63 pages • 2 hours read
Margaret EdsonWit
Fiction | Play | Adult | Published in 1995A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Poetry of John Donne
John Donne (1572-1631) is an English metaphysical poet best known for his use of language and wit. His poetry often wrestles with philosophical, metaphysical, and religious questions that have no real answers; rather, Donne wants his readers to reconsider these questions with logic and intellect. Donne is best known for using paradoxes and conceits to make his point.
Donne’s poetry pops up throughout Edson’s play, making it one of the work’s central motifs. Edson sprinkles Donne’s poems throughout Wit for two reasons. First, it helps audiences better understand Vivian’s character. Vivian is not just a fan of Donne—Donne is her life’s work. Her job as a professor of seventeenth-century poetry is not just her vocation; it is the core of her identity. Donne is an essential piece of who Vivian is, and she chooses to study him to prove her intellectual prowess. But the skills she learns from studying Donne become an essential tool for understanding her cancer, too. The doctors “anatomize” her through medical terminology she does not immediately understand, and she tells the audience that her only defense is “the acquisition of vocabulary” (43-44). Vivian has developed her own wit, and like Donne, she relies on it to make sense of an often-chaotic world.
Secondly, Edson uses Donne’s poetry to reinforce her themes during the play’s key moments. For example, Edson relies on a few lines from Donne’s Holy Sonnet that begin “This is my playes last scene.” In this poem, Donne tells the story of a man who is at the end of his life. He knows he is in his “pilgrimages last mile,” and he knows that “death will instantly unjoynt/My body, and soule” (52). Donne’s poem focuses on a man’s confrontation with his mortality and impending death. Edson uses this poem because it captures Vivian’s situation exactly. She continues to run her race by going through cancer treatment, but it has become clear that her time is also growing short. Not only does the poem reiterate the play’s thematic preoccupation with death, it also helps Vivian cope with the truth, too. That is why she tells viewers that while she once loved this poem, its truth now seems “a little too...pointed” (53).
“How Are You Feeling”
This question is the first line of Wit, and it appears repeatedly throughout the work as one of Edson’s central motifs. Vivian explains the irony of asking a cancer patient how she feels in the first scene of the play. She says she has been asked this question while suffering every indignity of illness, from throwing up to coming out of surgery. And yet, Vivian always says she feels fine even though “it is not very often that I do feel fine” (5). This question gets asked so often that it becomes meaningless—it is just another pleasantry. Despite its meaninglessness, it remains so pervasive that Vivian sarcastically remarks that she is “waiting for the moment when someone asks” her how she feels when she “is dead” (5). Because of its pointlessness, “how are you feeling” becomes Edson’s way of indicting the medical professionals who do little more than the bare minimum for their patients’ emotional well-being. Jason is the perfect example of this. Although he always asks Vivian how she feels, he rarely cares about the answer. Jason thinks about Vivian as a case, not a person. Consequently, Edson argues that a patient’s overall well-being should always come before doctors’ desire to “know more things” (68).
Hex and Vin
Hex and Vin are the shortened names of the chemotherapy drugs “Hexamethophosphacil” and “Vinplatin” (36). Dr. Kelekian prescribes these drugs as a very aggressive and experimental treatment for Vivian’s stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer, explaining that they are her best chance at survival. But the treatment comes with harsh side effects, and although Vivian assures Dr. Kelekian that she is tough, the drugs take their toll. Vivian experiences a litany of side effects from the mild (hair loss) to the severe (secondary infections and delirium). The irony of the treatment is not lost on Vivian, who says, “the treatment”—not the cancer—“imperils my health” (47). But Hex and Vin, like most things in Wit, have a second layer of irony, too. Once shortened, “Hex” and “Vin” sound like less like medicine and more like nicknames. The reoccurrence of Hex and Vin throughout the play drives home Edson’s theme of humanity. Vivian is dehumanized through each medical interaction, but the chemotherapy drugs themselves gain a strange personhood. In calling the drugs “Hex and Vin,” Jason gives them more humanity than he gives to Vivian, whom he sees as “research” (82).
