PANDEMICS Throughout The Ages as told by the faculty of the Foundation Year Program University of King’s College
Introduction Hilary Ilkay, faculty fellow
As an alumna of the Foundation Year and a current Faculty Fellow, I cannot think of a program better suited to grapple with the uncertainty and complexity of our time. Now, even a cursory glance at the syllabus will reveal that the vast majority of authors we explore together are, in fact, dead: this seems to place them decidedly in the past. Why should we turn our gaze back, and how can we find the motivation to do so, given the pervasive level of concern about the present and future state of our world? The answer lies in the Foundation Year Program’s (FYP) unique commitment to think across time and place: it looks to the past as a way to orient us toward the future. It explores how we are shaped by the past but also, in turn, how we have shaped and continue to shape historical narratives; in doing so, it rigourously interrogates the question that Socrates asks at the beginning of his dialogue called the Phaedrus: “where are you going and where have you come from?” This is, in many ways, a historic moment to be embarking upon the Foundation Year, when the issues and subjects raised by the curriculum are more pressing and relevant than ever. Even though our current state seems exceptional and unprecedented, engaging with works of literature, philosophy, and art that reflect on what it means to exist in a world that is often hostile and unpredictable - all the way from the war-torn, plaguestruck Athens of the 5th century BCE to the London of the 1920s, still recovering from WWI and the Spanish Flu - will situate our position within a rich tradition. Life has always posed serious challenges for us, often deadly serious: but the FYP reading list is a testament to how humans have endured, leaving marks of themselves through various acts of creation, testimony, and reflection. In a time dominated by social distancing, self-isolation, and restricted movement, FYP will allow you to embark on an intellectual itinerary, introducing you to a community of thinkers and ideas that will remain with you for the rest of your life. We hope that you will join us to help think through, and with, them - for the sheer pleasure and challenge of learning together.
Table of Contents Section I: The Ancient World 3 Section II: The Middle Ages 6 Section III: The Renaissance and Reformation
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Section IV: The Age of Reason 10 Section V: The Age of Revolutions 13 Section VI: The Contemporary World 15
Section I: The Ancient World Dr. Eli Diamond, Associate Professor, Department of Classics, Dalhousie University
Thinking through Thucydides’ account of the 5th century Athenian experience can help illuminate our own distinctive strengths and vulnerabilities for coping with these exceptional circumstances. In the Ancient World, and certainly in Greek religious belief, a plague was traditionally interpreted as a punishment from the gods for some moral or religious pollution within the city. Many of Greek tragedies we regularly study in FYP involve a city’s reckoning with a plague within its walls. In the Ancient World, and certainly in Greek religious belief, a plague was traditionally interpreted as a punishment from the gods for some moral or religious pollution within the city. Many of Greek tragedies we regularly study in FYP involve a city’s reckoning with a plague within its walls.
soaring oratory of that speech, Thucydides shifts immediately to his devastatingly grim account of the plague which ravaged many other cities in Greece and the Mediterranean region, but none worse than Athens. The plague appeared in 430
BCE and lasted almost four years, killing roughly one third of the population of Athens (perhaps as many as 100,000 people). Thucydides reports he himself caught the plague but survived. The plague was many times worse than what the world is experiencing right now with COVID-19, but some details of the reaction to the plague are strikingly similar:
“It is said that the plague had already struck widely elsewhere, especially in Lemnos and other places, but nowhere else was there recorded such virulence or so great a loss of life (as in Athens). The doctors could offer little help at first: they were attempting to treat the disease without knowing what it was, and in fact there was particularly high mortality among doctors because of their particular exposure. No other human skill could help either, and all supplications at temples and consultations of oracles and the like were of no avail. In the end people were overcome by the disaster and abandoned all efforts to escape it….it fell on the city of Athens suddenly. The first affected were the inhabitants of the Peiraeus
One of the most famous excerpts from all ancient Greek literature is the historian Thucydides’ reconstruction of the Funeral Oration given by the great Athenian general and political leader Pericles. At the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, Pericles delivered a funeral speech which praised not only the war dead, but the distinctive greatness of the Athens for which they died. It is an eloquent expression of Athenian political ideals and self-confidence, but also offers a good dose of the hubristic arrogance which leads to a tragic hero’s downfall. Directly following the 3
(the port of Athens), who went so far as to allege that the Peloponnesians had poisoned the wells (at the time there were no fountains in Piraeus). Afterwards the plague reached the upper city too, and now the number of deaths greatly increased.” (II, 47-8) We can see here that even in Athens, the heart of Greek science and philosophy, forces of nature overcame all human ingenuity and technical expertise, indifferent to either medical or religious treatment. The great temples in which prayers and supplications failed would soon be overflowing with corpses, and rather than pointing to some clear divine message, this plague shook Athenian piety and produced in many a kind of resigned indifference to their obligations to the gods.
succession of dirges for the dead….”
(II, 51)
The isolation required for survival led to breakdown of duties to friends and family. And where Pericles in his speech earlier that year had celebrated not only the freedom of Athenian democracy, but its deep respect for written and unwritten laws, the plague, for Thucydides, had the effect of eroding this reverence for law, opening up a new age of individualism, shamelessness, and anarchy which would only grow over the course of the war: “…the plague was the beginning of increased lawlessness in the city. People were less inhibited in the indulgence of pleasures previously concealed when they saw rapid changes of fortune - the prosperous suddenly dead, and the once indigent now possessing their fortune. As a result they decided to look for satisfactions that were quick and pleasurable, reckoning that neither life nor wealth would last long. No one was prepared to persevere in what had been thought the path of honour, as they could well be dead before that destination was reached. Immediate pleasure, and any means profitable to that end, became the new honour and the new value. No fear of god or human law was any constraint. Pious or impious made no difference in their view, when they could see all dying without distinction. As for offences against the law, no one expected to live long enough to be brought to justice and pay the penalty; they thought that a much heavier sentence had already been passed and was hanging over them, so they might as well have some enjoyment of life before it fell.” (II, 53)
Thucydides’ description of the symptoms is detailed, gruesome, and gripping, but beyond the terrible physical effects, Thucydides is a keen observer about how the unfolding of the plague affected the Athenians psychologically, when any hope seemed foolish, and all acts of courage and duty to others were rewarded by deadly infection: “Some died in neglect and others died despite constant care…The most dreadful aspects of the whole affliction were the despair into which people fell when they realized how they had contracted the disease (they were immediately convinced that they had no hope, and so were much more inclined to surrender themselves without a fight), and the cross-infection of those who cared for others: they died like sheep, and this was the greatest cause of mortality. When people were afraid to visit one another, the victims died in isolation, and many households were wiped through the lack of anyone to care for them. If they did visit the sick, they died, especially those who could claim some courage: these were people who out of a sense of duty disregarded their own safety and kept visiting their friends, even when ultimately the family members themselves were overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster and abandoned the
Pericles himself contracted the disease, and, unlike Thucydides, did not survive it. The confident idealism and collective unity of Athens under Pericles never recovered after the plague. Many of these forces Thucydides describes as being unleashed by the plague will further intensify throughout the thirty years of war between Athens and Sparta. Were these moral 4
and social forces initially caused by the terrible experience of the plague? Or did the plague merely help reveal and intensify psychological and ethical tendencies already present in Athens and Athenians? Figuring this out requires some careful reading of Thucydides, one of our tasks in Section I of FYP. This question gets to the heart of what our own plague might do to reveal our political and individual characters, or how it might even transform them in lasting ways. These are not primarily questions for epidemiology, but for ethics, religion, and politics. Thinking through Thucydides’ account of the 5th century Athenian experience can help illuminate our own distinctive strengths and vulnerabilities for coping with these exceptional circumstances.
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Section II: The Middle Ages
Dr. Susan Dodd, Associate Director, Foundation Year Program; Associate Professor of Humanities
...the Decameron shows that, unleashed from the ordinary by the extreme suffering of the plague, and salved by the release from fear, small comforts, and the glory of nature, people rediscover a divinity that reveals itself only when human beings gather together, creatively, to tell stories.
Every time, most gracious ladies, that I reflect on how natural feelings of pity are for you, I recognize that you will judge this work to have a wearisomely depressing beginning. What it thrusts before you is a painful re-evocation of the carnage caused by the recent plague, which cannot but be deeply hurtful and upsetting to everyone who witnessed the events or learned about them indirectly. But I don’t want this to frighten you from reading any further, as if you were bound to be sighing and weeping all through the book. As you read this horrible opening, consider yourselves travellers climbing a steep, rough path up a mountain, behind which is hidden a delightful plain; it proves all the more pleasurable the harder the climb and the descent that follows. If the extreme limit of happiness is pain, wretchedness is similarly brought to an end by the onset of joy. This brief distress (I say brief, because it takes up only a few pages) will be quickly followed by sweetness and pleasure, as I promised initially, but which you might not expect from an opening of this sort. And truly, if I could have decently led you where I want by some other path than the unpleasant one that this will be, I would have done so. But without recalling those
events, it would have been impossible to explain what lay behind what you will be reading later. So it is from a sense of necessity that I bring myself to write about them. (Boccaccio, Giovanni. Tales from the Decameron
(Penguin Classics) (pp. 9-10). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.)
The narrator of Boccaccio’s Decameron draws his lady-readers in by promising to move them through the “brief distress” of a “painful reevocation of the carnage caused by the recent plague” into a “sweetness and pleasure” that would have been unattainable by any other path. He tells us that he is compelled by “a sense of necessity” to begin his stories of love, revenge, and reversal of fortunes with a full (and some commentators say exaggerated) account of Florence as it was ravaged by the Black Death in 1384. “The plague brought out the best and the worst in everyone” the narrator explains, and so the youth set out to their villas to escape fear, death, and equally importantly, the existential and moral squalor brought on by the plague, in order to find refuge in a fanciful world of their own creation. The country frees the imagination from the mortal fear and moral oppression: 6
infiltrating the spaces of the living, and the illness making no social distinctions. More fundamental again, the Decameron shows that, unleashed from the ordinary by the extreme suffering of the plague, and salved by the release from fear, small comforts, and the glory of nature, people rediscover a divinity that reveals itself only when human beings gather together, creatively, to tell stories.
‘There you can listen to the birds singing and contemplate the changing greens of the hills and plains and the cornfields rippling like the sea, with all the different kinds of trees around you and the open sky above. Though heaven may be angry with us, it will not deny us its eternal beauties…’ (Boccaccio, Giovanni. Tales from the Decameron (Penguin Classics) (pp. 20-21). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.) But before we can go to the country with these “highly sensible young person[s] of noble birth, lovely looking, stylish and charmingly moral”, we have to hear the grim details of the plague. The narrator explains, “No expertise or human measures had any effect. Specially appointed officials made sure the city was cleansed of all refuse, anyone sick was refused entry, and advice was given in plenty about how best to stay healthy. Humble supplications to God to show mercy were repeatedly made by the pious, who organized processions and so on. But it was all fruitless: in the early spring of the year mentioned, the ravages of the plague began to be horribly evident and in a monstrous way.” Having passed through this terrible demonstration of humanity’s helplessness before the forces of nature, we will be prepared for the “sweetness and pleasure” of the stories, newly able “to enjoy all the fun and merriment and pleasure we are capable of, without ever going beyond the limits of what our reason tells us.” The stories they share are their respite from the horrors of the plague: ten stories on each of ten days (with a couple days off for the sabbath and chores). The resulting Decameron is a playful, varied, and scandalous collection that tells of very earthly loves and conflicts. Though the 7 ladies and 3 young men should not, by the conventions of the day, wander around to villas together in such informal associations, it is crucial that the real transgressions take place in the stories, not in their actions. If the Decameron has any “moral” it is that social propriety collapses as normal physical boundaries break down with the dead
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Section III: The Renaissance and Reformation Dr. Simon Kow, Director, Early Modern Studies Program; Associate Professor of Humanities
Ibn Khaldun’s analysis of the effects of the Black Death would also be echoed by, and inspire, later thinkers in the Muslim world, Europe and America.
…in the middle of the eighth [i.e., fourteenth] century, civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed. The East, it seems, was similarly visited, though in accordance with and in proportion to (the East’s more affluent) civilization. It was as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion and restriction, and the world had responded to its call. God inherits the earth and whomever is upon it. - Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (1377)
The Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century did not only inspire Boccaccio’s Decameron; it was also a pivotal event in the youth of Ibn Khaldun, the North African historian whose masterpiece The Muqaddimah opened Section III of the Foundation Year Program in Fall 2019. What was the importance of the Black Death in forming Ibn Khaldun’s reflections on history, and how do the latter constitute a prelude to the era of the Renaissance and Reformation? Ibn Khaldun lost his parents, teachers, and many of his friends to the Black Death. In hindsight, for this Islamic philosopher of history, it was also a sign that the golden age of Arab civilization was coming to an end. By ‘the East’ and ‘the West’ in the quotation above, Ibn Khaldun is referring to the great centres of Arab civilization from Egypt to Islamic Spain. The plague wiped out much of civilization in these regions, but at the same time, they had reached stages of cultural decadence (what he describes as ‘senility’) such that the Black Death finished off societies tottering on their last legs. In Ibn Khaldun’s east, Arab dynasties would be overrun by central Asian conquerors like Tamerlane (a prominent figure in the Renaissance imagination), while in the west, an invigorated Christian Europe was in the process of reconquering Spain, later to 8
assert dominance in the Mediterranean and across the ocean in the Americas. What Ibn Khaldun witnessed, then, was the end of an era which would usher in new formidable powers—and which in the west would radically transform Europe’s view of itself in the Renaissance and Reformation. Ibn Khaldun’s analysis of the effects of the Black Death would also be echoed by, and inspire, later thinkers in the Muslim world, Europe, and America. He saw the history of civilization especially in the Islamic world as a cyclical movement between vigorous tribal societies with strong ‘group feeling’ on the one hand; and established, increasingly despotic ‘sedentary’ civilizations on the other hand which were gradually enfeebled over time. The Black Death, then, was God’s way of finishing off societies which were already fatally vulnerable to enemies from within and without. History is governed by certain natural laws, but these are also God’s laws. Like other thinkers of his time, as well as in Renaissance and Reformation Europe, the hand of God was regarded as working through natural and historical causes. But unlike more forward-looking thinkers and artists of the Renaissance—such as Machiavelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, and Bacon—Ibn Khaldun interpreted the decline and imminent collapse of his civilization, hastened by such scourges as plague and foreign conquest, as possible signs of the end of time.
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Section IV: The Age of Reason Voltaire’s Candide: Being Enlightened in the Face of Disaster Dr. Neil Robertson, Director, Foundation Year Program; Associate Professor of Humanities
Neither Leibniz nor Pope denied that there was evil or “discord” in the world, but that it needed to be seen as necessary part of the greater good attained in and through that very evil or discord. As Pope suggests, in a piece of music there may be moments of disharmony, but it is through them that a more complete harmony and completeness is attained. “Candide drew near and saw his benefactor, who rose above the water one moment and was then swallowed up for ever. He was just going to jump after him, but was prevented by the philosopher Pangloss, who demonstrated to him that the Bay of Lisbon had been made on purpose for the Anabaptist to be drowned. While he was proving this à priori, the ship foundered; all perished except Pangloss, Candide, and that brutal sailor who had drowned the good Anabaptist. The villain swam safely to the shore, while Pangloss and Candide were borne thither upon a plank.
the pavements were scattered. Thirty thousand inhabitants of all ages and sexes were crushed under the ruins.[4] The sailor, whistling and swearing, said there was booty to be gained here. "What can be the sufficient reason of this phenomenon?" said Pangloss.” - Voltaire Candide, Chapter 5
As soon as they recovered themselves a little they walked toward Lisbon. They had some money left, with which they hoped to save themselves from starving, after they had escaped drowning. Scarcely had they reached the city, lamenting the death of their benefactor, when they felt the earth tremble under their feet. The sea swelled and foamed in the harbour, and beat to pieces the vessels riding at anchor. Whirlwinds of fire and ashes covered the streets and public places; houses fell, roofs were flung upon the pavements, and 10
On Saturday November 1, 1755, the feast of All Saints in the Catholic Church calendar, at around 9:40 am, while many in Lisbon, Portugal were at church, a terrible earthquake brought devastating chaos and death. In combination with the subsequent fires and a tsunami, most of Lisbon was destroyed, including the Cathedral. The death toll estimates range between 10,000 and 100,000. This would be a terrible natural catastrophe at any time. It was actually third major earthquake, that we have records of, to hit the city of Lisbon. But it was an especially significant event for eighteenth century Europe, the Europe of what we call in FYP, the Age of Reason or the Era of the Enlightenment. In this period in Europe, at least among the
literate classes, there was a growing sense that the world was knowable and that human life was, at least in principle, becoming more rational and civilized. The seventeenth century had undergone a “scientific revolution” through such figures as Galileo, Descartes and above all Isaac Newton. The human mind seemed capable of knowing the world outside it, nature, in all of its causal order and structure. Equally the modern state began to make human life more orderly and rational. Commerce grew; technology started to develop and human life seemed to have been liberated by scientific insight from being at the mercy of powers or accidents that it could not understand or control. The great contemporary of Newton (a fellow discoverer of calculus), Gottfried Leibniz famously argued in his book Theodicy, that this is “the best of all possible worlds”. Alexander Pope, also writing at the turn of the eighteenth century put a similar sentiment into poetry:
rational design in the world as determined by a rational benevolent God and so whatever sense of wrong or injustice one may have about the current disposition needs to recognize its limited perspective in the context of the divinely caused rational whole. To such a reconciling frame of mind the earthquake at Lisbon on the morning of a deeply holy day, when all who gathered to worship God were exposed, by that very worship, to catastrophic harm, came as an intellectual and moral earthquake. A number of important figures responded to this event, but the most famous was Voltaire (1694 -1778) in his most memorable work, Candide. Voltaire had been one of those who found the standpoint of Leibniz and Pope fundamentally persuasive. He was not an orthodox Christian, but found in the science of the age a powerful indication of a rational deity that governed the cosmos, including the lives of the humans who inhabited it. While Voltaire was never simply complacent about the status quo - he was always a bit of a thorn in the side of French society - Candide marks an important shift and one that was evidently informed by the experience of the Lisbon earthquake.
All nature is but art, unknown to thee; All chance, direction, which thou canst not see; All discord, harmony, not understood; All partial evil, universal good: And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. Neither Leibniz nor Pope denied that there was evil or “discord” in the world, but that it needed to be seen as necessary part of the greater good attained in and through that very evil or discord. As Pope suggests, in a piece of music there may be moments of disharmony, but it is through them that a more complete harmony and completeness is attained.
Candide is a wonderful, if sometimes cartoonish,
satire. It tells the story of the aptly named Candide who begins our novel as a follower of a caricature of Leibniz, called Pangloss, who argues that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Candide is then subject to a ridiculous number of incidents any one of which might reasonably have dislodged from Candide his confidence in Pangloss’s philosophy: he is subject to war, coercion, deception, any number of incidents of violence; those he knows and loves also undergo horrific events, often at the hands of apparently venerable institutions of state and church. There is a disquisition by Pangloss himself, who nearly dies from syphilis, about how the spread of syphilis to Europe a slow pandemic that arose from that form of globalization known as colonialism - was all part
Such a philosophy and more than philosophy, a frame of mind or way of experiencing the world was both elevating and reconciling. The experience that all is fundamentally well. Science far from being the enemy of religion was rather the means by which God’s creation and governance of the world was confirmed. But of course such a frame of mind is also deeply conservative: it is arguing that there is a deep 11
of this best of all possible worlds, sine without it “we should not have chocolate”. Quite early in the novel is Candide experiences the earthquake in Lisbon. One might expect this incident to be the turning point of the novel, the point that would break Candide’s happy confidence in Pangloss’s “optimism” (a word that literally refers to the belief that this is the best of worlds). But in fact that point of breaking occurs much later in the novel and reveals a deep insight by Voltaire. What finally breaks Candide’s optimism is his encounter with an enslaved African who has suffered terribly at the hands not of this or that cruel individual or accidental or natural wrong, but as the victim of a system that makes slavery and cruelty the “cost” for the sugar that Europeans put in their tea: “O Pangloss!” cried out Candide, “such horrid doings never entered your imagination. Here is an end of the matter; I find myself, after all, obliged to renounce your optimism.” “Optimism,” said Cacambo, “what is that?” “Alas!” replied Candide, “it is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is the best when it is the worst.” However, the final outcome of this recognition that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds is not, for Voltaire, or the European enlightenment generally, despair or cynicism. Strangely, it is what I like to call the “internalization” by humanity of the very principle of “the best of all possible worlds”. However, now this principle is no longer something divinely given and accomplished for us, but it has become instead the object of human moral work and aspiration. We will now strive and feel morally called to make this “the best of all possible worlds”: justice, equity, human happiness and well-being become human accomplishments or their deficiency human failures. Or, as Candide states it at the end of this novel:” We must cultivate our garden!”
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Section V: The Age of Revolutions Sheltering in Place with Mary Shelley
Dr. Roberta Barker, Associate Professor of Theatre; Assistant Dean Academic of FASS, Dalhousie
The “year without a summer” proved that sheltering in place can result in tremendous creativity: many great poems and not one but two novels, Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre, were begun at Villa Diodati that year.
“In a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, I kept my workshop of filthy creation.” - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Chapter IV
Tamboro, cold rain fell all year long as the sun was obscured by clouds of volcanic ash. Global disaster ensued. Crops failed and most of the agricultural work force went jobless, with many dying of disease or starvation. For the privileged young people hunkered down at Villa Diodati, these dire economic threats remained relatively distant. Still, the rain and cold kept them locked together indoors—and locked in their own inner turmoil. Mary and Percy’s first daughter had died the previous spring after only a few weeks of life, plunging Mary into deep sadness. Byron and Claire Clairemont began an affair, but he did not return her passionate love for him; she was left pregnant and in crisis, while he too sank into depression. At about the same time as Mary began writing Frankenstein, Byron wrote a poem called “Darkness” that evokes the gloom of the summer-without-summer:
One of the many remarkable things about Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus is that it was begun while its author was more or less sheltering in place. Along with her lover (and later husband), the poet Percy Shelley, the eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin (later Mary Shelley) spent the summer of 1816 by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. They were joined by Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairemont; the most celebrated poet and ‘bad boy’ of the Romantic era, Lord Byron; and Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori. It should have been a glorious summer holiday with a group of glamorous and gifted young people, but natural catastrophe intervened. Thanks to the eruption of Mount Tamboro in Indonesia in April 1815, 1816 came to be known as “the year without a summer.” Even in Europe, halfway around the world from Mount
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I had a dream, which was not all a dream. The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars Did wander darkling in the eternal space, Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air; Morn came and went—and came, and brought
no day, And men forgot their passions in the dread Of this their desolation; and all hearts Were chill’d into a selfish prayer for light.
will, Frankenstein isolates himself even more severely than Mary Shelley and her companions were isolated by the fallout from Mount Tambora. He stops writing to his family, stops speaking to his teachers and friends. He describes himself working “[i]n a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house, and separated from all the other apartments” (81). He loathes his own work, an act of “filthy creation” in which he stitches together the limbs of the dead to order make a new being without the participation of any other human (81). When he finally succeeds in his goal, he finds his Creature so hideous that cannot feel any compassion for it. He flees from the work of his hands. Abandoned and desolate, seeking love everywhere and finding only rejection, the Creature eventually comes to perceive violence as his only way of communicating with his Creator. By trying to prevent death, Victor Frankenstein ends by bringing about the destruction of everything he loves.
Like Frankenstein, this poem was born into a world rather like our own. The “year without a summer” proved that sheltering in place can result in tremendous creativity: many great poems and not one but two novels, Frankenstein and Polidori’s The Vampyre, were begun at Villa Diodati that year. But in the midst of this disaster Mary Godwin and her companions also experienced sadness, struggle, and a desire to escape from the “darkness” of their troubles into the “light” of the everyday world. Perhaps it was this situation, at least in part, that shaped Mary’s decision to make the protagonist of her novel a scientist—or, as the early nineteenth century in which she was writing put it, a natural philosopher—who longs to control and transform nature. As a young man, Victor Frankenstein is utterly devastated by the death of his mother from infectious scarlet fever. He describes the loss of a loved one as a “most irreparable evil,” a kind of outrage against humanity (72). So, he sets out to remedy the situation by becoming “capable of bestowing animation upon lifeless matter” (79). His vision is the elimination of mortality itself. “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds,” he declares, “which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world” (80). Frankenstein’s mammoth ambitions reflect those of many of his real-life contemporaries in the so-called “age of revolutions.” Whether through scientific exploration, creative endeavor, or radical political change, nineteenth-century thinkers from Maximilien Robespierre and Mary Wollstonecraft (Mary Shelley’s mother) to Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche sought to dispel human darkness and bring about a brave new world. Yet Frankenstein suggests that the solution to humanity’s problems may not lie in such innovations. As he strives to bend nature to his
Frankenstein, one of the great masterpieces of
world fiction, has been read in many ways by readers in many times and places. But for our time and place, one of its most striking messages may lie in the emphasis it places on the vital need for fellowship, understanding, and compassion. Faced with her era’s many revolutionary solutions to the huge problems posed by disease, disaster, inequality, and conflict, Mary Shelley saw clearly the challenges inherent in human efforts to control nature, destroy mortality, and radically transform the world. If these efforts are undertaken in a spirit that fosters isolation and division rather than companionship and sympathy, the cure may be more harmful than the disease. Trapped in isolation by natural disaster and recovering from an experience of profound loss, Shelley wrote a novel in which the isolation that human beings create for themselves turns out to be the greatest evil of all. As she sheltered in place on Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, she created a warning for the future—and a plea for compassion that still speaks urgently across time. 14
Section VI: The Contemporary World Reflection on the Global Pandemic of 1918-1919 Dr. Sarah Clift, Assistant Professor
Indeed, at a time when our own most commonplace activities—going for a walk, picking up groceries, visiting a friend—feel like, or indeed are, matters of life and death, the idea that running errands can be a highstakes escapade reverberates in unexpected ways. has only recently recovered from a grave illness, one which has confined her to her home for an extended period of time, bedridden. Memories of the illness are fresh in her mind as she takes in the intoxication of a busy June morning; they haunt her and others’ memories in subtle and often indistinct ways. Though never named as such—another dérive of indirection—the critical consensus is that Woolf has Clarissa recuperating from the 1918-19 global pandemic known as the Spanish flu.
“In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motorcars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.” “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” To be sure, Virginia Woolf ’s landmark 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway begins innocuously enough, as the novel’s central character Clarissa goes in search of floral arrangements for a party she is throwing later that evening. But this statement—along with its accompanying movement as Clarissa positively bursts onto the busy streets of a June day in London—has entered into collective literary consciousness as one of the most poised, and one of the most loaded, statements in twentieth-century English literature. And for good reason. Woolf is known, and loved, as the master of indirection, and as readers proceed through the novel, they slowly, and by degrees, come to realize the context for the momentousness of this occasion: Clarissa
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Woolf ’s novel is outstanding not only because of its composition or its stylistic innovation, but also because it registers the experiences of a pandemic that seems to have generated few aftershocks. Compared to the wide-ranging impact that the First World War had on literature and the arts, the 1918 pandemic has left very few traces on literature, music, and art, far fewer than we might expect given that it killed up to fifty million people worldwide. Critics have noted that this is in part because of how overshadowed the pandemic was by the end of the First World War, an event also strikingly depicted in Woolf ’s novel. Whatever the reasons—and there are doubtless
others—suffice it to say that the 1918 pandemic has largely receded from collective memory. To get a sense of this, one need only take note of how many times a day one hears politicians, health officials, economists, and journalists resort to the language of “unprecedented” to describe the current global pandemic. Perhaps, it is not despite this historical forgetting, though, but because of it, that Mrs. Dalloway can strike its COVID-19 readers as so contemporary, a little over a century later. In many respects, there is no greater literary companion to our own experiences of sheltering in place—and the eerily empty streets, the paradoxical enjoinder to be “separate together,” the tenuousness of our connections, and the ubiquity of grief in news broadcasts, siren sounds, and Skype calls that attend those experiences—than a novel where we find mundane joys laced with anxiety, and where the spirited anticipation of a party is rhythmically interrupted by the repetitive tolling of bells. Indeed, at a time when our own most commonplace activities—going for a walk, picking up groceries, visiting a friend—feel like, or indeed are, matters of life and death, the idea that running errands can be a high-stakes escapade reverberates in unexpected ways. Whether we Covidians are becoming newly attuned to the danger and the fragility of our daily routines, or to the fine thread separating life from death, it becomes difficult not to hear in Clarissa’s “sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live one day” the aftershock of our own solitude, together.
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