EL150: W;t and Tying it Together

Edson, "W;t"

Margaret Edson's play "W;t" ties in, rather ingeniously, with many of our past texts in EL150 and is a great play to end the semester with. Vivian's discussion about Donne's sonnets (specifically "Death Be Not Proud") and the importance of Donne's original punctuation fits right in with our own study of the sonnet and Truss's "Eats, Shoots and Leaves."

Edson describes Donne's use of the comma as a mere pause, showing that the difference between like and death is merely a beat. "Nothing but a breath--a comma--separates life from life everlasting," says Ashford, Vivian's professor. It's not as final, or as dramatic as a semicolon. She also points out the importance of the lowercase "death" over the capital "D," again making death less powerful, less powerful, less grand.

The character of Vivian was quite in intriguing, in that she was once a pretentious member of the intelligencia, and has been reduced to nothing more than a shell in a hospital gown. Vivian, of course, has a hard time coping with this, and dealing with the idea of not being the smartest person in the room. Vivian is coming from a world in which she was in control. She is used to ruling over the lives and grades of naive undergraduates, analyzing and deciphering a poet who's been dead for 300 years. She was an authority, a respected scholar... and now she is just a patient. She is forced into a world where she doesn't understand the vocabulary, and the vocab that she does recognized is used differently. Worse yet, she is barely respected, and instead thought of as a test subject.

Vivian begins to realize her cruelty and coldness as a teacher from the moment she meets Jason, a doctor who was a former student of hers. "I should have given him an A" she says to herself as he gives her a pelvic check-up. What follows are a number of flashbacks referring to her days as a student and as a teacher. As a student, she spent all of her time in the library, punishing herself for any ignorance she may have had. As a teacher, she belittled her students, and refused to show any sympathy when one of them had a death in the family. Now, we see Vivian alone, dying. No one has come to visit her. She feels as if she has lost her dignity in this weakened state: "I was a scholar when I had shoes, when I had eyebrows."

I really enjoyed this play and the complex character study Edson presents.