New Beginnings in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a disturbing and powerful work. Ironically, it is disturbing and powerful for many of the same reasons. As the audience watches George and Martha tear savagely at each other with the knives of hurled words, sharpened on pain and aimed to draw blood, the way in which these two relentlessly go at each other is awful to see, yet strangely familiar. Like wounded animals, they strike out at those closest to them, and reminds one of scenes witnessed as a child between screaming parents from a cracked door when one is supposed to be in bed.
In this age of psychoanalytic jargon, George and Martha are the quintessentially dysfunctional couple. Yet, with all their problems, Albee reveals that there is a positive core of feeling that unites these two troubled people and that helps them look beyond their self-created hell. The truth of their relationship is exposed layer by layer as the play progresses, like the peeling of an onion, and though the pattern of this truth appears vague at first, with each cycle of revelation, the pattern becomes more distinct, and the picture is fully revealed in the final, cathartic scene. One of the most consistent themes of the play is the question of George and Martha's "child," and all that this child, and children in general, symbolizes for them. The "child" seems not only a desire for fecundity within their relationship, but also a projection through which they express many of their personal desires, needs, and problems, and, in this context, the child's subsequent "death" signifies a milestone in their understanding of their marriage and of themselves. By the end of play, after much suffering and flagellation, George and Martha appear ready to deal with their lives in a new way.
George and Martha have a history. They are also emotionally trapped by this history, especially that of their respective childhoods. As a consequence, both are plagued by low self-image and self-doubt. The audience learns of this history slowly, in bits and pieces. Martha tells Nick and Honey in Act 1 how she lost her mother early and grew up very close to her father. She was married briefly, but her father had the marriage annulled. She returned to live with her father after college, and met and fell in love with George.
What is McCarthyism? It is the public onslaught of an individual or an individual’s character by means of baseless and uncorroborated charges, basically the repudiation of a person’s reputation. Joe McCarthy was the Wisconsin senator that evoked this era of fear and paranoia by inflaming the current fear of world domination by the Communist party that enveloped the Nation. He did this by announcing that he had discovered “57 cases of individuals who would appear to be either card carrying members or certainly loyal to the Communist Party, but who nevertheless are still helping to shape our foreign policy.” (McCarthy, 1950, p. 2), later the amount of implicated individuals rose to 205. These accusations launched McCarthy into the national spotlight where he then began his smear campaign against many well-known Americans, which was commonly referred to as “witch-hunts”. Because of McCarthy’s actions, up to 12, people lots their jobs hundreds were incarcerated. He then turned his sights to book banning because he claimed there were 30,000 books written by all shades of Communists. After his lists were made public all were removed from the Overseas Library Program. But he was not finished yet, he then assailed members of the entertainment business. He had writers and actors brought to trial. Many of these people were blacklisted and worse, all without a single shred of evidence. When people spoke out against McCarthy they were thrown onto the communist train, until enough people came forward to rebuke McCarthy’s unprecedented tactics. At this point he fell from political power into dishonor on December 2, 1954. This ended the McCarthy era, but not the atmosphere of paranoia that lingers in the nation today.
Joseph McCarthy’s negative influence first manifested itself through his ambition to gain political power. He used his senatorial position to litigate persons who were thought to be part of the Communist Party. Examples this would be the targeting of the Hollywood Ten. These were citizens in the film industry who were cited for contempt of Congress after refusing to answer the questions of McCarthy. The author of The Crucible, Arthur Miller, was even cited for contempt of Congress when he refused to identify writers that attended communist meetings. He went on to explain how the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, was deceitfully informing citizens that the Soviet way of controlling culture could be successfully exported to America. According to professor and historian Regin Schmidt, when McCarthyism was at its height, only 1% of the public was worried about the internal threat of Communism. This fact shows how manipulative and cynical the government was when fueling the fire of the anti-communist movement.
From 1949 to 1954, the citizens of the United States were overcome with terror of the possibility of being accused of Communism. Joseph McCarthy was an anti-communist zealot obsessed with rooting out perceived Communist spies and activities in the United States. Common opinion showed that McCarthy was a bully and a liar. The Senate condemned him for it because at the time, there was no evidence to support him. However, in recent years, evidence has come out that confirms the basis of what McCarthy said. There were Communists infiltrating America, and it seemed McCarthy was the only one who actively trying to find it. McCarthy governed the U.S. people with fear for three year, was censored, and now is being proven correct, despite people trying to hide the truth.
This paper will argue that post-secondary education is the most effective method of rehabilitation in American prisons. Education is not only cost-effective; it also has proven long-lasting effects on recidivism, employment, and personal growth. The majority of offenders in the American prison system are non-violent perpetrators, many of whom lack the resources for post-secondary education. By providing easily accessible education, offenders will have greater job prospects upon release and an improved sense of morality in connection to social values. Such a system must be slowly integrated into both federal and state prisons nation-wide. Implementation will be assisted by the use of electronic surveillance to monitor inmates, providing them a safer environment and access to the internet for research. In addition to this, online university programs will be used by the inmates to enable studying at recognized institutions. Grants, government-funded loans and public sponsorship are all necessary to provide the monetary funds needed to offer low-income offenders the opportunity to improve their quality of life through education. Access to post-secondary education is essential to improve the lives of non-violent offenders in the American justice system.
George shows extreme devotion and loyalty to Lennie by serving as Lennie’s “guardian angel”. Ever since Lennie's Aunt Clara had passed away, George has been caring for Lennie, providing Lennie with daily essentials including food and companionship, trying to give Lennie a life filled with honest labor, despite Lennie’s disadvantage. Most people would view Lennie as a mentally-ill person, and some may even take advantage of him. Instead, George takes Lennie’s life into his own hands and protects Lennie by watching over him. After all, they are both interdependent with one another; they both need one another. Lennie cannot think for himself and therefore depends on George’s intelligence to make good choices for him, allowing him to survive. On the other hand, George is a small man and requires Le...
My research concluded that incarceration is not the solution that we need in order to help criminal offenders gain back entry into their communities. The solution is to lay out strategies that focus on rehabilitation and re-engagement in prosocial activities. Give
Virginia Woolf uses many images in the Between the Acts. Like the other novels I read in the class, the images in the Between the Acts cannot be separated with the story development, and the images themselves construct the story in the book by dismantling the conventional expectation for the novel. However, Woolf uses common and conventional words and images with an experimental way in this novel. This novel constructs the images and the representation with their conventional words and actions of the characters. I think Woof explores how the communal use of the words like songs and cliché makes another meaning or another reversion in their daily life here. The characters in the novel are in the between representative words and their intentions which are overlapped into the words or erased and hidden by the words. The acts in the title of the novel are not only the acts in the play, but also the motion which the characters make and expect, and the motion of the natural sounds and the silence which the people cannot control the interruption from them.
Many changes are made inside the justice system, but very few have damaged the integrity of the system and the futures of citizens and prisoners. Although the story seems to focus more on lockdown, Hopkins clearly identifies the damaging change from rehabilitation in prisons to a strategy of locking up and containing the prisoners. To the writer, and furthermore the reader, the adjustment represented a failure to value lives. “More than 600,000- about 3 times what it was when I entered prison, sixteen years ago. In the resulting expansion of the nation’s prison systems, authorities have tended to dispense with much of the rehabilitative programming once prevalent in America’s penal institutions” (Hopkins 157). The new blueprint to lock every offender in prison for extended sentencing leads to an influx in incarcerated people. With each new person
The written text, The Veldt, identifies the theme of fate. Parents, George and Lydia, believe the correct way to parenting is to give your children everything to their hearts contempt. In this case, it is a highly expensive, high tech nursery. Designed to project anything the children are thinking. Unable to know better because of the way they had been taught to think, children Peter and Wendy begin to think volatile thoughts. They decide to kill their parents, this is foreshadowed by the series of strange events that begin happening towards the middle of the story. This starts off when the children begin to constantly think of Africa, projecting it into the nursery. Upon arrival, George and Lydia begin finding old possessions inside of the
Woolf, Virginia. “A Mark on the Wall.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Twentieth Century. 7th ed. Vol. 2C. Ed M.H. Abrams. New York: Norton, 2000. 2143-2148
In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy had a frenzied leadership in America. It all started when he claimed that there were many avowed Communist in the American government. There was no proof, but anyone who criticised McCarthy’s claims were accused of being communists themselves, people were claimed to be ’Communist Sympathisers’ and were put on trial and even executed, even those who escaped death or prison were blacklisted and their whole lives were ruined socially and through their careers, this was known as the period of McCarthyism.
Woolf’s pathos to begin the story paints a picture in readers minds of what the
Virginia Woolf can be considered one of the most influential authors of her time, she has helped pave the way for the female gender for generations, and possibly generations to come. Using her feminist approach to get her voice heard, Virginia Woolf was able to get her point across in a powerful yet meaningful way. My research of Virginia Woolf involved looking at her life to determine why she turned out the way she did, and why she wrote the way she wrote.
Although it may not seem like a major problem to most people in the United States, prisons are becoming overcrowded, expensive to maintain and have little to no effect on the moral discipline of inmates. The current prison system is extremely inefficient and the purpose of prisons has been completely forgotten. According to Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the primary purpose of prisons is to punish, to protect, and to rehabilitate. Not only is there an increase in prisoners, but there is a rise in the number of repeat offenders. Alternatives such as counseling, drug rehabilitation, education, job training and victim restitution must be better enforced and organized. People do not understand the severity of the problem mainly because
All over America, crime is on the rise. Every day, every minute, and even every second someone will commit a crime. Now, I invite you to consider that a crime is taking place as you read this paper. "The fraction of the population in the State and Federal prison has increased in every single year for the last 34 years and the rate for imprisonment today is now five times higher than in 1972"(Russell, 2009). Considering that rate along crime is a serious act. These crimes range from robbery, rape, kidnapping, identity theft, abuse, trafficking, assault, and murder. Crime is a major social problem in the United States. While the correctional system was designed to protect society from offenders it also serves two specific functions. First it can serve as a tool for punishing the offender. This involves making the offender pay for his/her crime while serving time in a correctional facility. On the other hand it can serve as a place to rehabilitate the offender as preparation to be successful as they renter society. The U.S correctional system is a quite controversial subject that leads to questions such as how does our correctional system punish offenders? How does our correctional system rehabilitate offenders? Which method is more effective in reducing crime punishment or rehabilitation? Our correctional system has several ways to punish and rehabilitate offenders.