“She’s discontent.”: The Nuclear Family and The Cold War in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Edward Albee wrote his famous play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, during the peak of the Cold War. There is much symbolism of patriotism in Albee’s play, from George and Martha’s names alluding to George Washington and his wife Martha and George’s speech against altering chromosomes could be seen as a metaphor for the popular fear that communism would take over the world: “There will be a certain… loss of liberty...diversity will no longer be the goal. Cultures and races will eventually vanish...the ants will take over the world” (Albee 73). In her book Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, Elaine Tyler May explores the direct link between “the suburban American dream and the international dynamics of the cold war” (153). In this book, she reveals that the idea of the “nuclear family” and the “American dream” were government tactics created to sway international voters away from the Communist party and to keep Americans “preoccupied with procurement” as a “safeguard against the threat of class warfare and communism” (157). My theory is that the big bad Virginia Woolf's metaphor in Albee’s play is infact the illusion of the American dream and displays this predominantly through the baby symbolism, focusing specifically on Martha.

“Inside of my body there are fires”: Fire and Ice Imagery in Anaïs Nin’s “Birth”

Anaïs Nin’s short story “Birth” is a part of a larger work titled Under a Glass Bell, and Other Stories, which, ultimately, relates back to The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin. In this version of Nin’s Diary, in the volume labeled Incest, Nin goes into detail about the horrors of delivering a stillborn child, the father of whom is never clearly stated. In the introduction to Nin in the Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, it states that Nin intended to “capture the living moments of her emotional reactions to experience” (588), and she is more than successful in doing so within this short piece through language and imagery. More specifically, by utilizing the contrasting images of both fire and ice throughout the story, Nin has successfully captured the contradictory emotions of a woman who both loves and hates the thing she has created.