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

Cancer and the Common Woman in Margaret Edson's W;t JACQUELINE VANHOUTTE Tlis essay is an exercise in the bringing together of apparentlydisparate roles. I am an assistantprofessor ofRenaissance 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 nineteendi-centurywriters glamorized tubercular patients,"nobodyconceives ofcancer ... as a decorative, oftenlyrical deatii"; she adds tiiat"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 ofneed. Hence my attraction to Margaret Edson's highly acclaimed W;t, a playthat dramatizes the diagnosis, treatment, and deatii ofDr.Vivian Bearing, a professor of seventeenth-century literature suffering from advanced ovarian cancer. W;r has achieved to general acclaim what Sontag had deemed "unimaginable." I had initially hoped that die playwould help me make sense ofwhat had happened to me. The fact mat I now approach it in a scholarlymode is itselfan indication tiiat the playwas 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 itselfto 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 reluctandy, as ifmy disease might be infectious. This reaction would become familiarto me; indeed,itis a common response to persons diagnosed witii cancer. After nervous assurances about how good I looked, 391 392ComparativeDrama my acquaintance offered the opinion that I "must have learned so much about [my]self"as a resultofhavingcancer.What,precisely,didshe mean? Did she think that all diseases led to enlightenment, or did she imagine that cancer was especially efficacious from a pedagogical point ofview? 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 mybodybuthad left mysense 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 oftrauma. So why had this person's response shocked me? What lesson was I supposed to have learned? Did she tiiinkthat,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 ofself-delusion, a cure for ignorance about my own deepest impulses?What logic could have accounted for her perception ofmy disease? Her comment was part of a series of troubling reactions that my cancer elicited in my community. When word ofmy diagnosis first circulated , for example, several people assumed tiiat 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 ofa program ofself-improvement, these people could not tolerate the possibility that cancer strikes arbitrarily. My actual diagnosis gave little enough supportto tiiisview: I hadparotid cancer—avery 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, tiiey were disinclined to believe me. They preferred to think that I was sick because I smoked, as tiiey did not. As tiiis anecdotal evidence suggests, we still think about cancer as a disease ofthe self. W;tproves no exception to this rule: it proposes that cancer offers an occasion for self-extension...