[Vwoolf] More on Mrs. Dalloway and Pandemic

[Diane Reynolds]

Elizabeth, 

That was a lovely article, beautifully written. I have reread “The Second Coming” many a time since 2016, but I had never thought of it in light of the influenza pandemic-- thank you for that.  I also felt very much the passage about contagion guilt: I think sometimes during the rare times I am now out, what if I infect someone? I think, too, of course, about being infected, but the other thought haunts me as well:

The invisibility of the threat in turn produces what we might term contagion guilt, a haunting fear that one might pass a deadly infection to another. Routes of transmission are known generally but rarely specifically; one fears but does not know the precise means of transfer. In William Maxwell’s elegiac novel They Came Like Swallows, which recalls his own pregnant mother’s death in the influenza pandemic, the characters are haunted by all the what-ifs: what if they had taken their boy out of school earlier? What if they had chosen the next train car rather than the first one? What if they had not entered the room that day? Such guilt can live in the mind as a low-lying presence, unresolved and unresolvable. And this guilt comes, too, in its anticipatory form—what if that touch, that visit, that missed hand wash harms a loved one or a stranger? 



> On Apr 10, 2020, at 5:55 PM, Diane Reynolds via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu> wrote:
> 
> And I should have mentioned how much I loved the research from your book that Kindley wove in—that was key to the piece! I look forward to reading your link now ...
> 
> Diane
> 
>> On Apr 10, 2020, at 5:34 PM, Outka, Elizabeth via Vwoolf <vwoolf at lists.osu.edu <mailto:vwoolf at lists.osu.edu>> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi all,
>>  
>> Love the Kindley New Yorker piece on reading Mrs. Dalloway amid COVID!  Here are some additional musings I wrote on Dalloway and our times, with Woolf coming in at the end: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/04/08/how-pandemics-seep-into-literature/ <https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/04/08/how-pandemics-seep-into-literature/>.   
>> Off to wash my hands,
>>  
>> Elizabeth 
>>  
>> Dr. Elizabeth Outka
>> Professor of English
>> English Department
>> Sarah Brunet Hall (until Fall 2021)
>> 206 Richmond Way, Office 112
>> University of Richmond, VA 23173
>> eoutka at richmond.edu <mailto:eoutka at richmond.edu>
>>  
>> Viral Modernism:  The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature
>> https://cup.columbia.edu/book/viral-modernism/9780231185752 <https://cup.columbia.edu/book/viral-modernism/9780231185752>
>>  
>> Consuming Traditions:  Modernity, Modernism, and the Commodified Authentic
>> https://global.oup.com/academic/product/consuming-traditions-9780199921843?lang=en&cc=us <https://global.oup.com/academic/product/consuming-traditions-9780199921843?lang=en&cc=us>
>>  
>>  
>>  
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