Runaway Bunny Sing Thee to Thy Rest

 In her dying moments, the Donne scholar in Margaret Edson’s W;t rejects Donne in favor of Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny.  What does this say about the usefulness of both Donne and Brown when we are pushed to the edge?

Runaway Bunny is about “a little bunny who wanted to run away.”  But each time he tells his mother where he will run to, she tells him that she will come after him.  For instance, when the bunny says, “I will become a fish in a trout stream and I will swim away from you,” his mother replies, “If you become a fish in a trout stream, I will become a fisherman and I will fish for you.”  And so on until the little bunny, surrendering, concludes, “Shucks, I might just as well stay where I am and be your little bunny.”

The story concludes with her offering him a carrot.

This story, which earlier in the play Vivian would call maudlin, now puts her to sleep.  Her former mentor, who has been reading it to her, at one point does a John Donne interpretation: “Look at that.  A little allegory of the soul.  No matter where it hides, God will find it.”

But Vivian does not want interpretation at this point, only a story that brings her home.  By which I mean, she lets go of her Donnean anxieties and her Donnean doubts and dies in peace.

One other note: In addition to reading Runaway Bunny, the mentor’s final words to Vivian are Horatio’s final words to Hamlet: “And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”  This is significant because the mentor, when Vivian was a student, once contrasted Donne with Shakespeare, finding Shakespeare overly melodramatic.  But it is the melodramatic Shakespeare, not the intellectual Donne, who gets the last word.

Runaway Bunny recalls another bunny story cited earlier in the play, Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies.  Vivian recalls reading it to her father and encountering the word “soporific.”  This scene and the one where her teacher berates her for a melodramatic reading of “Death Be Not Proud” are the two in which we see her moving from an emotional to an intellectual plane, with the intelletual ultimately proving itself to be insufficient.

But I don’t think W;t is simplistically anti-intellectual as, say, a movie like Dead Poets Society can be.  Or like the student I once had who read Wordsworth’s line “we murder to dissect” and concluded that he should stop reading poetry and go out and start communing with nature.  (For me, Wordsworth’s poetry actually helps me commune more deeply with nature.  But that’s a post for another day.)

I don’t buy this either/or, either the intellect or the emotions.   First of all, little girl Vivian’s fascination with the word “soporific” is an emotional as well as an intellectual experience.  She loves to feel her mind expanding.  A children’s book writer than I knew as a child, the Appalachian author May Justus, told me that she would  occasionally stick difficult words into books intended for very young children (such as The Wonderful School of Miss Tillie O’Toole) because it was an invigorating game for them.

In fact, this childhood fascination with challenging words is what draws Vivian to Donne.  As she explains,

The illustration [in Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies] bore out the meaning of the word, just as he had explained it.  At the time, it seemed like magic.

So imagine the effect that the words of John Donne first had on me: ratiocination, concatenation, coruscation, tergiversation.

So why does Vivian dry up and become brittle?  How is the intellect set against the emotions instead of working in concert with them?  We’re not really told. Maybe it’s because, as I suggested in an earlier post, she’s a woman in a man’s profession and feels she has to suppress her female (emotional) side.  Maybe it’s from living in a culture that is suspicious of emotional display.  Maybe it’s because America is a highly competitive world that puts emphasis more on results (publications in this field) than on human relations.  Edson critiques both research universities and research hospitals, a theme I’ll touch on tomorrow.

But for the moment, I’ll just note that Vivian needs to return to the delight that she once got from children’s books and, for that matter, to the delight that she once got from Donne.  She has gotten lost but her illness brings her back.

You may have noticed how, in this website, I sometimes talk about adult literature, sometimes children’s literature, sometimes high art, sometimes low.  Rather than seeing them warring with each other, I think they are linked by a common thread of delight.   Margaret Edson’s play makes dramatically clear how vital it is that we find our way back to that delight.