Wit, pride and the resurrection: Margaret Edson's play and John Donne's poetry

FOR reasons internal and external to Margaret Edson's play Wit, it is easy to miss the serious dialogue with John Donne's poetry to be found in it. Internally, the last utterance we hear from the dying scholar on the subject of her studies seems to be a rejection - she emphatically does not want to hear Donne recited to her in her extremity, preferring a children's story. Equally telling seems to be the play's condemnation of what a character calls Donne's "salvation anxiety" the endless complicating of God's simple gift of grace. Externally, audiences and reviewers seem resistant to two stark Augustinian themes sounded by the play: the recalcitrance of human pride and the utter graciousness of the Resurrection. I shall argue that far from rejecting Donne, the play grapples with these theological issues in terms largely set by Donne's divine poems.

As readers familiar with the play are aware, Wit presents us with the ordeal into which a distinguished middle-aged scholar of seventeenth century English poetry is plunged when she is diagnosed with deadly ovarian cancer. Assigned for treatment to the research hospital at her university, she is under the care of Dr. Harvey Kelekian, head of medical oncology, but she is most often attended by a former student, Jason Poser, who is now a clinical fellow in oncology, and by Susie Monahan, primary nurse for the cancer inpatient unit. During the entirety of her fatal illness, Vivian Bearing receives but one visitor: Professor E.M. Ashford, her former mentor and predecessor as eminent Donne scholar. Although she is gowned in hospital garb throughout, it is not the medical apparatus surrounding Professor Bearing that provides the primary material for reflection in the play; rather, it is the theological substance to be found in the poems she has so often anatomized.

In order to make this case, it will be helpful to frame the texts used by Edson with two well known poems that are not quoted in the play. The first is so strikingly apropos that one might easily imagine it to be the Donnean origin of Wit; it is "Hymn to God, My God in My Sicknesse." For in that poem, the speaker, like Vivian Bearing, lies in the grip of a fatal disease from which he does not expect to recover. He describes himself stretched out,

Whilst my Physitians by their love are growne

Cosmographers, and I their Mapp, who lie

Flat on this bed, that by them may be showne

That this is my South-west discoverie

Per fretrum febris, by these streights to die (ll.6-10).

Although this second stanza of the poem is the only one to mention the physicians, it is clear that we are to envision the entire scene as one in which they are in close attendance as the speaker contemplates his soul's last journey. And in view of issues which emerge in Wit, two aspects of their relation to the patient are worthy of note. One is that their "love" of the patient has led them to turn him into a "Mapp." With the best of intentions, they have reduced his body to a series of signs which they may read. Secondly, their prognosis seems to be a given. The patient will die. The only question that frets them is, how? By what strait will the soul make its exit from one life to the next?

The connections between these physicians and those who attend Edson's Donne scholar are easily drawn. Dr. Kelekian and his team know perfectly well that patients do not survive stage four metastatic ovarian cancer. From the time Vivian receives her diagnosis, her prognosis is certain. Thus, their "love" for her quickly turns her into a set of signs to be read. How long can they keep her alive? How many chemo treatments can she withstand? What can they learn about her "febris" as they chart her passage through it? Bearing herself is acutely aware of the nature of this interest. And the irony of the fact that the medical doctors are doing to her what she has so often done to a literal text in the past is borne out to her when she is visited on Grand Rounds. As she observes the medical observers she muses:

Full of subservience, hierarchy, gratuitous displays, sublimated rivalries - I feel right at home. It is just like a graduate seminar.

With one important difference: in Grand Rounds, they read me like a book. Once I did the teaching, now I am taught. (37)

This moment of self-recognition on Dr. Bearing's part is also mirrored in Donne's poem. For while his physicians determine the manner of his death, Donne contemplates its meaning. And so Vivian, too, is forced to face in existential terms what for her medical colleagues remains a matter of research. Her attention must be turned so that she, too, will "thinke here before" what "I must doe then."

Such a turning to the business of preparation for death is precisely what Vivian needs. Unlike the speaker in Donne's poem, Bearing is not ready to look beyond the horizons of the world in which she has successfully made her way. Thus the poem is not only descriptive of Vivian's state as an object of research laid out before her doctors; it is also theologically prescriptive, charting the course she must follow. Her own spiritual self-examination must be as rigorous as the scrutiny her physicians employ. And it will be painful. As Vivian says after eight months of treatment, "[I]t is highly educational. I am learning to suffer" (31). Given Bearing's ironic tone it is easy to miss the fact that here she speaks the plain truth. Within the Augustinian context established by the Divine Poems she knows so well, suffering, insofar as it leads to self-examination and helps to defeat pride, is a blessing.