An Analysis On The Polyphonic Features In Edward Albee's Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

Edward Albee (1928-), a prominent American playwright who already gained his fame in the 1960s, enjoys equal popularity with Eugene O'neil, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. As one of Albee's masterpieces, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? has been acclaimed as a classic of American drama. Ever since its premiere, the play has immediately aroused both enthusiasm and controversy from the audiences and critics. So far various perspectives have been engaged to the analysis of the play by the scholars and numerous articles can be found, but no job has been done on the work from the perspective of polyphonism either at home or abroad.Based on the study of Russian writer Dostoyevsky's novels, Bakhtin has put forward the famous polyphonic theory, which exerted an enormous influence on Europe and even the whole world. With the application of the professional term "counterpoint" from musicology to the exploration of the novel creation, Bakhtin discovers the independence of the protagonist's self-consciousness, as well as the equal dialogic relationship between main characters or between characters and the author. However, Bakhtin's polyphonic theory focuses more attention on novels, less on drama. Thus, it is rarely used for theatrical studies. But the author of the thesis thinks it also applicable to the discussion of drama. So a bold attempt has been made in the employment of the polyphonic theory in the exploration of theatre.By employing the polyphonic theory, the thesis makes a detailed text analysis into the play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and tries to investigate whether the abundant polyphonic elements are contained in the play. The research is done from the following three aspects. Chapter one discusses the dialogism in the play from its two inner literary meanings:great dialogue and microdialogue. The great dialogue focuses on the dialogic relationship between characters through their verbal expressions, the length and initiative in conversation as well as the similarities and contrasts exhibited in their personalities or spiritual conditions, while the microdialogue centers on the connotative dialogue within one's own mind. Chapter two points out in the text another important element contained in polyphonic theory---carnivalization, which includes the carnival laughter, carnival culture and marketplace speech. Chapter three focuses on the discussion of chronotope and analyzes examples in the text concerning the blending of past and present and the intersection of illusion and reality, presenting the spatial characteristics in time and the temporal characteristics in space.Through the detailed analysis from the above three aspects, we can draw the following conclusion. Albee has applied Bakhtin's polyphonism in his plays, through which the two American couples'physical and spiritual conditions are vividly portrayed and the cruel reality concerning the disillusionment of American dream among the intellectual stratum is fully reflected, showing their spiritual emptiness and desolation under the materialistic domination. Therefore, Albee is not only a dramatist with great writing skills, but also a modern social critic who has paid much attention on the lifestyles of American intellectuals and even the social conditions of the whole America.