Cancer and the Common Woman in Margaret Edson's W;t

Authors

Jacqueline Vanhoutte

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the essay follows:

This essay is an exercise in the bringing together of apparently disparate roles. I am an assistant professor of Renaissance Literature, and I am a cancer patient. These two identities rarely overlap, since cancer has not proved a popular literary subject. As Susan Sontag notes, although nineteenth-century writers glamorized tubercular patients, “nobody conceives of cancer … as a decorative, often lyrical death”; she adds that “cancer is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to aestheticize the disease.”¹ Cancer’s resistance to aesthetic rendering poses an additional difficulty for patients like myself, accustomed to turn to imaginative literature in times of need. Hence my attraction to Margaret Edson’s highly acclaimed W;t, a play that dramatizes the diagnoses, treatment, and death of Dr. Vivian Bearing, a professor of seventeenth-century literature suffering from advanced ovarian cancer. W;t has achieved to general acclaim what Sontag had deemed “unimaginable.” I had initially hoped that the play would help me make sense of what had happened to me. The fact that I now approach it in a scholarly mode is itself an indication that the play was a disappointment to me on a more fundamental level.

Notes

¹Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphore, in “Illness as Metaphor” and “AIDS and Its Metaphors” (London and New York: Doubleday, 1989), 20.

Recommended Citation

Vanhoutte, Jacqueline (2002) "Cancer and the Common Woman in Margaret Edson's W;t," Comparative Drama: Vol. 36: Iss. 3, Article 6.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol36/iss3/6