Appearance, Secrecy, and Truth-Telling Theme Analysis

George and Martha use Nick and Honey as an audience to whom they reveal dark secrets about their marriage, and thereby to betray one another’s honor and secrecy. Alcohol loosens everyone’s lips, and encourages even Nick and Honey to say things they otherwise wouldn’t. Nick discloses to George the story of his own marriage and Honey’s false pregnancy; Martha tells Nick and Honey about the book that George wrote but failed to publish on account of her father.

At the end of the play, as though revealing some truth, George and Martha begin to tell conflicting stories of their son’s birth and childhood. When George speaks, Martha accuses him of lying; when Martha speaks, he accuses her of lying. Then George dramatically reports that their son has recently died in a car crash. Martha yells at her husband, accusing him of having killed their son, and he responds, “You broke our rule, baby. You mentioned him . . . you mentioned him to someone else.” While the scene is confounding and difficult, it becomes clear that they never had a child after all, and yet placed great importance on maintaining, privately, the belief that they did. The fact that they have been lying all along about the existence of their son throws doubt on the truth of other stories they have told throughout the play, as of George’s story about the boy who accidentally kills both his parents. In fact, there is a suggestion that it is George's parents who have died, though perhaps not that he actually caused their deaths.

The play puts pressure on the contrast between stable appearances and chaotic hidden realities, and on the thin line between secret-revealing and story-telling. The final line of the play—Martha’s admitting that she is afraid of Virginia Woolf—lends further significance to this theme. Virginia Woolf was a social realist, who often depicted darkly realistic family lives. In admitting that she’s afraid of Woolf, Martha identifies the scariness of unmasking the truth, of facing reality, and in doing so, for the first time, admits a deep and honest truth about herself.