Search for Identity in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Abstract

Searching for the identity refers to the collection of event and orientation various goals at explaining, establishing, and defending a state of political, economical, cultural, and social rights for women. Feminism has had a massive influence on American writers. Women’s expression of their freedom and position with men has been echoing  for centuries in America. Edward Albee, the twentieth-century American playwright dramatizes the twentieth century American womanhood on his writings in various stages. In his play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Albee portrays female characters as homemakers and their counterparts as fighters, similarly the Victorian ideology of women: “Man for the field and woman for the hearth:/Man for the sword and for the needle she” Martha is shut up within the web of the American Dream ignoring her duties and responsibilities of woman assigned by Nature. Throughout the play, she readily hold inequality between sexes and conforms herself to male expectations, first, to her father to fulfill the American Dream and then to her husband to keep body and soul together. The present article is a discussion of Anti-feminist acts in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. It is divided into three sections. The first section deliberates upon definitions, concepts and dimensions of anti-feminism. The second section reflects anti-feminist acts in Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and the third section deals with the conclusion.