The Set of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
For a play as drastically depressing and oppressive as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, the set needs to augment the mood as much as possible. Albee’s play calls for several props, and all of these have to be provided, but more than that, the set needs to look as real as possible, to show that these people are not vastly different from the rest of us. And because in that fact the true horror of the play resides the set is all-important. Luckily, the performance featured a realistic, intricate, close set.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is set in an ordinary 1950s New England suburban house. Nothing is overly expensive or glamorous. But in plays, designers typically want things to catch the eye, even though in this instance such would ruin the mood. The set designers captured this mood perfectly. Nothing is anachronistic. The set even lacks a coherent color scheme; but why would there be? In most houses, walls are painted and papered, carpet is put down, but, twenty years later, these same walls are decorated with paintings and the floors are covered with rugs and furniture that would not have even been considered in the inception. The set of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? shows this hodgepodge perfectly. Above the set, the eaves of the house, and the roof of another house are clearly seen, providing, again, a voyeuristic view of the play’s events. Such realism creates a believable mood for the play, heightening the effect that these things are actually happening (heightened still more with Albee’s back-and-forth style of dialog), leaving the viewer acting as a voyeur, but also identifying closely with the characters.
The realism in the set design is even more ...
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...h a crowded area (set close to the edge of the stage for an even greater close appearance), and seeing them not bump into one another is uncomfortable to watch, simply because of the slight inherent feeling of wrongness, rather than a good-natured and cozy feeling, that is supported by the caustic dialogue.
The set of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? is perfectly designed for the play. The realism and intricacy of the scenery and props attempt to raise the fourth wall as much as possible, heightening the reality of the performance, while the claustrophobic closeness of everything tears the wall down in tiny shreds, giving a feel of unease to the play. In any modern play, unlike Shakespeare’s plays, there is a struggle to present the play in the accurate time, and the set designers of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? have done this flawlessly and accurately.
The book of “Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence” is written by Carol Berkin, a professor of American history at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She has been considered as an expert on the subject of women's history in colonial America. Through her research, Professor Berkin has provided vivid interpretations of seventeenth and eighteenth-century women as active participants in the creation of their societies in addition to the existing stories regarding the American Revolution.
Women played an important role throughout American history. They were known in the Civil War to be doing various acts. Women had enlisted in the army as soldiers, spied and gathered information about the enemy, took care of wounded soldiers, traveled and helped within the military camps and even took over their husbands’ businesses. There were many things that they did to contribute to the war just as much as the men did. Even though it was dangerous they still helped whether it was on the battlefield, in a hospital, or at home, they still tried to help out the best they could.
One of the first jarring uses of such harsh, blunt diction is in her third entry when she talks about the pattern and says the lines “suddenly commit suicide” (Gilman). She then goes on to discuss the color, calling it “repellent” and “revolting” (Gilman). She uses words similar to this throughout every entry: “atrocious”, “dreadfully depressing”, “constant irritant”, “torturing”, and “infuriating” are just a few examples (Gilman). Each one of those examples described the wallpaper. Gilman’s staggering word choice allows the reader to be able to understand and even begin to feel the same way her unnamed narrator does. She creates a disturbingly ominous mood which rattles the reader to the core. The reader doesn’t understand fully what is happening, receiving only hints from a very limited viewpoint, until the end when the pieces suddenly begin to fit together. Even then, the reader is left with an unsettling feeling and an uncertainty of what had just happened. Not only does Gilman’s word choice create a distinct feeling in the reader, but it characterizes the narrator as well. The narrator is supposedly writing all of this in a journal which means the words are her own, not the author’s. Creating an environment using such blunt, harsh language, forms an image in the reader’s mind of what type of person the narrator is. By making the narrator use this
Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights share similarities in many aspects, perhaps most plainly seen in the plots: just as Clarissa marries Richard rather than Peter Walsh in order to secure a comfortable life for herself, Catherine chooses Edgar Linton over Heathcliff in an attempt to wrest both herself and Heathcliff from the squalid lifestyle of Wuthering Heights. However, these two novels also overlap in thematic elements in that both are concerned with the opposing forces of civilization or order and chaos or madness. The recurring image of the house is an important symbol used to illustrate both authors’ order versus chaos themes. Though Woolf and Bronte use the house as a symbol in very different ways, the existing similarities create striking resonances between the two novels at certain critical scenes.
Firstly I would set this play in the 21st century so that a modern audience could relate to it. Algernon, one of the main characters in the play, would live in a luxury apartment in the centre of London, over looking the River Thames. His apartment would have a minimalist theme to it and would be influenced by aesthetic; for example he would have a piece of abstract art on the wall for no reason other than that he thinks it looks nice.
One of the most prominent rhetorical devices Virginia Woolf uses throughout both pieces is imagery. She uses imagery in order to make the ideas and situations become more personal. An even more important way she used imagery was to express the differenced throughout her experiences at both colleges. In the first passage with the men’s college, Woolf uses very descriptive and colorful imagery to describe her surroundings. Describing the “soles, sunk in a deep dish…spread on a counterpane of the whitest cream…” and the wineglasses “flushed yellow and flushed crimson,” the author shows the lavish style that those in the men’s college lived in. With her second piece, Woolf described the place as plain, describing the food as very normal and borin...
Woolf’s pathos to begin the story paints a picture in readers minds of what the
Ellet, E. F., and Lincoln Diamant. Revolutionary Women in the War for American Independence: A One-volume Revised Edition of Elizabeth Ellet's 1848 Landmark Series. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998.
Before the Revolutionary war many felt women has a mental and moral weakness. Women 's part in the war gave all the proof needed to show their ability to think clearly and make good ethical decisions. A woman 's formal education was essential to their transformation. Some believed that a “formal education would create masculine women, unattractive in their appearance, neglect in their duties to husbands and family” (Berkin, 2005, 153). No longer did women need to value beauty over
When looking at two nineteenth century works of change for two females in an American society, Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Stephen Crane come to mind. A feminist socialist and a realist novelist capture moments that make their readers rethink life and the world surrounding. Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” was first published in 1892, about a white middle-class woman who was confined to an upstairs room by her husband and doctor, the room’s wallpaper imprisons her and as well as liberates herself when she tears the wallpaper off at the end of the story. On the other hand, Crane’s 1893 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets is the realist account of a New York girl and her trials of growing up with an alcoholic mother and slum life world. The imagery in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets uses color in unconventional ways by embedding color in their narratives to symbolize the opposite of their common meanings, allowing these colors to represent unique associations; to support their thematic concerns of emotional, mental and societal challenges throughout their stories; offering their reader's the opportunity to question the conventionality of both gender and social systems.
The house and property are seen as positive only when the narrator first describes them. Gilman uses the imagery to create an air of suspense and insinuates the narrator’s coming fall into insanity. The setting of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in large part, leads to the narrator’s collapse. Almost instantly, the narrator’s already unstable mind perceives a ghostliness that begins to set her even more on edge.
Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh are defined by their memories. Virginia Woolf creates their characters through the memories they share, and indeed fabricates their very identities from these mutual experiences. Mrs. Dalloway creates a unique tapestry of time and memory, interweaving past and present, memory and dream. The past is the key to the future, and indeed for these two characters the past creates the future, shaping them into the people they are on the June day described by Woolf. Peter and Clarissa’s memories of the days spent at Bourton have a profound effect on them both and are still very much a part of them. These images of their younger selves are not broad, all-encompassing mental pictures, but rather the bits and pieces of life that create personality and identity. Peter remembers various idiosyncracies about Clarissa, and she does the same about him. They remember each other by “the colours, salts, tones of existence,” the very essence that makes human beings original and unique: the fabric of their true identities (30).
Upon moving in to her home she is captivated, enthralled with the luscious garden, stunning greenhouse and well crafted colonial estate. This was a place she fantasized about, qualifying it as a home in which she seemed comfortable and free. These thoughts don’t last for long, however, when she is prescribed bed rest. She begins to think that the wallpaper, or someone in the wallpaper is watching her making her feel crazy. She finally abandons her positivity towards what now can be considered her husband’s home, and only labels negative features of the home. For example, the narrator rants about the wallpaper being, “the strangest yellow…wallpaper! It makes me think of… foul, bad yellow things” (Gilman). One can only imagine the mental torture that the narrator is experiencing, staring at the lifeless, repulsive yellow hue of ripping
Clurman, Harold. "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Edward Albee: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. C.W.E. Bigsby. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall 1975. 76-79
Woolf divided this thought into three categories: what women are like throughout history, women and the fiction they write, and women and the fiction written about them. When one thinks of women and fiction, what they think of; Woolf tried to answer this question through the discovery of the female within literature in her writing. Virginia Woolf Throughout her life Virginia Woolf became increasingly interested in the topic of women and fiction, which is highly reflected in her writing. To understand her piece, A Room of One’s Own Room, her reader must understand her.