For this response, I will be focusing on the novel Cancer Vixen by Marisa Acocella Marchetto. Within the selected pages we had to read for class, I realized a common theme of blame or guilt. One of the pages in this comic book is a game-like puzzle piece. Each step shows different studies and/or reasons as to why people develop cancer. This game is titled: “The Cancer Guessing Game.” These puzzle pieces and all the possibilities of how Marisa could have developed cancer all lead back to the same emotion—guilt. She feels as though she is to blame for developing cancer. Marisa thinks back at all the things she did in life, and considers those actions as possible reasons as to why she is in the situation she finds herself in. I think this illuminates the idea of women always taking the blame, and always being the reason as to why bad things happen. I think about Mother Nature, and how people blame a woman entity for when the weather does not go according to plan. Society always places the blame on women, and this true, personal story from Marisa shows how the diagnosis of cancer consumes her with fears of where she “went wrong.”
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