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ANIKÓ LUKÁCS HONEY (To GEORGE, brightly) I did not know until just a minute ago that you had a son. GEORGE (Wheeling, as if struck from behind) WHAT? HONEY A son! I hadn’t known. [...] GEORGE (To HONEY) She told you about him? HONEY (Flustered) Well, yes. Well, I mean... GEORGE (Nailing it down) She told you about him.” Following the arrival of Nick and Honey in Act I — despite George’s two warnings: “Just don’t start on the bit, that’s all.”, “Just don’t shoot your mouth off ... about ... you-know-what.”*4 (or maybe just because of these: “MARTHA (really angered) Yeah? Well, I'll start in on the kid if I want to.”, “(Surprisingly vehement) TII talk about any goddamn thing I want to, George!”)”> — Martha breaks the most basic system-establishing rule: silence. George, as a result, rightly (in the context of our analysis) calls his wife “goddamn destructive... ,6 indicating already in this early stage of the play, that the foundation of the structure of their life has lost its validity, and has thus become dysfunctional. His wife senses almost immediately the resulting uncertainty, however the transformative question is asked a lot later in the play: “Truth and illusion. Who knows the difference, eh, toots? Eh?””” The answer to the question is the shift into liminality, the aim of which is George’s desire to end the lies in their life, that is the illusion they have created by concealing from themselves the fact that they are social outcasts as a childless couple that does not meet the normative expectations of society (nor, perhaps, their own). Their longing for a blonde-haired child — “MARTHA: And | had wanted a child ... oh, I wanted a child.”** — and their fabrication, has nevertheless created for them the opportunity to identify with the role of the parent — although perhaps not in New Carthage’s eyes — and at the same time with an apparent idea of integration. The invention of Jimmy, is, on the one hand, an opportunity for George and Martha to define themselves as mother and father, filling the void that the absence of children created in their marriage but, also, in addition to the desire of fulfilling these roles, the idea of a son also means protection, not only from threats of the outside world but also in “the mire of this vile, crushing marriage”: 3 Edward Albee: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, New York, New American Library, 1983, 44-45. 4 Ibid., 18, 29. 25 Ibid., 18, 29. 26 Ibid., 46. 27 Ibid., 201. 28 Ibid., 218. 29 Tbid., 227. * 122°
