Vivian's Bearing

Vivian’s Bearing is a fifty year old professor of English Literature. At the beginning of the play, she portrays herself as an extremely intelligent woman of wit, full of knowledge, and you can imagine her a force to be reckoned, teaching one of her college classes. She is without family, and seems as though that her life’s purpose has been her work, much of it spent studying the poet John Donne and his ideas of mortality. She values intellectual pursuits and research over all else, and her attitude brings you to believe she could be somewhat curt with someone not of her intellectual level.
Nevertheless, throughout the play, you can see Vivian’s own values and ideas about life change. She has been reformed from researcher to the research itself. As she is stripped from her intellectual world where it all makes sense, she is transformed in to a vulnerable, sick patient. "Once I did the teaching, now I am taught,” she states after rounds with multiple physicians. In the play, Vivian has flashbacks to …show more content…
Susie, her nurse, becomes her confidant throughout her treatment. Vivian shares with her fears and worries, and Susie not only comforts her but gives her permission to feel not ok. As Vivian says, “I thought being extremely smart would take care of it, but I see I have been found out.” Through Susie’s actions, Vivian is touched by her compassion and trusts her. Toward the end of her life, she finally gets a visitor, Dr. Ashford, her mentor and professor. She starts to read her John Donne sonnets, but Vivian refuses. Instead, she reads her a children’s story The Runaway Bunny to comfort her. Vivian falls asleep in her arms. In her final hours she understands that life is not about the intellect gained throughout, but human compassion and connections instead. I would have to agree with her new values. Life was never meant for us to go