Internal Life Of Vivian Bearing, By Margaret Edson

Sprinkled throughout the account of Beauvoir`s experience, it is easy to see the many difficulties that occur within the relationships of doctors, health care staff, family and friends. This repertoire offers a profoundly private account of the, anguish, remorse, and frustration that is often associated with the journey of a loved one to his or her demise. The account is simplistic and to the point; with the frank and truthful visualization and rumination one would experience under similar circumstances. There is a moral dilemma initiated at the beginning of Beauvoir’s hospital experience with her mother, which not only includes deception on the part of her and her sister, but dishonesty

Vivian shows her relation to Donne rather early on in the play, however. As she observes the doctors and physicians examining her, she makes a connection between the manner in which they study her body and the manner in which she studies poetry. She refers to the doctors’ rounds of examining when she states, “In Grand Rounds, they read me like a book. Once I did the teaching, now I am taught” (Edson 32). This is Vivian’s first step towards her ultimate realization. In Donne’s work, “Hymn to God, My God, in my Sickness,” more connections can be made between Vivian and Donne’s speaker. Just like the speaker in the poem, Vivian sees her body as the doctors’ map to study. “…my physicians..cosmographers, and I their map, who lie flat on this bed” (Donne lines 1-2).

John Donne’s poems are similar in their content. They usually point out at same topics like love, lust, sex and religion; only they are dissimilar in the feelings they express. These subjects reflect the different stages of his life: the lust of his youth, the love of his married middle age, and the piety of the latter part of his life. His poem,’ The Flea’ represents the restless feeling of lust during his youthful days but it comes together with a true respect for women through the metaphysical conceit of the flea as a church in the rhythm of the sexual act.

The metaphysical era in poetry started in the 17th century when a number of poets extended the content of their poems to a more elaborate one which investigated the principles of nature and thought. John Donne was part of this literary movement and he explored the themes of love, death, and religion to such an extent, that he instilled his own beliefs and theories into his poems. His earlier works, such as The Flea and The Sunne Rising, exhibit his sexist views of women as he wrote more about the physical pleasures of being in a relationship with women. However, John Donne displays maturity and adulthood in his later works, The Canonization and A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning, in which his attitude transcends to a more grown up one. The

The poet’s use of an astonished tone is the backbone of the speaker’s discoveries about itself as a poet and as a person. The speaker being “surprised” about seeing a book on the bookstore's shelf indicate that something was profoundly different about Louise Bogan’s book of poetry. The speaker conveys her astonishment at the fact that Louise Bogan’s poetry book did have “blurbs” by the “big boys,” in reference to big name poets including: “Chaucer- Milton- Shakespeare- Yeats,” on the back of the book. The speaker was also astonished at the fact that the poet’s name was “blurred” and at the “bottom” of the book. This astonishment conveyed to the speaker and to the readers that the poet was secure in himself and his writing and he does not need validation from other poets. The speaker’s tone shifts to a passionate tone because the speaker is passionately wanting to find herself and take ownership of who she is. The speaker’s attitude was so passionate that she wanted to “own” the moment. The speaker was so ardent in her attempt to find herself, that she felt the book of poems was apart of her and she

Getting prepared for death can be an exhausting experience for the patient and their family. It is very important that the patient not only knows what they want as far as their right to receive or reject treatment and medications or knowing whether they want to receive palliative care at home or in a hospital setting to include the advantages and disadvantages of each. The main focus of this paper is to give the reader an in depth look on how an end of life crisis affects a patient and their family. Ella is a breast cancer patient who just came out of remission and is at the end of her life.

Throughout Prose’s essay, she uses rhetorical questions to state what she deems as the ‘obvious’ to put a crack in the foundation of the standard of literature for the national education

This story was written in the late 1800’s, which emphasizes women and their place in society. The narrator’s story is quite accurate given the treating of her illness and the overall treatment toward the narrator herself at the time of publication. The deterioration of the narrator’s emotional state began when her career was at a halt when the responsibilities of motherhood overwhelmed her. This is when the narrator begins to fall into a depression that her husband, a therapist that was well respected, treated by a form of rehabilitation called the ‘rest cure’. This cure consisted of rest and destruction of all thoughts or actions toward a career. When this method proved to be unsuccessful, the narrator begins to understand her roles of wife and mother as the source of her depression. This leads the narrator to leave her husband, as well as her own child, in pursuit of leaving behind the chain that brought her career to a halt.

Donne’s 17th century neo-classical metaphysical poetry is based around his own personal experiences and the historic context. While Margaret Edson’s 20th century metatheatrical post-modern play Wit has exploited Donne’s strong religious ideas and metaphysical conceits, it has deciphered it towards a more secular context and audience. Despite contextual differences, the two composers, through in textual reading, shares and explores the common values and ideas including the value of relationships and the concept of death.

In the movie Wit, English literary scholar Vivian Bearing has spent years translating and interpreting the poetry of John Donne. Unfortunately, she is a person who has cultivated her intellect at the expense of her heart. Both colleagues and students view Bearing as a chilly and unfriendly person lost in her private world of words and mysterious thoughts.

And what can one do? If a physician of high standing, and one's own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression -- a slight hysterical tendency -- what is one to do?” (Gilman). John is so far removed from his wife’s reality due to the fact that he is “a physician of high standing.” One might expect that because he is a doctor, he would be the most understanding of the illnesses people possess.

The idea of love is not as passionate in Dickinson’s poem as it is in Donne’s. Death is described as a suitor, picking up the main character for a “date.” The two are not married as the characters in Donne’s poem are; therefore, their “love” is not as desperate nor as strong.

To begin with, I will look at what cancer is. I would like to look at cancer as a disease and the social determinants of this perspective. I would then like to investigate cancer as an illness and look at the narrative of this experience including its social determinants. Finally, I will address the differences and similarities between the two.

She not only uses words to describe how she feels but she also pauses in between some words and phrases to add emotion to her speech. She describes how she feels by saying, “We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, not if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you.

Juliet makes a claim that words cannot capture the most important ideas and emotions. After reading the play and reflecting on recent experiences in my life I agree with Juliet, words do not have value because words can lie and be empty and words can’t express