Abstract
Cather ends One of Ours with Mrs. Wheeler’s dark yet clear vision of World War I and Claude’s double life, his experiences in the 1918 influenza pandemic and the trenches that granted him a strangely coherent final identity. Defined in terms of individual perception and interpretation, vision is similarly valorized in Woolf’s essay “On Being Ill” and in her novel Mrs. Dalloway, where it becomes one of the compensatory gains a patient can receive from the otherwise disorienting and destructive experience of illness. Woolf’s novel deliberately links Clarissa’s point of view, as the recovered patient whose vision has been transformed by illness, with the hallucinations of the still shell-shocked Septimus Smith, contrasting both to the anxious optical powers of a London public struggling to interpret twin signs of postwar modernity—a motorcar and an airplane. With her fine Chinese eyes, the character of Elizabeth Dalloway, Clarissa’s daughter, offers an alternative form of vision untainted by war or disease, turned toward the future.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Sims calls attention to Woolf’s denigration of language’s power to express pain while calling attention to illness’s ability to change perception. Lorraine Sims, “Ailing Dualisms: Woolf’s Revolt Against Rationalism in the ‘Real World’ of Influenza,” in Virginia World in the Real World: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Virginia Woolf Conference, Clemson University Digital Press, November 15, 2005, 88–9.
“On Being I11” was first published in a slightly different form in the New Criterion edited by T. S. Eliot in January, 1926. Woolf’s essay appeared again the same year under the title “Illness—An Unexploited Mine” in the American journal Forum. See Kimberley Enghahl Coates, “Exposing the Nerves of Language’: Virginia Woolf, Charles Mauron, and the Affinity Between Aesthetics and Illness,” Literature and Medicine 21.1 (2002): 242. It was also collected by Hogarth Press in The Moment and Other Essays in 1930. Throughout this chapter, I draw on the 2002 version of the essay published by Paris Press, introduction by Hermione Lee.
Virginia Woolf, “On Being I11” (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 2002), 9.
Ibid., 9.
Ibid., 10–11.
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 9–10.
Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Vintage, 1999), 441; Hermione Lee, introduction to “On Being I11,” by Virginia Woolf (Ashfield, MA: Paris Press, 2002), xii.
Thomas Caramagno, The Flight of the Mind: Virginia Woolf’s Art and Manic-Depressive Illness (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996).
Louise De Salvo, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Boston: Beacon, 1989); Patricia Moran, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and the Aesthetics of Trauma (City: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Molly Hite, “Virginia Woolf’s Two Bodies,” Genders 31 (2000): 1.
Ibid., 1–2. Conversely, Simms interprets the mind-body relationship in “On Being I11” in relation to Platonic rationalism.
Ibid., 6.
Throughout this chapter, my argument takes into account the substantial critical work on Virginia Woolf and trauma. For a consideration of the negative aspects of illness in Woolf’s writing, see Toni A. H. McNaron’s essay “The Uneasy Solace of Art: The Effect of Sexual Abuse on Virginia Woolf’s Aesthetic,” in Virginia Woolf and Trauma: Embodied Texts, ed. by Suzette Henke and David Eberly (New York: Pace University Press, 2007), 72–3.
Virginia Woolf, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two: 1912–22, ed. Nigel Nicholson and Joanne Trautmann (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 1210, 499.
Mark Hussey, introduction to Virginia Woolf and War: Fiction, Reality, and Myth, ed. Mark Hussey (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 3.
While beginning her essay by focusing on the metaphysical elements of “On Being I11,” Evelyne Ender also recognizes that “Woolf’s thinking on illness is inconceivable without the experience of war…” See Evelyne Ender, “‘Speculating Carnally’: or, Some Reflections on the Modernist Body,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 12.1 (1999): 10.
Julia Stephen made nursing her private and public role in life, writing a pamphlet on the subject, and dying probably as a result of catching typhus while caring for the poor in the London slums. See Diane Gillespie, Julia Duckworth Stephen: Stories for Children, Essays for Adults (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987).
For critical discussions of these topics, see Caramagno, Flight of the Mind, on sanity and insanity; Christina Froula, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant Garde: War, Civilization, and Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), on sexuality; Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), on World War I; and Natania Rosenfeld, “Links into Fences: The Subtext of Class Division in Mrs. Dalloway” Literature Interpretation Theory 9.2 (1998): 139–60, on social class.
Leslie Hankins, “‘To kindle and illuminate’: Woolf’s Hot Flashes Against Ageism—Challenges for Cinema,” Virginia Woolf and Her Influences: Selected Papers from the Seventh Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Laura Davis and Jeanette McVicker (New York: Pace University Press, 1998), 27
Woolf’s essay “Street Haunting” also equates urban identity with vision, comparing the flânuer/flâneuse figure to an “enormous eye.” See Virginia Woolf, The Death of the Moth (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1974), 22. Ogden also interprets “Mrs. Dalloway—with its flâneuse, domestic, Sapphist, and imperial manifestations of sight—as a tour de force of female visuality.” See Daryl Ogden, The Language of the Eyes: Science, Sexuality, and Female Vision in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1927 (Albany: State University of New York Press), 208.
Niall Johnson, Britain and the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic: A Dark Epilogue (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 8.
Ibid., 6.
Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989), 256.
Burian interprets the novel’s use of flower imagery in relation to trauma and homoeroticism, with both Clarissa and Septimus included in a network of floral allusions. See Cornelia Burian, “Modernity’s Shock and Beauty: Trauma and the Vulnerable Body in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway” in Virginia Woolf in the Real World.: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Virginia Woolf Conference, Clemson University Digital Press, accessed November 15, 2005, 70–5.
Conversely, Tseung interprets Clarissa as a flâneuse whose errand serves a “specific domestic purpose.” She also perceives Clarissa as reactionary, her character still incarnating “the orthodox femininity of the earlier century.” See Ching-fang Tseung, “The Flâneur, the Flâneuse, and the Hostess: Virginia Woolf’s (Un)Domesticating Flânerie in Mrs. Dalloway,” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 32.1 (2006): 219–58.
Jennie-Rebecca Falcetta, “Geometries of Space and Time: The Cubist London of Mrs. Dalloway,” Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007): 121.
Virginia Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume Two: 1920–24. Edited by Anne Olivier Bell (New York and London: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978), 2, 263.
For an excellent discussion of the cenotaph’s history and its different meanings in Mrs. Dalloway, see Marlene A. Briggs, “Circling the Cenotaph: Mrs. Dalloway, Historical Trauma, and the Archives,” in Approaches to Teaching Mrs. Dalloway, ed. by Eileen Barrett and Ruth O. Saxton (New York: Modern Language Association, 2009), 58–63.
Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 104.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 282. Abraham makes a parallel argument in Are Girls Necessary? when she distinguishes between lesbian writing and lesbian novels; the former traps its protagonists in the heterosexual plot so that they must either revert to heterosexuality or get punished for their lesbianism. See Julie Abraham, Are Girls Necessary?: Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 4–6. Mrs. Dalloway is clearly an example of what Abraham terms lesbian writing.
Paul K. Saint Amour, “Airwar Prophecy and Interwar Modernism,” Comparative Literature Studies 42. 2 (2005): 354.
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 211.
Karen DeMeester argues that Clarissa attempts to recover from the private trauma of her sister’s death by creating moments of “beauty, harmony, and unity.” See Karen DeMeester, “Trauma, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Obstacles to Postwar Recovery in Mrs. Dalloway,” in Virginia Woolf and Trauma: Embodied Texts, ed. Suzette Henke and David Eberly (New York: Pace University Press, 2007), 77–94. Froula also interprets Clarissa as traumatized by her sister Sylvia’s death and thus her party as elegiac. See Froula, Avant Garde, 96 ff.
Raymond H. Fredette, The Sky on Fire: The First Battle of Britain 1917–8 and the Birth of the Royal Air Force (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 55–6.
Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 310–11. Fredette’s figures are substantially higher than Kern’s: 1,414 killed and 3,416 injured. See Fredette, Sky, 231.
Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (Oxford University Press, 2003), 265.
Gillian Beer, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground: Essays (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1996), 149–78; Jennifer Wicke, “Mrs. Dalloway Goes to Market: Woolf, Keynes, and Modern Markets,” Novel (1994): 5–23.
Melba Cuddy-Keane, Natasha Aliksiuk, Kay Ki, Morgan Love, Chris Rose, and Andrea Williams, “The Heteroglossia of History, Part One: The Car” in Texts and Contexts: Selected Papers from the Fifth Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf, ed. Beth Rigel Daughtery and Eileen Barrett (New York: Pace University, 1996), 72–3.
Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, 20. Benjamin D. Hagen, “A Car, A Plane, and a Tower: Interrogating Public Images in Mrs. Dalloway” Modernism/Modernity 16.3 (2009): 537–51.
Meg Albrinck, “Humanitarians and He-Men: Recruitment Posters and the Masculine Ideal,” in Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture, ed. Pearl James (Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 327.
Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1997); DeMeester, “Trauma, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and Obstacles to Postwar Recovery in Mrs. Dalloway,” 79–80.
Tseung, “The Flâneur, the Flâneuse, and the Hostess”219-58; Daryl Ogden, The Language of the Eyes: Science, Sexuality, and Female Vision in English Literature and Culture, 1690–1927 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 204–205.
Emily Dalgarno, Virginia Woolf and the Visible World (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 84.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of Ones Own, Annotated Edition, ed. Mark Hussey (Mariner Books, 2005), 112.
Tseung, “The Flâneur, the Flâneuse, and the Hostess” 248. Dibert-Himes also connects Elizabeth to an undefined future. See Audra Dibert-Himes, “Elizabeth Dalloway: Virginia Woolf’s Forward Look at Feminism,” in Virginia Woolf: Emerging Perspectives: Selected Papers from the Third Annual Conference on Virginia Woolf ed. Vera Neverow (New York: Pace University Press, 1994), 227.
Copyright information
© 2012 Jane Elizabeth Fisher
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fisher, J.E. (2012). “Novels Devoted to Influenza”: Regarding War and Illness in Mrs. Dalloway. In: Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05438-8_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-05438-8_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-63018-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-05438-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)