Albee Literary Analysis Power and Research Paper

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In her brief sexual encounter with Nick, Martha is the embodiment of this predicament. By seducing him, she is clearly trying to have an impact on George's emotions and establish her voluptuous femininity in the face of Honey's thin-hipped but younger presence. But George refuses to provide Martha with the rage she desires, and the revelation of her non-existent son erases any superior femininity that she was trying to establish.

In the end, Martha's confused gender identity can be best understood through the play's title. Virginia Woolf was an icon for the feminist movement, though she died 20 years before its inception. She was a writer whose female characters challenged the feminine norm, and whose own sense of womanhood refused to conform to societal standards. Though she was married, she too was childless and she famously explored her sexuality with other women. Mental instability and deep depression caused her to commit suicide in her late fifties, but she remained for the intelligentsia a symbol of resistance to societal gender norms.

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Though Albee never made explicit why he chose the name of his play, it seems clear that both Martha and George are afraid of Virginia Woolf -- that is, they are afraid of the implications of leaving behind traditional gender roles, even as they find themselves unable to fulfill them. Though Martha tries to find fulfillment in a Woolf-like assumption of masculine characteristics, Kundert- Gibbs points out that she is in fact "betrayed by these strengths, trapped in society's eye between proper 'male' and 'female' behaviors" (230). Ultimately, Albee's play does not give a clear moral about the proper gender roles in a marriage, only a sense of the violence and heartbreak that accompany revolutionary change.

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