Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Perhaps it was when I was a middle school student — we were eating dinner, sitting around the table at home. While watching TV, my father said to himself, “She looks so strangely attractive.” Elizabeth Taylor was on the screen. She was an actress who was second to none. She seemed to be so perfectly beautiful that she needed no explanation. Though I have seen some American movies that she had appeared in, I can’t quite recall the plots or any impressive scenes. What stood out to me the most was just the fact that she was such a beautiful woman. This could be a weakness for an actress, as her face was visible and her acting was not.
Some time ago, I watched the movie “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” It was produced in the 1960s. "Why Virginia Woolf?" I thought to myself. I know that Woolf was a distinguished modernist writer and figure in British literary history, and that she helped develop the "stream of consciousness" writing style. Even though I could not understand all the contents of the movie, as there were no Korean subtitles, I could feel its serious, sharp insights into life and the world despite all the differences in language, time, culture and nationality.
In the latter part of the movie, I was stunned. Obviously, Elizabeth Taylor was the main actress, but I could not find her on the screen. There was no splendid, gorgeous woman. There was only a middle-aged woman with disheveled hair. She was aged and weary with the sorrow of life — just an ordinary woman like me. There were deep wrinkles on her forehead. The weight of a person’s drained life seemed to be conveyed through the screen.
The film was based on the play by Edward Albee, which won the Tony award. Both the play and the movie feature two couples where the husbands are professors at a university. Taylor plays the wife of one professor and the daughter of the president of the university. All the characters appear to be upper-class intellectuals. Nonetheless, their real life is ugly — full of lies, illusions, self-righteousness, fear and conflict. Taylor's character and her husband even create an imaginary son to maintain their precarious, loveless marriage. The couple fight over this fictional son, hurting and insulting each other. This clearly reflects a miserable, shabby reality, far from the American ideal of the "happy family" set by the Hollywood movie industry in the 1950s.
Due to her father’s violence and her mother’s coldness, Taylor was reportedly thrown into the commercial movie production field from early childhood. Though she was in the spotlight for a long time, she seemed to have longed to love and to be loved, seeking true love endlessly. Watching the movie, I felt as if I saw not the life of the daughter of the university president but the human being behind the role. The brighter and more gorgeous the spotlight is, the darker and deeper the shadow it casts.
I felt as if I had made a deep, profound journey to feel the weight of a human life from long ago in a distant, foreign land. On top of this, I would say that no one is afraid of Virginia Woolf. As Woolf valued everyone’s existential being, unconstrained by rigid formality, I felt that each one of our existential beings matters. I can say that I have always been taking journeys, by reading books, watching movies, writing poems, meeting, sympathizing with and loving people. I live every day as if I am making a journey. I realize how precious everyone’s life is and how valuable each and every moment of life is! Every one of us shines in our own way.
Lee Nan-hee studied English in college and theology at Hanshin University.