In what ways does a comparative study accentuate the distinctive contexts of Who’s
Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and A Room of One’s Own?
Context is vividly reflected through artistic texts over time in order to assert the author’s opinion on the same human issues, such as truth. Virginia Woolf’s A room of one’s own (1928) dismantles the strength of the patriarchy and their singular truth, through the creative form of her lecture given at a women’s college, to empower women to speak the truth. She achieves this through the reflection on a male dominated history, whilst including a fictional aside, as evidence of the female truths. These ideas mirror her context of post WWI, subsequently leading people to question the status quo due to their loss of innocence, sparking both the feminist and modernist movements. Whilst Woolf strived for a harmonious balance of gender truths, Albee through Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf (1961) condemns his society for its obscured truth with illusions and its worship for artificial values. The boom in consumerism and the overvaluing of the nuclear family creates a void in his society that people fill with illusions, which he illustrates through theatre. Albee reflects his society’s foibles to his audience by his verging on absurdist play, whilst simultaneously destroying the illusions that have eroded their evolution. Both composers achieve their resolution of change to a major flaw in their societies’ through the power of artistic form. A comparative study accentuates the distinctive contexts by the shift in perspective on the value of truth.
Virginia Woolf Highlights the power of fiction to speak the truth. She’s able to encapsulate through her form, the linear logic of the patriarchy, melded with the creative feminine form of fiction, thus creating an incandescence of an androgynous mind. Her polemic commences with the dismantling of the male truth, demonstrated through her mocking tone to their “nugget of pure