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Section VI: The Contemporary World
Reflection on the Global Pandemic of 1918-1919
Dr. Sarah Clift, Assistant Professor
“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 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.
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.
