Travelling Memory, Staged and Screened: Adapting the Imaginary Child in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) has been a fertile groundwork for academic criticisms, both as a literary text and a theatrical performance. Additionally, Mike Nichols’ 1966 film adaptation of the play with the same title has also been recognized as its most outstanding reproduction into another medium. Critics have analyzed this adaptation by focusing on its aspects of fidelity, censorship, and Broadway conventions. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon’s adaptation theory and Astrid Erll’s concept of travelling memory, the present study, however, intertwines the play and its adaptation as a unified process of memory transmission, specifically the imaginary child, as it sheds its temporality and turns timeless from an ideological and historically bound perspective. Turning into a memory that travels from stage to screen, the adapter recontextualizes the child into a mobile structure that transcends the stage’s verbal instability resulting from sociopolitical ideologies of postwar American domesticity. The resulting adaptation employs cinematic aesthetics to unbound the child’s historically situated narrative into a culturally mobile memory. Through this investigation, the present study’s main argument centers on adaptation as a vehicle that enables literary memories to traverse across time, space, and mediums, thus undermining fidelity as the primary measuring value of an adapted work.