Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 9 Number 2, August 2008
___________________________________________________________________
Constructed Identities, the Medical Gaze and Social Power Spaces in Margaret Edson’s Wit
by
China University of Technology in Taiwan
I. Introduction
This article examines themes in Margaret Edson’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize winning play Wit through the theoretic framework of the relationship between space, power and knowledge. Using this framework, the article analyzes the idea of socially constructed identities, how and why they are created, and how they can be de-constructed given the right circumstances—under normally dire conditions and with consequences that are not usually productive or efficacious. The article also examines the notion that all identities are at their base a nexus of psychic and social connections and there does not exist an essential self at the center of the construct known as the human being. The articles intends to draw on a number of thinkers including: Michel Foucault and his structures of perception in relation to medical practice as uncovered in the deconstruction of the use of power in discourse; Pierre Bourdieu and his notion of fields, habitus and social capital; Donna Haraway and her concept of situated knowledge, transcoding and the Cyborg as a knowledge structure that does away with the “clinical gaze” as is has been directed at the human body.
In particular, the paper draws upon Foucault’s Birth of The Clinic (1976) where he sees the “normalization” of the Western world’s conception of “health” as the absence of disease as the most influential discourse in the individual perception of “illness,” and how illness is dealt with on a social/institutional/individual level. With respect to Bourdieu, the paper focuses on several of his papers on the concept of “field,”1 as well as Language and Symbolic Power (1991) and Homo Academicus (1988) where he discusses how identities are supplied in essence by the power structures around them and are constrained and restricted by the play of “field.” As well, his idea of the lack of the purely disinterested act is discussed in terms of doctor-patient discourse.
In Haraway, the article concentrates on her Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991) and the “Situated Knowledges” essay, in which she argues not for an adversarial role between the study of science and feminism but rather one that combines constructivism and feminism. The idea is to fit this spectrum of post-modern identity theories into the nexus created by Edson’s Wit, most importantly with respect to Vivian, the main character in the play.
II. Foucault, Bourdieu, Haraway: The Individual and the Postmodern Project
In keeping with his lifelong tearing down of the concepts of the ordinary and the normal as independent, self-evident variables rather than social constructs through the use of power, Foucault observes that behind any attempt to define health is the notion of "normality" and this dictates our present-day view of health and disease, of what is healthy and what is diseased.
The disease paradigm of health that emerged in modern times could be considered a direct and predictable effect of the scientific advancement that followed the understood linear progression of Western science-as-culture quest for knowledge. As Wilkin points out, the idea of knowledge has lost much of its meaning through Foucault and other social constructivists: “[K]nowledge is not innate in any sense of the term, but is thoroughly historicized and passed on to us through the discursive practices that construct the social body at both the macro and the micro level” (Wilkin 183).
For the most part, Bourdieu’s fields correspond more or less to some fairly familiar divisions such as art, sport, business, medicine, academic, etc. He also defines fields according to social contexts such as capital, economic, cultural, social and symbolic (“The Social Space” 724). The individual agents or players within any specific field can be defined by where that person is within the field and how the themes and problems within that particular part of the field are interpreted (“Intellectual Field” 161-62). At the same time, “every field is the site of a more or less overt struggle over the definition of the legitimate principles of the division of the field” (“The Social Space” 734).
Decision-making within these fields is not done by either some type of over-riding ideological concerns or by a conscious strategy but rather through what Bourdieu labels the “habitus,” a form of subconscious that is cultural rather than individual, a type of dispositional matrix that helps organize and link the perceptions of those within the field. As well, because this “habitus” is linked inexorably to a person’s position within the social field or space, the view of the external world we receive also becomes part of what he called an “ontological complicity” and can no longer be looked about as completely objective (as if we could step outside the field and then cast our judgment on it) (Bourdieu, “Intellectual Field” 182).
Bourdieu also tries to take apart what the idea of the general or universal really signifies in, for example, a cancer specialist who acts as an oracle for the dispensing of “objective” comments and wisdom:
Delegates [or spokespersons] base universal value on themselves, appropriate values,
‘requisition morality,’ and thus monopolize the notions of God, Truth, Wisdom, People,
Message, Freedom, etc. They make them synonyms. What of? Of themselves. ‘I am the
Truth.’ They turn themselves into the sacred, they consecrate themselves and thereby
draw a boundary between themselves and ordinary people. They thus become, as
Nietzsche says, ‘the measure of all things’. (Language and Symbolic Power 210-11)
Connecting the two, the individual and the would-be universal, is what Bourdieu calls “habitus” or habit. He describes this as both the historical and cultural creation of individual practices and the individual production of practices, laws, contexts, etc. It is here that the notions of objective external structures, the subjective practices of individuals and the unconscious production of such structures and practices come together, according to Bourdieu:
In practice, it is the habitus, history turned into nature, i.e. denied as such, which
accomplishes practically the relating of these two systems of relations, in and through
the production of practice. The ‘unconscious’ is never anything other than the
forgetting of history which history itself produces by incorporating the objective
structures it produces in the second natures of the habitus. (Outline of a Theory of
Practice 78-9)
Haraway’s notion of reflexivity is imbedded in what she calls “situated knowledges.” These refer to “location, partial embodiment and partial perspective” that reflects the “particular and specific embodiment” (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 190-91) of the knower and that reflects the knower’s situation or position in social networks, spaces or what Bourdieu would call fields. Under these circumstances, Haraway is able to argue that the notion that someone can claim his or her knowledge to be universal, the “god-trick,” as she calls it, is no longer a viable possibility (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 189).
For Haraway, there is no pre-existing, essential entity upon which to pin an identity. The subject is a construction. In fact, she goes further and argues for a multiplicity of subjects. This means that one cannot use any essential identity to be uncovered to argue against the imposition of someone else’s identity upon the subject, insisting on “the impossibility of innocent ‘identity’ politics and epistemologies as strategies for seeing from the standpoints of the subjugated” (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 192).
Finally, Haraway argues for a critical link and relationship between the dispensing of knowledge and the social position of the one doing the dispensing. This can be easily adapted to the modern doctor-patient, teacher-student relationship, with the acceptance of such a relationship on both sides—from the side of the dispenser of critical knowledge because he/she wants to maintain that privileged position, and from the side of the person receiving such knowledge because he/she wants to believe that such knowledge will allow him/her to return to “normal” if that person is a patient and will allow him/her to achieve the same success if he/she is a student wishing to emulate the teacher.
II. Health and Disease: Applying the Theory
It is obvious from examining the theories of all three theorists above that, if it were not for the modern disease paradigm occupying the dominant mode of thought when it comes to health, the patient would have not have become such an object of examination, with the emphasis squarely on “object.” This mode of thought, constructed by the Western medical scientific model, helped to transform the “person” of a patient into the patient as an objective “case.” Or rather, if one accepts Bourdieu and Haraway’s formulation, what takes place is that one identity is deconstructed while another is constructed in its place. There is a displacement that takes place, seemingly without the approval (or in some cases even the knowledge) of the person to whom it is happening. As Haraway writes: “By the late twentieth century, our time, our mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism, in short we are cyborgs” (Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 192).
In Wit, for example, the main character is a cancer patient by the name of Vivian Bearing who finds herself both literally and figuratively stripped of her lifelong, tenaciously-constructed and toughly-defended identity as teacher/scholar. Instead, once she is diagnosed and admitted to hospital, not only are her “garments of academia” taken from her and replaced by the hospital uniform signifying helplessness, but she is treated like a discrete disease to be conquered, rather than as a whole human being suffering from a terminal illness.
She is treated like a cyborg, in other words, “a reconfiguration of the subject that not only undermines the concept of human subjectivity but also threatens and promises to transform the very subject matter of the study of human communication” (Gunkel 333). The key thing, however, is that this cyborg invasion is not coming from an external threat but is the result of the primary focus of the attempt by humans to dominate the world through the scientific process, with medicine being one of the sub-categories. Thus, by the time, humans realize they have been assimilated by the Borg, as it were, it is already too late. Or, as Foucault says: “Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end” (The Order of Things 387). According to Gray, Mentor, and Figueroa-Sarriera: “There are many actual cyborgs among us in society. Anyone with an artificial organ, limb or supplement (like a pacemaker), anyone programmed to resist disease (immunized) or drugged to think/ behave/feel better (psychopharmacology) is technically a cyborg” (Gary. et al. 2).
Aside from those described as actual cyborgs, there are also those called virtual cyborgs, those who “participate in occupations that make them into metaphoric cyborgs, including the computer keyboarder in a cybernetic circuit with the screen, the neurosurgeon guided by fiber optic microscopy during an operation, and the teen gameplayer in the local videogame arcade” (Hayles 322). Not to mention the patient hooked up to a medical machine of some type.
In the end, the main character in Edson’s play calls into question the hegemonic culture of academia and research that have combined to create this state: both hers and that of modern medical science. This reduction of the patient to objective case, to the disease to be eradicated, is what Foucault called the “clinical gaze.” The power of this “gaze” lies in its logical/rational approach to containing disorder and chaos. While the gaze seems to be culturally neutral at first glance, something we have discovered as existing “out there” in a predictable and foregone-conclusion reality, Foucault exposes it as a representative of the cultural foregrounding of objectivity/rationalism, combined with the idea that humans, given the right powers and mental attitude, can control the unpredictability of the world (read: can conquer nature and rise above it).
Haraway draws a similar conclusion when she states that the practice of the scientific representation of an object is part of what she calls “a revolutionary apparatus for turning disorderly bodies into disciplined art and science” (Modest-Witness@second-Millenium 180). This makes no difference if the “object” happens to be an Albrecht Durer print such as “Draughtsman Drawing A Nude” or a female cancer patient by the name of Vivian: “The gendering of this kind of vision is, of course, not subtle. Indeed, feminists argue that this visual technology was part of the apparatus for the production of modern gender” (180).
At the same time, the patient—and this is true of Vivian—does not act simply as a bystander while this deconstructing and reconstructing of identities is taking place. In fact, the patient plays a crucial role in the acceptance and support of the newly-constructed relationship, which is a reciprocal one, after all. While the doctor does have or is presumed to have objective knowledge and expertise that the patient may need to survive (or to at least have the opportunity to survive), it is the way the doctor and patient imagine each other and the other that has the greatest impact on the relationship.
In this sense, both doctor and patient become willing or unwilling participants in the socially constructed roles they have been handed. After all, what would the reaction of a hospital patient be if a witchdoctor or other natural healer were to enter the cancer ward and begin to perform his or her rituals? This is where Bourdieu’s habitus, his “system of structured, structuring dispositions”, comes into play (The Logic of Practice 52). As Collins puts it:
Through the concept of a habitus, Bourdieu understands agents as socially inculcated,
as significantly constrained in their ways and means, yet as actors who are not
automata in a self-perpetuating machine … the habitus can be usefully viewed as a
tradition—an inheritance informing present and future perception and action—that is
schematic, selective, and improvisational. Seen from this perspective, the
habitus/tradition equation offers a fruitful alternative to the polarities of ‘authentic’ and
‘invented’ tradition with which many anthropologists and historians struggle. (728)
In the play, this is shown most clearly by the fact that Vivian Bearing herself took part in a similar discourse where knowledge was associated with power: the world of academia. That was a field of discourse that she struggled to enter, that she fought tooth and nail to gain admittance to, weighed down by the gender posturing of the academics who came before her. That was how she differentiated herself from others. This was something that she did deliberately and of which she was quite proud. This was what served to identify her—in the eyes of other academics and most importantly in the eyes of her students.
When she can no longer maintain that particular discourse because her body has let her down, Vivian quickly finds herself in another, one where she becomes an interesting “case” within the realm of medical discourse that offers her the promise of once again returning to “normal,” to once again regain power through knowledge. At this time, she honestly equates her individuality and sense of self with her constructed identity as a brilliant and forward-thinking academic.
Without that constructed identity, she feels that she is nothing and that she has nothing to distinguish her from every other person in the world. In fact, when her academic persona is stripped from her through the disease ravaging her body, Vivian does not prepare to do battle to assume a new identity: she simply allows the doctors, the experts, the scientific objectivists, to create one for her. That they create one that she does not feel really “fits” her comes out in one layer of the play—in the layer where she stubbornly fights against the objectification of who she is. But eventually even that layer of identity turns out to be constructed. Eventually the paring down of Vivian’s identity to its bare essentials reveals something that is very frightening for her: stripped of her academic construction and not willing to any longer accept the identity foisted on her by the doctors, what exactly is she?
III. The Postmodern Self
In a sense, Vivian joins the list of characters who have been stripped to their existentialist core—somewhat like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting For Godot. The only difference is that, as an academic, she is very much aware of the theoretical implications of such a descent. In postmodern theory, the self has gone from something essential, something held within the person and making that person unique to what has been described as “largely a product of the relatively anonymous and ambiguous forms of power that embed one in a network of social relations” (Thiele 120). This is also the Foucauldian concept of the power-subject relationship wherein humans are basically “beings-in-the-world situated within an existing web of relations occurring within a context of background practices” (Gordon 395).
In his The Subject and Power, Foucault specifically states that he does not believe in any sort of ideal human nature and that there are no inherent characteristics for the Foucauldian subject. Meaning can be attained only through the relationships such a subject has with other subjects within the social structure: the “form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others recognize in him” (“The Subject and Power” 212).
What does that mean for Vivian? Essentially, throughout most of her life, she has been what her social and power relationships with others made her into being: first a woman battling to make her way through an academia that was hostile to women and that threw obstacles and traps in her way; then, having made it into the hallowed halls, she turned herself into one of those who did the tormenting, the belittling. It was her turn, in other words, to use her power to “create” others. The realization that both these were not her “true” identity only comes when she is stripped of those identities—by another of the power relationships, that of Foucault’s clinical gaze.
Bourdieu argues a similar point but from a slightly different angle. These are his fields which serve as action from a distance to establish certain areas in social life, areas that one needs certain very precise prerequisites and a pre-conceived identity to enter. Once a person enters then he or she must adhere to a certain set of possibilities. These then become what Bourdieu calls “embodied history,” “embodied social structure,” “one’s total social baggage” (The Logic of Practice 198).
Again, Vivian fits into this quite nicely. Without having seen the skeleton or structure holding together her relationships, Vivian engaged in exactly this type of activity before being diagnosed with a malicious and fast-spreading cancer. When she did, she too adhered to the possibilities set out before her and adopted a pre-digested identity while believing that she was making her own way through life and actually fashioning an identity that was unique to her own self. She suffered from the same delusions, in other words, as every other power monger: the notion that she was actually having some effect in the world. While it is a cliché that an encounter with death strips away many of our delusions about ourselves, Vivian sinks even deeper here in that she is not really allowed to become philosophical about it. Rather, she is used by other power brokers as an experiment, something to be prodded and poked, to be used and then discarded.
Finally, what is perhaps the most radical theory on the self in postmodern thought comes from Haraway and her cyborgs. Here, she substitutes the idea of genetic replication for human reproduction. To continue the quote from previously in the article: “The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation” (Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 150). Here, everything is flattened, eliminating even the possibility of hierarchy and parenthood (metaphoric and biological). Instead, “the organism has been translated into problems of genetic coding and read-out … biology here is a kind of cryptology” (164).
With respect to Edson’s Wit, Vivian is not seen as human by the specialists who examine her. Instead, she is a mass of genetic coding, some of which has run amok within the container that is encasing that coding. The notion that humans for some reason need to be treated differently because they have some special type of “soul” or “spirit” or even self-consciousness is considered impractical and, in fact, the belief is that such notions stand in the way of finding a cure. So Vivian is not encouraged to see herself as a human being but rather as some type of machine whose parts are causing her trouble, a replicating machinery that must be fixed before it completely overruns itself. Why it is important to stop this overrunning is not a question that the specialists are willing to ask, let alone answer.
No matter what, at this point, among the questions that need asking are: If our “self” is mostly a socially constructed identity, something that is the result of action at a distance within a social field, or something that is basically beyond our control (as in a pre-programmed cyborg mechanism or genetic code), how is that identity managed? And who gets to manage it? And how is it possible for human beings to become this type of manageable entity? Foucault answered this obliquely in his Discipline and Punish (1979). Here he describes how power turns human beings into objects and gives them external identity sets and categories such as: female/passive/lack, criminal/illicit/ dangerous, sane/reason/normal. These sets of categories are then internalized by the subject and accepted both as individually natural and as socially standard practices. Among the power relations that Foucault, Bourdieu, Haraway and similar postmodernist thinkers have found are: scientific theories and models, economic institutions, artistic creations, political frameworks, and, perhaps of most interest here in the analysis of Wit, medical and legal discourses.
At the same time, someone like Foucault understands quite clearly and precisely that power relationships cannot exist unless the subject of those relations has the possibility of freedom. One does not exercise power over a computer, for example: “One must observe … that there cannot be relations of power unless the subject is free … [I]n the relations of power, there is necessarily the possibility of resistance, for if there were no possibility of resistance—of violent resistance, of escape, of ruse, of strategies that reverse the situation—there would be no relations of power” (Foucault, “The Ethic of Care” 12).
This is precisely the case in the relationship between Vivian in Wit and the doctors who are treating her. They exercise power over her in the belief that this is the only way they can cure her. As long as she believes that they can cure her, she is under their power, within their circle. The moment that is no longer a possibility, Vivian is free from their hold. She can then escape the constructed identity they have set up to hold her. Unfortunately, as it turns out, the only real possibility of escape for Vivian, after all her resistance, seems to be death. As she says in the opening to the play: “It is not my intention to give away the plot; but I think I die in the end” (Wit 6). But then again, is there anyone else on Earth who escapes this particular predicament?
IV. Wit, Medical Practice and the Clinical Gaze
In The Birth of the Clinic, Foucault argues that the “gaze (or vision) of Western medicine was fundamentally transformed in the eighteenth century by the advent of the autopsy” (Boyce W. 144). Thus, rather than seeing patients as human beings, rather than seeing them holistically, doctors were now able to actually look upon and touch what they felt were the actual sources of the illness—the lesions, tumors, etc.
When you add postmodern theories (Foucault, Bourdieu, Haraway) of the body/subject as the site of the play of social relationships rather than a container for essential qualities, it is easy to see how the change was a fundamental one, producing a new type of knowledge—and thus a new type of power: “[C]linical experience sees a new space opening up before it; the tangible space of the body … the medicine of organs, sites, causes, a clinic wholly ordered in accordance with pathological anatomy” (Foucault, Birth of the Clinic 122). At the same time, a person’s life became a series of dossiers, histories, notations, “the collection of documents that locates, describes, and accounts for each prisoner, patient, or child” (Rhodes 169) which Foucault himself describes as “a procedure of objectification and subjection” (Discipline and Punish 192).
In terms of the clinical gaze and the dying patient specifically, this theory would specify that, as the patient approaches death, the gaze would observe less and less of the patient and more and more of the illness. According to Tanner: “Because the medical gaze sees disease only by blocking out the human subject whose body bears the mark of illness, illness becomes increasingly visible as it becomes increasingly incontestable. The person with terminal illness may thus feel totally abandoned, for the medical gaze, as Foucault observes, sees its logical extension in the absolute obliteration of the person by the disease, in death” (Tanner 103).
At the same time as this so-called objective clinical gaze was taking flight, it had to be remembered that both clinicians and patients were human. Thus, there arose a clash between the scientific and existential accounts of disease. As Komesaroff puts it:
[T]he clinic itself assumed an ambivalence that has ever since been both productive
and limiting: on the one hand, there was the ‘scientific’ reduction of disease and
physical processes, which enabled the body to be opened up to systematic, empirical
investigation; on the other, there was the ancient appreciation of the delicacy and
mystery of embodied subjectivity and of the altered forms it assumes under conditions
of illness. (Komesaroff 76)
If one were to apply this dichotomy to Wit, it becomes quickly apparent that Jason, the resident, represents the “objective” clinical gaze while Susie, the nurse, represents the compassionate side of the equation, the one who believes that Vivian can manage redemption—ironically through a “Do Not Resuscitate” decision.
V. Wit and Socially Constructed Identities
In Margaret Edson’s Wit, the main character Vivian Bearing has always seen herself as someone who is a little above the common run-of-the-mill human being. She is, after all, a scholar and university professor who specializes in the Holy Sonnets of seventeenth-century poet John Donne. But now, suffering from advanced ovarian cancer, Vivian is no longer the aloof intellectual. She no longer has any control over her own identity (even if it had always been simply another constructed identity). Instead, as Vanhoutte says: “Vivian experiences her disease as a ritual degradation—a painful and humiliating erosion of the barriers that had separated her from, and elevated her above, other human beings” (393).
In the play, we are given constant reminders of Vivian’s past career as an academic—a career that she struggles to keep intact even as she slides into terminal illness. She even comments on her own situation as something within a play, saying at one point that “irony is a literary device that will necessarily be deployed to great effect” and that she would prefer “that a play about me be cast in the mythic-heroic-pastoral mode; but the facts, most notably stage-four metastatic ovarian cancer, conspire against that. The Faerie Queene this is not” (Wit 6). Later on, Vivian is still being witty: “I have stage four metastatic ovarian cancer. There is no stage five. Oh, and I have to be very tough. It appears to be a matter, as the saying goes, of life and death” (Wit 12).
In one of the central scenes of the play, Vivian must undergo the humiliation of a quasi-public pelvic examination at the hands of Jason, one of her ex-students, before a group of student doctors. Jason himself is also uneasy about the examination and, in an effort to ease the situation somewhat, he starts to talk about some of his classroom experiences with Vivian. Ironically, this adds to the tension as Vivian is painfully reminded that the barriers have all collapsed between her previously unassailable position as a teacher and her now completely vulnerable position on a table with her legs spread in stirrups. In her soliloquy on what is happening to her, Vivian uses phrases such as “thoroughly degrading” and “could not have imaged the depths of humiliation” (Wit 32).
At the start of the play, Vivian still seems to try to cling onto her academic persona, the intellectual professor type who fought all the stereotypes to get to where she was, despite an appearance that speaks volumes to the contrary: “VIVIAN BEARING walks on the empty stage pushing her IV pole. She is fifty, tall and very thin, barefoot, and completely bald. She wears two hospital gowns -- one tied in the front and one tied in the back -- a baseball cap, and a hospital ID bracelet.” (Wit 5) For example, in the opening scene of the play, she enters the stage and says things like:
It is unfortunate that this remarkable line of inquiry has come to me so late in my
career. I could have exploited its feigned solicitude to great advantage … Of course, I
would not be wearing this costume at the time, so the question’s ironic significance
would not be fully apparent … Irony is a literary device that will necessarily be
deployed to great effect. I ardently wish this were not so. (Wit 6)
Later, as the disease plays out its course, we are presented with a Vivian who no longer tries to make ironic comments, someone who was a scholar when she “had shoes, when I had eyebrows” (Wit 68), when she had the proper uniform so that she could identify herself. In a sense, she finally accepts the reduction in status and the humiliation of the “clinical gaze,” the human being reduced to a grouping of symptoms, the cyborg collection of genetic material, the person at the center of a power nexus field that no longer takes her humanity into consideration (if it ever had). At the same time, however, she is still struggling with trying to discover her identity, thinking that there is still a possibility of an essential humanity despite everything that has happened and all the humiliation she has undergone. After learning to accept Susie’s little kindnesses towards her, she says:
That was certainly a maudlin display. Popsicles? “Sweetheart”? I can’t believe my life
has become so … corny. But it can’t be helped … Now is not the time for verbal
swordplay, for unlikely flights of imagination, and wildly shifting perspectives, for
metaphysical conceit, for wit. And nothing would be worse than a detailed scholarly
analysis. Erudition. Interpretation. Complication. (Slowly) Now is a time for simplicity.
Now is a time for, dare I say it, kindness. (Searchingly) I thought being extremely
smart would take care of it. But I see that I have been found out. Ooooooh. I’m scared.
Oh, God. I want … I want … Now. I want to hide. I just want to curl up in a little ball.
(She dives under the covers. Scene Change. Vivian wakes in horrible pain. She is tense,
agitated, fearful. Slowly she calms down and addresses the audience. Trying extremely
hard.) I want to tell you how it feels, to use my words. It’s as if … I can’t … There
aren’t … say it, Vivian. It hurts like hell. It really does. (Susie enters. Vivian writhing
in pain.) Oh, God. Oh, God. (Wit 69-70)
There is the horrible recognition here that Vivian has not really lost her true identity by suffering from this terminal illness. What she has lost is simply another of the socially constructed identities created through the modern knowledge-power nexus—and that these are all part of the same mind-set, or fields, as Bourdieu would describe them. In other words, she has gone from one gaze to another, from one “empty signifier” that needs to be filled to another—and such empty signification only rises to the surface when there is a struggle (Laclau and Mouffe 398).
We see that, in her academic career, Vivian prized her research over any sense of teaching. She looks at teaching as some type of competition, one at which she has to be the best. She has always maintained a distance between her and her students. She speaks of having used her “agile wit” not to dig into deep issues such as “life and God” but as a way to point out and delight “in their complexity” (Wit 60). She has always won these contests because they were rigged in advance by her, thus allowing her to see herself as “powerful” (Wit 48) and her students as “simpering” (Wit 59). As Vanhoutte points out: “Vivian’s favored pedagogical tools—derision and humiliation—further implement her separation from and elevation above her students. The impression that these classroom flashbacks create is of Vivian as a fortressed self—she lets no one in at all” (398).
In her role as professor, she did not serve so much as an educator but as someone conducting a social experiment, one in which she was the controlling force and her students had better not forget it—or they would be the victims of her relentless irony. Again, she did not see her students as human beings but as sparring partners in some gigantic game of wit. Thus the title of the play. At the same time, she kept her own humanity hidden, her own desires and fears, her own uncertainties. She presented a cold wall that spat back Shakespearean lines like some sort of machine … the more she spat out, the more she felt fulfilled.
Now, it would seem, the opposite is taking place. Under the “clinical gaze,” everything is exposed. In fact, as Schneider would argue, the body itself is in performance with the aim to:
[E]xplicate bodies in social relation … to peel back layers of signification that surround
[them] like ghosts at a grave … A mass of orifices and appendages, details and tactile
surfaces, the explicit body in representation is foremost a site of social markings,
physical parts and gestural signatures of gender, race, class, age, and sexuality—all of
which bear ghost of historical meaning. (Schneider 2).
This bears a close resemblance to Haraway’s cyborg signification, but without the structured information package that the cyborgs represent.
Often, the person undergoing the transformation, the person being shifted out of one field into another does not realize it is happening—until the person finds herself out in “left field,” as it were. In fact, as we have already noted, Vivian uses elements of her previous socially constructed identity even while she appears on stage as emaciated, bald, and connected to an IV that she pushes along as she traverses the stage. At this point, despite the fact she’s eight months into her treatment, she still relies on her identity as a distinguished scholar.
As DeShazer puts it: “Vivian’s initial self-presentation exudes confidence. She banters with the audience, acknowledges the dramatic dimensions of her struggle, and employs irony to distance herself from her disease, even as she predicts her imminent demise” (7). But, as we have seen, this stance cannot be maintained for long. She cannot continue to play word games with her doctor, to pretend to be on the same level with him. As her body abandons her, that sense of equality shrivels under his gaze. In the end, she is left to answer questions that cannot be truly answered:
Am I in pain? I don’t believe this. Yes, I’m in goddamn pain. (Furious) I have a fever
of 101 spiking to 104. And I have bone metastases in my pelvis and both femurs.
(Screaming) There is cancer eating away at my goddamn bones, and I did not know
there could be such pain on this earth. (Wit 71)
In a sense, here, Vivian’s body becomes a type of battleground among various types of socially constructed identities. Or as Potts describes it: “The body and the identity of the woman … become contested sites of meaning between the hegemony of the discourse of medical practice and her own sense of the disease and her relationship to it, the meaning she generates through the process” (117).
What meaning does Vivian generate? What can she make of her own disease? At one point, there seems to be nothing but pain, excruciating pain. It blots everything else out. All other reality becomes insignificant. Little wonder that she submits to the “clinical gaze” even if it results in “physical, verbal, and psychological indignities,” even if “they face invasive treatments with painful side effects and uncertain outcomes rivaling the malignancy of the cancer itself”(DeShazer 14).
At the same time, there seems to be a deliberate attempt on the part of the doctors, on Jason’s part in particular, to confuse and obfuscate, to create a vocabulary only others who have been initiated into the “clinical gaze” lexicon can hope to understand. This is how Jason describes Vivian as he probes her:
Very late detection. Staged as a four upon admission. Hexamethophosphacil with
Vinplatin to potentiate. Hex at 300 mg. per meter squared. Vin at 100. Today is cycle
two, day three. Both cycles at full dose. (The FELLOWS are impressed.) The primary
site is—here (He puts his finger on the spot on her abdomen), behind the left ovary.
Metastases are suspected in the peritoneal cavity—here. (Wit 36)
Vivian is still fighting back at this stage. But all she can identify with is the fact that she herself acted in the same way when she stood before her classroom. She says: “Full of subservience, hierarchy, gratuitous displays, sublimated rivalries … I feel right at home. It is just like a graduate seminar” (Wit 37). Foucault, Bourdieu, Haraway would argue that these gazes—the clinical, the scientific, the academic, the artistic, the philosophic—is really all there is; that nothing lies beneath them when they are stripped away. Renner says:
How does one know the self at this terminal moment? Not as a collection of cell
pathologies and blood chemistry data, as Bearing’s young doctors assume. Bearing
cannot be reduced to the suffering animal life shivering beneath the hospital gown. She
is more than a body and a past—although even the metaphysical poets can only
speculate about the future of a woman who, in the ordinary sense, has no future. (Wit
35)
But that does not really answer the postmodernist challenge. In Wit, the answer comes from the notion of redemption, the re-introduction of messy emotions into the mix. Those who practice the “clinical gaze” do not like emotions: Jason is pathetic when it comes to any type of bedside manner. Vivian was the same way in her previous life: she had no friends, only witticisms. In fact, the only person who visits her in the hospital is her old teacher and mentor. Vivian treated her students in the same way she is being treated now.
The redemption comes from nurse Susie, who does not possess the intellectual rigor or strength that Vivian and Jason have. What she offers instead is some type of succor—first in the form of a popsicle and then in compassion and understanding. Susie highlights the fact that “the hospital setting serves to underscore the human absurdity at the core of the scientific worldview … about the search for empirical knowledge as it fails—brutally and painfully—to postpone the final chapter of a human life” (Renner 34).
In the end, it is Susie who convinces Vivian to sign a “Do Not Resuscitate” (DNR) order, something which Jason then tries to ignore. At one point, Susie shouts at him: “She’s DNR!” (Wit 85). Jason pushes her away and yells: “She’s research!” (Wit 85). But when the Code team that has been summoned by Jason realizes the DNR order, they blame him for the error: “It’s a doctor fuckup—What is he, a resident?” (Wit 85). At this point, Vivian rises from the bed, “attentive and eager, moving slowly toward the light” (Wit 85). The stage directions indicate that, as she takes off the cap to reveal her baldness, and removes her medical bracelet that held her name and hospital number, she is glowing and suddenly in full control of her body again, i.e., a whole person:
(She loosens the ties and the top gown slides to the floor. She lets the second gown
fall. The instant she is naked, and beautiful, reaching for the light—Lights out). (Wit
85)
There is a scene where the ghostly Vivian goes back to the place where she is no longer present, to where the gaze has held her. As Schneider says: “The subject returns for a second time in relation to its own death, as if beside itself … exposing the historical mechanisms of a social drama what has parsed its players, by bodily markings, into subjects and objects” (180-81). Vivian has gone from being under the “clinical gaze” to the “guise of subjectivity … a second sight/site” (180). This is in keeping with what Schneider has labeled a type of reciprocity, “a project of recognizing the ricochet of gazes, the histories of who-gets-to-see-what-where” (184).
VI. Some Conclusions
The analysis of Margaret Edson’s Wit using the postmodern theory of self as composed of “socially constructed identities” combined with Foucault’s “clinical gaze”, Bourdieu’s “social field” and “habitus”, and Haraway’s “cyborg transcoding” has produced what seems an interesting and productive approach: criticism that rises above the purely academic/literary. It also gets to the gist of the problem of what human identity is really all about going back to the basic question: What exactly is a human being? Is there something essential that a human being has that makes that particular person unique, different, special?
In Wit, we see a character who is stripped of what she thought was her humanity. But that human identity turns out to simply be one more constructed identity (if we are to believe the postmodernists), one more false alarm. So Vivian actually goes from one constructed identity to another. She originally felt that her first identity was self-constructed; instead, she realizes in the end that it is rather self-delusion than self-construction. There is nothing there, in other words, once the trappings are removed. Vivian is able to fight against her second constructed identity because she feels this was created by others and roughly placed on her. When the two identities become equated, they lose any differences that Vivian originally thought they had.
But what makes the play poignant beyond this deconstruction of identity is the fact that there comes a point where it does not matter what identity one takes up. The person must still face the same questions that all human beings face sooner or later. And it is the response to this challenge that in some ways determines who that person is. So, in a sense, there is still some irony in it all. As Vivian says at the opening of the play, commenting on the fact everyone asks her how she is feeling without really caring about the answer: “I am waiting for the moment when someone asks me this question and I am dead. I’ a little sorry I’ll miss that” (Wit 5).
On the theoretical level, the play has raised questions related to the whole “game” of the objective-logical project and how humans fit into that project; in other words, how individual humans relate to the idea of “humanity”. In this sense, the play must itself objectivize certain of the characters (placing them under its own gaze, as it were). In other words, the doctors for the most part have been removed from the possibility of achieving redemption. They serve as victims of their own “clinical gaze,” as it reflects upon them—much like creatures turned to stone after seeing their own reflections.
The postmodern scholars underpinning this analysis would not have objected to this characterization because they have come to the conclusion that, in one way or another, there is nothing behind the gaze—that the gaze itself is all, in other words. They would argue that “self” and an “essential human identity” do not exist except as creations of those with the power to insinuate knowledge.
Wit is unwilling to accept that, unwilling to believe that there really is nothing else but what we humans create in our drive to power and self-importance. In its place, it offers not some type of earthly recompense or solution but redemption. Vivian would have been amused by the irony of the fact that the self would only regain its “true” identity after death!
In a sense, because Vivian tells the audience right at the start that she dies in the end, this raises the possibility that the play is only peripherally about dying. The real thrust of the play is the stripping down of Vivian’s constructed identities so that she is left unprotected and with all her humanity exposed—whatever that may be. It is only then that she can achieve redemption. It is not coincidental that Vivian is an expert on the poetry of John Donne, whose lines in Holy Sonnet #10 include: “One short step past, we wake eternally,/ And death shall be no more; Death thou shalt die.”
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