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Article Excerpt
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 diagnosis, 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.
Having cancer is a disorienting experience. All cancer patients expect to suffer physical pain. But few, I imagine, are ready for the social stigma that attaches itself to the disease. A personal anecdote will illustrate the point. Shortly after I returned from my six-month course of treatment, I encountered an acquaintance at the gym. She approached me reluctantly, as if my disease might be infectious. This reaction would become familiar to me; indeed, it is a common response to persons diagnosed with cancer. After nervous assurances about how good I looked, my acquaintance offered the opinion that I "must have learned so much about [my]self" as a result of having cancer. What, precisely, did she mean? Did she think that all diseases led to enlightenment, or did she imagine that cancer was especially efficacious from a pedagogical point of view? Would she have said the same thing to someone suffering, say, from a potentially fatal case of botulism? The comment, I told myself, might simply reflect this person's new-age tendencies. In any case, cancer had taught me little about what this person referred to as my "self." It had ravaged my body but had left my sense of "self" intact. Had I the capacity for pleasure while in treatment, I suppose I might have found it in this reassuring consistency of my personality in the face of trauma. So why had this person's response shocked me? What lesson was I supposed to have learned? Did she think that, prior to the diagnosis, I had not "known myself"? Was my cancer an indication of this failure, a sort of punishment exacted for the sin of self-delusion, a cure for ignorance about my own deepest impulses? What logic could have accounted for her perception of my disease?
Her comment was part of a series of troubling reactions that my cancer elicited in my community. When word of my diagnosis first circulated, for example, several people assumed that I had breast cancer (because I was a woman) or lung cancer (because I was a smoker). Interestingly, men assumed that I had breast cancer and nonsmokers assumed that I had lung cancer. People defined my disease in ways that helped them mark their own distance from it. Their assumptions about my cancer, in other words, were comforting to them. Like my acquaintance at the gym who protected herself from disease by imagining it as part of a program of self-improvement, these people could not tolerate the possibility that cancer strikes arbitrarily. My actual diagnosis gave little enough support to this view: I had parotid cancer--a very rare form, for which there are no known risk factors. Remarkably, however, when I tried to explain to various people that my personal habits had not contributed to my disease, they were disinclined to believe me. They preferred to think that I was sick because I smoked, as they did not.
As this anecdotal evidence suggests, we still think about cancer as a disease of the self. W;t proves no exception to this rule: it proposes that cancer offers an occasion for self-extension. After a medical team botches an attempt to resuscitate Vivian, the stage directions stipulate that she steps out of her bed, "moving slowly toward the light" as she sheds her clothing, and "the instant she is naked and beautiful, reach[es] for the light...." Jason, the resident in charge, accompanies Vivian's progress by the refrain "Oh God." (2) Ironically, the young doctor registers his patient's death as a failure while the play presents it as a success. The final scene offers a theatrical analogue of John Donne's "Death Be Not Proud," a sonnet that, according to Vivian's teacher E. M Ashford, is about "overcoming the seemingly insuperable barriers separating life, death, and eternal life" (14). Through such references to the Holy Sonnets, W;t establishes a homology between Vivian's cancer and Donne's God: cancer breaks, blows, burns, and makes Vivian new. (3)
My concern is not with the nature of Vivian's redemption but with the implications of using cancer as a vehicle for that redemption. Vivian experiences her disease as a ritual degradation--a painful and humiliating erosion of the barriers that had separated her from, and elevated her above, other human beings. She learns, as Raymond-Jean Frontain observes, "that the only way to be raised up is to allow oneself to be thrown down." (4) Although W;t advertises its interest in seventeenth-century poetry, the play depends for its effects on the conventions of a different Renaissance genre. For all her citing of Donne, Edson owes a more important debt to his near-contemporary Shakespeare. Arrogance, irony, elevation, fall, illumination, self-knowledge: this is the stuff of tragedy. By imposing tragic shape on Vivian's suffering, Edson conveys the devastating sense of isolation and alienation that follows a diagnosis of cancer. But tragedy also assumes causal connections between human agents and the fate that befalls them; as A. C. Bradley puts it, "the necessity" that impresses us in tragedy "is that the calamities and catastrophe follow inevitably from the deeds of men." (5) To make a cancer patient the subject of a tragedy is to reproduce and legitimate the "moralistic and punitive" fantasies about cancer that Sontag describes. (6)
W;t's reliance on cultural commonplaces may account for the fact that, despite the play's apparent brutality, some critics report feeling "in a strange way, enormously comforted by it." (7) Its central characters are all stereotypes: the cold doctor, the caring nurse, and the repressed female academic. It is structured, moreover, around commonplace oppositions, most obviously that between intellect and emotion. Edson's basic understanding of cancer is no more sophisticated than that of my acquaintances, who so diligently sought to distance themselves from my disease. But she does provide a powerful and authoritative frame for that understanding:...
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