Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? AS & A Level Literature: Model Examination Questions

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Cambridge AS and A Level Literature: Modal Examination Questions.

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee.

The model questions that follow are aimed at representing the style, command words, and assessment objectives of AS and A Level English Literature examinations. They are sorted by the type of question to enable you to train the whole set of skills you need. Every question has a guide on how to go about it, and the chosen questions contain indicative material to show the level required in top-band answers.

Part A: Essay Questions (Open Text)

These questions will ask you to construct a formal essay using your understanding of the entire play. They are usually marked highly and test AO1 (critical analysis), AO2 (understanding of dramatic methods), AO3 (contextual awareness) and AO4 (evaluation).

Question 1 :The actual theme of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is not a marriage but a culture. Discuss this view of the play.

Discuss (write about in detail in an organized manner)

Approach guidance:

• Take into account the critique of the American Dream, academic life, and domestic ideals of the 1950s in the play.
• Discuss the ways in which the marriage of George and Martha reflects the general cultural fears: the cold war, the ineffectiveness of communication, the barrenness of material achievement.
• Examine how the play eventually handles George and Martha as people or as members of a society in crisis.
• Add some contextual details about post-war America, the Theatre of the Absurd, and the biography of Albee.

Indicative content (top-band):

A good essay would contend that the play purposely confuses the personal and the cultural. George (History) and Nick (Biology) represent a collision of humanistic ideals and scientific aspiration that reacts to the 1960s fears of progress and purpose. The son is not only a matrimonial fiction but a parody of the obligatory nuclear family that was the hallmark of post-war American identity. The environment, a university campus, which is supposed to be a source of enlightenment, turns into a place of corruption, nepotism, and moral bankruptcy. The home, as Albee employs it, reveals the decay behind the veil of the American Dream, and the marriage is a synecdoche of a culture that has lost the ability to connect with each other.

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Question 2 :Examine how Albee employs the character of Nick and Honey to bring out the main themes of the play.

Analyse (to examine carefully to reveal meaning, to distinguish elements and how they relate to each other)

Approach guidance:

• Discuss the symbolic character of Nick as Biology against the History of George.
• Examine the role of Honey as an active spectator whose secrets disclose the play with illusion, reproduction and performance of happiness.
• Think of how the younger couple are a reflection of George and Martha: they are still on the same destructive path, albeit earlier.
• Pay attention to certain episodes: the game Get the Guests, the hysterical pregnancy of Honey, the speech about eugenics by Nick.

Indicative content (top-band):

Nick and Honey are not just incidental visitors, they are dramatic catalysts and thematic foils. Nick is an ambition of the future, a morally adaptable vision that Albee approaches with a grain of salt--his wish to breed a better race resonates with the worst tendencies of twentieth-century thought. The female body as a place of anxiety and control is represented by Honey, with her silliness and hysterical pregnancy; her fear of giving birth resembles the childlessness of Martha and the preoccupation of the play with reproduction as a biological and symbolic process. The combination of them enables Albee to investigate how the malfunctions of the marriage between George and Martha are not isolated but structural, and they are likely to be reproduced in the following generation. The ending with the younger couple leaving them behind, they must go, leaves George and Martha alone, without their audience, implying that the enactment of American domesticity can only continue in the presence of observers.

Question 3 :The games in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? are a means of evading reality, not facing it. To what extent do you agree?

How much do you agree? (evaluative; must make a balanced judgement)

Approach guidance:

• Name the games: Humiliate the Host, Get the Guests, Hump the Hostess, Bringing up the Baby.
• Take into consideration the argument that the games enable the characters to express aggression in a ritual way, thereby avoiding real confrontation.
• Take the counter-argument that the games build up until they compel the demolition of the central illusion, and confrontation is inevitable.
• Examine the last game, the one George specifically refers to as a game, but which is in fact a violent exorcism-Bringing Up the Baby.
• End with a subtle verdict.

Indicative content (top-band):

The games play a paradoxical role. First, they are avoidance mechanisms: calling cruelty fun and games, George and Martha are able to deny that they are killing one another. The rules of both games offer a framework in which there is chaos, and the marriage can proceed without ever discussing its underlying emptiness. But the structure of the play, three acts, which shift between Fun and Games and The Exorcism, demonstrates that games can transform. The last game that George plays is a game in itself; it kills the common fiction that has kept the marriage alive. The exorcism is a challenge which the games have postponed and facilitated. The characters no longer are playing by the end: they are revealed. So, the games, although, at first, they serve as avoidance, end up being the means whereby the truth, or at least the lack of illusion, is revealed.

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Question 4 : Discuss the meaning of the title Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in connection with how the play treats the subjects of fear and illusion.

Comment (give an informed opinion)

Approach guidance:

• Discuss the intertextual layers of the title (the work of Virginia Woolf, the parody of the Disney song).
• Compare the way the question in the title is repeated in the play and the way the meaning of the question changes.
• Discuss how the play addresses the issue of fear: what does the characters fear (childlessness, failure, meaninglessness, the loss of illusion)
• Think about the last dialogue: George singing the song, the confession of Martha, I am.
• Discuss whether the title is eventually a question, a challenge or a confession.

Indicative content (top-band):

The title is a compression masterpiece. On the one hand, it mocks childish fear, (Who is afraid of the big bad wolf?), and makes it an intellectual, existential anxiety. To fear Virginia Woolf is to be frightened by the uncompromising candor, the modernist insistence on subjective truth, and tragic sense of mortality with which her work is imbued. The characters in the play act fearless, as Martha bravado, George cynical, shake in fear of the only thing that could help them: the truth. The song is a litmus test: in Act I it is a drunken taunt; in Act III it is a loving, almost liturgical dialogue. When Martha says I am, she is finally able to acknowledge what the play has demonstrated throughout, that we are all afraid of living without illusions. The title then becomes a question to which the play provides no easy answer. It is a call to look at personal fears.

Passage‑Based Questions

These questions present an extract from the play and require close analysis, often combined with links to the whole text. They test AO1 (analysis), AO2 (dramatic methods), and the ability to connect detail to wider themes.

Question 5 – Act I Extract (opening of “Fun and Games”)

Read the following extract from the beginning of Act I. George and Martha have just returned home.

MARTHA: What a dump! Hey, what’s that from? “What a dump!”
GEORGE: Beyond the Horizon.
MARTHA: What?
GEORGE: It’s from Beyond the Horizon.
MARTHA: I … oh. Another of your lousy plays.
GEORGE: It was a lousy play when O’Neill wrote it.
MARTHA: Well, I didn’t ask you to quote plays at me. I just asked you what it was from. If you have to go around showing off your education, at least get it right.
GEORGE: I did get it right.
MARTHA: Well, you’re so smart, then you tell me what I was quoting.
GEORGE: I don’t know.
MARTHA: It was from The Philadelphia Story.
GEORGE: No. That wasn’t The Philadelphia Story. “What a dump!” was Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest, and then it was in Beyond the Horizon, and then it was in a lot of other lousy plays. But it wasn’t in The Philadelphia Story.
MARTHA: Well, whatever it was, it was a dumb thing to say.

(a) Discuss the ways in which Albee sets the key issues of the play in this opening dialogue.

(b) How does this extract prefigure the character of the relationship between George and Martha that will develop throughout the entire play?

Approach guidance (a):

• Pay attention to language as a weapon: Martha insists that George find the quotation, and rejects his knowledge.
• The theme of failure and artistic inadequacy is brought in with the mention of lousy plays.
• The competitive reference to cultural artefacts determines the issue of intellectual pretension and the acting of education in the play.
• Pay attention to the power dynamics: social confidence of Martha (daughter of the college president) and academic insecurity of George.

Approach guidance (b):

• Relate to the entire play: this demand/dismissal pattern is repeated in each act.
• The son has not been mentioned yet, however, the theme of a shared fiction (the son) is anticipated by the argument over what actually happened in the quotation.
• The play is cyclical, as the argument is circular (they start where they started).
• The last thing George says, a dumb thing to say, is his surrender, a trend that will turn only in Act III.

Question 6 – Act III Extract (the exorcism)

Read the following extract from Act III, after George has announced that their son is dead.

GEORGE: He was … our son.
MARTHA: NO!
GEORGE: He was our son. The car …
MARTHA: NO!
GEORGE: It was a matter of … the car … he … he … he … the steering wheel … an accident … he was killed …
MARTHA: NO! YOU CAN’T DO THAT! YOU CAN’T DECIDE THESE THINGS!
GEORGE: It was an accident. These things happen.
MARTHA: LIAR! LIAR! LIAR!
GEORGE: It was an accident. We must try to control ourselves.
MARTHA: YOU’RE A LIAR! THERE IS NO … THERE IS NO … THERE IS NO … AWWWWWWWWW! (She breaks down, sobbing.)
GEORGE (to MARTHA): It will be better that way.
MARTHA: (sobbing): No …
GEORGE: It will be better.

(a) Discuss the dramatic techniques employed by Albee in this passage to create the urgency of the situation.

(b) Explain the importance of this scene to the play and its treatment of illusion and reality.

Approach guidance (a):

• Language: incantatory effect through repetition (“NO!”, “LIAR!”, It will be better) is achieved.
• Stage directions: The breakdown of Martha is well planned; the control of George is in opposition to the breakdown of Martha.
• Pacing: The disjointed syntax of George (he … he … he … the steering wheel) is reminiscent of trauma, but it is coldly exact.
• The shift in power is supported by the opposition between the calmness of George (We must try to control ourselves) and the hysteria of Martha.

Approach guidance (b):

• The scene is the culmination of the illusion/reality theme: George demolishes the main fiction which has been supporting their marriage.
• Denial by Martha, YOU CAN’T DO THAT! YOU CAN’T decide these things!--discloses that it was a joint decision, a conspiracy, to have the son.
• It will be better by George is ambiguous: is he saying that the marriage will be healthier, or is he saying that illusion is a comfort he is cruelly depriving him of?
• Connection to the end of the play: the deception is destroyed, but it does not plunge the characters into reality but exposes them to a state of vulnerability.

Comparative / Thematic Questions.

These questions can be used in papers where you have to compare texts. They challenge the skill to make associations between literary texts.

Question 7: Contrast how Edward Albee in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and [another dramatist/novelist of your choice] examine the failure of communication between people.

(Otherwise, when a prescribed text is provided, this question would be customized. Here it is introduced as a model which can be transferred.)

Approach guidance:

• In the case of Albee, pay attention to the weaponisation of language, circular dialogue and the idea of pathological communication.
• Find an appropriate comparative text (e.g., The Homecoming by Harold Pinter, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, a novel by Ian McEwan, e.g., Enduring Love).
• Arrange the essay in a thematic way, discussing the techniques, contexts, and impacts of each text.
• Sum up by comparing the more pessimistic perspective of human connection in the two texts.

Exam Conditions Practice Plans

These skeleton plans can be used to train writing essays within a time limit.

Plan : Marriage and Culture.

Introduction: Conjecture that the personal and cultural cannot be separated; the marriage is a microcosm of American anxieties.

• Point 1: George and Nick as History vs. Science-cultural conflict within characters.
• Point 2: The symbol of the compulsory nuclear family, the son, is an illusion produced by social pressure.
• Point 3: The university environment- institutions of higher learning corrupted.
• Point 4: Language as cultural symptom- inability to communicate is a symptom of post-war alienation.

Conclusion: The play is a domestic drama and a cultural critique, and its strength is in its refusal to make the distinctions between the two.

Plan : Games and Truth.

Introduction: Accept the paradox- games prevent and facilitate confrontation.

• Point 1: Fun and Games-games as a mechanism of avoidance; rules are full of chaos.
• Point 2: Escalation- every game increases stakes, compelling revelation (the secrets of Nick, the pregnancy of Honey).
• Point 3: “Bringing Up the Baby”-game that kills the game; George employs the shape of a game to break the illusion.
• Point 4: Ending no more games; the characters are abandoned without ritual.

Conclusion: Games are an essential diversion on the way to the truth; Albee implies that only by the annihilation of play, reality can be confronted.

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