SOURCE: DeShazer, Mary K. “‘Walls Made Out of Paper’: Witnessing Wit and How I Learned to Drive.” Women & Performance 13, no. 1 (fall 2002): 107-20.

In the following essay, DeShazer uses the critical theories of writer Lynda Hart, a cancer victim in 2000, to examine the literary representations of the female body in two plays: Edson's Wit and Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive.

What we are faced with, then … is a story that theoretically cannot be told.

—Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh

What does it signify about American culture at the millennium that a play about incest and transgressive desire, Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1998? Or that a play about a middle-aged woman's metastatic ovarian cancer, Margaret Edson's Wit, won the same prestigious award in 1999? Incest and cancer: betrayals of women's bodies, if not the body politic, sources...