[Delusion Female Boxing Vol.03
Betty Neyhart
Edward Albee's 1962 play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is a landmark American play for the challenges it presented to conventional theater, both thematically and dramaturgically. In this essay, I argue that recognizing the disability presence in Albee's play as embodied in the work's references to eugenics is also important to a fuller understanding of the play's revolutionary nature. Through his references to pronatalism as well as genetic engineering and sterilization, Albee invokes the presence of those disabled bodies upon whose oppression the regulation of normalcy over the twentieth-century has rested. In this way, we can come to see that disability does not simply metaphorize the gender oppression and middle-class complacency the play attacks, but is itself also recognized and historicized. Reading Albee's play in this way further suggests the importance of re-reading canonical drama through the lens of disability studies.
While his work has been lauded for its consistent challenges to ossified notions of identity, gender, sexuality, and class, Edward Albee is more than likely not the first modern American playwright to come to mind when one is seeking to reclaim a disability presence in drama. Certainly, his work defies genre classification, containing elements of the realist and absurd; over the course of his career he has challenged the notion of a dramaturgical normate, a process most visibly initiated in 1962 with his first full-length play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? And just as ableism signals discomfort with the body's contingency, so too did the fragmentation of form in Who's Afraid instill a similar anxiety in critics:
Albee's play was troubling not only because of his characters' uninhibited behaviour, but because it blurred and destabilised the familiar categorical boundaries between Broadway's staple diet of domestic naturalism and the overt experimentalism of the new avant garde. (Bottoms, Who's Afraid 82)
That many debates about Who's Afraid center around the nature and extent of Albee's critiques of gender, sexuality, and the middle-class values of the bourgeoisie is well-established.1 Indeed, from his first play produced off-Broadway, The Zoo Story (1960) forward, Albee's plays consistently asserted this direct challenge to the normate as embodied in American individualism, the ideal of the American family, the notion of the American dream, and compulsory heteronormativity. Still, for all that his plays are, by his own definition, mirrors that he holds up to society to say "'This is who you are, this is how you behave. If you don't like it, why don't you change?'," no one has considered what his work might be asking us to consider about and through its disability presence (Savran 16).
As with so much of art, disability becomes more apparent once you begin to look for it. And so even though he comes at it slant, never focusing on it as the central subject, a reader can discern a disability presence in the early, explosive works that bookend Who's Afraid, plays such as The Zoo Story, The Death of Bessie Smith (1961), and The Ballad of the Sad Caf (1963; adapted from the novel by Carson McCullers). In these, for example, one might find schizophrenia, alcoholism, dwarfism, and disability. Disability functions quite predictably, alternately expressing alienation and otherness, creating a sharp contrast to the normate, and operating as narrative prosthesis; there are perfect bodies that are satirized, freaks to be stared at, and wounded psyches that howl in their isolation. In The Zoo Story, for example, the main character, Jerry, expresses his antipathy for his obese, alcoholic landlady, as well as her diseased, disfigured dog. His alienation manifesting itself as seeming insanity, Jerry has a kinship with these reviled figures, one he alternately recognizes and denies. In Albee's adaptation of The Ballad of the Sad Caf, the extraordinary bodies of mannish Amelia and her short-statured cousin are likewise portrayed as expressing alienation, but as Stephen Bottoms points out, Albee is able to call attention to an audience's own voyeuristic tendencies to stare at, and objectify, difference:
In The Death of Bessie Smith, a wheelchair-using father is made to symbolize a desiccated, racist patriarchy; likewise, African-American singer Bessie Smith's body, mortally wounded in a car crash, is fragmented by play's end, and she becomes the literal embodiment of the body politic, being torn apart by seismic shifts in race relations. While most of these uses of disability are meant to create sympathy for the marginalized characters to whom they refer, it is important to note that the binaries of disabled/nondisabled, normate/nonnormate are still preserved, and that disability still can carry negative metaphoric weight. Or in other words, we may be chastened for our treatment of Jerry, Amelia, or Bessie Smith, but each play still depends on their ostracized presence to make its essential point, even if it does critique ways of looking and judging.
By the time Who's Afraid appeared, Albee had already created a stir on the theatrical scene with his one-act plays The American Dream and The Zoo Story; if his short plays were volleys across the bow of American complacency, Who's Afraid scored a direct hit. For 664 performances, Albee attacked the middle-class hypocrisy of those audience members who flocked in droves to see the production. The play focuses on George and Martha, a middle-aged couple at a small New England college. On the night of the play's action, they host a younger couple, Nick and Honey, for an evening of "fun and games." Over a nightcap that turns into a long night's journey into day, Martha tries to rouse George's jealousy while Nick flirts with Martha, the college president's daughter, in hopes of advancing his career. Nick and Honey become an audience to George and Martha as the latter alternately savage one another in their customary games of wordplay, insults, and intellectual one-upsmanship. But these games take a new, more insidious turn on this evening, as George begins to strip away the life-lies that have permeated his relationship with Martha, the principal one being the imaginary son they have created as a private game between them, countering and ostensibly filling the "lack" of their childlessness. Trying to torment George, Martha tells Nick and Honey about the son as though he existed, and for the first time, the game crosses over into the realm of the real. When this happens, George realizes the line between illusion and reality has become too dangerously blurred, and responds by figuratively killing off their son, thus ending the charade.
One way it is possible to see the play loosely aligned with disability theory is in its relentless savaging of bourgeois normalcy. Albee's play roundly attacks the WASP culture from which he came and which he ultimately fled as a young gay man, and several of the symbolic elements in the play speak to how stridently normalcy is enforced in the world of George and Martha, particularly with regards to gender. George and Martha, as many have noted, are named for the ur-American mother and father, George and Martha Washington. Similarly, we are posited at a small school in New England; the geographic locale and the liberal arts institution, once the sites of political and intellectual innovation, have now devolved into places for the policing of the boundaries of knowledge and identity. Or in short, the liberal arts are now anything but in New Carthage, itself named for an ancient city once splendid, now long destroyed. George, a history professor, literally is ancient history; anything he tries to create beyond those supposedly natural boundaries of discipline or genre (for example, the sensational novel he writes) is stifled by his father-in-law, the patriarch of the play who is the president of the college. More specifically, George is bound by strictures of masculinity to which he can't measure up; he was once humiliated in a boxing match with Martha and regularly is upbraided by her for being an ineffectual "flop," although we later learn she does, in fact, love him desperately. Nick is the full embodiment of the normate; he is young, intelligent, athletic, and handsome, and represents the latest generation of ambitious young male professors prepared to do whatever they can to reach the top, including sleeping with the college president's married daughter.
Martha, too, has been bound by gender roles. Her femininity is labeled excessive and braying, and her first marriage to a gardener, a Lady Chatterley-like expression of her own sexuality, was promptly annulled by her father. In a world where every one of her appetites is deemed excessive and cannot be channeled, where her husband is deemed effeminate, where she cannot please her father, where she cannot bear a child to fulfill the socially-prescribed role of mother, Martha's imagined son with George fills those perceived lacks. And Martha's game of what George calls "hump the hostess," her move to make him jealous by seducing Nick, is itself another way for Martha to find meaning. This pursuit of Nick-as-the-normate is accomplished with heavy irony, and not a slight sense of the ridiculous as it invokes two strangely contradictory, but equally banal narratives that result. She inserts herself into a hackneyed ritual of one-upsmanship as the thing-to-be-pursued by Nick, the latest in a long line of academic careerists who have crossed her bedroom threshold on the way up. She also manipulates Nick as the living manifestation of the son she and George were never able to have, just as picture-perfect as the boy she describes and whose fate they war over.
Critics have explored the extent to which this critique of gender norms circulates throughout the play through its various kinds of game-playing; as Bette Mandl confirms, "we are witnessing a deadly serious game, a gender game" (26). Bonnie Blumenthal Finkelstein argues that Albee
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