Wit demonstrates that words, despite their ability to define, describe, teach, inform, and comfort, often fall short. Vivian Bearing has devoted her life to the study of the written word. She is a scholar of John Donne’s metaphysical poetry, which is famous for its complicated vocabulary and mind-boggling examinations of life’s “big questions” (e.g., God, love, death). She has lived her whole life under the impression that her rigorous study of Donne’s language has the power to fulfill her (her scholarly work gives her success and a sense of purpose) and that it gives her a unique understanding of the world. Then she is diagnosed with untreatable cancer. Facing down her cancer, Vivian must confront her tendency to escape her life through language.
Before her cancer diagnosis, Vivian derived nearly all of her self-confidence from her ability to tease out meaning from Donne’s poems, which she claims “requires a capacity for scrupulously detailed examination.” She takes an enormous amount of pride in her work, to the extent that her self-worth is entirely based on her academic superiority. “Donne’s wit is…a way to see how good you are,” she says. “After twenty years, I can say with confidence, no one is quite as good as I.” However, Vivian’s time spent climbing the ranks in academia comes at great cost; she has never prioritized having a personal life, which has left her alone in her time of crisis, without friends or family. She recalls that even as a young graduate student, and even despite her mentor Dr. E. M. Ashford advising her to spend time with her friends, she preferred to study at the library.
Once Vivian is diagnosed with cancer, she doesn’t immediately recognize that her love of language can be both a source of joy and a way to hide from reality. In the beginning of the play, Vivian clings to her fascination with words in order to cope with her cancer diagnosis and bring the measured coolness of her scholarly work into her personal life. For example, when Dr. Kelekian describes her cancer using the medical term “insidious,” Vivian zones out, focusing on the multiple meanings of the word “insidious” instead of taking in the harsh reality of the information Kelekian is providing.
On one hand, this coping mechanism helps Vivian to keep up her strength as she endures a horribly difficult experience. For instance, in a moment when the side effects of her treatment are making her extremely sick, she thinks of the situation as parallel to Donne. “My treatment imperils my health,” she says. “Herein lies the paradox. John Donne would revel in it. I would revel in it, if he wrote a poem about it. My students would flounder in it, because paradox is too difficult to understand. Think of it as a puzzle, I would tell them, an intellectual game.” In this scene, Vivian goes from thinking aloud in her hospital room to delivering a full-blown lecture, and the stage directions read “escaping” as she moves into the lecture flashback. She is escaping—back into her mind and the world of poetry, where things are safe and certain, which is comforting but also dangerous for Vivian. Escaping allows her to stay at arm’s length from her fate, and in doing so, it prevents her from addressing it head-on.