神崎 ゆかり

Margaret Edson's first play Wit (1993), which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1999, features Vivian Bearing, a professor specializing in John Donne's metaphysical poetry. She is hospitalized dying of advanced ovarian cancer. Her doctors Kelekian and Jason have Vivian undergo an experimental treatment with strong side effects. The treatment is very aggressive and lasts for no less than eight weeks. For the doctors, Vivian is no longer a human being but "material" for their medical research, or in Dr. Moreau's term a "problem" for their intellectual desires. Focusing on the unsympathetic attitudes of Kelekian and Jason toward their patient Vivian, this play can be classified within the Gothic genre and containing the "Mad Scientist" motif. What allows this play from falling into a simple dichotomy between the assailants and the victim, however, is the fact that Vivian herself shares the character of "Mad Scientist." This paper analyzes how Vivian can be characterized as a mad scientist along with her doctors.

Madness is one of the conventional motifs in Gothic literature. This literary genre first appeared in 18^<th>-century British society, where reason and rationality were appreciated. Against this social trend, Gothic literature tried to disclose irrational emotions or desires repressed into the inner part of the human psyche. One of the symbolic expressions for these feelings veiled in darkness was madness. Of particular interest in Gothic literature is the phenomenon of female madness. As Helen Small argues, "the forms of insanity are usually clearly gendered in early Gothic fiction." In the case of male protagonists, they are "driven to insanity by vaulting ambition and uncontrollable lust." (153) On the contrary, females tend to lose their wits as the result of being victimized by male villains. Feminist critics maintain, however, that since the Victorian era, female writers have adopted heroines afflicted with madness in order to articulate their angry protest against the idea of "the Angel in the House" created in the male-oriented society. Taking such examples as "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, I would like to discuss how heroines' madness symbolizes resistance to their situations in American society in the period from the late 19^<th> century to the mid-20^<th> century.