Why Anxious Readers Under Quarantine Turn to “Mrs. Dalloway”

Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf understood as well as anyone the long-term effects that viruses could wreak on bodies, and on societies.Photograph from Alamy
In the first days of the stay-in-place orders made necessary by the coronavirus pandemic, anxious variations on one of the most famous openings in English literature began cropping up on Twitter. March 16th: “mrs. dalloway said she would disinfect the doorknobs herself.” March 19th: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the sanitiser herself.” March 23rd: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would catch the virus herself.” (That one accompanied a photo of a crowded flower market in East London.) March 24th: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would scroll through pictures of flowers herself.” March 31st: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would have the flowers delivered because they were [a] non-essential need, but she would make sure to tip the delivery guy at least 30% herself.” April 3rd: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would order from @Instacart herself.” April 5th: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would make the mask herself.”
It’s oddly fitting that so many people are reaching for Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” in the midst of this particular crisis, not least because the novel’s opening pages are probably the most ecstatic representation of running errands in the Western canon. “What a lark! What a plunge!” Clarissa Dalloway thinks, as she embarks on her morning expedition in quest of decorations for the society party she will throw that evening. At a time when our most ordinary acts—shopping, taking a walk—have come to seem momentous, a matter of life or death, Clarissa’s vision of everyday shopping as a high-stakes adventure resonates in a peculiar way. We are all Mrs. Dalloway now.
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“Mrs. Dalloway” is set in 1923, five years on from the global influenza pandemic that killed somewhere between fifty and a hundred million people. Clarissa Dalloway is one of the survivors. On the book’s second page, in the first of many perspective shifts, a neighbor of Clarissa’s watches her and observes that she has “grown very white since her illness”; in the next paragraph, we learn that her heart had been “affected . . . by influenza.” Though the 1918 flu is never directly mentioned, the literary scholar Elizabeth Outka, in her recent book “Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature,” reckons that “any reference to influenza in 1925—especially one with continued serious side effects—would have evoked the pandemic.” Key motifs in the novel, like the frequent ringing of bells (likened to “leaden circles dissolved in the air”), evoke the pandemic in subtler ways; one of the phenomena most associated with the influenza pandemic by those who survived it, Outka writes, was “the constant sound of tolling bells that rang for the victims.”
Woolf had copious personal experience with influenza. Her mother died of heart failure brought on by influenza in 1895, a tragedy that precipitated the first of Woolf’s many nervous breakdowns. Woolf herself came down with serious cases of the disease a half-dozen times between 1916 and 1925, and needed to remain confined to bed for significant stretches. Influenza affected her heart, just as it did Clarissa’s, and may have played a role in her worsening mental health during this period, as well. In 1922, she had three teeth removed in order to prevent future infections, on the advice of her doctor, Sir George Savage (the basis for the odious Sir William Bradshaw in “Mrs. Dalloway”).
Woolf understood as well as anyone the long-term effects that viruses could wreak on bodies, and on societies. But she also understood that not everyone was able to speak of it, or wanted to hear about it. “Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza,” Woolf wrote in her 1926 essay “On Being Ill.”
Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, negligible, and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes. . . . The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant.
The 1918 pandemic left far fewer traces on literature and culture than might have been expected for an event that, by some calculations, killed more than five per cent of the world’s population. This is in part because it took place in 1918 and early 1919, just as the First World War was winding down, and it has been accordingly overshadowed. “The millions of flu deaths didn’t (and don’t) count as history in the ways the war casualties did,” Outka writes. Even at the time, there was a paucity of news coverage of the pandemic relative to the war, and historical memory has only increased this gap between the representation of the two events.
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Outka suggests that, while people had become used to viewing war deaths as sacrificial and heroic, the pandemic “eroded the pretense of death as a meaningful sacrifice.” A “death in battle could be seen as courageous,” but “there was something humiliating about dying of the flu in wartime.” For writers, too, “writing about the flu could feel disloyal and unpatriotic, a problematic dodge of the more important story, and thus its representations often go underground, reflecting the very ways it seemed subordinate at the time.” The distinction between the war and the flu was also gendered. “In 1918, women as well as men were in extreme danger, and the domestic space became as deadly as the front lines,” Outka writes. “The war, with all its male deaths, became the story, and the pandemic, with its mix of female and male victims who succumbed, a deflating sequel.”
Unlike influenza, the Great War does appear in “Mrs. Dalloway,” most conspicuously in the character of Septimus Smith, a combat veteran who suffers from hallucinations and ultimately commits suicide by flinging himself out of a window. Most critics have understood Septimus as a case of post-traumatic stress disorder—what was then known as “shell shock”—and his story as Woolf’s comment on British society’s failure to process the lingering horror of the war. But Outka argues that his symptoms—delirium, hallucinations—are also consistent with influenza, which was known to “cause short- and long-term mental instability.” He easily could have been suffering from a combination of both: soldiers were infected at extremely high rates during the 1918 epidemic. Literary etiology aside, the idea that Septimus’s tragic sacrifice mirrors Clarissa’s “meaningless” suffering helps make sense of the novel’s somewhat puzzling climax, in which Clarissa learns of Septimus’s death and thinks, “Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace.” The disaster of war and the disgrace of illness are linked in Woolf’s novel.
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Reading “Mrs. Dalloway” as, at least in part, “a novel devoted to influenza” puts Clarissa’s pleasure in traversing the city in a new light. So does reading it in the midst of our own pandemic, which has temporarily dissolved the busy urban scenes Woolf describes so lovingly throughout her book. For Clarissa, London is animated by “divine vitality”: its density and crowding—precisely what would have made it deadly in 1918—are seen as signs of life. “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.” When I reread the novel recently, this passage, which has always thrilled me, had an even stronger charge. Woolf’s vivid description of a crowded metropolis right now, when our own cities’ streets lie empty, feels like something out of a fantasy novel. Yet Clarissa’s joie de vivre is mixed with a sense of latent dread: “she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”

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