Reality versus Illusion in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Essay

“...fear can't hurt you any more than a dream.” Quote William Golding in Lord of Flies. William Golding argues that the fear of the unknown gives a high disadvantage to certain boys who are easily frightened. Golding’s opinion of fear is expressed in Lord of the Flies, relating to the nightmares he had as a child and his fear of abuse from his parents. In our society, the less courageous people have more life struggles and do not have as many experiences. I believe this novel proves that fear holds us back, but in reality, it will not hurt us.

     The plays, The Glass Menagerie and A Raisin in the Sun, deal with the love, honor, and respect of family. In The Glass Menagerie, Amanda, the caring but overbearing and over protective mother, wants to be taken care of, but in A Raisin in the Sun, Mama, as she is known, is the overseer of the family. The prospective of the plays identify that we have family members, like Amanda, as overprotective, or like Mama, as overseers. I am going to give a contrast of the mothers in the plays.

Power Struggles are very common is many marriages. In Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, by Edward Albee, the relationship or marriage between George and Martha is based in power. The power struggle between George and Martha has become the basis of their relationship. Their love has turned into hate. The only connection they have is through their insults and the series of games they play. The power struggle between George and Martha develops is reveled and is resolved through out the play.

In the words of Sigmund Freud, “The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.” The legendary psychologist saw dreams as an avenue to study one’s underlying motives for action. Similarly, in literature one finds striking significance from the illusions of protagonists that often predict the nature of one’s psyche. Two such examples present themselves in Blanche, from Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire, and the grandmother, from Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find. The former tale follows a lady without a home who finds herself reliant on her belligerent and bestial brother-in-law. The latter traces a family’s road trip South and their encounter with a wanted fugitive. Both Blanche and the grandmother find themselves tethered to their idealistic and often times hypocritical fantasies which signify their underlying mental instability and foreshadow their eventual ruinations. Williams and O’Connor examine their protagonists’ delusions through gender, clothing, and nostalgia.

When we try to chase our dreams, we end up in our own diminutive lonely world. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck, has taught readers that the American dream can only ever be accomplished through hard work and determination. More times than others, we are distracted by the dream itself, and don’t chase the reality, which can then lead to high expectations, and without hard determination, that can then failure. In the end, we have been lonely for so long, chasing a dream, that when reality hits us, we become isolated and lonely. For George and Lennie, they have each other, until the American dream seemed too hard to chase.

In Virginia Woolf’s feminist essay “A Room of One’s Own,” Woolf argues that “a woman must have money and a room of her own” (16) if she is to write fiction of any merit. The point as she develops it is a perceptive one, and far more layered and various in its implications than it might at first seem. But I wonder if perhaps Woolf did not really tap the full power of her thesis. She recognized the necessity of the writer’s financial independence to the birth of great writing, but she failed to discover the true relationship to great writing of another freedom; for just as economic freedom allows one to inhabit a physical space---a room of one’s own---so does mental freedom allow one to inhabit one’s own mind and body “incandescent and

The play shows the audiences what the children had been through in the residential school. Whether it is physical, psychological, or sexual abuse, each had made a big influence in their life. The native women in the play who claims herself as Johnny accuses George of sexual abuse back in the day when he is teaching at the residential school she attended. Thought the play did not clearly state whether George did or did not do the thing she said, but it surely put on a focus point of child abuse was one of the main issues in the school. The woman real name was not revealed until near the end of the story. The purpose of this part of the play was to show the audiences of how residential school

The Contrast of Virginia Woolf and Alice Walker After reading the four essays assigned to this sequence, it becomes interesting to contrast two author's points of view on the same subject. Reading one professional writer's rewriting of a portion of another professional writer's essay brings out many of each of their characteristics and views. Also, the difference in writing styles could be drastic, or slight. Nevertheless, the writers display how versatile the English language can be.

Reality is the state of the world of how it really is, whereas an illusion is erroneous interpretation of reality. Illusions often derail people from their sanity, as they cause them to inadvertently live lives in accordance to false beliefs. As a result, the outcomes for these people, and the people around them, are often atrocious. The theme of illusion versus reality is excessively demonstrated in Macbeth, a play written by William Shakespeare, and also in The Crucible, a play written by Arthur Miller. In both plays, the characters that lived illusive lives ultimately ended up leaving behind a trail of ignominy, grief, and death. In Macbeth, it is Macbeth and Lady Macbeth who consistently misinterpret reality as a world that

There are several possible stresses in Woolf’s life that may be contributing to her depression. One is the stress and isolation Woolf feels living in the suburb of Richmond. Although her husband states that they made to move in an attempt to relieve Woolf’s depression, Woolf herself states that if given the choice between Richmond and death, she would choose death. Another possible stressor in Woolf’s life is the task of writing a novel. Yet another stressor could be difficulties in Woolf’s interpersonal relationships. Woolf expresses that “even crazy people like to be asked [to parties].” Whether Woolf’s interpersonal difficulties contribute to her depression or are a result of it is unclear, however. An additional stressor may be the incestuous relationship Woolf has with her sister. We may not speculate upon a history of abuse in Woolf’s childhood but the nature of Woolf’s relationship with her sister goes against cultural norms of acceptable sexual behaviour at the time, being both incestuous and homosexual. In addition, although some people may not feel distressed at the existence of extramarital feelings for someone, many do. This abnormal relationship may be distressing to

The battle fought between George and Martha is played with the weapons that each sex has perfected. In American Plays and Playwrights of the Contemporary Theater, Lewis notes "Martha has instinct for the right wound; her tongue for the cutting word and her body for the most humiliating insult"(89). George has a greater vision of cruelty. When threatened by Martha, to cheat on him with one of the guests, George pretends not to care in order to upset his wife."I'm necking with one of the guests" "Good...good. You go right on" "Good?" "Yes, good... good for you, why don't you go back to your necking and stop bothering me? I want to read" (Albee,171,2). At the end of the play, George triumphs in the battle by using what he knows will hurt Martha the most; their son. Amacher states in Edward Albee, "All of the games, in terms of Albee's purpose, relate directly or indirectly to George and Martha's attempts to hurt each other"(93).

Of the many concepts Virginia Woolf has made in her works, the idea of “moments of being” in her autobiography, A Sketch of the Past, is of special interest because of its possible application to other works of literature which focus on the composition of life. After reading the fictitious Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson, one could wonder how Woolf’s concept is evident or not so evident in Johnson’s narration to test the concept’s applicability. It seems that Johnson’s moments of clarity or “being” are reminiscent of Woolf’s own “moments of being” in the way their senses interacted with the memories and the manner with which those memories present themselves, particularly when Woolf hears of Valpy’s suicide and

Throughout Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf uses the characters Clarissa and Lucrezia not only to further the plot of the story but to make a profound statement about the role of wives in both society and their marriages. While these women are subjected to differing experiences in their marriages, there is one common thread that unites each of their marriages: oppression. These women drive the story of Mrs. Dalloway and provide meaning and reason in the lives of the men in the story; however, these women are slowly but surely forced to forsake their own ambitions in order to act in accordance with the social standards set in place by marriage for women. For women outside of many modern cultures, marriage has been a necessity for a woman’s safety and security, and it required her to give up her freedom and passions and subjected her to an oppressed lifestyle. Ultimately, through the wives in Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf communicates that marriage is an institution where in women are forced to suppress their individual desires and passions in order to serve their husband and further his own ambitions as first priority.

In her essay “In Search of a Room of One’s Own” Virginia Woolf used Shakespeare’s sister as a metaphor to explain the position of women in Elizabethan era. Since author finds it difficult to find any trace of women in the Elizabethan era, she creates a fictional character through imagination, and to feel situations that the women in Elizabethan society would have had to go through. Woolf compares fiction to a “spider’s web” (520) that permeates life “at all four corners” (520). Through this metaphor, she personifies narratives of women suffering as a spider’s web that cling to our material reality. For Woolf, our lived stories are a part of this web which can be changed, destroyed or, re-spin with our imagination. In my paper, I argue that Wolfe uses the metaphor of a spider’s web as a heuristic device to make a case for literacy analysis and fiction as tools for exercising narrative agency and challenging stories that deny us representation in this world. To illustrate this, she creates an imaginative character, named Judith Shakespeare, to surface the gender inequality in the Elizabethan era. For this purpose, she not only writes a new chapter of Elizabethan history that centers the perspective of the women, but she also gives voice to women of that era who, like Judith her main character, were silenced and delegitimized by the spider’s web of their time.

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse has been described as a Künstlerroman or artist novel. It traces the development of an artist, much like the Bildungsroman traced the development of a child into adulthood (Daughtery 148). The main artist of the novel is Lily Briscoe. As the novel progresses, Lily comes to terms with art and with life. To the Lighthouse is, in many ways, a quest novel (Daughter 148). This is evidenced by the title, which includes the preposition “to”. Nearly all the characters in the novels have a goal which they are aiming for. For example, in Part I, James Ramsay wants nothing but else but to go on an expedition to the lighthouse. Mr. Ramsay muses about how to reach the letter “R”. Lily sets sail with her canvas and her