Wit by Margaret Edson

Wit Every student has at some point in his or her educational career had a teacher that seemed completely unreasonable and immune to any sympathy towards the student. In the play Wit by Margaret Edson the main character is Dr. Vivian Bearing who is an esteemed professor of early 17th century poetry and fits the bill of the hard-nosed stubborn professor. This character is diagnosed with cancer and the play is about her treatments and battle with the cancer that ultimately at the end of the play leads to her death. Throughout the play itself Dr. Bearing goes through many trials and tribulations and her interactions with the audience, doctors, former students, and herself all show how she goes through stages in order to come to terms with her illness. In the first stage of the play where Vivian is initially diagnosed she shows signs of defiance, which gives the play a real life scenario feeling because it is natural to be in denial for a person under her circumstances. She feels as if she can beat this disease and get back to teaching as soon as possible. There are many of times that she tells the doctors (and audience) to keep giving the highest dosing of chemotherapy. Dr. Bearing understands what she is going to go through and is in terms with that on an intellectual level. She even reads books on medical terminology so as to not feel inferior to the doctors when they are reading her charts to her. This also shows the sense of denial and ignorance Dr. Bearing has to the big picture. And this big picture is that in the end she will die.
All her life she has been studying and she relates to the two doctors in that way because they are taking her as information and data and she respects that in the beginning. Her attitude toward being treated as data begins to change and she begins to resent that feeling. Then she has a flashback to a certain point in her teaching career that she was the same way with her students. This one particular student asked