Wit and Cancer as a Tool of Shaming

Wit presents the decline and death of a middle-aged academic who specializes in the metaphysical poetry of the 17th century, specifically John Donne. Vivian Bearing, the main character, is being treated at a research hospital underneath the auspices of Harvey Kelekian, the prominent head of medical ontology, and specifically attended by a former student. The play begins by a monologue about herself and her diagnoses, dripping with irony about her imminent death. She comments, in relationship to the constant questions about how she is feeling, that she is “waiting for the moment when someone asks me this question and I am dead. I’m a little sorry I’ll miss that” (Edson 7-8). Her story in the hospital is interspersed with flashbacks about her life, recalling events such as her initial diagnoses and an early paper she returns to her mentor, Professor E.M. Ashford, about John Donne.

The narrative of the play is fundamentally one of redemption. She is faced with the perspective through which she has lived her life in the figure of the teaching hospital, commenting that it is “full of subservience, hierarchy, gratuitous displays, sublimated rivalries—I feel right at home. It is just like a graduate seminar” (Edson 37). This is not a positive association, as while she once was the powerful one in scenarios like this, now she is the one who is subject to power: “Once I did the teaching, now I am taught” (Edson 37). The ending of the play contains her only visitor, her elderly former mentor Professor Ashford, and she asks for the teacher to read her a children’s book instead of a poem of Donne At the moment of her death, she strips naked and in that beautiful form, reaches for the light. The play figures her even only slight move from analytical self-possession to emotional connection as a key, last minute turn around to her life, an intensely positive moment. Through the grueling, oppressive cancer, she has been made pure.

The play in general is very focused on the salutary and educational effects of being terminally ill. In Vivian’s words, her eight months are treatment are “highly educational. I am learning to suffer” (Edson 31). The poem almost seems to relish in subjecting her to a mirror of her typical conduct in her student, Jason Posner, She reflects that she wishes she had been nicer to him, implying perhaps that previously kinder treatment would lead her to being less dehumanized in the moment. Indeed, cancer teaches Vivian the lesson that not even her respected mentor could; one of the flashbacks contains Prof. Ashford urging Vivian to go and socialize, turn aside from the paper she’s working on in the afternoon. Vivian tries to maintain that approach to intellectualization, struggling to keep her dignity and persistent approach to life. There is a way the story almost feels like it is trying to shame her, rub her nose in her own inadequacy, and even punish her for her previously intellectualized approach to life. Cancer is a cosmic tool of comeuppance, despite her greatest sin being simply that she enjoyed the life of the mind and was cool, self-contained. It strikes me as unpleasant, this focus on suffering as a productive tool for breaking down the pride of a successful female academic, and the play does not seem to sufficiently justify its own cruelty. It seems mean-spirited and only to reinforce that a powerful, intellectual woman is frigid and unhappy. It is unclear, even, if Vivian was unhappy with her life until her cancer diagnosis. It seems to be no flaw that one is suffering while one has cancer; it should not invalidate her previous life choices. That is not to say that it is implausible to have a change of heart at the last moment, but it is my view that the play does not earn the transformation.

Work Cited

Edson, Margaret. Wit. Dramatists Play Service, 1999.