failure of language to provide
clarification and illumination. Martha in Act Two again
reveals that George has used his moral rebellion as an ex—
cuse for his own fears:

You mean he didn't start in on how he would

have amounted to something if it hadn't been

for Daddy? How his high moral sense wouldn't
even let him try to better himself? (124).

73

George and Martha exemplify how the Dionysian impulse,
which (as George's futuristic predictions underscore) can
be a means for change and growth, can also, if repressed
and used as a means to avoid responsible action, exhibit
itself as a distortion. George and Martha display these
distortions by their pointless cruelties, their constant
shifts in attitudes and behaviors, and their entrapment in
habitual, repetitive actions. At the point at which they
are in the play, the violent, disruptive aspect of Dionysis
must, ironically, be unleashed in all its most destructive
potential in order to become once again creative; hence,
what the drama consists of essentially is a Dionysian night
of revelry. Because all the more positive associations usu-
ally made with Dionysis--ritual, sexuality, revelry, elated
intoxication, emotional release, magic, even song and dance

—-are present but perverted in Who's Afraid of Virginia

 

Woolf? these become both examples of the couple's dissapa-
tion and the possible means for their liberation.

The definition of the drama as a displaced Dionysian
initiation rite is made in the first and last scenes. As
the "front doorbell chimes" in Act One, Martha announces
expectantly: "Party! Party!" (17). When finally those
same chimes have signalled the death of George and Martha's
mutual myth--their "son"——the party ends and George pro-
claims "(Softly) It will be dawn soon. I think the party's
over" (237). As in The Zoo Story Albee makes an overt con-

nection between his play and the Dionysian ritual from

 

 

74
which all drama originates and in so doing reestablishes
drama's religious/mythic potential.

The ritual, Albee's play suggests, becomes trivial-
ized in its modern setting: the "rite" is a "party" and
the "rituals" are the "games" which George and Martha
alternately lead: "Humiliate the Host," "Get the Guests,"
"Hump the Hostess." The format of these games are obvious-
ly familiar extensions of their habitual marital inter-
actions.

The most serious function of ritual, as was estab-
lished in the last chapter, grows out of the impulse of the
self-conscious human ego to make contact with the external
world, that is, everything apart from its own conscious—
ness. It is an effort to reestablish a lost feeling of
relatedness with nature and with the Other (all that is not
perceived as the self). George and Martha's ritualized
interactions, therefore, underscore their real desire for
connectedness. However, the method of these interactions
representsa gross deterioration of ritual from its original

function; ritual in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has

 

diminished into "fun and games." The example given earlier
of how George and Martha's games are benevolent and playful
without being truly loving and are caustic without reveal-
ing the anger that might lead to true confrontation illus-
trates why these games, by always falling short of the
extremity of emotion needed to bridge the gap between self

and Other, can never achieve their original purpose. They

 

75
become instead, in Martha's words, "Ugly games. . .ugly"
(207).

Though, as the play progresses, the characters are
able to uncover real anger and pain in each other, even
this remains pointless. For instance, Martha is "viciously
triumphant" in "Humiliate the Host," reducing George almost
to tears. As she persists in her pursuit, however, he
undercuts the image she paints of him, an image he does not
want to confront, by singing "Who's Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?" "to drown her" (85). The song, rather than a
vehicle for release, is a means of avoidance; by the next
act, though he is quiet and preoccupied, George seems to
have readjusted himself to his old role.

His own game, "Get the Guests," in this next act con-
tains similar potential for self—disclosure and self-con-
frontation that is likewise aborted. Nick reveals his
"secret" about Honey's false pregnancy and his own decision
to marry her for her money. George, in turn, confronts
the couple with a mirror. The "explosion" he creates with
his revelation of "the puff [that] went sysy. . .like magic
. . .pouf!" (147) also comes to nothing. Not only is
George, himself, certain that Honey will "get over it" but
by the next act she has come to the apparently deliberate
decision to readjust to her old patterns:

Honey: (To George) I've decided I don't

remember anything. (To Nick) Hello,
Dear.

 

76

George: (Close to Honey's ear) It's just
some things you can't remember. . .
hunh?

Honey: (A great laugh to cover; then
quietly, intensely to George) Don't
remember; not can't. (At Nick, cheer—
fully) Hello, Dear.

 

 

George's indulgence in "Get the Guests," moreover,
given the extent of his own self-avoidance, is, as Martha
points out to him, "pigmy hunting" (151). The game reveals
"the corruption of weakness and petty revenges," the same
terms Martha uses to define her and George's mutual assaults.

The sustained inebriation of the couples is another
reminder of the connection between the action of the play
and the ritualistic, primitive, bacchic cults. The original
purgative function of Dionysian intoxications has degen-
erated in modern society to an inverse condition summed up
in an exchange between Nick and George:

Nick: After a while you don't get any
drunker, do you?

George: Well, you gs. . .but it's different

. .everything slows down. . .you

get sodden. . .unless you can up—
chuck. . .like your wife. . .then
you can sort of start all over
again (106).

In contrast to the explosive release of tensions trig-
gered by bacchanalian gods, the inertia in which "every-
thing slows down" is an entropic state which precludes pro-
gressive movement. The condition is suggested by Martha
early in the play when she calls George "a cipher" and "a

zero": that perfect circle excluding the chaotic elements

necessary for growth.

77

Though Honey's "upchucking" signals the need to
shatter this cycle and "start all over again," the ges-
ture, in being involuntary, is inevitably ineffective.
Honey leaves the room to vomit whenever the characters'
games reach the point of intense emotion, after "Humiliate
the Host" and "Get the Guests," for instance, and so she
translates into physical terms all of the characters'
ability to continue and recontinue familiar strategies.

Honey also converts psychological ploys into physical
reality by her self—inflicted abortions, which we learn
about in Act Two. Like her vomiting, the characters'

drinking, and George and Martha's games, Honey's abortions,

intended to avoid pain, also prevent new possibilities. In
her cry against giving birth—-"I don't. . .want. . .any. . .
children. . .I'm afraid! I don't want to be hurt. .

PLEASEV'(176)--she articulates that fear of death which pre-
vents life. This, as George makes us aware, keeps her in
an infantile state:

You going to throw up again? You going to

lie down on the cold tiles, your knees

pulled up under your chin, your thumbs stuck

in your mouth. . .? (177).

All of the characters are psychologically at the same
arrested level, and they figuratively effect the same
"smaller murders" to avoid confrontation with larger, more
comprehensive pain. The childlessness of both couples, in

translating a psychological condition into a physical

reality, symbolizes the detrimental consequences of this

78
avoidance.

The epithet "crummy, totally pointless infidelities"
(191) Martha gives her perverted sexual activities defines
these as another example of meaningless, repetitive, com-
pulsive actions. Her seduction of Nick also plays upon an
aspect of the nature and fertility cults associated with
earth goddesses and Dionysian spring gods. George and
Honey's comments as Nick and Martha dance explicate how

vestiges of instinctive fertility dances manifest them—

selves:
Honey: They're dancing like they've danced
before.
George: It's a familiar dance. . .they both

know it. . . .

. . .It's a very old ritual, monkey-

nipples. . .old as they come (131).
George earlier alluded to the relationship between Martha's
seduction and the rites of spring: "Martha's going to put
on some rhythm she understands. . .Sacre du Printemps, may-
be" (129).

Though Martha refers to herself as an "Earth Mother,"

the term is ironic given her inability to have children,
a biological condition that is itself simply symbolic of
the much more important issue of her incapacity for per-
sonal psychological growth. She is, in fact, locked into
a stereotype: the seductive, domineering Mother appealed
to by young men—-"sons"--for the sexual and (more perti-

nently) the material favors she might bestow. This stereo-

type, furthermore, is a cheapening of the original archetype

79
of the Earth Goddess, which, in its most positive, undis-
torted form represents life, healing, and continuity. In
being suppressed and devalued by patriarchal culture, the
symbol is seen as vindictive, castrating, and dominating:
"the Shrew." Even so, the Earth Goddess has little
potency: the "favors" Martha is wanted for ultimately are
not hers to give; they belong to "Daddy." As she ruefully
remarks, "But that's how it is in a civilized society." (189).

It is clear, therefore, that Martha is locked into a
negative cultural image that, by confiscating her best
qualities, turns her into, in George's words, "a Satanic
bitch" (137). The real issue, however, is that she is
locked into a stereotype at all. Her own individuality is
what is really suppressed. She reveals her frustration
with this to Nick:

Martha—poo sits there with her dress up
over her head. . .suffocating—-you don't
know how STUFFY it is with your dress up
over your head—~suffocating! (191).

The image here is of the individual human identity
lost in the sex role. Martha, the person, is being stifled;
but all roles, even the most personally destructive, pro-
vide the comfort of the familiar. Only through her rela—
tionship with George (who apparently sees her as an indi-
vidual and who, for all his problems, remains himself free
of the culturally-defined "male" role) can Martha achieve
potential freedom from the pre-defined symbol. This poten—

tial for individuality and psychological autonomy is one

80
she both wants and rejects:
There is only one man in my life who has

ever. . .made me happy. Do you know that?
One!. . .George; my husband.

. . .whom I will not forgive for having come
to rest; for having seen me and having said:
yes; this will do; who has made the hideous,
the hurting, the insulting mistake of loving
me and must be punished for it. . .

.who tolerates, which is intolerable; who
is kind, which is cruel, who understands,
which is beyond comprehension. . . . (191).
Because of his acceptance of her as an individual (the per-
son beyond the function) George represents an implicit
challenge to Martha. In rejecting him she rejects the
challenge of self-actualization or self—creation.

Martha's fears are not unfounded. To shed relied-upon
roles and behavior patterns (especially those which are
socially sanctioned) is to lose all assumed personal and
social definition; to leave the individual, in effect,
without a language. Obviously, this presents both a liber-
ation and a radical reduction. In fact, the more cherished
the beliefs the more destructive must be the force to
demolish them.

Once again, both the liberating and the frightening
aspects of this force are more delineated in The Zoo Story.
In the character of Jerry Albee creates the romantic,
Dionysian hero whose role it is to liberate the individual
(Peter) from the confining structures that are impeding

him. The playwright retains the frightening aspects of

81
the process in Jerry's non-rational, threatening, confusing
actions and rhetoric.

The image of modern society in Who's Afraid of Virginia

 

Woolf? illustrates more complexly how the liberating/
frightening Dionysian impulses have become so misused and
diminished that they, themselves, present an obstacle to

the individual person and to the social group. As illus-
trated, dance, intoxication, sexuality——functions meant

to discharge tensions-—in being distorted into a kind of
"social acceptability," become confining and tension-pro—
ducing. Consequently, we are given in this play several
symbols corresponding to the stultifying "cages" in The Zoo
Stssy, of which George and Martha's ritual games are a

prime example. The cages in the earlier play represented

a severely repressed individual personality adhering unques-
tioningly to the social establishment and its code of
rationality. Conversely, the characters in the later play
are "caged in" by their anti—establishment and anti-rational
activities. Consequently, in The Zoo Story the force which
broke through this "cage" came from outside the person of
Peter and, as Jerry is a social outcast, from outside the

social system as well. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

 

George and Martha are already outside the social system;
they have, in fact, created their own microcosmic society
and must, therefore, generate their own "breakthrough" or
initiation by pushing to the extreme those forces for

change that have atrophied.

 

 

 

82

All of the characters' reluctance (or downright re-
fusal) to relinquish known patterns has already been illus-
trated. What is necessary for them-—particularly George
and Marth—-(as was necessary for Peter) is the complete
demolition of everything familiar; anything less will leave
them traveling in the same circles.

The destruction of all frameworks for meaning is the
movement toward non-differentiation. This is the condi—
tion where all distinctions are leveled away; everything
presents itself as "equal" and therefore drained of the
meanings which distinctions, differentiations, and separa-
tions provide. A11 becomes meaningless. In mythic terms
this condition is referred to as the return to cosmic
chaos; in the modern existential terms usually used in

reference to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? it is confron-

 

tation with the void; in romantic terms it is transcendence
or the manifestation of total abstraction; in terms of the
theme of illusion and reality with which Albee is concerned,
it is the annihilation of all the fictions which serve as

a bulwark against unmitigated reality. Whatever it is
called, it is a central aspect of the true Dionysian ritual.

In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? this movement toward

 

non~differentiation is presented in many forms, from more
trivial and comic verbal confusions to the escalating vio—
lence, Oedipal crisis, and ritual sacrifice.

As early as the first act, George and Martha perpe—

trate confusions that, in their implications, threaten the

83
order of the characters' lives. Martha confuses Nick's
position in the Biology Department with a position in the
Math Department, and George not only continues the error
but compounds it repeatedly by suggesting that Nick will
one day run the History Department. These "departments"
are also metaphoric "cages" serving both as convenient
definition and as personal restriction. The definitions
they provide, however, signify crucial distinctions between
the various "disciplines" or aspects which in essence de-
fine culture.

George and Martha's almost deliberate confusion in
regard to Nick's department hints at their impulse toward
undifferentiation, though, because their intention is
never quite deliberate and never completely carried through
it remains simply a hint, pointing the way toward necessary
action.

Similarly, the couple personify a challenge to the
social order by reversing the usual sex-role distinction.
George's passivity and Martha's aggressiveness are apparent

throughout the play. Martha articulates the role reversal

in her boxing match story (55). Though she underscores

the importance of the incident—-"I think it's colored our
whole life. Really I do!"—-she disclaims responsibility

for it--And it was an accident. . .a real, goddam accident!"

Later in the play, as the characters begin to move further
from accident and closer to intention, she again brings up

the role reversal, though she still rejects the implications:

84
"I'm loud, and I'm vulgar, and I wear the pants in this
house because somebody's got to, but I'm ESE a monster. I
am ESE" (157). Gender differentiation is even more central
to the structural understanding and definitions upon which
society organizes itself. Martha expresses the fear of the
"monstrosity" of the crisis in definition which could occur
were these distinctions to become inoperative.

On an increasingly serious level, George and Martha
undermine the most fundamental aspect of civilization:
language itself. The theme of breaking through assumed
structures is expressed here, as in The Zoo Story, through
a de—emphasis on the usefulness of language to communicate
experience. Tony Tanner's term "foregrounding," that is,
the "use of language in such a way that it draws attention
to itself" and becomes "both referential and part of a verbal

display," applies to Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as it

 

did to the earlier play.7

George is, as Martha calls him, a "PHRASEMAKER!" (14)
who is continuously conscious of words as words: "Good,
better, best, bested. How's do you like that for a declen-
sion, young man? Eh?" (32). One of his stories relies on
the mispronounciation of bourbon and seems to have little
meaning beyond that verbal confusion and its illustration
of the power of language to create an event. He often
seems to create verbal confusions to which he then arbi-
trarily assigns or removes significance:

George: Look. . .Martha has money too. I

85

mean, her father's been robbing this
place blind for years, and. . . .

Nick: No, he hasn't. He has not.
George: He hasn't?

Nick: No.

George: (Shrugs) Very well. . . .Martha's

father has not been robbing this place
blind for years, and Martha does not
have money. O.K.? (107-108).
He similarly shifts symbols abruptly, turning the benign
gift of snapdragons into a weapon (204) as earlier in the
play he used a toy gun to create a dramatically tense inci—
dent (57).

His "son" is, significantly, also a verbally created
fiction who can be and is destroyed by words in the form of
the imaginary telegram which George claims he eats, in
effect, eating his own words. Albee creates an insightful
portrait of the twentieth century man who reduces all
reality to verbal constructs whose meanings he then cannot
trust.

The focus in Who‘s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is there-
fore not only on the power of language but on its limita-
tions. Of particular importance is the barrier which words
set up against the confrontation with whatever reality exists
beyond the forms imposed upon it. As Tanner explains:

American writers seem from the first to have
felt how tenuous, arbitrary, and even illusory,
are the verbal constructs which mean call de-
scriptions of reality. . .there has. . .been
from the start in American literature an inter-
mittent sense of the futility of pretending
that the putative exactitude of words can ever

measure up to the actual mystery of things (23).

George voices a similar opinion to Nick: "And every

86
definition has its boundaries, eh?" (40). The drama moves
toward the breakdown of boundaries to expose direct expe-
rience free of intervening structures. The final scene in
which George and Martha speak in monosyllable somewhere
between language and silence becomes the most eloquent ex-
pression of meaning in the play, parallel to the tableau

scene in The Zoo Story.

 

As critical as he is of language, Albee does not pre-
sent silence as an alternative. The postscript to George's
story of the boy who killed his mother and father is that
the boy has "not. . .uttered. . .one. . .sound in the thirty
years following the incident. George comments:

The saddest thing about men. . .Well, no, one

of the saddest things about men is the way

they age. . .some of them. Do you know what

it is with insane people? Do you? The quiet

ones?. . .They don't change. . .they don't grow

old. . .in the usual sense. They maintain a

. . .a firm skinned serenity. . .the. . .the

under-use of everything leaves them. . .quite

whole" (97).
The boy's insanity, as an avoidance of pain and a refusal
to participate in life, becomes another example of arrested
growth. Albee's emphasis, again, is not on the end-point
of any absolute but on the active interplay of form/fiction
and reality, life and death, language and silence.

Though George and Martha represent, for reasons illus-
trated above, a challenge to rigid, unquestioned adherence
to most of the structures sanctioned by civilized society,

they have, ironically capitulated to their own, privately

created, myth. Their creation of such a private myth was

 

87

inevitable since it would be impossible to derive meaning
from experience without some verbal, mythic, fictional sys-
tem to contain it. Thus, the couple's use of the son as a
way of giving their life together meaning and purpose con—
veys Albee's point that all systems of meaning are arbi-
trarily created, as opposed to being absolute, and since
whatever function the son has had for the couple is clearly
eroding as the drama begins, Albee is also noting that such
systems are potentially dangerous to the psychic equilibrium
of the individual and social group. The creators of struc—
tures must never forget that they are arbitrary, must never
identify too strongly with what they have created, must
never cease to question and examine.

George's warning to Martha at the beginning of the play
"not to start in with the bit about the kid" is an early
signal of crisis. Martha has come to believe in their
"myth" to the point where she can no longer maintain any
objectivity toward it; the illusion begins to envelop her.
To speak of the son to others, that is, to those who have
ESE created him, who cannot know that he is not real, not
an absolute certainty, who could not understand that he
provides simply a useful framework through which husband
and wife can relate, is to risk becoming entrapped within
a system of belief so completely that it takes on a life
of its own. Once this happens, the individual will become
dominated by and subject to something larger than itself,

something upon which it can project its own hopes and fears

88

and which it can consequently use as an excuse for its own
actions and impulses. This is the connection between the
"son" and Martha's father, the hope of the future and the
contribution of the past.

On this particular night of fun and games George has
somehow realized the seriousness of this situation. In
bringing up the son at all, he in effect, "cues" Martha by
feeding her her lines. He thereby sets in motion the pro-
cess which will result in his assumption of the deliberate
action of murdering the myth. By implanting the subliminal
suggestion in Martha's mind to violate their "pact" of
secrecy in regard to their fictional child, George solidi—
fies her complicity in the ritual murder.

This ritual murder is crucial to the couple's initia-
tion rite, that is, the process by which old forms will be
eliminated and new ones begun. The sacrifice will be of
the gss myth they rely on most strongly and toward which
they are least objective. Their fictional son represents,
however, more than just a framework for meaning. He is the
symbol for George and Martha's actual need to "penetrate"
through to each other.

The theme of one character "making contact" with an—
other, and of characters "getting through to each other"
runs throughout this play as it does throughout other of
Albee's dramas. In a scene between the two men in Act Two,
for instance, George expresses sentiments which echo

Jerry's to Peter:

89

George: I've tried. . .tried to reach you. . .
to. . .

Nick: (Contemptuously) . . .make contact?

George: Yes.

Nick: (Still). . .communicate?

George: Yes. Exactly. (116)
At this point Nick's response is reasonable; George's over-
ture is cliche, perhaps revealing his ultimate intentions
but having no basis in his actions. His focus, at any
rate, is actually on Martha; it is in relationship to her
that the full and frightening implications of "making con-
tact" will be brought to the fore. What George says to
his wife later in the act is ultimately more revealing:
"It's just that I've got to figure out some new way to
fight you, Martha. Guerilla tactics, maybe. . .internal
subversion. . .I don't know. Something" (125). He repeats
this again several scenes later, underlining the importance
of the idea: "I‘ve got to find some way to really get at
you" (156). Their subsequent exchange makes explicit the
frustration that drives them. Martha vows, "Look, I'm not
going to try to get through to you any more. . . .There was
a second back there, maybe, there was a second, just a
second, when I could have gotten through to you, when may-

be we could have cut through all this crap. But that‘s

past, and now I'm not going to try." George, in turn,
duplicates the message: "There is no moment. . .there is
no moment any more when we could. . .come together" (158).

This scene is the turning point of the drama. George

and Martha's expressed resolve to "give up" on each other

90
misleads, however, for the result is the inverse of the
emotional detachment the words would normally suggest.
Martha is earlier concerned about the same risk of complete
severance from her husband: ". . .some highs. . .some
stupid, liquor-ridden night. . .I will go too far. . .and
I'll either break the man's back. . .or push him off for
good. . ." (191). But George's continual warning to her
"not to go too far" prophesies a different event. With-
out realizing the full implications of their decision the
couple agree in this scene to confront the extremity of
their emotions, and to thereby approach the mutuality they
want. Because this will inevitably explode old assump-
tions, Martha's pledge to "make the biggest damned explo-
sion you ever heard" has a peculiar truth.

With their declaration of "total war" the dynamics
of the ritual they have been unconsciously preparing for
throughout the play will begin to take effect. In a
ritual to end their rituals they will act to penetrate
the elemental barrier between self and Other. George, as
usual, defines the procedure, ending, significantly, with
"a strange smile at Martha":

We all peel labels, sweetie; and when you
get through the skin, all three layers,
through the muscle, slosh aside the organs
. . . .and get down to bone. . .you know
what you do then?. . . .When you get down
to bone, you haven't got all the way, yet.
There's something inside the bone. . .the
marrow. . .and that's what you gotta get

at (212).

In the last scene of the play, after George and Martha have

91
in fact gone through to the marrow, Martha will question
why George had to "push it over the Eggs." Albee uses
this phrase or something equivalent to it often in his
works to convey the condition of complete abstraction, the
reduction or elimination of all distinguishing differences,
and the renunciation of all sustaining fictions. This
"psychic chaos," as noted above, is at the core of initia—
tory death and rebirth.

For George and Martha the only fiction not undermined
in their martial system is the "son." He remains the per-
fect ideal representing "strength, goodness, and inno—
cence" (224), "the one person" Martha sentimentalizes
she has "tried to protect, to raise above the mire of this
vile, crushing marriage; the one light in all this hope-
less. . .gsihness. . ." (227). Because this darkness is
exactly that which George and Martha must face, the son
has actually become an impediment to their psychic growth
and so is the last and most central illusion that must be
destroyed. This destruction will thereby resolve, in a
single unifying action, even the radical polarization be-
tween death and life. Only in embracing the task of
destroying his mythological son, and thereby his own his-
torical continuity, will George transpose chance to choice,
passivity to conscious action, accident to will and thus
uncover his link to the unhistoric hero and to the shaman.

George comes to accept this task of shaman on his

own and Martha's initiation rite by a process very similar

 

 

92

to Jerry's decision to force a confrontation between him-
self and Peter. But Jerry does not become aware of his
intention until his death and the end of the play, and
even then, the awareness is only tentative, never fully-
faced. George, with the help of Martha's increasingly
urgent provocations, accepts his role at the end of the
second act of the play. Essentially talking to himself
(though Honey is present in the room), "his mind racing
ahead" he gropes toward a decision:

. . .somebody rang. . .it was somebody. . .

with. . . I'VE GOT IT! I'VE GOT IT, MARTHA

. . ! Somebody with a message. . .and the

message was. . .our son. . .OUR SON! (Almost

whispered) IT was a message. . .the bells

rang and it was a message, and it was about

.our son. . .and the message. . .was. .

and the message was. . .our. . .son. . .is

. . .DEAD! (180).

Because his decision is consciously formed and the
actions of it deliberate George retains an emotional ironic
detachment from these actions; consequently, at the end of
the scene, "He begins to laugh very softly." However,
this cannot deny the importance of the ritual he will
enact nor the seriousness of its consequences, and so, his
laughter "is mixed with crying" (180).

In George, Albee creates a perfect blending of the
romantic tragic hero and modern ironic anti-hero; George
is a man aware of being caught in the human predicament
and impelled to transcend it, aware of the urgent need for

action and haunted by the possibility that all action may

be futile, a man driven by destiny in whatever forms it

 

93
presents itself-— as historical inevitability, as uncon-
scious processes, as archetypal images—-and acquiescent
to the challenge to surmount these through willed effort
and self—determination. He is positioned between the
ironic detachment of laughter and the emotional involve—
ment of tears. He is Albee's strongest protagonist (who,
incidentally, also functions as an antagonist) because,
unlike the many of Albee's other characters who come to
the understanding of their situation at the conclusion of
their dramas, George understands it early and moves to act
nevertheless.

Though at the end of Act Two his decision to enact a
sacrificial murder becomes conscious, it has been an un-
conscious motivation from the opening scene of the play.
Even more expressly than Jerry in The Zoo Story and Julian
in Tiny Alice George writes his own script, or rather some
unconscious "ghost" writer, seeking to re—establish a lost
equilibrium in his own psyche, writes it for him, until he
takes the task in hand in Act Three.

He thus orchestrates the last "game" he and Martha
will play within the existing context of their marriage:

' in which, in the true spirit of mourn-

"Bringing Up Baby,‘
ing, they will recollect what they have lost before letting
it go. They idealize and crystallize the idea of their son
as a prelude to relinquishing him to memory (214—222).

Appropriately, therefore, at the end of a lengthy, idyllic

dialogue on the blissful and perfect birth and youth of

94
the boy Martha seems to "slip," putting her image in the
past tense: "It was true! Beautiful; wise; perfect."
At this point there is a shift in tone; "son as
saint" becomes "son as weapon":

Martha: Of course, this state, this perfec-

tion. . .couldn't last. Not with
George. . .not with George around.
George: (To the others) There; you see? I

knew she'd shift.

Martha: Not with George around. A drowning man
takes down those nearest. George
tried, but, oh, God, how I fought
him.God, how I fought him (223).

In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee is particularly

 

effective in fashioning characters who reveal universals
through particular circumstances. Martha here depicts the
need to find causes and assign blame for a condition--the
loss of an idyllic paradise--which, in actuality, is an
inevitable outcome of the process of life. This generally
applicable human trait is more apparently self-deluding in
this play since, as we will come to learn, neither the
original "perfect condition" nor George's "guilt" in
destroying it have objective correlatives. Albee thus
encourages us to see all his themes as metaphoric, not in
order to lead us to some center of absolute meaning, but
to emphasize reality as continuous process and change based
on an interplay of "meanings."

Because the purpose of the battle Martha refers to
will uncover a more abstract truth, George joins her in

trying to pinpoint a particular cause to a universal

 

95
condition: "She had a son who fought her every inch of
the way, who didn't want to be turned into a weapon
against his father, who didn't want to be used as a god-
damn club whenever Martha didn't get things like she
wanted them!" (225).

The "son,' as the couple's "offspring" would normally
be the expression of their mutuality, created to give tan-
gible form to their union. This would be especially true
of George and Martha's metaphoric son since, as a myth,

he would always remain in his original form and serve his
original function, without assuming any autonomy apart
from his creators. However, a curious inversion occurs.
Since George and Martha's real desire is to "possess each
other's being" (a desire for which their son is simply a
metaphor) they inevitably try to imitate each other by
seeking to possess what the other has. In their case what
they each have is a mutual possession--the son. The accu-
sation of incest which George levels at Martha"--". . .the
real reason (Spits out the words) our son. . .use to throw
up all the time, wife and lover, was nothing more compli-
cated than that he couldn't stand you fiddling at him all
the time, breaking into his bedroom with your kimono
flying" (120)——serves two purposes. On the one hand it is
another metaphor for the breakdown of distinctions, the
incest taboo being a very crucial differentiating prin-
ciple of civilization. On the other hand, Martha's

"incest" serves as an indication of her elemental desire

96

for George, who, as already explained, presents her with
the possibility of accepting herself. Because on some
level of her psyche she wants to "possess" herself and
because George represents the externalization of that self-
possession, she wants, in effect, to incorporate him by
incorporating what he has, their son. Nick (and all the
other men Martha seduces) is simply one more level removed
from her basic, original goal. George brings that level
one step closer to the truth when he "mistakenly" substi-
tutes Nick for the son in Act Three (195-196).

Paradoxically, therefore, George and Martha try to
"reach" each other by commandeering the son, over whom a
dispute naturally arises, polarizing the couple even
further. Their decision to engage in a fight for victory
is one that is really meant to break the cycle.8 An esca—
lation of the "battle" and the violence it engenders will
finally convert the couple from opponents to "likes" who
reflect each other's violent behavior. In the final stages
of the drama the struggle itself, not the object under con-
tention, becomes the central issue. George is particularly
emphatic in his insistence on the condition that the two
approach each other evenly matched. He will not accept
Martha's plea for "no more games" because he senses the
imperative to follow the violence through to its ultimate
result:

Now you listen to me, Martha; you have had

quite an evening. . .and you can't just cut
it off whenever you've got enough blood in

97
your mouth. We are going on, and I'm
going to have at you. . . .I want you up
on your feet and slugging, sweetheart,
because I'm going to knock you around,
and I want you up for it (208).

Whereas throughout the play George and Martha perpetu-
ated their perfected offense/defense strategy in which one
would advance while the other would retreat, here, for the
first time, they finally simultaneously mirror each other's
violence. George wants "An equal battle, baby; that's all"
(209) because he intuits that in the process he and Martha
will be converted from antagonists to doubles, and will
thus achieve, finally, the mutuality they originally
sought.

Albee clarifies this doubling at the point at which
George and Martha's verbal battle over their son escalates
to their synchronous monologues (227). Martha continues
the argument while George, in what must sound both ominous
and nonsensical, chants the last rites in Latin. The words
which they have been using as weapons are rendered meaning-
less and inoperative as they drown each other out. The
Dionysian initiation ritual culminates here, blurring,
equalizing, leveling everything to indistinction and re-
ducing reason (and all "reasons" or rationalizations) to a
sham. Nick's fear at the opening of the Act that everyone
had "gone crazy" (187) is given visible, prophetic, sub-
stance. This is a true "ecstacy" contrasting the assumed

joviality of the rest of the play. Obviously, the conse-

quences are intensely dramatic and powerfully chaotic; the

98
liberation which the breakdown makes possible seems both
a triumph and a crisis.

According to the theories of Rene’Girard in Violence
and the Sacred, a ritual sacrifice would be necessary at
this point to restore order by deflecting the antagonists'
hostility from each other toward an arbitrary, surrogate
victim.9 A case for this can be made in Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? by George's follow—through on his decision
to reveal the son's death to Martha. Interestingly, where-
as Girard discusses ritual sacrifice as the end result of
violence, George decides first upon the sacrifice and then
orchestrates the events to lead to the predicted result.
What must have been a spontaneous impulse toward ritual
becomes, once the structure is consciously applied, a
staged event, again formulating the link between ritual
and drama, shaman and playwright. A question in fact
arises regarding George's ability to "create" this event:

Martha: You cannot. You may not decide these

things.

Nick: He hasn't decided anything, lady. It's
not his doing. He doesn't have the
power. . . .

George: That‘s right, Martha; I'm not a God. I
don't have the power over life and
death, do I?

Martha: You can't kill him! You can't have
him die!

 

Nick remains part of the old context which projects
responsibility outside of the realm of the individual.
Martha knows, as he cannot, that George, as creator of the

son, can also destroy him. George, a representative,

99
modern Everyman, incorporates the powers previously
assigned to gods, accepting those powers as his own: "I
have the right, Martha. We never spoke of it; that's all.
I could kill him any time I wanted to" (236).

Given the centrality of the son myth to George and
Martha's lives there are two even more important reasons
for his sacrifice. First, since the purpose of the initi—
ation rite is to actualize the formation of a new person-
ality, elimination of the one symbol upon which the couple
projected crucial aspects of their own selves will neces-
sitate the reincorporation of those aspects back into
their psyches, thus allowing them to re-create their lives,
and, not incidentally, to take personal responsibility for
their "new" selves. To prove this, George equates the son
with the boy who killed his father in a car accident by
using the same incidents to explain both events. Both
occurred "on a country road" with "his learner's permit in
his pocket" when "he swerved the car, to avoid a porcupine,
and drove straight into a large tree" (95, 231). The boy-
murderer, the son, and George the man/father, are all
interchangeable selves. As Emerson, another romantic put
it, "the child is father to the man." The "guilty" George,
haunted by history (the mother and father and their "acci-
dental" deaths), is finally killed by the man's deliberate
murder.

The second reason grows from the first. Albee's

characters' real psychic drive is to possess, accept, and

100
confront themselves, or more specifically if less pre-
cisely, the Self, an idea he will expand on in his next

play, Tiny Alice. When everything George and Martha have

 

placed as obstacles to this confrontation is eliminated,
the one remaining "barrier" is the Other, what they are
to each other. When the son, who is the final barrier
separating self and Other is also removed, the characters
become doubles: they encounter each other and they find
themselves. This, of course, cannot be their end-point,
since the Self and Other (in the metaphysical sense in
which Albee employs them) push the characters beyond

ordinary reality. Edna, at the end of A Delicate Balance

 

will explain the problem most clearly when she speaks of
"the boundaries. what we may not do. . .not ask, for fear
of looking in a mirror."

That George and Martha begin again, that is reenter
the continuum, is depicted by their halting, groping, ele-
mentary words in the closing lines of the play, words by
which they relinquish all certainties and acknowledge the
paradoxes whereby reality becomes not a polarization of
opposites but a coexistence of contradictions:

George: (Long silence) It will be better.

Martha: (Long silence) I don't. . .know.
George: It will be. . .maybe

Martha: I'm. . .not. . .sure

George: No.

Martha: Just. . .us?

George: Yes.

Martha: I don't suppose, maybe, we could. .

George: No, Martha.
Martha. Yes. No.

 

 

101

George: Are you all right?
Martha: Yes. No.

In Tiny Alice Albee will again take up the theme of

 

self-confrontation, and that play will end similarly with
a death—rebirth image that attempts to emphasize the idea

of meaning as process by uniting opposites without elimin-

 

ating them.

 

CHAPTER I II
Tiny Alice

Near the end of his lengthy monologue about himself
and the dog, Jerry, in Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, un—
leashes a desperate rambling which springs from his deep
need to establish contact with something:

If not with people. . .if not with people

.SOMETHING. With a bed, with a cock-
roach, with a mirror. . . .

But, here he stops: ". . .no, that's too hard, that's one
of the last steps."l It is approaching this last step
that we find the lay brother, Julian, in Tiny Alice which
remains Albee's most cryptic play. Julian's oddyssey with-
in Miss Alice's house takes him, in fact, through the look—
ing glass on a.quest for self-discovery, a quest resounding
with psychic implication and leading (if we accept the con—
clusion as epiphany) to a revelation of mythic proportion.
Most critics willing to go beyond Robert Brustein's
and George Wellworth's dismissal of the play as "meaning—
less" have interpreted its theme as ironic; among them,
Anne Paolucci and Ruby Cohn agree on a definition of Alice
as "an incomprehensible Nothing" while Lee Baxandall and
Leighton M. Ballow see her as simply the manifestation of
Julian's need to believe in something, the final irony

102

103

being that he accepts the man-made symbol of God he so
strongly resisted.2

Harold Clurman pans the play as an ultimately unin-
teresting effort "to prove the world an intolerably damned
place" and only John Gassner is willing to concede that its
concern with "the enigmas of life" or "the futility of
trying to explain existence rationally" has claimed play-
3

wrights' attention from the beginning of literate theatre.

Albee himself has said of the ending of Tiny Alice:

 

[Julian] is left with pure abstraction--
whatever it be called: God or Alice--and
in the end, according to your faith, one

of two things happens. Either the abstrac-
tion personifies itself, is proven real, or
the dying man, in the last necessary effort
of self-delusion, creates and believes in
what he knows does not exist.

The ironic interpretation remains ultimately unsatis-
fying, however, especially since in all his drama, most
critical interpretations not withstanding, Albee has never
shown himself to be either absurdist or nihilist. In Ths

Zoo Story, he portrays the wasteland of modern society in

 

which the chasm between one human being and another has
become so vast that Jerry must sacrifice his life in order
to bridge it. But, by so doing, he does, in fact, manage
to break through Peter's carefully designed cage of false
security and self-preservation. The essence of Jerry's
communication with Peter at the moment their lives touch
is disturbingly transient and enigmatic. Albee questions

the substance of one human being's contact with another,

 

104
but he never doubts that somehow that contact is possible,
and he posits unquestioningly that it is essential.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a purgation rite

 

in which George and Martha strip each other of their de—
fenses, illusions, and fictions. The destruction of their
metaphorical son provides at least the potential for their
rebirth into a new and more authentic relationship where
before none had existed. But again, Albee will not define
for us the nature of authenticity nor even suggest whether
that authenticity can ever be actualized and sustained
between George and Martha. His message is only that in
order to hsgih we must face our past, admit our illusions
and our vulnerability, and accept our fear.

In Seascape, we find Charlie, who must learn to relin-
quish the womb-like security to which he has retreated (as
a child he would descend to a cove at the bottom of the
sea where mentally he has remained through his adult life)
in order to accept the challenge of assisting a new species,
themselves emerging from the sea, to "Begin." In this con-

text, then, it is plausible to give Tiny Alice, despite its

 

dark and foreboding tone, an apocalyptic reading.

It has been suggested often enough that the play oper-
ates on numerous 1eVels, the simplest being an apparent
betrayal story of a man offered by his church to a group
of demonic characters for the sum of $lOO-million a year
for 20 years. The man is sent as an emissary to the house

of the donor, an eccentric woman named simply Miss Alice,

105

to "clear up odds and ends." While there, this man, a
celibate and ascetic, is lured into a strange and mysteri—
ous world by the temptations of wealth, luxury, friendship,
and finally sexuality. He is offered happiness in the
form of marriage to Miss Alice; but once he accepts he is
abandoned by her and her cohorts (including his Cardinal
who sent him on the bizarre mission), fatally shot, and
left to die alone on the altar of Alice, the mysterious
goddess whom they all seem to serve, thus becoming their
sacrifice to her.

But, the play seen on this level leaves many ambigu-
ities, the chief of which is, perhaps, the role of the
three tempters: Lawyer, Butler, and Miss Alice. They
seem at first sinister agents of an evil force sent to
undermine the virtues of Julian. But, often they indicate
to him that they are helping him, that the process he is
undergoing, painful though it is, is for his own benefit.
In the last act, for instance, when Julian asks Butler,
"Are you my friend?" Butler responds, "I sm; yes; but
you'll probably think not."5 In the same scene, Julian
insists that all his life he has "fought against the symbol"
and Miss Alice tells him, "Then you should be happy now"
(162), indicating his struggle is over. We must question,
too, whether Julian's virtues, sincere though they seem
as far as he is aware of them, are in fact genuine. As
he begins to reveal himself to Miss Alice, it becomes

apparent that his conscious spirituality has been based all

106

along on a subconscious carnality.

This insistent split demands a more subtle interpre-
tation of the play, one focused on Julian's psychology.
The disclosure of Julian's personal unconscious with its
powerful, repressed sex drive is prepared for early in

Tiny Alice by the motif of revealing information (as one

 

would reveal repressed motivations). The first scene be—
tween Lawyer and Cardinal is filled with persistent refer-
ences to secret pasts, dossiers, and the manifestation of
defamatory information. When, in the following scene,
Julian refuses to reveal to Lawyer the details of his years
in the asylum, Lawyer hisses prophetically, "You will. . .
in time. Won't he, Butler? Time? The great revealer?"
(42).

The action of the drama will unveil the layers of
Julian's psyche, from the exposure of his repressed sex-
uality to the disclosure of the Oedipal drive and the
father-son conflict. And, beyond that we find yet a
deeper layer--so that we might concur with Miss Alice
when she exclaims "expansively" at one point, "Oh, my
Julian! How many layers! Yes?" (114).

Thfl:the play undertakes a journey through his mind is
made clear from the very first scene in which Julian ap-
pears and describes his experiences in the mental home to
Butler: "I declined. I. . .shriveled into myself; a
glass dome. . .descended, and it seemed I was out of reach,

unreachable, finally unreaching, in this. . .paralysis of

 

107
sorts" (43). The model house, the home of Alice, a
shriveled version of the real house sealed by a glass dome
also appears on stage for the first time in this scene.
Clearly, it presents itself to us as a symbol of Julian's
unconscious.

Butler explicates the theme of self-confrontation
when he suggests to Julian that one feels one should see
one's self in the model (25). The theory he poses on the
care one would take if one had such a "dream toy" made in—
vites psychic correlation:

It would almost be taken for granted——one
would think-—that if a person or a per-
son's surrogate went to the trouble, and
expense of having such a dream toy made
that the person would have it sealed, so
that there'd be no dust (26).
"Dream toy" becomes a significant word choice here when
considered in terms of the subconscious.
Julian remarks as he gazes into it, ". . .it seemed

so. . .continual" (25); and in response to Butler's com-

ment that the house is enormous he replies, "Endless!"

(27). Significantly, in both dimensions, the house has
many rooms, as Miss Alice's non-sequitur points out: "I
. . .am a very beautiful woman. . .and a very rich one. . .
and I live here, in all these rooms" (63). Throughout the

play, other references to rooms, divisions, and partitions
--the asylum to which Julian committed himself was "deep
inland" and had "buildings, or floors of buildings" (58)--

bolster the mind imagery. The phrenological head is an

108
obvious symbol.

As I've already suggested, it becomes clear early
in the play that Julian's expressed intentions are belied
by the unconscious drives which motivate them. The fan-
tasies and hallucinations he divulges betray the libidi-
nous forces threatening his conscious self—concept. In
his scenes with Miss Alice, Julian is always the one to
initiate an atmosphere of high tensioned eroticism by
relating a past fantasy. (Act 2, scene 3 is surely the
best example of this.)

Julian sublimates his sexual drives into a desire to
serve and constructs a persona of himself as martyr,
refusing to accept that any self-actualization must be
channelled into a role which serves his human needs one
way or another. In other words, Julian's image of himself
as martyr does not eliminate or even substitute for his
other needs; it simply displaces them.

This repression accounts for the perverse eroticism
which fills the stage each time Julian divulges his fan-
tasies. According the C. G. Jung, the ideal relationship
of the unconscious to the conscious is compensatory, with
the one balancing the extremes of the other. The more
repressed the unconscious tendencies--the more, in Julian's
case, the sexual needs are denied--the less displaced and
the more primitive, even distorted these tendencies be-
come. The stronger his desires make themselves felt to

Julian as doubts or temptations (since the effects of the

109

unconscious will always present themselves as forces out-
side the person), the more his conscious attitude takes on
an extreme, rigid position to compensate. In turn, the
unconscious drives become even more exaggerated and gro-
tesque in a continuously vicious cycle. What might have
been the healthy expression of his sexuality has become
for Julian violent, distorted and pathological.

Julian's desire for martyrdom, then, is anything but
a healthy expression of his faith. It is, rather, an
obsessive, fanatical drive to counteract the threat from

his unconscious. He is obsessed with martyrdom. We might

 

also see this obsession as an impulse toward self—destruc-
tion brought on by the tension between his conflicting
desires, as well as an unrealized longing for punishment
for his transgressions, unconscious though they be.

But Albee is hardly offering us any profound insight
when he suggest that religious fanaticism is often based
upon sexual repression. If his play sought only to uncover
Julian as a fraud at the end, after having uncovered insti-
tutional religion as a fraud right from the start, Tihy
Aiigs would simply be a social statement against all the
spiritual trappings, even the most strenuous, with which
we surround ourselves. There is certainly that statement
made in the play, but it is not the central issue. For one
thing, unlike Soeur Jeanne des Agnes in John Whiting's Ths
Devils, Julian is far too attractive a character. Some

critics have suggested that he is, in fact, the most

llO
appealing of Albee's protagonists. He is sincerely con-
fused in regard to this area of his life, but in other
respects he is open, intelligent, flexible, genuinely
simple, unlike his Cardinal, without conscious ulterior
motives.

And Julian, like Jerry in The Zoo Story and George in

 

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is an outsider, belonging

 

wholeheartedly neither to the traditional hierarchical
church, which uses God for its own gains, nor to the secu-
lar world, which has long since substituted money and tech-
nology for God. His title, lay brother, typifies his situ-
ation: "You are of the cloth but have not taken it" as
Butler puts it (28).

Because, like Jerry and George, his sensibility pre-
cludes his place within traditional structures, Julian is
set apart as a modern hero, who, in Jung's words, "has
become 'un-historical' in the deepest sense and has
estranged himself from the mass of men who live entirely
within the bounds of tradition." We find him isolated and
at a crossroads: either he must block out the outside
world completely and return to the asylum, or he must dis-
card his personal illusions, accept and understand him-
self, and acknowledge that, again to quote Jung, he "has
come to the very edge of the world, leaving behind him all
that has been discarded and outgrown, and. . .he stands
before the Nothing out of which All may grow."6

Therefore, it is difficult to accept that the main

111

motive of the tempters in Tiny Alice is to uncover Julian's

 

weaknesses and undermine his good intentions simply to
punish him with abandonment and death. If it is necessary
for Julian to recognize and discard the fictions he has
clung to, as it was for George and Martha to discard their
fictional son, we might question whether his possibility
for new light and understanding should be any less than
theirs. And, if these unconscious motives are uncovered,
leaving a more balanced Julian, can we accept that he is
betrayed and punished for these unless we accept his own
original, distorted definition of his "sins"?

The questions turn on the meaning of Alice and the
significance of Julian's acceptance of her. The first
part of the play, in which Julian's personal unconscious
does become integrated, is only a first or preparatory
step, leading to some understanding of even greater,
deeper consequence. What this is can be understood in part

by viewing Tiny Alice not in the context of realistic,

 

ironic tragedy, but within the genre of allegorical romance.
Several signs in the play point in this direction.

Northrop Frye states that "in romance the characters
are still largely dream characters" and that they func-
tion as "expressions of emotional attachments, whether of
wishfulfillment or of repugnance."7 The very first word
we hear Julian utter, "Extraordinary," in the light of
Frye's definition is very apt. From the moment he enters

Miss Alice's house there is a sense that he has entered

112
a dream-like or extra-ordinary world, where common sense
logic will not apply. The characters who people that
world are, by their very names, embodiments of ideas, con-
cepts, or split—off parts of Julian's own psyche, on one
level at least. Lawyer, for instance, is the prototype
of everything repugnant and reductive, Julian's Shadow or
dark side as it were, and critics who accept his commen-
tary as a key to understanding the play are hearing only
one bias.

Julian's mission contains the obvious allegorical
overtones of the life-cycle quest: the accomplishment of
a task to achieve a treasure, represented by the money
Miss Alice promises to the church. In traditional mytho-
logical format, the hero is sent on a task or journey by
a devine superior, a role into which the Cardinal fits
nicely (36).

Part of his reward is the winning of a bride, whom he
takes from the hands of a previous, older lover; the hero,
though he must die, is exalted at the end. According to
Frye, the quest has three stages:

The stage of the perilous journey and the
preliminary minor adventures; the crucial
struggle, usually some kind of battle in
which either the hero or his foe, or both
must die; and the exaltation of the hero (187).

From the beginning of Act Two, it becomes very clear

that little but open hostility exists between Lawyer (the

evil ogre) and Miss Alice: lustful pursuit on the part of

the one, revulsion and evasion on the part of the other.

113

Lawyer makes such little effort to conceal his tremendous
hatred of his successor that Butler can easily observe,
"I've noticed, you've let your feelings loose lately: too
much: possessiveness, jealousy" (99).

Julian, himself, is fully cognizant of the rivalry,

as his accusation to Miss Alice attests: "You have allowed
that. . .that man, your. . .your lover, to. . .ridicule me.
You have permitted it. . .You have allowed him to abuse

 

me, my position, his, the church; you have tolerated it
and smiled" (117).
To quote Frye once again, apropos of Miss Alice:

This bride-figure is ambiguous: her psycho-
logical connection with the mother in an
Oedipus fantasy is more insistent than in
comedy. She is often to be found in a peri-
lous, forbidden or tabooed place. . .and she
is, of course, often rescued from the unwel-
come embraces of another and generally older
male, or from giants or bandits or other
usurpers. . . (193).

The tension between Lawyer and Julian reflects the
son—father rivalry for the mother. Miss Alice does, in
fact, treat Julian as a favored child, referring to him as
"my little Julian" and "little recluse." The three char—
acters' interaction as hero/rescuer, bride, and ogre is
structured upon the son, mother, father psychological
triad in which the child perceives his father as a rival
hurting his mother who must be rescued.8

That is one level on which the quest motif operates

in Tiny Alice. On another level, Miss Alice herself is

 

the temptress, and as mother-figure she personifies the

114

most formidable taboo. Julian articulates his instinctive

dread of what she represents toward the end of Act Two:

"WHY AM I BEING TESTED!. . .And why am I being tempted?
By luxury, by ease, by. . .content. . .by things I do not
care to discuss. . ." (117).

The quest for the treasure is the more generalized
version of Julian's specific or personal lifetime preoccu-
pation: the search for the Father, in his terms, God.
Within Miss Alice's house his dual purposes converge. He
realizes only intuitively at this point that the latter is
the search for his Self, a fact implicit in his declara-
tion "My faith and my sanity. . .they are one and the
same" (45).

The motif of the search for the Self brings us,
finally, to the last and most elusive level of Albee's play.
If the house is the symbol of Julian's unconscious (as well
as a female archetype), and Alice lives there, then Alice
must be the personification of something within Julian
which he must confront. That something can be explored
through the Jungian theory of the Anima, the female prin-
ciple existing inside all men.

The Anima first appears as an image in a man's mind
of the nurturing, all embracing, protecting mother (but it
includes other archetypical images as well, such as the
virgin, the tempress, the witch, and the Spiritual guide).
It is not clear from where this image arises for it does

not come from the real mother. Jung attributed it to the

 

115
collective unconscious, present a priori in a person's
mind; while other psychological studies do not accept this
completely, they do concede, in the words of Maud Bodkin

in her book, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, that "where

 

forms are assbnilated from the environment upon slight con-
tact only, predisposing factors must exist in mind and
brain."9
In his infantile or immature state, the man will cling
to this first image of the mother, his unconscious desire
for what Jung calls "the enveloping. embracing. and devour-

ing element."10

He projects this desire first onto his
real mother and later onto the substitute mother, that is,
the wife or lover. Seen in this context, Miss Alice is
Julian's projection of part of his Anima or his desire, in
Jungian terminology, to be caught, sucked in, enveloped,
and devoured. This is easily supported from the play by
the numerous images of envelopment, for instance, Miss
Alice's quote from D. H. Lawrence's "Love on the Farm":

'And down his mouth comes on my mouth! and

down His bright dark eyes over me.

. .his lips meet mine, and a flood

Of sweet fire sweeps across me, so I drown

Against him, die and find death good!‘ (112).
In Julian's fantasies of martyrdom he sees himself devoured
by a lion and after a graphic description he concludes:

And as the fangs sank in, the great tongue

on my cheek and eye, the splitting of the

bone, and the BLOOD. . .just before the

great sound the coming dark and the silence.

I could. . .experience it all. And was. .
engulfed (124).

 

116

When Julian finally comes to Miss Alice in Act Two,
scene 3, the stage directions indicate that she opens her
gown like great wings unfurling and "Julian utters a sort
of dying cry and moves, his arms in front of him, to Miss
Alice; when he reaches her, she enfolds him in her great
wings" (127). And, of course, in the final scene the dark-
ness moves out of the model house, surrounds Julian as a
presence and, again to quote Albee's directions, "his head
moves to all areas of the room, noticing his engulfment"
(190). [All emphases mine.]

Mother Church, to which Julian's loyalties lie before
he relinquishes them to Miss Alice, is also an archetypal
Anima--the female counterpart to Christ,the male Animus.
We might recollect, too, that Julian's memory of his first
sexual experience which "did or did not happen" involved a
woman who believed herself to be yet another female arche-
type: the Virgin Mary, Mother of God.

When Miss Alice appears in Act One, scene 3 as in
Albee's directions, a "withered crone, her hair gray and
white and matted," bent and moving with two canes, and
speaks "with a cracked and ancient voice" this is more
than simply an indication that in this play things will
not be as they seem, though it certainly is that. The
disguise is also a sign, from the outset, that she is
playing a role-—the doning of a mask transforms the wearer
into an archetypal image—-a role with mythic significance.

In this case, she is the projection of another aspect of

 

——-——:1 -._.._1____...____—___1._, __._._-1 . . ..

117
the Anima of Julian's psyche: the Terrible Mother, which
appears in archetypal dream imagery as a witch or crone.
The duality between the Good Mother and the Terrible
Mother is explained best by a quote from Ruth L. Munroe
regarding Jungian theory:
For the infant the mother is the major image,
regardless of the sex of the child, and the
mother remains the symbol of bliss, repose,
comfort, and total passivity, the source of
life. But a duality is apparent in the def-
inition. Life is not passive. The child
must go forth into the real world. So while
the man retains a nostalgia for the Eternal
Mother. . .he must also leave the Mother.
The Good Mother of his deepest dreams is also
the Terrible Mother within the person's own
psyche. .

The Terrible Mother is associated with death and the
dark side of life a man must accept in order to live active-
ly. Therefore, when Miss Alice appears to Julian first as
a crone this is a message to him from his own psyche that,
in order to find what he is looking for, he must first
leave the safety of his secluded world, the confines of
Mother Church. In light of this, the exchange between
Julian and Miss Alice after she has removed the mask makes
more sense than it otherwise would:

Miss Alice: Oh, indulge us, please.
Julian: Well, of course, it would be my

pleasure. . .but, considering the
importance of our meeting. .

Miss Alice: Exactly. Considering the impor-
tance of our meeting.
Julian: A. . .a test for me (53).

Julian comes very close to a conscious awareness of

the meaning of the Terrible Mother when he describes his

 

118

meeting with her as a test. He will not arrive at full
consciousness of everything that is happening to him, how-
ever, until the very end of the play. These events and

the people who act within them are simply signals from his
unconscious, similar to the symbols of dreams, revealing a
great deal of what his conscious self cannot immediately
comprehend. The extent to which this is true adds weight
to the association frequently made between the title of the
play and the wonderland of Lewis Carroll's Alice.

It may be to her function as a dream symbol (which is
experienced but not always understood) that Miss Alice
refers when she says early in the play, "It may be I am

.noticeable, but almost never identified" (59).

Though Julian is obviously fascinated and enticed by
Miss Alice this alone would not provide sufficient incen-
tive for his renunciation of the safety of Mother Church.
Miss Alice must lure him out of that world and into a
dynamic participation in life. In her primary role of
Temptress, she does this by being to him still another
projection of his desire for "the protecting, nourishing,
charmed circle of the mother." He succumbs to this il-
lusion when he comes to her uttering "a sort of dying cry"
and she enfolds him in her wings (127).

This is a point of initiation for Julian, necessi-
tating the loss of innocence (Albee, in an interview

appearing in the April 1965 issue of The Atlantic Monthly,

 

referred to Julian as an innocent); he undergoes a symbolic

ll9
death and an entrance into experience resulting in the
sacrifice of rigidly idealistic (and, by implication, im-
mature) beliefs. Thus, as the hero, Julian experiences a
kind of initial re-birth into a more autonomous individu-
alism, enabling him to continue on his quest to penetrate
the mysteries of life and death.
A definition from Jung further explicates Miss Alice's

role:

the seductress. . .draws him into life with

her Maya [Illusion personified as a celes-

tial maiden]--and not only into life's

reasonable and useful aspects, but into its

frightful paradoxes and ambivalence where

good and evil, success and ruin, hope and
despair, counterbalanceoneanother.12

 

 

That he has, in fact, progressed in his journey and
shed his limiting and self-protecting beliefs is suggested
by his words to the Cardinal in the scene following his
marriage to Miss Alice:

But then I judge it is God's doing, this
wrenching of my life from one light to
another. . .though not losing God's light,
joining with it. . .my new. I can't tell
you the radiance, humming, and the witch-
craft, I think it must be, the ecstasy of
this light, as God's light exactly; the.
blessed wonder of service with a renewing,
not an ending joy-—that joy I thought
possible only through martyrdom. . . (140).

Julian intuits that his entrance into life has had
something to do with witchcraft. Though he is focusing on
the bright side (which is real) he senses that there is a

dark side as well (also real). His first experience of

leaving the mother's womb-like safety is abandonment. In

 

 

 

 

 

120
fact, at the opening of that same scene we see Julian, the
bridegroom, confused and anxious as to why everyone, in-
cluding his new wife, has left him on his wedding day.

One of the first things he says is, "I feel quite lost,"

and a little later, "There I was. . .one moment married,
flooded with white, and. . .then. . .the next, alone.
Quite alone. . 3(132). Entering the continuum of life he

begins to experience the "frightful paradoxes" Jung speaks
of, where light and dark, the Apollonian and the Dionysian,
expansion and diminuition, exist side by side.

Miss Alice seems to be Julian's betrayer by initiating
him into that world, but he must take that necessary step
toward the goal he has set for himself, a goal he cannot
reach without conscious acceptance (in the final scene) of
everything happening to him so far in his unconscious. His
only alternative is complete withdrawal from the world;
that is, total surrender of his unconscious, the substitu-
tion of hallucination for reality. Lawyer and Butler refer
to these two alternatives when they speak of Julian in Act
Two, scene 2 as "walking on the edge of an abyss, but is
balancing. Can be pushed. . .over, back to the asylums.

Or over. . .to the Truth" (106).

This Truth will come with the integration of the con—
scious and the unconscious, with the attainment of the
masculine principle to balance the feminine, and with the
acceptance of the ambiguities, paradoxes and limitations

which will become recognizable. In this sense, it must be

 

 

121
remembered that Miss Alice is the projection of Julian's
own Anima seeking this balance. And even when, in Act
Three, he is lost and abandoned after his marriage, he has
not forsaken his quest (138).
The pain of "the reality of things" is so great, how-

ever, that Julian's ego resists it to the point where he

almost opts for insanity: "I cannot. . .accept. . .this
.No, no, I will. . .I will go back! I will. . .go back
to it. . .To. . .to. . .I will go back to the asylum" (170).

According to Jung, if the conscious and the uncon-
scious become too split, as in the case of Julian, a ten-
sion arises, and the function of the Anima in a man and
the Animus in a woman "harmless till then, confront the
conscious mind in personified form and behave rather like
systems split off from the personality, or like part

souls."l3

It must be made very clear, I think, that on
one level Lawyer, Miss Alice, and Butler function as full,
three-dimensional characters with independent motivations
and psychologies. But, on another level, they are projec-
tions of Julian's mind. It is because of this dual func-
tion that their roles and rhetoric become so confusing.

If, in the case of Julian, the Anima can be withdrawn
from projections, these projections can be integrated into
consciousness. Thus, to a certain extent, the Anima repre-
sents a function which filters the collective unconscious

through to the conscious mind. Alluding to this function,

Miss Alice attempts to explain to Julian, "I have tried to

122
be. . .her. No; I have tried to be. . .what I thought she
might, what might make you happy, what you might use, as
a. . .what?" (161), and later, ". . .accept what's real.
I am the. . .illusion" (167); and to which Lawyer refers

when he says, "We are surrogates; our task is done now"

(162).

As functionaries of Julian's psyche, Lawyer's,Butler's
and Miss Alice's tasks are done as they bring him to the
point of consciousness, in which they can no longer be
personified for him by projections, and so in a sense must
abandon him. As archetypal symbols, however, they function
beyond Julian's psyche in the realm of a collective uncon-
scious. Therefore, they remain autonomous even after he
has integrated them into his ego ("On. . .and on. . .we go"
[99]). Because of this, Lawyer declares, "You have brought
us to the end of our services here. We go on; you stay"
(161). The indications are that they will continue to act
the same roles within other circumstances (177-178).

Like Sophocles' Oedipus, Julian had been on a search
for the truth; like Oedipus who questioned everyone,

Julian was sent to Miss Alice's house to take care of "a
few questions and answers"; and like Oedipus, Julian had
not bargained for the outcome that truth is painful, that
it brings with it the recognition of unconscious forces
and existential alienation and that it leads ultimately to
self-confrontation. His anger toward and rejection of

Miss Alice's protective gesture in the last act of Tiny

123

Alice (183) underscores the dawning of his understanding

of autonomy and acceptance of responsibility: "It is what
I have wanted, have insisted on. Have nagged. . .for"
(188).

Albee has insisted that though "The sound of heart-
beats and heavy breathing as the doors open have widely
been misinterpreted as being those of an increasingly ter-
rified Julian. . .they are meant to belong to whatever

comes through the door."14

Alice is the abstraction of the
Anima which exists in the most sublimated realm of Julian's
unconscious--his archetypal or collective unconscious. In
recognizing her, Julian finds her counterpart, the Animus,
or the God for which he has been searching (190); and
consequently he comes to possess himself.
The Animus or Logos representing the male aspect of

spirit and intellect and the Anima or Eros representing
the female or Earth Mother, are, as Jung tells us, god-like
because of the great psychic energy they produce:

Both of them are unconscious powers, 'gods'

in fact, as the ancient world quite rightly

conceived them to be. To call them by this

name is to give them that central position

in the scale of psychological values which

has always been theirs whether consciously

acknowledged or not; for their power grows

in proportion to the degree that they re-

main unconscious.

In accepting them both, Julian has reached his epiph—

any which, according to Northrop Frye is:

The symbolic presentation of the point at

which the undisplaced apocalyptic world and
the cyclical world of nature come into

 

124

alignment. . .Its most common settings are the
mountain—top, the tower, the island, the
lighthouse, and the ladder or staircase.

Folk tales and mythologies are full of stories
of an original connection between heaven or the
sun and earth. . .The movement from the one
world to the other may be symbolized by the
golden fire that descends from the sun. . .and
by its human response, the fire kindled on

the sacrificial altar (203-204).

The setting for Julian is up against the model house,
the altar of Alice, but it is interesting that Albee orig—
inally intended him to be locked in an attic closet (cor-
responding more closely to Frye's tower or ladder), an
idea he had to forego for the sake of dramatic effect. The
movement of the world of Nature (Alice) into the world of
the Spirit (God) comes in the form of the light descending
through the rooms of the model house into the room Julian
occupies (Frye's golden fire descending from the sun).
Julian is the human response on the sacrificial altar.

Through a modern rite of initiation he comes, at
last, to achieve the integration he sought. What the drama
depicts, finally, is a birth-rebirth ritual in which Julian
is first outfitted in ritual robes (in his case, a business
suit), shot with a pistol (phallic symbol of fertility),
and united with the Earth Mother who destroys in order to
immortalize. In an impressive feat of dramatic compres—
sion, the scene of his death, with heartbeats and ensuing
darkness, carries unmistakeable overtones of a birth--

expulsion from the womb.

The modern audience may well remain impervious to

125

to the suggestion of spiritual rebirth for Julian, since,
as Jung argues in his essay, "Freud and Jung," our civil-
ization has by and large forgotten the meaning of d vine
procreation and tends to overlook the possibility that
incestuous longings go back past the desire for the
temporal father and mother to a primal desire for unity
with the spirit and with nature.16

Perhaps in this play, in which Albee must surely have
been working out of his own unconscious, his contention
that the use of the unconscious is 20th century theatre's
most interesting development, comes most fully to bear.17
The psychological processes dissected here occur simul-
taneously in the play so that the overall effect contributes
to its most fascinating element: the capacity to recreate
the atmosphere of the dream. Thus, it is haunting and
disturbing despite its resistance to discursive logic.

Like many of Albee's plays (one is reminded of the

three mentioned early in this essay), the effect of the

ending of Tiny Alice in one of suspended motion; there is

 

a sense of resolution but it remains intangible. Julian's
epiphany is as elusive as the elation Jerry experiences
right before his death: a bright flash of light before
what remains, for us, darkness. Both characters, at

their deaths, take the full implication of their visions
with them, leaving the audience to ponder, finally, the

persistent sense of mystery which remains.

CONCLUSION

Examination of Albee's themes reveals that he shares
the impulse of many twentieth century artists to renounce
all belief in absolute values and fixed systems of meaning.
This, however, does not automatically qualify him as a
voice for the existential pain, inevitable disillusionment,
and ultimate isolation and futility of human existence. As
a dramatist he is more than one of the modern "priests" who,
in Robert Brustein's words, "turns the mirror on the void"
in protest "against the conditions of his existence."1 The
opposite is true. Albee's plays recover the concept of
salvation by depicting the modern human as a de-energized
psychological system in need of radical personal and col-
lective renewal, and by using the stage as the dramatic,
ritualistic medium for that renewal.

Albee reaches back past the forms of modern cultural
and religious rituals (which appear in his works as dis-
torted echoes) to utilize the structure and reclaim the
intention of primitive rites of initiation. Since these
rites found the paradigm of all experience in the recurring
natural cycle of death and rebirth, the playwright recovers
through them the earliest human impulse to dramatize the

continual process of psychological regeneration. He comes

126

127
to his dramatic structure through the tenants of modern
psychology which also assume a process of psychological
renewal in the calling up of dream images, unconscious
motives, and latent desires to challenge and restructure
the conscious personality. All of this ties Albee philo-
sophically to the Romantic ideal of human reidentification
with the preconscious natural world.

Theatrically, Albee‘s drama continues the tradition
of Strindberg's dream plays and builds upon Pirandello's
artistic challenges to the assumed distinction between
illusion and reality and his emphasis on the chameleon
human character, uncertain and unconscious of its own moti—
vations. More directly, Albee realizes the theories of
Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty which would representationally
confront modern humans with their most primal impulses in
order to annihilate their comforting social forms and re-
involve them in their own lives.

Albee's theater, then, shares with primitive ritual,
19th century Romanticism, and some of the major philo-
sophies of the 20th century stage a focus on the redemp-
tive aspects of revolution and anarchy in the human spirit
and in the social body. Each of his early plays begins with
a metaphorically significant occasion: an encounter be—
tween strangers in The Zoo Story, a private party in Who's

Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a task in Tiny Alice. These

 

occasions begin ordeals during which the principal charac—

ters are brought to name those aspects of their lives upon

128

which they have relied for self-definition. At the same
time, the situations grow increasingly intense and
threatening to the point of an explosive confrontation:
Jerry forces Peter to fight for his bench; George and
Martha lock horns in a battle over their son; Julian is
forced to remain in Miss Alice's house alone. These con-
frontations finally render all rationalizations and defini-
tions absurd by reducing the characters to their most pri—
mal fears and desires; from this point they should begin
again to restructure their lives.

Most of this contains overtones of Greek tragedy be-
cause Albee does try to revitalize drama's capacity for

catharsis and renewal. A Delicate Balance, as the first

 

exception to this pattern, illustrates the point. Agnes
and Tobias do not directly confront the primal fear that
Edna and Harry represent--what Agnes calls "the plague"--
and so they sustain none of the same losses that crumble
the framework of the lives of the characters in the other
plays. Unlike Peter, Jerry, George and Martha, and

Julian, the characters in A Delicate Balance experience

 

no visible change in their situations at the end of their
drama. More in keeping with much absurdist drama, the
play stresses the repetitive patterns that maintain order
and predictability at the expense of growth.

In keeping with this contrast, Tobias' fortress of
security, his home, is clearly invaded from the outside,

whereas the ordeals for the other protagonists begin with

129
their self—imposed exile from the larger social structure.
Anthropologists speak of the transition stage in rites of
passage during which the initiate is physically placed in
an isolated zofitflgymbolizing his position between the "pro-
fane“ world of the uninitiated and the world of knowledge of
the "sacred" mysteries. Though Albee's characters are not
conscious of their motives, they all place themselves
(either physically or emotionally or both) in a position
which makes them vulnerable to invasion by the forces that
will challenge them.

Though, for instance, Peter can consciously define
himself in no other'Qay than as the "group" or "organiza—
tion man," he nevertheless seeks solitude and isolation on
a lonely park bench. This habit underscores his unnamed
quest for individuality and personal autonomy; he becomes,
in fact, a convenient target for Jerry, the intruder who
will actualize his quest. Jerry's own isolation and
social alienation reflects on an explicit level the emo—
tional isolation the audience will come to see lurking
beneath Peter's surface contentment.

George and Martha, as blatant non—conformists, have
likewise placed themselves emotionally and actually apart
from the larger university structure of New Carthage.
George, in his further alienation from the patriarchal
figure of his father-in-law and from the History Depart—
ment, is, as a symbol of modern man, also removed from

all of Western civilization. Moreover, in their metaphoric

129
their self—imposed exile from the larger social structure.
Anthropologists speak of the transition stage in rites of
passage during which the initiate is physically placed in
an isolated zone symbolizing his position between the "pro-
fane" world of the uninitiated and the world of knowledge of
the "sacred" mysteries. Though Albee's characters are not
conscious of their motives, they all place themselves
(either physically or emotionally or both) in a position
which makes them vulnerable to invasion by the forces that
will challenge them.

Though, for instance, Peter can consciously define
himself in no other way than as the "group" or "organiza-
tion man," he nevertheless seeks solitude and isolation on
a lonely park bench. This habit underscores his unnamed
quest for individuality and personal autonomy; he becomes,
in fact, a convenient target for Jerry, the intruder who
will actualize his quest. Jerry's own isolation and
social alienation reflects on an explicit level the emo—
tional isolation the audience will come to see lurking
beneath Peter's surface contentment.

George and Martha, as blatant non—conformists, have
likewise placed themselves emotionally and actually apart
from the larger university structure of New Carthage.
George, in his further alienation from the patriarchal
figure of his father—in-law and from the History Depart-
ment, is, as a symbol of modern man, also removed from

all of Western civilization. Moreover, in their metaphoric

130
son, the couple have created a personal ideal they cannot
share with anyone; their belief in him helps them to main—
tain an isolated nucleus that ensures their separation
from the rest of the world. Yet, by inviting Nick and
Honey into their home, George and Martha risk confronting
in the potentially successful younger couple the spectre,
of their own vulnerability to the society which names them
failures. Inversely, Nick and Honey, as long as they re—
main in George and Martha's home and allow themselves to
be confronted by the other couple's rebelliousness, are
in a position which highlights, by contrast, their own
willingness to compromise their integrity and sacrifice
their individuality to the cause of status.

Like George, who is "in the History Department as
opposed to being the History Department," Julian in Tiny
Alige is "of the cloth, but has not taken it." He, too,
positions himself between worlds, in this case a life of
self-renunciation and service in the Church on the one
hand, and active participation in the world on the other.
Clearly he has not committed himself to either. The iso-
lated detachment this inevitably ensures for him takes
actual form once he (with briefcase in hand like the
symbolic fool carrying his past on his back) enters Miss
Alice's house: "a castle" with "pillared walls, obviously
well removed from the rest of the world." His chosen role
as obedient servant justifies for him his surrender to

the external forces of Cardinal, Lawyer, Butler, and Miss

 

131
Alice, who become his guides. But in his acceptance of
the role of emissary, Julian himself, like Peter, has un-
consciously taken the first step in making himself sus-
ceptible to "alien forces"; his implicit invitation to
them is as ultimately effective as George and Martha's
more explicit summoning of Nick and Honey.

In many of Albee's plays, as in rites of passage,
houses, doors, and thresholds give symbolic form to the
characters' psychological point of transition. Since
dwellings and entrances separate the realms of the foreign
and the familiar, the profane and the consecrated, the
ordinary and the extraordinary, "to cross the threshold
is to unite oneself with a new world."2

In a dramatically pointed and effective scene,

George and Martha litigate at length the issue of who

will Open the door to admit Nick and Honey. When George
finally "flings open the front door" "Honey and Nick are
framed in the entrance," after which there is a momentary
pause in the action. Julian, of course, crosses over from
the ordinary, everyday world to the exotic, confusing
castle, and Jerry, whose "parable of Jerry and the dog"
provides perhaps the clearest metaphor for the initiatory
experience of all the characters, hovers on the threshold
between the social world and the mysterious, unknown, out-
cast realm of his boardinghouse, at the entrance of which
he has his revelatory encounter with the hostile dog.

All these examples indicate the characters'

 

132

willingness, on one level, to undertake the transition
from one stage to another. Albee, however, creates psycho—
logically complex characters dominated by conflicting im-
pulses. Though they themselves begin the process which
invites the upheaval of their lives, they also cling
tenaciously to the "limbo" of the safe, socially accept—
able forms of individuality they have devised as compro-
mises between the radical instinct for change and the con-
servative instinct to adapt to the status quo. When
pushed, furthermore, to confront the increasingly fearsome
consequences of their own steps toward autonomy, they tend
to retreat, like children, further back to the original
source of refuge.

Perhaps Tobias states the internal approach-avoidance
conflict ("I don't want you but I need you to stay") of
the other characters most explicitly when he says to Harry:
"YOU BRING YOUR TERROR AND YOU COME IN HERE AND YOU LIVE
WITH US! YOU BRING YOUR PLAGUE! YOU STAY WITH US! I
DON'T WANT YOU HERE! I DON'T LOVE YOU! BUT BY GOD. . .

3 This play illus-

YOU STAY! . . .Stay? Please? Stay?"
trates, by contrast with the others, how the strategy,
once named, becomes inoperative. Tobias names his own
lack and his own cowardice; he tries consciously and
deliberately to force Harry to force him to do what he
does not have the courage to do on his own: consciously

accept the challenge to restructure his life.

In these conflicts of his characters Albee most

 

 

 

133
closely approximates the tendency of many modern artists,
beginning with the Dadaists and the Surrealists, to hold
modern man responsible for his spiritual inadequacies and
his drab existence. The playwright echoes, as well, the
Romantics' conviction that, though man wants liberty, his
cowardice invents gods to prevent him from getting it and
to keep him dominated by a nostalgia for reunification
with an idealized, mythic, lost paradise. On the other
hand, Albee realizes man's capacity to call up other
"gods" to help him secure his freedom.

The first human tendency—-to create out of our own
cowardice, gods we must also resist-—most often takes the
form in Albee's plays of female characters to whom the
male is subjugated and from whom he seeks freedom. Both
a material world and a "maternal" world (in the form of
his wife and daughters), for instance, dominate Peter in

The Zoo Story. The female figure of Jerry's landlady

 

would prevent him from completing his quest into the
boarding house by "devouring" him with her "sweaty lust."
He evades her and even tries to conquer her (and his un-
conscious fears) through her counterpart, the dog. Julian
wages the strongest battle with female figures-—Mother
Church, the Virgin Mary, Miss Alice, Alice-~all personfi-
cations of his threatening attraction to retreat through
reincorporation into a "paradisal" union with the female
mother figure. He comes to terms with this to a certain

extent when he marries Miss Alice, though, even then, he

134
must go one step beyond to conquer his own over—blown
dread of the undisplaced Earth—Goddess (Alice) and to dis-
cover, like the Romantics, that "The lost paradise becomes
an unborn world, a pre-existent idea."4 The fact that
Alice is first "tiny" then overpowering illustrates how
Julian's repression of his fears make him increasingly

subject to them. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

 

Albee translates this phenomenon to a "male god"--Martha's
Daddy-~whom the characters both discount and idealize,
rebel against and obey. Interestingly, Albee unites a
female and a male symbol of dread in the title of his play.
Martha, too, retains for the author some of the vestiges
of the overpowering female figure in her voluptuous
seductiveness, but, in comparison with the "unseen god-

desses" of The Zoo Story and Tiny Alice, she loses much of

 

 

her symbolic potency as she begins to claim greater per-
sonal distinction.

In A Delicate Balance Agnes perpetuates the dangerous

 

comfort of a life of security and balance. Though a force
against change, she renounces personal responsibility by

defining her role as one in which she simply carries out

male decisions. As she tells Tobias: "Whatever you
decide. . .I'll make it work; I'll run it for you so you'll
never know there's been a change in anything" (132). Tobias

obviously cannot assume the responsibility to decide to
renounce the confining order Agnes maintains.

In addition to mother figures, younger female

135
counterparts appear in Albee's plays. Honey, for instance,
like a younger daughter to Martha, refused to grow up, as

does Julia in A Delicate Balance. This mythic-dream duo

 

of Earth Goddess and maiden daughter begins in The Zoo
Story with Peter's wife and daughters, takes various forms
in Martha and Honey, Alice and Miss Alice, Agnes and Julia,
and becomes more explicit, hence consciously applied, in
Elizabeth and Jo from Albee's latest play, The Lady From
Dubuque. In this play Albee makes explicit as well how
the male's fear of the female mother symbol is self-gener—
ated; that is, Sam's fear and hostility toward Elizabeth
has no objective correlative in her own demeanor or actions.

Primitive cultures were clear that initiation must
begin with an act of rupture they saw as separation from
the mother, who represents the place of security, the place
that is known. Modern psychology likewise assumes that a
differentiated individual arises only in moving away from
the narcissism represented by its attachment to the initial
caregiver. Albee's protagonists usually must learn, like
Proust, "that maturity means among other things the irrepar—
able and final loss of the mother" as a symbol of bliss as
well as of dread.5

For Albee, as for the Romantics, inability to renounce
false security, whether this false security is represented
by the mother, by an ideal of Paradise, or by the social
organization, drains the human psyche of vitality and cre-

ative energy. Thus Albee's plays often begin with an

136

atmosphere of depletion, waste, weariness, and stasis.
Martha's first words are, "What a dump" as she enters her
home; George is "tired" though he hasn't "done anything";
Jerry is lost and has "a great weariness" suggesting age;
Peter completely lacks verve; Julian calls his years in

the asylum a time of "dull waste" when he was "in paralysis
of sorts." The interaction between Lawyer and Cardinal in

the first scene of Tiny Alice best depicts the decadence

 

and moral degeneration to which the major institutions of
modern society have sunk. The energy in that scene, how-
ever, like the energy in the opeining scenes of the other
two plays differs dramatically from the tone Agnes sets up

for A Delicate Balance when she muses on the possibility of

 

declining into a madness she "never" sees "as violent"
(hence redemptive), only as "becoming a stranger in. . .the
world, quite. . .uninvolved" (3). Albee sets up the same

need for revitalization in the characters of A Delicate

 

Balance as he does for the characters in his other plays;
yet, since his schema includes precisely that violent
"insanity" Agnes denies, that play neither moves toward
the same intense crisis as the others nor makes possible
for its characters the same intense re—involvement.

Until Albee's protagonists can break from their need
to retreat, they can neither cross the line into authentic
freedom nor achieve through an integrated psyche and in
communion with the natural (as opposed to the acquired)

world the alternatives to isolation and alienation. Yet,

 

137

as Peter, Julian, and Martha in particular make clear, the
individual responds to the invitation to freedom by re-
treating; the forces for change, therefore, must become
more and more strident in proportion to the resistance
they meet. Albee's most dramatically effective plays pro-
vide a representational framework to unleash the full
energy of these forces. These plays are, therefore, dis—
placed versions of the original Bacchanalian rites whose
purgative function in society theater has traditionally
striven to approximate.

In keeping with this connection to Dionysian revelry,

the dramatic climates of The Zoo Story, Who's Afraid of

 

 

Virginia Woolf?, and Tiny Alice grow more confusing,

 

 

chaotic, and threatening as the plays progress. The be-
havior of certain characters becomes more incomprehensible;
language becomes less meaningful and more decorative, often
becoming incantation; the meanings of symbols shift; the
atmosphere becomes frightening, though the exact source of
the threat remains vague; the undertones of sexual frenzy
escalate and the violence and the threat of violence in-
creases.

If, as Agnes says, the characters in A Delicate Balance

 

"sleep to let the demons out--to let the mind go raving
mad, our dreams and nightmares all our logic gone awry,
the dark side of our reason [sic]" (170), in the other
three plays Albee actually dramatizes the "Walpurgisnacht"

necessary before the "Exorcism" can be effected. The

138

characters in these plays face their internal demons head-
on when they lower the barrier of consciousness. Albee's
plays thereby approximate the Romantics' challenge to the
mandate of the civilized world, a world which, in the
words of Northrop Frye, ascribes to the Christian dogma
that "To regain his true identity man had to keep the bar-
rier of consciousness against nature, and think of himself
first as a social being."6 Albee realizes, too, Artaud's
view of theater as the arena in which to reintroduce primi-
tive ritual into civilized life in order to reclaim the
"archetypal, prelogical, primitive spirit" that "still
lives in the unconscious of Western man, though deeply
submerged under the dead skin of civilization."7

The chief perpetrators of all this emotional and intel-
lectual anarchy in Albee's plays appear in the roles of
Jerry, George, and Lawyer in their relationship to Peter,
Nick, and Julian respectively, and in their relationship
to the audience. The dramatic purpose of these characters
can be found in their connections as types to certain
recurring figures of ritual, myth, dream, and literature:
the shaman of primitive rites, the Dionysian god, and the
shadow or double of dream and literary archetype.

Jerry, George, and Lawyer each retain identifiable
characteristics of the shaman or high priest presiding
over the initiation ordeal. These personages tradition-

ally acted out visibily and publicly the social group's

latent irrationality. This then qualified them to lead

 

139
others in summoning and confronting unconscious contents.
So, too, Albee's characters confront personal "demons,"
employ explicitly ritualistic language and gestures, and
operate within some undefined larger plan. As a shaman
figure, Jerry, furthermore, employs what the stage direc-
tions designate as mesmerizing, incantatory language in
cataloguing his own possessions and in retelling the par—
able of Jerry and the dog. He creates and leads Peter
through an ordeal culminating, appropriately, with a
ritual sacrifice-—death.

George assumes the role of shaman more deliberately
than Jerry, and Albee highlights the ritual exorcism in
this play. Yet, the ritual elements in Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf? echo those in The Zoo Story: George leads
Nick through a series of confessions, retells in the story
of the boy who killed his mother and father an event both
personal and symbolic, and conducts a sacrificial rite.
Two crucial differences in George's role in Who's Afraid

of Virginia Woolf? suggest a more complex application of

 

the shaman and explain, in part, the triumph of that play
over Albee's others. The first is that George simultane-
ously provides a framework for Nick's potential initiation,
assists Martha in her initiation, and, most importantly,
conducts the rite of exorcism for himself; that is, he is
both initiate and priest, both the subject of the event
and its author. Secondly, at a pivotal point in the drama,

George decides consciously to undertake this role and to

140
undergo its consequences. Therefore, while the effects
of Peter's initiation remain circumstantial and unacknowl-
edged, and the outcome of Julian's leads to a point of
abstraction that cannot be articulated except through his
death, George assumes conscious responsibility to change
his situation. While the other two characters are acted
upon, he is the actor.

Lawyer, whose only virtue is dedication to his task,
takes principal responsibility for arranging the details
leading Julian into Miss Alice's house. He oversees Miss
Alice, coaching her in the "way to behave," drilling her
in "matters of consequence." More apparently in service
to a mysterious author than Jerry, Lawyer, in his own
words, will continue to play out a scenario more ancient
than the individuals subject to it: "until everything is
desert. . .on the chance that it runs out before ye do."

In shooting Julian he, too, officiates at a sacrificial
rite.

However, though Julian is clearly the initiate in Tiny
éllEE! hisstruggles with insanity, his expertise with wines
and plants, and his clerical position constitute Dionysian
associations similar to the shaman's. In actuality, Julian,
like Peter, though less obviously than George, conducts his
own rite of passage, guided by Lawyer as Jerry guides Peter
and George guides himself. These psychological doubles
play out unacceptable but indestructible characteristics

of the complete human identity.

141

If the shaman calls up unconscious contents, the
double personifies those contents; he therefore appears
as the other half of the divided self. Thus Jerry is
cruel and aggressive while Peter is polite and reserved;
verbose and self—revealing while Peter is guarded and in-
articulate; ironic and cynical while Peter is gullible and
sheltered; and physically and mentally unstable while
Peter appears in his prime.

Lawyer——"Satan" according to Cardinal--aggressive,
vengeful, crudely and overtly sexual, ironic and detached,
self-serving, scornful of religion and all softer emotional
and spiritual concerns, similarly counterpoints Julian's
good-natured "saintliness." Emissary of Crosseus, king of
gold, with correspondence exclusively to the material world,
Lawyer contrasts the emissary of the Church who has re—
nounced all such worldiness. Even Butler calls his cohort
a "cruel person-~straight through, hard and cold."

In fact, Albee's doubles challenge the innocence
their counterparts derive from unexamined adherence to
social, intellectual, and religious establishments. The
playwright thus exhibits shades of the Romantics' attrac—
tion to the "earth man" as an alternative to the unheroic,
social man spoiled by a soft, decadent civilization.
Jerry, George, and Lawyer implicitly (and sometimes ex-
plicitly) threaten the existing establishment. Victims of
cultural repression, aiming to undermine social order,

they invariably do not speak the language of reason and

 

142

logic. Rather, they personify confusion and generate frus-
tration in the protagonists.

Jerry, like the stranger in Euripides' Bacchae, seems
to appear out of nowhere, has no biological or social roots
(his parents are dead and there are no pictures in his pic-
ture frames), seems incapable of carrying on what Peter
describes as "normal conversation," and is at once aggres—
sively threatening and placatingly suppliant.

George is equally changeable and more overtly reminis-
cent of the magician, with whom the double is also connected.
He creates deliberate verbal confusions, relates allegories
whose validity seems questionable, produces a weapon from
which emerges a red and yellow Chinese parasol, and is the
parent of a mythological son he can cause to appear and
disappear at his will.

Lawyer, together with Butler and Miss Alice, further
an atmosphere of confusion, ambiguity, and illogic, espe-
cially as to the question of whether they are Julian's
friends (as they often avow), dedicated to bringing him to
the "Truth," or his enemies, intent on proving to him the
futility of his noble aspirations.

Peter, Nick, and Julian eventually experience chaos
when they can no longer rely on their long-held assumptions
and familiar behavior patterns. "I don't understand any
of this!" wails Peter to Jerry at the conclusion of the
story of Jerry and the dog. "Hell, I don't know when you

people are lying, or what," Nick explodes in exasperation

 

 

143
to George and Martha. "What's being done to me. Am I

. . .am I being temp~—tested in some fashion?" Julian asks
Miss Alice, and later, after her marriage to her, he con—
fides to Butler that he feels "quite lost."

In each case, the character's confusion verbalizes
what must also be the audience's experience. Contrary to
what has often been thought about Albee's plays, this con-
fusion and the frustration it inevitably generates, is not
arbitrary, gratuitous, or privately idiosyncratic. Rather,
the experience of chaos foreshadows renewal. The double
gives testimony to the impulsive, a-social part of the self
designated "Other." The individual must, in acknowledging
his double's potency, discover a lost self and, simultane-
ously, a new, more comprehensive and mature identity. With-
out the personal self-acceptance, inter-personal under—
standing is untenable.

The action of The Zoo Story, for instance, serves to
equate the characters; Jerry, in a very explicit gesture,
tosses his knife to Peter to make the two men "evenly
matched" in their fight for the same object, the bench.
Since the metaphoric language in this play is that of a
materialistic culture, the object under contention clari-
fies Peter and Jerry's division between what is "mine" and
what is "yours." Though throughout the play Peter has
sought recourse in his social role and the amenities and
rationalizations it supplies, Jerry intends to resolve

their differences by forcing the other man to meet him

144

face to face in an instinctive, undeniably mutual, inter-
action.

Like Jerry, George wants his opponent evenly matched;
he requires his wife to be up and swinging and madder than
hell. George and Martha both lay claim to one object,
their "son"; this mutual possessiveness first polarizes
the couple, then resolves the polarization in the reflective
hostility it engenders. In this play, as in the earlier
one, human beings, alienated from themselves and others
by rational, intellectual, and religious moral conventions,
meet in the implacable reality of their undifferentiated
animal impulses.

The same theme applies more complexly in Tiny Alice

 

in which opposites are less displaced toward realism.
Julian simply divides his world into the spiritual father-
God, with whom he identifies himself, and the flesh which
he consigns as the province of the "Other," including all
women and certain men, like Lawyer, linked exclusively to
the material world. Both realms obsess and neither satis-
fies him. In the play, Julian's god-image takes three
forms: Lawyer (logos?), the aggressive authority figure,
Butler, the humble servant, and Julian who longs to re-
nounce all form to become substanceless spirit, to "serve
and be forgotten."

Albee's audiences can see in Julian's concepts of
Alice and God (flesh and spirit) the same tension between

material-temporal concerns and spiritual-intellectual

145

concerns also characteristic of Peter and Jerry and
George and Martha's relationships. Julian's marriage to
Miss Alice resolves the conflict in finite terms; but the
play goes on to merge the polarization on its most ab-
stract level when the amorphous reality without distin-
guishable form (God and Alice, Spirit and Nature) liter-
ally overwhelmsJulian, the individual bound by temporal
space and time.

Since Julian (like Jerry) does not return to his

original dimension (he dies), Tiny Alice emphasizes as

 

expressly metaphysical that sudden synthesis which Peter
and Jerry and George and Martha also experience. Each
play, therefore, realizes in some way the Romantic inclin-
ation to destroy the subject—object relationship within
and among human beings.

Nietzche, the Romantic from whom so much of modern
thought emanates, reclaimed as the symbol of this ideal
the god Dionysis, the god of freedom from the constricting
bond of a rationalistic society and the means toward re-
conciliation and unity between "man" and "man" and between
"man" and nature. Dionysian influences are indeed evident
in Jerry, George, and Lawyer. By symbolically violating or
manipulating others into violating social taboos, by
endangering the uniquely human reliance upon language as
a meaningful tool, and by perpetrating violence, each of
these characters incites chaos. This function coincides

with the role of shaman and of double: each aims to

 

 

146
disrupt the status quo.

In keeping with these roles these characters per-
sonify cultural polarizations only to dissolve them by
equating themselves with their counterparts. As a by-
product of their actions, they undertake a sacrificial
death symbolic of the emotional and intellectual "death“
the audience and the other characters experience as a
result of the events taking place on stage. They insti-
gate in the other characters, moreover, the surfacing of
latent feelings ranging from nonsense to incest.

Though these characteristics would seem to consign
Jerry, George, and Lawyer to the realm of the diabolic,
these characters actually inherit from the mythic Dionysis
the paradoxical qualities identifying them as both demonic
and heroic, as both death-dealing and life-giving. The
apparently mutually exclusive attributes come together in
the psychological verity that the terrible influences cap-
able of leading people to commit unspeakable, "perverted"
acts become more potent the longer and more forcefully
they are resisted. The Dionysian figure, therefore, is,
like the double, an image of an internal self and a signal
to individuals that the time has come for them to admit
not that they necessarily would do terrible, "unspeakable"
things but certainly that they are capable of doing such
things. The more willingly the individual admits this the
less influence the destructive aspect of Dionysis can

exert on him or her.

 

147

This provides the reason why Jerry is so intent to
prove Peter an "animal" not a "vegetable"; why George and
Martha explore their capacity for increasingly destructive
cruelties toward each other and toward their guests; why
Miss Alice, Butler, and Lawyer so ruthlessly challenge
Julian's ideals. Each character functions, like the
Dionysian figure of ancient ritual, as a kind of savior
who comes to remind individuals that they are, in part,
irrational animals so that, under the expedient ration-
alistic imperatives of civilization, their repressions do
not become great enough to overwhelm them. The ancient
world knew Dionysis as the "loosener"; that is, the god
who expressed the need "to escape from the repressions
that so dangerously exist below conventional consciousness."
The function the Dionysian ritual served was to act as "a
cathartic that took man out of himself and purged his ir-
rational impulses, or directed them into this special
channel."8

Albee's implementation of Dionysian ritual would,
therefore, confront his audiences with their own impulses
toward evil. Again, this has been misinterpreted as the
playwright's desire to "prove the world an intolerably
damned place."9 On the contrary, the point is that evil
cannot be combatted unless it is first recognized. It
must, furthermore, be recognized not as the province of
some alien force existing "out there" and projected onto

other people and other ideologies, but as one's own potential.

148

Otherwise, like Peter (the prototype of social man
and the prescursor of all Albee's initiates), the indi-
vidual is the eternal victim subject not to an active
acceptance of fate but to a passive, untested conviction
of his own impotency. "What do you want?" "What are you
going to do to me?" he asks of Jerry. Jerry hands him
the knife and goads him into fighting in order to thwart
this adherence to the role of victim. If Jerry cannot make
Peter into an actual victimizer at least he can create a
complicity between them which makes the distinction mean—
ingless.

Like Peter, George and Martha see themselves as
wronged by each other and victimized by circumstances;
they must eventually transcend this view of themselves, as
Julian must outgrow his idealization of martyrdom. In
The Zoo Story, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Tiny
Alice these representative characters re-experience the
innate a—rationality attesting to humans' origin in nature
in order to know, first hand, what makes succumbing to this
side of themselves so intolerable.

Thus, the Dionysian god is also the spring god. Jerry,
George, and Lawyer (and company), create frightening situ—
ations metaphoric of the mandatory experience of night,
winter, or death, and thus attest to the continual inter-
play between destruction and regeneration. Since destruc-
tion implies reconstruction, these characters generate re-

newal as well.

 

149

Because Albee, through these characters, dramatizes
chaos, the sense of rebirth or reentry into life after
death is built right into the fabric of these plays; hence
the elation struggling with the irony in Jerry's final mono-
logue. George and Martha's reduction to elemental langu-
age and primitive emotions, their admission of uncertainty
and fear, and the sense that they will start again equally
imply renewal. The womb imagery implicit in the heartbeats
and darkness at the point of Julian's dying also combines
a death and birth image.

Albee, we can therefore conclude, leads his charac-
ters to a confrontation with their primal fears and im—
pulses, a place beyond all fictions and illusions, as an
ordeal necessary to effect in them the means toward their
renewal. This thematic device is consistent with rites of
passage. In these rites death symbolized reincorporation
similar to the process of nature. Jane Harrison writes:
"There are but two factors in every rite, the putting off
of the old, the putting on of the new; you carry out Winter

10 In keeping with

or death, you bring in Summer, or life."
nature's model, the ordeals of initiation included at some
point the initiate's confrontation with the possibility of
his own death, after which he could emerge possessed of a
new identity:

Hence, the mystical death of the novice is

not something negative. On the contrary,

their death to childhood, to asexuality,

to ignorance--in short to the profane con-
dition--is the occasion for a total

150

regeneration of the cosmos and the collec-
tivity.ll

Again, A Delicate Balance proves the relationship

 

between anarchy and renewal in the earlier plays by
depicting the alternative. Julia, in that play, comes
home to find her room occupied by "alien persons," that
is, persons who have no "right" to be there. Julia's
room, like Peter's bench, George and Martha's son, and
Julian's mind, is both her stake in individuality (what
she can claim, as she does repeatedly, as "Mine") and the
private refuge to which, again like the other characters,
she can retreat when the outside world appears too threat-
ening. The room becomes her excuse to avoid growth.

Also like the earlier characters, Julia is between
worlds: the outside world of maturity and responsibility
and the childhood world of protection and dependency. Be-
cause she cannot remain in this midway state, the issue
must be resolved one way or another. In her outburst
against Harry and Edna, Julia comes very close to fighting
for her right to her room and to accepting, in the process,
the responsibility of naming and defending her own desires
and needs. However, whereas in the other plays the char-
acters are pushed to follow the implications of their de-
sires to their most extreme consequences, renouncing, in
the process, all the measures of safety they have evolved
in order to avoid just such a confrontation, Julia, in her

fear, calls on her mother and father, and to her detriment,

 

151

Agnes responds. The forces closing in on Julia in the
persons of Agnes and Harry and Edna (her godparents) are
guardians, not of change but of the status quo.

Julia, at this point, becomes the outsider, the out-
cast. She follows through on this role when she appears
in Act Two, scene two with a gun, introducing, as Jerry,
George, and Lawyer do before her, the threat of death. But

the balance tips in A Delicate Balance not toward increased

 

anarchy, as it does in the other plays, but toward a re-
assertion of order, a force which Julia is too weak to
meet. She hands her gun to Tobias, as all the characters
hand him the responsibility to make their decisions, a
responsibility he, like they, cannot accept. Consequently,
the scene ends with an emphasis on the characters' calm.
When they subsequently retire to sleep Tobias can do no
more than sit and watch.

The dialogue and action of A Delicate Balance imply

 

that the characters' refusal to confront their fears and
disrupt their lives in the profound way necessary to
challenge their beliefs, condemns them to lives as ob-
servers rather than as participants, as maintainers rather
than as initiators. Agnes may brag of her "ability to
View a situation objectively," but Claire's explanation
captures the irony in the boast: "We live with our truths
submerged in the grassy bottom, and we examine alllll the
interpretations of alllll the implications like we had a

life for nothing else" (93).

152

All attempts at initiation in A Delicate Balance are

 

aborted. The characters do not "attempt the impossible,"
do not confront the looking glass, do not embrace death,

do not risk the plague (which refers not so much to death
as to disruption). Consequently, they each remain in their
separate rooms refusing the salvaticn1 Albee equates with
change. "Nothing changes," says Julia. "The individual-
ity we hold so dearly sinks into crotchet; we see our-
selves repeated by those we bring into it all," says

Agnes (82). In the conflict between change and adaptation,

as central to A Delicate Balance as to the earlier plays,

 

adaptation triumphs; rather than risk the walk on water,
the characters "develop gills."

Conversely, in Albee's three most important plays
change triumphs through a moment of synthesis uniting dis-
parate elements and confronting the characters with their
pre-civilized, pre-conscious natures. For Jerry and Julian
the radical extent of the experience can be metaphorically
contained only in their deaths. Frye explains this Roman—
tic solution as follows:

The only point at which one visibly enters
into an identity with nature is death.

Thus death is all we can usually see of
what may or may not be the fullest entering
into life.

The deaths of these two characters and of George and
Martha's son come Us exemplify Albee's equating of psycho-

logical death with revitalization. Rather than encouraging

the replacement of one attitude with another or one lifestyle

 

153
with its opposite, Albee focuses, through the death-re-
birth motif, on the continual process of change. Whenever
any one "reality" grows large and fossilized and threatens

to define rather than be defined by human capabilities it

 

must be shattered. The destruction must be complete
enough to force individuals consciously to create new
mythic structures, informed by a new understanding of
themselves and their place in nature. In nearly all his
plays, Albee's characters, representing modern American
society, fall on either side of this one dividing line:
those who will actively participate in change and impose

the imprint of human ingenuity on destiny, and those who

will remain a casualty of it.

NOTES

Introduction

 

1C. W. E. Bigsby, Albee (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd,
1969), P. 111.

2"Fertility Rites and Sorcery in a New Guinea Village,"
National Geographic, 1952 (July 1977), 131.

3Digby Diehl, "Edward Albee Interviewed," Trans-
atlantic Review, 13 (Summer 1963), 62.

4Jane Ellen Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (Cam-
bridge: Henry Holt and Co., 1913), p. 45.

 

 

5William Flanagan, "The Art of the Theater IV: Edward
Albee, An Interview," Paris Review, 10 (Fall 1966), 111-112.

6

 

Diehl, p. 59.

7"Albee Returns to the Living Room," InterView, The
New York Times, 27 January 1980, p. 5.

8Edward Albee, The Lady From Dubuque (New York:
Antheneum, 1980), p. 158.

 

 

Chapter I: The Zoo Story

 

1Rose A. Zimbardo, "Symbolism and Naturalism in
Edward Albee's The Zoo Story," Twentieth Century Literature,
8 (April 1962), 15; Michael E. Rutenberg, Edward Albee:
Playwright in Protest (New York: Avon Books, 1969), p. 29;
Ronald Hayman, Edward Albee (New York: Frederick Unger
Publishing Co., 1973), PP. 16-17.

2Mary M. Nilan, "Albee's The Zoo Story: Alienated Man
and the Nature of Love," Modern Drama, 16 (June 1973),
58-59.

3

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Brooks Atkinson. "Theatre: A Double Bill off

154

 

 

155

Broadway," New York Times 15 January 1960, II, 1; Robert
Brustein, "Krapp and a Little Claptrap," New Republic, 142
(22 February 1960), 21—22.

4Gilbert Debusscher, Edward Albee--Tradition and Re—
newal, Trans. Anne D. Williams (Brussels: American Studies
Center 1967), p. 12; Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the
Absurd (Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press 1973), pp.
266-267; Anne Paolucci, From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of
Edward Albee (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1972), p. 43; see also Charles R. Lyons, "Two Pro-
jections of the Isolation of the Human Soul: Brecht's Im
Dickicht der Staedt and Albee's The Zoo Story," Drama Survey,
4 (Summer 1965), p. 131.

 

 

 

 

 

5Ruby Cohn, Edward Albee (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1969), p. 10; Bigsby, Albee, p. 16; Robert
Bennett, "Tragic Vision in The Zoo Story," Modern Drama
20 (March, 1977), 58.

 

6Albee is quoted in an interview with Arthur Gelb as
explaining that "'The Zoo Story is neither nihilistic nor
pessimistic. My hero is not a beatnik and he is not insane.
He is over-sane. Though he dies, he passes on an awareness
of life to the other characters in the play; the play,
therefore, is obviously not a denial of life.'" Arthur
Gelb, "Dramatists Deny Nihilistic Trend," New York Times
15 February 1960, p. 23, col. 1.

7Edward Albee, The American Dream and The Zoo Story
(New York: Signet, 1963), p. 11. All page references are
from this edition and are indicated in the text.

 

8William H. Whyte, Jr., The Organization Man (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1956), p. 147.

 

9See, for instance, Russell Baker, "Has the Senate
Gone Grey Flannel?" New York Times Magazine, 19 July 1959,
p. 11.

10Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy
of Women's Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), PP.
23-24.

llCarl F. Keppler, The Literature of the Second Self
(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1972), p. 1, p. 10.
All page references are from this edition.

12C. G. Jung, Four Archetypes: Mother/Rebirth/Spirit/
Trickster, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton Uni—
verSity Press, Bollingen Series, 1959, 1969), p. 55.

13

 

 

 

 

 

Albee uses themes such as shamanism and initiation

 

 

156

in the tradition of Romanticism. For a discussion of the
connection between these, as well as an enlightening
definition of the shaman, see Ross Woodman, "Shaman, Poet,
and Failed Initiate: Reflections on Romanticism and Jungian
Psychology," Studies In Romanticism, 19 (Spring 1980),
51-82.

14The obvious application of ritual in The Zoo Story
is a reminder of drama's original link to ritual and
ritual's emphasis on the intermediary position of human
consciousness. The device also has an alienating effect,
reminding the audience it is witnessing mimetic, not real,
action. Thus, like Pirandello, Albee presents the dilemma
between unmitigated reality and illusion, between subjec-
tive participation and objective scrutiny, both structurally
and thematically. Jerry's obviously directorial role con-
tributes to the alienation effect; the theatrical ploy goes
back at least to Shakespear's Hamlet and is emphasized in
modern times by Brecht, Pirandello, and Wilder, among others.
In Albee's play the ploy is less obvious, the effect on the
audience more subliminal. Albee strikes a balance between
realistic and stylized actions, an aesthetic balance that
reflects the theme of balancing oppOSites.

15Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans.
Monika B. Vizedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1960), p. 65-115; see also Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth,
the Religious Meanings of Initiation in Human Culture, trans.
Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper and Row, 1958), p. x.

16Eliade, P. 62.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

l7Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Conscious-
ness, trans. R.F.C. Hull (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, Bollingen Series, 1954), p. 61. There have been
various other explanations of mythological animals. Joseph
Campbell in The Hero with A Thousand Faces writes of how the
hero "comes at last to the Lord of the Underworld. . .[who]
rushes against him, horribly bellowing; but if the shaman
is sufficiently skillful he can soothe the monster back
again with promises of luxurious offerings." Joseph
Henderson in The Wisdom of the Serpent calls the mythic
animals "sacred animals possessing secret wisdom the dreamer
wishes to learn" and representatives of the experience of
"submission to a power greater than the hero himself" (p.

 

 

 

 

51). C. G. Jung refers to them as "part of the instinctive
psyche" which has been lost or separated from consciousness
like a "'loss of soul'", Jung, p. 73.

18

Tony Tanner, City of Words: American Fiction, 1950—
1970 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 25.

l

 

9Quoted in Tanner, p. 29.

157
20 .

Tanner calls the self-consc1ous uses of language
(noticeable in Jerry), "foregrounding." According to
Tanner the stylistic device of foregrounding permeates
most of American literature. His thesis is that American
writers are overwhelmingly concerned with the tension be-
tween structure or artifice and reality. Though Tanner
does not refer to Albee in his book, his analysis that
"American writers seem from the first to have felt how
tenuous, arbitrary, and even illusory, are the verbal
constructs which mean call description of reality" can
apply to the playwright. We can see the tension in
Jerry's frustration with the inadequacy of definition.
Tanner, p. 27; see also, Robert 8. Wallace, "The Zoo
Story: Albee's Attack on Fiction," Modern Drama 16 (June
1973), 49-54; Arthur K. Oberg, "Edward Albee: His Language
and Imagination," Prairie Schooner, 40 (1966), 139-146.

21Joseph Campbell, The Hero with A Thousand Faces
(Princeton: ’Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 218.

22Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans.
Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: John Hopkins University
Press, 1977), p. 49.

 

 

23Friedrich Nietzche, "The Birth of Tragedy," in
Critical Theory Since Plato, ed., Hazard Adams (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971) first published in
1872 in The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals
(New York: Doubleday and Co., 1956), p. 638.

24Eric Robertson Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), p. 77.

 

Chapter II: Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

 

1See, for instance, Bigsby, Albee, p. 43; Wendell V.

Harris, "Morality, Absurdity, and Albee," Snuthwest Review,
49 (Summer 1964), 255; Lawrence Kingsley, "Reality and
Illusion: Continuity of a Theme in Albee," Educatipnal
Theatre Journal, 25 (March 1973), 71-79; Emil Roy, "Who's
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the Tradition," Bucknell
Review, 13-14 (March 1965), 29; Peter Wolfe, "The Social
Theatre of Edward Albee," Prairie Schooner, 39 (Fall 1965),
248-262.
2Ruby Cohn, Edward Albee, p. 24; Anne Paolucci, From
Tension to Tonic, p. 62; James P. Quinn, "Myth and Romance
in Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" The Arizona
Quarterly, 30 (Autumn 1974), 197-204.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

158

3Foster Hirsch, Who's Afraid of Edward Albee?
(Berkeley: Creative Arts Book Company, 1978), p. 33.

4Duane R. Carr, "St. George and the Snapdragons: the
influence of Unamuno on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
The Arizona Quarterly, 29 (Spring 1973), 10; Charlene M.
Taylor, "Coming of Age in New Carthage: Albee's Grownup
Children," Educational Tneatre Journal, 25 (March 1973),
53—65; Thomas P. Adler, "Albee's Who Afraid of Virginia
Woolf?: A Long Night's Journey into Day?“ Educational
Theatre Journal 25 (March 1973), 66-70.

5Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane (New York:
Harper and Row, 1959), pp.l95—l96.

6Edward Albee, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(New York: Atheneum, 1965), p. 7. All page references
are from this edition.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

7Tanner, City of Words, p. 20-21.

8Orley I. Holton, "Who'§_Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
and the Patterns of History," Educational Theatre Journal
25 (March 1973), 52. Holton links this to the name Albee
gives the college town: "In order for the illusion [of
the son] to be destroyed. . .a night of carnage and chaos
has been required. It is undoubtedly significant that the
name of the town. . .is New Carthage, with its echoes of
the struggle between two great powers, one destroying the
other in the interests of Empire, and then destroyed in
its turn."

 

 

 

9Girard,Violence and the Sacred, p. 8, 132.

 

Chapter III: Tiny Alice

 

1Edward Albee, The American Dream and the Zoo Story
(New York: Signet, 1963), p. 34.

2Brustein, Seasons of Discontent (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1965), p. 308; Wellworth, The Theatre of Protest
and Paradox, 2nd ed. (New York: New York University Press,
1972), p. 332; Paolucci, From Tension to Tonic: The Playn
of Edward Albee (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1972), p. 96; Cohn, Currents in Contemporary Drama
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), p. 249;
Baxandall, "The Theatre of Edward Albee," Tulane Drama
Review 9 (Summer 1965), 35; Ballew, "Who's Afraid of
Tiny Alice?" Georgia Review, 20 (1966), 299.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

159

3Clurman, The Naked Image (New York: Macmillan Co.,
1966), p. 24; Gassner, Dramatic Soundings (New York:
Crown Publishers, 1968), p. 602.

 

4Quoted in Alice Mandanis, "Symbol and Substance in
Tiny Alice," Modern Drama, 12 (May 1969), 92.

5Edward Albee, Tiny Alice (New York: Atheneum, 1965),
p. 138. All page references are from this edition.

6Carl Gustave Jung, "The Spiritual Problem of Modern
Man," from Civilization in Transition in The Collected Works,
Vol. 10, trans. R.F.C. Hull (New York: Bollingen Foundation
Inc., 1964), p. 75.

7Northrop Frye, The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays
(New York: Atheneum, 1968), P. 206. All page references
are from this edition.

8For a discussion of the theme of Tiny Alice in Oedipal
terms, see John W. Markson, "Tiny Alice: Edward Albee's
Negative Oedipal Enigma," American Imago, 23 (1966), 3-21.

9Maude Bodkin, Archetypal Patterns In Poetry (London:
Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 4-5.

10Jung, "The Syzygy: Anima and Animus," from Aion:
Researches Into the Phenomenology of the Self in The
Collected Works, Vol. 9, II, trans. R.F.C. Hull (New York:
Bollingen Foundation Inc., 1959), p. 11.

 

 

 

 

llMunroe, Schools of Psycho-Analytic Thought: An Expo-
sition, Critique, and Attempt at Integration (New York:
Henry Holt and Co., 1955), p. 542.

12

 

Aion, p. 13.

l3Aion, p. 20.

14Quoted in Henry Hewes, "The Tiny Alice Caper,"
Saturday Review, 48 (30 January 1965), 39.

15Aion, p. 21.

 

l6Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, W. S. Dell and
Gary F. Baynes, trans. (New York: Harcourt, Brace &
World, 1933), P- 123.

17

Michael E. Rutenberg, Edward Albee: Playwright in
Protest (New York: Avon, 1969), p. 227.

 

 

160

Conclusion

 

lRobert Brustein, The Theatre of Revolt (Boston:

Little, Brown and Company, 1962), p. 16.
2Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, trans.

Monika B. Vizedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1960), p. 20.

3Edward Albee, A Delicate Balance (New York: Atheneum,

1966), p. 162. All references are from this edition.

 

 

4Northrop Frye, A Study of English Romanticism (New
York: Random House, 1968), p. 18.

5Frye, English Romanticism, p. 43.

6Frye, English Romanticism, p. 8.

 

7Brustein, Theatre of Revolt, p. 367.

 

8Michael Grant, Myths of the Greeks and Romans
(Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1962), pp. 283,

 

 

 

281.
9Brustein, Seasons of Discontent, p. 308.
10Harrison, p. 111.
11Mircea Eliade, Birth and Rebirth, p. 19.
12

Frye, English Romanticism, p. 34.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

 

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Works on Albee

 

Adler, Thomas P. "Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?:
A Long Night's Journey into Day." Educational
Theatre Journal, 25 (March 1973), 66-70.

 

 

 

"Albee." New Yorker, 37 (25 March 1961), 30-2.

 

Albee, Edward. The American Dream and The Zoo Story. New
York: Signet, 1963.

 

A Delicate Balance. New York: Atheneum, 1966.

 

. The Lady From Dubuque. New York: Atheneum, 1980.

 

. Tiny Alice. New York: Atheneum, 1965.

 

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Atheneum, 1962.

 

 

Amacher, Richard E. Edward Albee. New York: Twayne,
1969.

 

and Margaret Rule. Edward Albee at Home and Abroad:
A Bibliography. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1973.

 

 

"Albee Returns to the Livingroom." New York Times, 27
January 1980, p. 5.

 

Atkinson, Brooks. "Theatre: A Double Bill off Broadway."
New York Times, 15 January 1960, p. 37.

 

Ballew, Leighton. "Who's Afraid of Tiny Alice?" Georgia
Review, 20 (1966), 292-99.

Baxandall, Lee. "The Theatre of Edward Albee." Tulane
Drama Review, 9, no. 4 (Summer 1965), 19-40.

 

Bennett, Robert B. "Tragic Vision in The Zoo Story."
Modern Drama, 20 (March 1977), 55-66.

 

 

Bigsby, C. W. E. Albee. London: Oliver and Boyd, 1969.

161

 

162

. Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Con-
temporary American Drama 1959-1966. London: Mac-
gibbon & Kee, 1967.

 

., ed. Edward Albee: A Collection of Critical Essays.
Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1974.

 

Brody, Jane. "The Case is Familiar, but the Theater is
Absurd." New York Times, 15 July 1967, p. 15.

 

Brustein, Robert. "Krapp and a Little Claptrap." New
Republic, 142 (22 February 1960), 21—2.

. Seasons of Discontent. 2nd ed. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1965.

 

Carr, Duane R. "St. George and the Snapdragons: The In-
fluence of Unamuno on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"
Arizona Quarterly, 29 (Spring 1973), 5-13.

 

 

Clurman, Harold. The Naked Image. New York: Macmillan,
1966.

 

Cohn, Ruby. Currents in Contemporary Drama. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1969.

 

Edward Albee. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1969.

 

Debusscher, Gilbert. Edward Albee: Tradition and Renewal.
Trans. Anne Williams. Brussels: Center for American
Studies, 1967.

 

Diehl, Digby. "Edward Albee Interviewed." Transatlantic
Review, 13 (Summer 1963), 57-72.

 

Downer, Alan 8., ed. American Drama and Its Critics: A
Collection of Critical Essays. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1965.

 

 

Esslin, Martin. Reflections: Essays on Modern Theatre.
New York: Doubleday, 1971.

 

. The Theatre of the Absurd. New York: Doubleday,
1961.

 

 

Flannagan, William. "The Art of the Theater IV: Edward
Albee, An Interview." Paris Review, 10 (Fall 1966),
92-121.

Freedman, Morris. American Drama in Social Context. Car-
bondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971.

 

 

163

Franzblau, Abraham N. "A Psychiatrist Looks at 'Tiny
Alice.'" Saturday Review, 48 (30 January 1965), 39.

 

Gardner, Paul. "'Tiny Alice' Mystifies Albee, Too." New
York Times, 21 January 1965, p. 22.

 

Gassner, John. Dramatic Soundings. New York: Crown Pub-
lishers, 1968.

 

. The Theatre in Our Times: A Survey of the Men,
Materials and Movements in the Modern Theatre. New
York: Crown Publishers, 1954.

 

 

 

 

Gelb, Arthur. "Dramatists Deny Nihilistic Trend." New
York Times, 15 February 1960, p. 23.

Goodman, Henry. "The New Dramatists: 4. Edward Albee."
Drama Survey, 2 (1962), 72-79.

Gould, Jean. "Edward Albee and the Current Scene."
In Modern American Playwrights. New York: Dodd,
Mead, 1966.

Harris, Wendell. "Morality, Absurdity, and Albee."
Southwest Review, 49 (1964), 249-256.

 

Hayman, Ronald. Edward Albee. New York: Frederick Ungar,
1973.

 

Hewes, Henry. "The Tiny Alice Caper." Saturday Review,
48 (30 January 1965), 38, 39, 65.

 

Hirsch, Foster. Who's Afraid of Edward Albee? Berkeley:
Creative Arts Books Co., 1978.

 

Holton, Orley I. "Who'sAfraid of Virginia Woolf? and the
Patterns of History." Educational Theatre Journal,
25 (March 1973), 46-52.

 

 

Kingsley, Lawrence. "Reality and Illusion: Continuity
of a Theme in Albee." Educational Theatre Journal, 25
(March 1973), 71-79.

 

Kolin, Philip C. "A Supplementary Edward Albee Checklist."
Serif, 19 (December 1971), 28-39.

Lahr, John. Acting Out America: Essays on Modern Theater.
New York: Penguin, 1972.

 

Lewis, Allen. American Plays and Playwrights of the Con-
temporary Theater. New York: Crown Publishers, 1968.

 

 

Lyons, Charles R. "Two Projections of the Isolation of the

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

164

Human Soul: Brecht's Tm_Dickicht der Staedte and
Albee's The Zoo Story." Drama Survey, 4 (Summer 1965),
121-138.

Mandanis, Alice. "Symbol and Substance in Tiny Alice."
Modern Drama, 12 (May 1969), 92-98.

Markson, John W. "Tiny Alice: Edward Albee's Negative
Oedipal Enigma." American Imago, 23 (1966), 3-21.

Marshall, Thomas F. "Edward Albee and the Nowhere Gener-
ation." New Mexico Quarterly Review, 8, no. 1 (1968),
39-47.

Morgan, Thomas B. "Angry Playwright in a Soft Spell."
Life, 26 May 1967, pp. 38—40.

 

 

 

Nelson, Gerald. "Edward Albee and His Well-Made Plays."
Tri-Quarterly, 5 (1966), 182-88.

Nilan, Mary M. "Albee's The Zoo Story: Alienated Man and
the Nature of Love." Modern Drama, 16 (June 1973),
55-59.

Oberg, Arthur K. "Edward Albee: His Language and Imagin-
ation." Prairie Schooner, 40 (1966), 139-46.

 

Paolucci, Anne. From Tension to Tonic: The Plays of
Edward Albee. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univer-
sity Press, 1972.

 

 

Porter, Thomas E. Myth and Modern American Drama. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1969.

 

Quinn, James P. "Myth and Romance in Albee's Who's Afraid
of Virginia Woolf?" Arizona Quarterly, 30 (Autumn
1974), 197—204.

 

 

 

Roy, Emil. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and the Tradi-
tion." Bucknell Review, 13 (March 1965), 27-36.

 

 

Rutenberg, Michael E. Edward Albee: Playwright in Protest.
New York: Avon, Discus Books, 1969.

 

"Talk with the Author." Newsweek, 29 October 1962, pp. 52-
53.

Taylor, Charlene M. "Coming of Age in New Carthage:
Albee's Grown-up Children." Educational Theatre
Journal, 25 (March 1973), 53-65.

 

Wallace, Robert S. "The Zoo Story: Albee's Attack on
Fiction." Modern Drama, 16 (June 1973), 49-54.

 

 

 

 

165

Weales, Gerald. American Drama Since World War II. New
York: Harcourt, Brace & WOrld, 1962.

 

Wellworth, George. The Theatre of Protest and Paradox.
New York: New York University Press, I964.

 

 

 

Wolfe, Peter. "The Social Theatre of Edward Albee."
Praire Schooner, 39 (Fall 1965), 248-262.

Vos, Nelvin. "The Process of Dying in the Plays of Edward
Albee." Educational Theatre Journal, 25 (March 1973),
80-85.

Zimbardo, Rose A. "Symbolism and Naturalism in Edward

Albee's The Zoo Story." Twentieth Century Literature,
8 (April 1962), 10-17.

 

 

GENERAL REFERENCES

Baker, Russell. "Has the Senate Gone Gray Flannel?" New
York Times Magazine, 19 July 1959, p. 11, 38.

 

Barrett, William. Irrational Man: A Study in Existential
Philosophy. New York: Doubleday, 1958.

 

 

Bodkin, Maud. Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. London:
Oxford University Press, 1934.

 

Bolgan, Anne C. What the Thunder Really Said: A Retro-
spective Essay on the Making of the Wasteland. London:
Queens University Press, 1973.

 

 

Brustein, Robert. The Theatre of Revolt: An Approach to
Modern Drama. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1964.

 

 

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.

 

Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy
of Women's Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.

 

 

Dinnerstein, Dorothy. The Mermaid and the Minotaur:
Sexual Arrangements and the Human Malaise. New York:
Harper and Row, 1977.

 

 

Dodds, Eric Robertson. The Greeks and the Irrational.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951.

 

Eliade, Mircea. Birth and Rebirth: The Religious Meanings
of Initiation in Human Culture. Trans. Willard R.

 

 

166
Trask. New York: Harper and Row, 1958.
. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of
Religion. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York:

Harper and Row, 1959.

"Fertility Rites and Sorcery in a New Guinea Village."
National Geographic, 152 (July 1977), 124-146.

 

Frye, Northrop. The Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays.
New York: Atheneum, 1968.

 

. A Study of English Romanticism. New York: Random
House, 1968.

 

 

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Trans. Patrick
Gregory. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press,
1977.

 

Grant, Michael. Myths of the Greeks and Romans. Cleve-
land: The World Publishing Co., 1962.

 

Harrison, Jane Ellen. Ancient Art and Ritual. Cambridge:
Henry Holt & Co., 1913.

 

Heller, Erick. The Artist's Journey into the Interior and
Other Essays. New York: Vintage Books, Random House,
1959.

 

 

Henderson, Joseph and Maude Oakes. The Wisdom of the Ser-
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New York: G. Braziller, 1963.

 

 

Jung, Carl G. Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of
the Self, in The Collected Works, Vol. 9, Trans.
R.F.C. Hull. New York: Bollingen Foundation, Inc.,
1959.

 

 

. Four Archetypes: Mother/ Rebirth/ Spirit/ Trick-
ster. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1959, 1969.

 

 

. Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Trans. W. S. Dell
and Cary F. Baynes. New York: Harcourt Brace &
World, 1933.

 

. "The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man." from
Civilization in Transition in The Collected Works,
Vol. 10. Trans. R.F.C. Hull. New York: Bollingen
Foundation Inc., 1964.

 

 

Keppler, Carl. The Literature of the Second Self. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1972.

 

167

Munroe, Ruth. Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought: An
Exposition, Critique, and Attempt at Integration.
New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1955.

Neumann, Erich. The Origins and History of Consciousness.
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Press, Bollingen Series 42, 1954.

Nietzche, Friedrich. "The Birth of Tragedy." In Critical
Theory Since Plato. Ed. Hazard Adams. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.

 

Paolucci, Anne. "Pirandello and the Waiting Stage of the
Absurd (With Some Observations on a New 'Critical
language')." Modern Drama, 23 (March 1980), 102-111.

 

Tanner, Tony. City of Words: American Fiction, 1950-1970.
New York: Harper and Row, 1971.

 

Whyte, William H., Jr. The Organization Man. New York:
Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956.

 

Woodman, Ross. "Shaman, Poet, and Failed Initiate:
Reflections on Romanticism and Jungian Psychology."
Studies in Romanticism, 19 (Spring 1980), 51-82.

 

van Gennep, Arnold. The Rites of Passage. Trans.
Monika B. Vizedom. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1960.

 

S

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