Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

The title of the play is referenced in the first moments, when Martha sings, “Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?” (12) to the tune of the song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” from Disney’s adaptation of The Three Little Pigs. This title is reminiscent of Eugène Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano (1950), an important play in the absurdist movement. Of the title, Ionesco said, “One of the reasons [for the] title is that no prima donna, with or without hair, appears in the play. This detail should suffice.” Similarly, there is no discussion of Virginia Woolf in the play, and none of the characters express interest in literature. Albee saw the phrase scrawled on a mirror in soap at a bar in New York, making the title the literary version of found art. And at the time, it struck him as “a rather typical university intellectual joke.”

The most common explanation for the title joke is that Virginia Woolf wrote in a stream-of-consciousness style that leaves little space to hide behind the illusions or pretenses that hold the characters’ lives together. The joke comes up at the faculty party from which

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