New Beginnings in Who's Afraid of Virginia WoolfEdward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is a disturbing and powerful work. Ironically, it’s disturbing and powerful for many of the same reasons. As the audience watches George and Martha savagely tear each other apart with the knives of thrown words, sharpened by pain and intended to draw blood, the way these two relentlessly attack each other is horrifying to behold, yet strangely familiar . Like wounded animals, they strike those closest to them and recall the scenes observed as a child between parents screaming from a cracked door when one was supposed to be in bed. In the age of psychoanalytic jargon, George and Martha are the typical dysfunctional couple. Yet for all their problems, Albee reveals that there is a core of positive feelings that unites these two troubled people and helps them look beyond the hell they themselves have created. The truth of their relationship is exposed layer by layer as the play progresses, like the peeling of an onion, and although the pattern of this truth seems vague at first, with each cycle of revelation, the pattern becomes more distinct and the image is clearer. fully revealed in the final, cathartic scene. One of the play's most recurring themes is the question of George and Martha's "child" and all that this child, and children in general, symbolizes to them. The "child" appears not only as a desire for fertility within their relationship, but also as a projection through which they express many of their personal desires, needs and problems and, in this context, the subsequent "death" of the child signifies an important milestone in their life. their understanding of their marriage and themselves. At the end of the play, after much suffering and flogging, George and Martha seem ready to approach their lives in a new way. George and Martha have a history. They are also emotionally trapped by this story, particularly that of their respective childhoods. As a result, both suffer from poor self-image and self-doubt. The audience learns this story slowly, in bits and pieces. Martha tells Nick and Honey in Act 1 about how she lost her mother at an early age and grew up very close to her father. She married briefly, but her father had the marriage annulled. She moved back in with her father after college, met George and fell in love with him..