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CREATION OF CRUELTY
MARTHA And as he grew ... and as he grew... oh! so wise! ... he walked evenly
between us ... (She spreads her hands) ... ahand out to each of us for
what we could offer by way of support, affection, teaching, even love
... and these hands, still, to hold us off a bit, for mutual protection,
to protect us from George’s ... weakness ... and my ... necessary
greater strength ... to protect himself... and us.*°
Martha’s moving confession in Act III further enhances the significance of
imagining the child by making it clear that their son does not simply have the
function of filling a void, merely to provide them with the sensation of having
a child, and it is also not just a means of defense against external expectations,
but a primary component of the structure that determined their previous lives:
“the one light in all this hopeless ... darkness ... our SON.”*!
“CRUEL GAMES”
Disclosure of the secret, however, leads the couple to liminality, depriving
them of their position in their previous system but not yet nominating a new
one they can take. Liminality is therefore a form of insecurity, and, according
to Turner, one of its main features is that the participants have to go through
serious trials and humiliations.” In this case, this can be grasped in the “cruel
games” — Humiliate the Host, Hump the Hostess, Bringing up Baby (or in
the case of Honey and Nick, Get the Guest) — which are all newer and newer
degrees of destruction of the former personality.
Although the play constitutes a web of games of various kinds, the above¬
mentioned four are the decisive stages of the pathway through liminality, in
which George and Martha in particular (but the initiation and discovery of
Nick and Honey is also significant), penetrate deeper layers of cruelty. Veronika
Gspann’s view is that the games have a dual function: on the one hand, they
show how the couple’s life has slipped away from reality, where the gameplay
and bloody quarrels are pointless void-filling acts deriving from desperation,
but on the other hand, this structure of games is a revealing insight into the
inner workings of their marriage.** The following is a more detailed analysis
of this process, a possible reading of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? which
interprets George and Martha's night of unleashed demons as a kind of rite of
passage by working through the theories of Gennep, Gluckman, and Turner.
30 Ibid., 222.
31 Ibid., 227.
Victor Turner: A rituális folyamat. Struktúra és antistruktúra, trans. István Orosz, Budapest,
Osiris, 2002, 117.
33 Veronika Gspann: Edward Albee drámái, Budapest, Akadémiai Kiadó, 1992, 63.
e 123"