‘Night, Mother and Wit both feature socially inept protagonists who give up their will to live in one way or another. While both authors are successful at providing the reader with an understanding of their protagonist’s choices, Marsha Norman is the only one able to have the reader empathize with her protagonist’s death. However, this doesn’t mean Margaret Edson has failed as an author by not providing a character with which the reader can empathize. Jessie Cates, the lead character of ‘Night, Mother uses suicide as a way to gain control of her life. She’s an epileptic who has gone an entire year without experiencing any more seizures But despite her newly gained physical autonomy, Jessie is still unsatisfied by her life. Her marriage has failed and her son has become a failure. She has no control over any of this, since her son is an adult whom she can’t even locate.
And it wasn‘t even her decision to end the marriage, it was her seizures and how they scared her husband that led him to divorce hert It was barely even Jessie‘s choice to marry her husband, She mostlyjust married him because her mother set them up, making her marriage a failure from beginning to end. Her disease makes it difficult to hold down a job and impossible for her to have a driver’s license, Because of all this, moving in with her widowed mother was hardly a choice at all. So it’s clear that even with the help of medication that prevents Jessie from having seizure, she’s still not leading a quality life And a reader can empathize with a protagonist who’s unhappy with her life without a way to fix it, According to William Demastes, “she‘s finally decided that after a lifetime of being told what to do (and doing it badly), the one action she can to without outside influence or interference is to commit suicide.”
So even though the reader might hope that Jessie doesn’t kill herself, it’s made perfectly clear why she‘s made this decision, no matter how controversial it may seem. Even her typically oblivious mother who urges Jessie to not commit suicide comes to a moment of understanding when she asks Jessie “who am I talking to?” and tells Jessie that she can’t stop her because she’s “already gone.” So while some readers might interpret Jessie to be selfish for abandoning her mother who loves her and wants her to live, it’s still difficult not to empathize with Jessie’s pitiful backstory and the status of her life. In Wit, the protagonist’s decision to give up her will to live is much less problematic. With her ovarian cancer in the state it’s in, Drt Vivian Bearing knows that the experimental medication she‘s taking is unlikely to save her, but she still volunteers herself, specifying that she doesn‘t want to be revived should her heart stop.
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This makes her choice different than Jessie’s because she’s fighting for her life at the beginning of the play, even when the odds are against her. She just has limits for how long she‘ll allow herself to suffer. So it‘s very easy to understand why she allows the doctors to let her die by the end of the play. It’s empathy for Vivian Bearing that Margaret Edson makes problematic, if not impossible. Vivian is a difficult character to feel sorry for, because of how cold, aloof, and ruthless she presents herself to bet She’s fully aware of how unsympathetic she was toward the concerns of her students, including those experiencing a death in their family. And she seems to be unpleasant toward people just for the sake of it, like when she laughs at Susie, the nurse for not knowing what the word “soporific” means.
Critics have taken notice of this saying that her “approaches to Metaphysical poetry and her own ovarian cancer are coldly intellectual, and her dealings with others show her limited capacity to empathize.” But it’s clear that empathy isn’t what Edson is trying to elicit from the readert If she were, she were, she probably would have made Vivian a more “likeable” person that readers would be sad to see die. Instead, Edson uses archetypes to accomplish the complete opposite. Wit has been criticized for this, with scholars such as Jacqueline Vanhoutte arguing that “its central characters are all stereotypes: the cold doctor, the caring nurse, and the repressed female academic.”
This critique makes it seems negative that Edson has chosen to develop her Characters in such a way, but it’s actually appropriate. The dying patient has little empathy toward others, and the doctors have little empathy toward her. And when Vivian dies, it’s hard for the reader to feel empathy. But by using these stereotypical examples of people who are unable to empathize, Edson makes it correct for the reader to not empathize, Vivian feels no empathy toward others, and expects no empathy from others, Her ruthless exterior is what she aims to show the world, even during the most humbling of times Because of this, Margaret Edson hasn‘t failed to gain empathy from the reader; she never tries to.
