Scenes to note for Wit essay

[spideywing]

Yeah; third essay is on the movie version of the play Wit, and I kinda know what I want to discuss, so these three scenes are the ones I want to remember:

• Vivian pinching her IV drip to summon Susie
• Vivian offering half her popsicle to Susie
• Susie trying to clean up Vivian after her death and the attempted Code Blue

I still need to think about a connection between all these scenes, but this is the start of my essay.

Thesis: In the film adaption of Wit, Vivian only gains the emotional strength to face her own mortality through the friendship she develops with her nurse, Susie.

Possible secondary quotes

From http://www.westga.edu/~pburgey/Wit/TheologicalHumanism.pdf:

• However, below the surface of things, she is mysterious-even sacred-a more complicated character than anyone in the production or audience might begin to imagine.
• Despite a stockpile of degrees, certificates, and awards of recognition, the ‘expert’ readers are far from humanistic

From http://www.westga.edu/~pburgey/Wit/PrideRessurrection.pdf:

•  Vivian Bearing receives but one visitor: Professor E.M. Ashford, her former mentor and predecessor as preeminent Donne scholar.
• Further, her reliance on "wit" keeps her at a distance from others and initially increases her suffering.
• She has made no friends...(there's more to this quote, but that's the part I think I'll use)

From http://www.westga.edu/~pburgey/Wit/ArtofAnalogy.pdf:

• Vivian's emotional bildung is assisted by Susie, the nurse, who is constantly contrasted to the doctors in the play. Susie keeps Vivian company in moments of loneliness, comforts her in moments of anxiety, and brings her a popsicle to help fight the dehydration caused by the chemotherapy.
• Like
  everything else in the play, this manifestation of a human touch is not presented
  uncritically. It has a sentimental side, to which Vivian reacts in revulsion:
  "Popsicles? "Sweetheart?" I can't believe my life has become so ... corny" (69).
• she explains why, and a bond of laughter is created between the two women who have very different cultural heritages