SOURCE: Vanhoutte, Jacqueline. “Cancer and the Common Woman in Margaret Edson's W;t.” Comparative Drama 36, nos. 3-4 (fall/winter 2002-03): 391-410.

In the following essay, Vanhoutte notes that Edson uses cancer as a tool to judge how Vivian has lived her life—a stereotype to which Vanhoutte objects, arguing that such methodology maintains the misguided belief that cancer is in some way a metaphysical punishment for poor life choices.

This essay is an exercise in the bringing together of apparently disparate roles. I am an assistant professor of Renaissance literature, and I am a cancer patient. These two identities rarely overlap, since cancer has not proved a popular literary subject. As Susan Sontag notes, although nineteenth-century writers glamorized tubercular patients, “nobody conceives of cancer … as a decorative, often lyrical death”; she adds that “cancer is a rare and still scandalous subject for poetry; and it seems unimaginable to...