Wit and "Death, Be Not Proud"

The movie Wit, directed by Mike Nichols, illustrates the meaning of John Donne’s poem “Death, Be Not Proud” by making the audience feel and somewhat experience the transition from the common notion of “Death” being something “mighty and dreadful” to something that can be conquered.

Vivian Bearing, the protagonist, lives her whole life immersed as a scholar in John Donne’s Holy Sonnets. However, when she finds that she has stage four ovarian cancer, not even the words of Donne, to which she has been passionately devoted, can help alleviate the fear she feels in knowing that death is just around the corner. During her sickness, she continuously recites Donne’s “Death, Be Not Proud”, hoping that John Donne’s fearlessness of death would somehow be passed on to her and give her solace. However, the more she suffers, the more she could not grasp the poem’s meaning. Her agony is powerfully portrayed in the movie such as in the scene where she curls up on the side of her bed and helplessly and desperately cries for any kind of rescue, from her torment, from death. In scenes such as this, we, the audience, easily understands why she is scared. We can relate to her fear of dying. Death, after all, as Donne says, typically thought of as a dark and fearsome force that is in no way surmountable. How then can Donne just illustrate death as something so insignificant when dying, as portrayed by Vivian, seems such a long and tormenting process?

As Vivian gets closer and closer to the face of death, we too slowly realize what Donne’s message is in “Death, Be Not Proud”. In Donne’s poem, he describes death as something so trivial because he separates death from the agonizing road that leads to death. Death is not the dreadful ovarian cancer that tortures Vivian. It simply is the point, the split second in which the body and soul “unjoints”, the “minute’s latest point” (Holy Sonnet VI) in Vivian’s life. Vivian’s sickness, her cancer, is what causes death. Death, in Donne’s poem, does not involve the long suffering that Vivian experiences just before. It is just “one short sleep past”, painless and powerless, contrary to what we all believe. At the end of the movie, instead of something so frightful, we may even see death as something positive, as it is a gateway for Vivian to escape her agony into a new and eternal life.

Before watching the movie, many people are not able to understand Donne’s ideology about death. By watching Vivian’s story, by watching someone’s battle with death and someone’s with Donne’s poem itself, we start to understand how Donne, who found himself in a similar situation with another sickness, is able to view death as something that is not worth the fear.