In Margaret Edson’s play Wit, the main character, Dr. Vivian Bearing, Ph.D., is a cunning, feisty professor of seventeenth-century poetry who happens to be diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic ovarian cancer. She is approached by her doctor with an opportunity undertake an aggressive, eight-month-long chemotherapy regiment, and in return, she would gain the hope for recovery and the honor of making “a significant contribution to our knowledge” (Edson) – as so eloquently put by her primary physician, Dr. Kelekian.
Throughout her tenure at the hospital during her treatment, her feelings and emotions are regularly pushed aside in the name of scientific progress, and the notion of extreme apathy toward her emotional wellbeing and desires is displayed when she dies and one of her doctors (who is also a former student), Jason, ignores her wish to reject resuscitation in the event that she dies:
“SUSIE: WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
JASON: A GODDAMN CODE. GET OVER HERE!
SUSIE: She’s DNR! (she grabs him.)
JASON: (He pushes her away.) She’s Research!
SUSIE: She's NO CODE!” (Edson).
In one review of Wit, writer Richard Hornby acknowledges the play’s portrayal of Vivian Bearing’s doctors as “concerned but detached, viewing their patient more as a scientific case study than as a person” (Hornby). The reader is left with a feeling of sympathy towards Dr. Bearing because she does not have a family of her own that can offer her love and comfort during her battle with cancer (compared to the medical approach that her doctors take).
Bearing’s initial relationship with the doctors is one where she frequently challenges them while exhibiting wit and intellect – “She narrates her experiences as she is dying, including the clinical details, with insight and wit worthy of Donne himself” (Hornby). As she grows sicker, her wit begins to die down, and she reverts to a childlike state of dependency and fear of the future. In her deterioration of body and mind, she allows herself to grow abnormally close to her primary nurse, Susie. During a scene where Bearing has a breakdown, Susie attempts to comfort her as a mother would a child:
“SUSIE: Vivian. It’s all right. I know. It hurts. I know. It’s all right. Do you want a tissue? It’s all right. (Silence) Vivian, would you like a popsicle?
VIVIAN: (Like a child) Yes, please” (Edson).
With Susie, Bearing is secure enough to let her guard down, and as a result, she is finally able to die in peace and on her own terms.
2 comments:
Your analysis of Vivian Bearings character is quite perceptive. She is, like her doctors, an intellectual; she has had in the past no time for emotions; rather she reads Donne as a critic. Her approach is not emotional. It is not until she gets sick that she sees the value of feelings.
The way Vivian finally opens up, towards the end of the play, does symbolize her deterioration of body and mind, as you put it. This state Vivian is in, so vulnerable, explains to the reader how she came to acknowledge how important it is to be in contact with one’s feelings, accepting one can’t live a life on their own.
After sometime withstanding the arduous treatment, Vivian’s friend, Evelyn, visits her. While Evelyn remains with Vivian in the hospital room, she reads to her and comforts her in her last hours of life. In this scene of the play, we notice how weak Vivian has truly gotten. In an excerpt in which Vivian narrates how she’s become so kind and vulnerable she explains:
“Now is not the time for verbal swordplay, for unlikely flights of imagination and wildly shifting perspectives, for metaphysical conceit, for wit.
Now is the time for simplicity. Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness.”
So, she accepts her will and decides to lower her guard and embrace the feeling of kindness. It does seem a little strange how Vivian becomes close to her primary nurse, but then again, Susie is the person she sees and interacts the with most, while the doctors come in every now and then to check on Vivian and their interest it purely for the sake of knowledge.
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