Corkern, Wit

In the play, Wit, by Margaret Edison, we are introduced to Vivian Bearing as she addresses the audience. She says, “How are you feeling today?” and explains that is not her standard greeting, rather what she has been hearing lately, since she has been hospitalized and treated for advanced ovarian cancer. She has caught on to the absurdity of the question, given her state, but those around her do not get it. According to the dictionary, one of the definitions of wit is as follows: Wit: a. The ability to perceive and express in an ingeniously humorous manner the relationship between seemingly incongruous or disparate things. That sums up the main character of the play, Vivian Bearing, quite nicely. As she, a 50 year old professor turned cancer patient, is whisked from one test to another, all greeted by the same, expressionless question “name?”; she responds to one of them “Lucy, Countess of Bedford.” He doesn’t get her wit there, as most people don’t. Throughout the play, she exhibits her wittiness, and I believe it helps her get through the terrible side affects of chemotherapy. She is undergoing extensive experimental treatment for advanced ovarian cancer. The play is a series of interactions between she and her doctors and nurse, along with flashbacks to her teaching career and childhood, and it is, dare I say, one of the wittiest productions I have come across.

According to Richard Hornby’s review of the play Wit, “The weakness of the play is that Bearing is shown in isolation. We see no family (aside from a flashback with her father), no friends, no lovers, and certainly no colleagues.” He missed the mark. The fact that she is shown in isolation shows her character and well, the result of a life lived without marriage, children, and with deceased parents. It portrays the life of someone so dedicated to her work that she did not have a social/personal life. Only one person, her former teacher, visits her at the hospital. It is not a weakness, rather a sad fact of her life.

What stuck out to me as the real tragedy is that her body, her living body became nothing more than cancer research. She suffered through extensive, full dose chemotherapy, eight rounds to be exact, not to save her life, but to give the researchers more to research. From the beginning, she was not fully informed as to their goal. Their goal was never to save her life, though she was given a glimmer of hope. Their goal was to learn from her. As evidenced toward the end, when she knowingly asked her nurse, “My cancer’s not being cured, is it”, Vivian was treated poorly as a patient and a person. Her saving grace was her sweet nurse Susie. She cared about Vivian and did all she could to help her stay comfortable. She talked to her, got her popsicles, and even informed her in advance of her options regarding life support. Her doctors were far from caring. Jason Posner, the clinical fellow who begrudgingly was doing his residency before going on to his goal of full time research, had to remind himself simply to ask Vivian how she was feeling. Even in the end, when Vivian began to die, Jason called a code, not realizing she had requested to be DNR (do not resuscitate). As Susan exclaimed, “She’s DNR, no code!” over and over, Jason shot back with “She’s RESEARCH.” That’s all she had been to him. She was not a person, she was a project. While I understand cancer is a major problem for many, as my own nephew is a cancer survivor, people are still people. They should always be given respect, and in a case like this full disclosure, before being offered the consent to treat form. To see Vivian suffer, and end up the same way as had she not endured all that physical torture, is truly the weakness of not only the play, but of many medical professionals.