What happens in Act Three of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf??
Act Three begins amidst the aftermath of the previous night's events. Nick, feeling drunk and humiliated after his failed encounter with Martha, steps back into the shadows as George enters, holding a bunch of snapdragons. With an unsettling calmness, he reveals that he has received a telegram: their son has died—tragically killed in a car accident on his birthday. Martha is shattered, angrily asserting that George had no right to take their boy’s life. In response, George, methodical and almost ritualistic, begins to recite the Latin from the Requiem Mass while Martha continues to protest. Nick gradually realizes the truth he has been witnessing all night: there is no son. The child was a shared illusion, a private mythology that George and Martha had created and maintained throughout their marriage. By "killing" the boy, George has unilaterally ended the game, violating the one rule they had promised never to break. Honey, now clear-headed enough to comprehend, confesses that she has always been afraid of having children. As dawn arrives and Nick and Honey depart, George and Martha are left alone. The combative structure of the night crumbles, revealing something more profound: two people stripped of their final illusion, sitting together in silence.
Analysis
Albee titles the act "The Exorcism," and this choice serves a vital purpose in the structure. The entire play has been leading up to the removal of a shared delusion, and George's act of killing the imaginary son feels less like cruelty and more like a painful necessity—a surgical intervention. The snapdragons he carries are a brilliant touch: they symbolize both funerals and the child’s game of snapping the bloom shut, merging themes of death and play into a single, powerful prop.
The Latin Requiem that George recites, despite Martha's protests, introduces a tone that the play hasn't explored until now—it's solemn, ritualistic, almost medieval—making Martha's raw grief feel even more exposed. Albee is intentionally layering tones here: the sacred colliding with the profane.
The son-as-fiction represents the play's core dramatic irony, and Albee has woven hints of this throughout—the son's oddly symbolic background and how George and Martha monitor each other's narratives. When the illusion shatters, the title of the play becomes clear: the fear lies not with Virginia Woolf the writer but with the wolf at the door, representing the darkness that lingers when comforting stories are stripped away.
The final image—George humming softly while Martha responds to his questions with one-word answers—avoids any straightforward sense of catharsis. The silence doesn’t suggest peace; it reveals vulnerability. Albee's closing rhythm is intentionally slow, with the dialogue pared down to almost nothing, compelling the audience to confront what has been lost rather than allowing them to escape from it.
Key quotes from Act Three
“YOU CANNOT DO THAT! YOU CANNOT DECIDE THESE THINGS!”
Martha's anguished cry when George announces the death of their son, the moment the fiction's emotional reality—and its rules—are laid bare.
“It will be better... maybe... in the morning.”
George's closing reassurance to Martha, offered in the grey dawn after Nick and Honey have left, its tentative syntax undercutting any promise of resolution.
“Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf... Virginia Woolf... Virginia Woolf...”
Martha's whispered, halting answer to George's final question—the play's title returning as an admission of existential dread rather than a punchline.
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Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Act Three
- exorcism
- The ritual driving out of an evil spirit or a destructive force; Albee uses it as Act Three's title to suggest George is purging the damaging fantasy that has haunted their marriage.
- snapdragons
- A common garden flower with blossoms that open and close like a mouth; George's entrance carrying them is a deliberately strange, theatrical gesture loaded with irony.
- telegram
- A written message delivered by wire service, once the fastest form of long-distance communication — George claims to have received one announcing their son's death.
- illusion
- A false belief or comforting fiction that someone clings to in place of reality — the invented son is the central illusion the play finally destroys.
- Virginia Woolf
- Used in the title and the repeated refrain as a pun on 'Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?' — it stands for the terror of facing life without comforting illusions, not merely a reference to the author.