《Who27s Afraid of Virginia Woolf》人物分析

1、Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf? -CharactersFour Characters George Martha Nick Honey GeorgeGeorge is an associate professor of history at a college in the New England town of New Carthage. At 46, he should probably be further along in his career, but through a lack of ambition, coupled with a bad rela

2、tionship with the college president (his father-in-law), he has become bogged down in the history department. Hes been married to Martha, six years older than he, for 23 years, and their marriage has degenerated into an ongoing battle of words and psychological games to get the upper hand.George is

3、intelligent and witty, and has a keen ability to use words. In fact, he might be an excellent dinner companion if his basic energy had not been dissipated by Marthas constant belittling of him. He fights back by using his wits, but she knows where to wound him at his most vulnerable points- his fail

4、ures, his physical weakness, his passivity.Virtually nothing is told us of Georges (or the other characters) early life. George relates a story that he claims to be autobiographical, about a trip to a gin mill (saloon) during the Prohibition era, when he was a teenager. Whatever interpretation is ac

5、cepted, however, its evident that George suffers from a great deal of conflict about his parents, and seems to harbor guilt and/or resentment about them.Through most of the play Martha gets the better of George, beating him down psychologically. She is skillful at dishing out punishment, and George

6、accepts it. He turns the tables by abusing their guests in ways similar to Marthas treatment of him, by chiding them for their weaknesses and revealing their hidden secrets.In the end, however, George proves himself stronger than Martha. His decision to kill their imaginary child- a fantasy he and M

7、artha have shared privately can be viewed as an act of heroism or as an act of revenge. Whichever approach you favor, it is clear that George is in control by the end of the play.Martha Martha is the daughter of the college president, and one of the great conflicts of her life is that while she reve

8、res her father, he seems to have no great love for her. Intelligent, well-read, and perceptive, Martha hides her intellectual gifts beneath a brassy（厚臉皮的）, aggressive（好斗的）and vulgar（通俗的 ）exterior(外型）. She tries to dominate and control her husband for two reasons: she resents his inability to fill he

9、r fathers role, both professionally and psychologically; and George seems to enjoy the role of victim to her torturer. Martha battles almost continuously with George as an act of attempted communication. Faced with lives filled with self-loathing, they punish each other at the same time they wish to

10、 connect. Both drink heavily, and Martha seduces a number of younger men. A self-styled earth mother, Martha admits that these encounters are unsatisfying; the only man who has given her true satisfaction is George. But its one of the tragic ironies of the play that their mutual need can never be ex

11、pressed to each other. Only when George successfully ends their fantasy of having a child does Martha admit a vulnerability and a fear of the future that she has not revealed before, but what lies ahead for her and George remains ambiguous.One of George and Marthas guests, Nick is young , attractive

12、, and physically fit. A biology professor, new to the faculty, Nick seems the ideal man, but he eventually reveals himself to have a hollow center. He is amoral, shallow, coldly ambitious. His plans to get ahead at the college include sleeping with pertinent faculty wives.His willingness to be seduc

13、ed by Martha, despite the presence of his wife and George, is evidence of his cynicism and lack of morals. But underneath the macho exterior is a weak and crass human being. He is impotent in his sexual encounter with Martha, and he admits to having married Honey because he thought she was pregnant

14、and because her father was wealthy. Nick Nicks profession as a biologist is contrasted to Georges as a historian. Biology in the play is viewed as the science whose practitioners are determined to toy with human genetics in order to create a race of perfect human beings. Nick therefore suggests the

15、results of these experiments, the wave of the future- attractive on the outside, empty within. Nick is the one character who comes to understand that George and Marthas son is an imaginary creation, and his half hearted attempt to help (Id like to.) suggests to some that the evening spent with Georg

16、e and Martha has changed him. But Albee gives no further clues as to what the future holds for Nick and Honey.Honey Nicks wife, Honey, 26, is, on the surface, sweet, gentle, eager to make a good impression, and prudish. She is also unable to handle her liquor, so her contributions to the conversatio

17、n are minor at best. Her mindlessness turns out to reveal an inability to cope with reality.Honey shows herself on one level to be the eternal child. She defers to her husband, is easily offended, gives in to frequent bouts of vomiting. Yet, in the course of the play she also reveals complex emotion

18、s. The daughter of a moderately famous preacher who left her a sizable amount of money, Honey was apparently pregnant when she married Nick, but the pregnancy turned out to be a false alarm. Since then she has skillfully concealed from Nick her efforts to prevent a pregnancy. Her use of secret birth control d