Virginia Woolf Essay

In the decades after the WWI there was this concept of the ‘American Dream’ that most people tried to achieve; having a career, owning your own home, and having a lot of money. The social norms consisted of a family with two parents and a child. Moreover, the father had to be the breadwinner and the mother was a stay-at-home mom. Because of the concept of the ‘American Dream’ both Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee’s plays criticize the American ideals about relationships and family life.

The American Dream is a sought after idea sold to Americans and immigrants alike. It promises the opportunity to create a better future for oneself. So long as said individual works hard it promises a happy ending. Arthur Miller reveals the reality of the American Dream in his play Death of a Salesman through the life of Willy Loman and his family. Willy represents the primary target audience as a working class man providing for his family. His pride causes him to be two steps behind in his life-long quest to achieve the American Dream and his family inherit his failures in their own individual quests.

The American Dream is like a beautiful yet poisonous mushroom. Its colorful appearance lures humans and animals to consume it, but the outcome results in death if left untreated. The American Dream lures people into thinking that their dream and their social class can be changed with hard work and determination. However, the results are deadly in The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald with all that tried. Through the use of imagery, Fitzgerald characterizes Jay Gatsby as ambitious, naive, and selfish, demonstrating how time and a corrupt, rigid and selfish society contributes to the non-existence of the American Dream.

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.

American politician Marco Rubio once said,“The American dream is a term that is often misunderstood. It isn’t really about becoming rich or famous. It is about things much simpler and more fundamental than that” (brainyquote.com). This concept is true in the novels The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger, and The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald. In both novels, the protagonists (Holden and Gatsby) are pushed by society to live up to the stereotypical ‘American dream’. Both Holden and Gatsby have high and unrealistic expectations of themselves. They both share fond memories and their different ideas of the American dream; but in the end, they realize their ideas of them are just fantasies. After realising the truth behind the American dream, it leads them to their tragic end. The American dream is not beneficial because it pushes people in society to be something they are not. Both stories are tragic because the pursuit of the dream, and Holden’s individuality.

It was one of the many saddest events that occurred in the history of the world. In the following paragraphs you will be reading a summary or a “movie review”, what ever might call it, about Anne Frank. At the end of the review I will write about my opinion to the movie.

For many years, many people have thrown around the term the American Dream. The American Dream can be defined as the perfect life. By achieving this dream, it can be said that an individual has it all. However, for a majority of people, achieving the American Dream is one of the hardest things in life. For some, it seems impossible to achieve. This was very relevant in the time period known as the Roaring 20’s (1920s-1930s). An author that emerges from this time is a man named F. Scoot Fitzgerald. His main thought on this idea was that it was a very complex thing. LuElla Putnam states in her article, “American Dream”, that, “The Great Gatsby depicts the lure of the American Dream as being a destructive force rather than a beneficial one” (Putnam para. 4). In his writings, he likes to compare and contrast the different lifestyles of people trying to accomplish this goal by using their backgrounds, setting the stage, and the interactions between people. F. Scott Fitzgerald shows in The Great Gatsby

A blue house, red shutters, and a white picket fence with a border collie. Three kids are running around in the front lawn up on a hilltop. That is what the American dream is right? The American dream is truly in the eye of the beholder. One might think that the American dream is an apartment in downtown Los Angeles, but others might want the smell of fresh cut grass in a small suburb. It’s whatever the person who is working for it wants it to be. As we can see in the play, all of the main characters might be striving for an American dream, but none of them are striving for their same American dream.

Each character in the novel has their own interpretation of the ‘American Dream – the pursuit of happiness’ as they all lack happiness due to the

Flaws within the Perception of the American Dream The Modernist era provided an inordinate fortuity for authors as well as other composers of art to express pieces conveying ambiguous ideologies and meanings. A representation of such ambiguous work is conveyed through Edward Albee and his contemporary American theatre piece, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. According to Dr. S. C. Mundra, one of the main characteristics of absurdism is “Reality is unbearable unless relieved by dreams and illusions.” This is evident in Albee’s life as well as expressed through his American play.

Edward Albee was an American playwright producer and director. He was born on March 12, 1928 probably in Virginia. He was adopted at an early age, which influenced him to write about characters that are different. His writings were characterized by realism; fidelity to life as perceived and experienced, and were considered to be absurd dramas. Albee, in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, portrays a primitive sex struggle between a middle aged couple; the relationship between George and Martha is acted out in a series of games in which one sex dominates the other through unapparent love, weapons that each have mastered, and the most hurtful insult, the revealing of the hidden truth.

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

Our main focus in this time period was Edward Albee’s The American Dream. To have background information before reading it, we read “Theories of Humor and Comedy,” “Theater of the Absurd,” and “Existentialism 101”. Through these articles we learned about the Theater of the Absurd and Existentialism, and how Albee’s play could be classified as this. Articles that more deeply analyze Albee’s play really focus on making arguments about the lack of meaning, which is why people are willing to classify it under Theater of the Absurd. At first, I thought this was a very unique way of analyzing something as it questions the things that we just accept to be true in life, but I can definitely see where these authors were coming from and why they started to think about literary works in this completely different fashion, as they wondered if anything in our lives actually had meaning. With all this information to lead to more thorough discussions, we read The American Dream, which definitely was not the easiest thing to understand after the first read. At first glance, Albee’s work seemed like a strange play with bizarre actions and details

Albee describes his work as “an examination of the American Scene, an attack on the substitution of artificial for real values in our society, a condemnation of complacency, cruelty, and emasculation and vacuity, a stand against the fiction that everything in this slipping land of ours is peachy-keen.”

That meaning is most obviously associated with the Young Man, since he is specifically identified as the American Dream by the dialogue of the play. The less obvious--but more important--meaning is embodied in Grandma. The goal of this essay will be to clarify how Grandma's character and experience bear most of the meaning of the American Dream that Albee wants to communicate in this play. As we shall see, that meaning fits squarely within the mainstream American humanist tradition stretching back to the early, idealistic years of the American republic.