W; t

Faith McLellan

doi:10.7326/0003-4819-131-9-199911020-00030

Medical Writings |2 November 1999

W; t

Faith McLellan, PhD

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On Monday, 12 April 1999, Margaret Edson was summoned from her Atlanta kindergarten class to the principal's office. Though hardly an unusual ritual, in Edson's case the occasion was indeed unique. She was 37, rather than, say, 5, and was the teacher of this class, not a student in it. What “transgression” was she hauled in for? Winning the Pulitzer Prize for her off-Broadway play, W;t(1), news that the principal was, for once, happy to break in a celebratory, rather than a disciplinary, encounter. Clearly, a critically acclaimed play about one woman's experience of stage IV ovarian cancer isn't an everyday occurrence.

In W; t, Edson eloquently captures some hard truths about the experience of illness, while at the same time reflecting a long and sometimes distinguished tradition of illness narratives, or pathographies(2, 3). Because W; t is not an autobiographical or biographical story of personal illness, it is not, strictly speaking, a pathography, but it is an imaginative relative of the genre. In a subtle—and perhaps unwitting—way, Edson becomes the heir of the play's shadowy hero, the 17th-century metaphysical poet John Donne, whose Devotions upon Emergent Occasions is one of the earliest narratives of illness (4). When Vivian Bearing, the protagonist of Wit, turns out to be a Donne scholar, the story of her cancer becomes firmly anchored in the world of the famed author of another illness narrative.

Ever professorial, the protagonist sets an ironic tone in her opening address to the audience:...

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1999 American College of Physicians

Medical Writings |2 November 1999

W; t

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Medical Writings |2 November 1999

W; t

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