Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War Women's Narratives

of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic

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Envisioning Disease, Gender,
and War
Women's Narratives of the 1918
Influenza Pandemic

Jane Elizabeth Fisher

Palgrave
macmillan
*
ENVISIONING DISEASE, GENDER, AND WAR
Copyright © Jane Elizabeth Fisher, 2012.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-312-23449-2
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States-a division of St. Martin's Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-63018-9 ISBN 978-1-137-05438-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-05438-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fisher, jane Elizabeth, 1959-
Envisioning disease, gender, and war: women's narratives of the 1918
influenza pandemic I By jane Elizabeth Fisher.
pages cm

1. Diseases and literature. 2. Literature-Women authors-History

and criticism. 3. Epidemics in literature. 4. Gender identity in literature.
5. Influenza Epidemic, 1918-1919. 6. Literature-20th century-History
and criticism. I. Title.
PN56.D56F57 2012
809' .933561-dc23 2011051407
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: July 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Michael, Ani, and Elia
This page intentionally left blank
 Contents

List ofFigures ix

Acknowledgments xi

Prologue The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and Modern Memory

Chapter 1 The Fldneuse: Seeing and Remembering the Shock
of Modernity 27
Chapter 2 Gender and Modernity: The Things Not Named in
~if~ ~

Chapter 3 "Novels Devoted to Influenza": Regarding War and

Illness in Mrs. Dalloway 73
Chapter 4 Vision, Plague, and Apocalypse in "Pale Horse,
Pale Rider" 105
Chapter 5 Munro's "Carried Away" and Voigt's Kyrie: Ghostly
Hauntings, Sublime Eclipses 149
Chapter 6 The 1918 Influenza Pandemic in the Developing
World: Elechi Amadi and Buchi Emecheta's
Occluded Vision 177
Epilogue Loss, Contagion, and Community 197

Notes 203
Index 251
This page intentionally left blank
 Figures

1.1 John Singer Sargent drawing/watercolor of

Influenza Hospital 31
2.1 Joan of Arc Saved France 52
3.1 "On Which Side of the Window are YOU?" 95
3.2 "Women of Britain Say-'GO!"' 96
4.1 "Fight or Buy Bonds" 120
4.2 "You Can Help" 122
4.3 "The Greatest Mother in the World" 123
This page intentionally left blank
 Acknowledgments

I have accumulated numerous debts of gratitude as I have labored on this

project intermittently for a decade. Beginning in 2000, before the adop-
tion of my first child, I conceived of a very different book. The adoption
of our second child unexpectedly brought my husband and me to China
immediately after the SARS pandemic concluded, allowing me to directly
experience the aftermath of a contemporary plague. For many reasons, I
have to thank my family for their abundant patience and energy, which have
made the writing of this book possible.
For early encouragement and support, I would like to thank Professor
William Carroll of Boston University, Professor Carolyn Williams of
Rutgers University, and Professor Dorothy Mermin of Cornell University.
While they did not contribute directly to this project, they demonstrated
how academic work can be both intelligent and respectful, an ideal to which
I aspire daily. I am also grateful to the International Virginia Woolf Society,
which provided a community supportive of my early work.
I would also like to thank Jane Lilienfeld of Lincoln University and Kristi
Long of St. Martin's Press for their original support of this project. My
current editor at Palgrave Macmillan Brigitte Shull and her many capable
assistants have provided the perfect balance of encouragement and alacrity
necessary to complete the task. I will always be enormously grateful to my
readers-Molly Hite, Christine Froula, Allyson Booth, and Janis P. Stout-
for their generous suggestions and corrections. Their detailed advice greatly
improved many aspects of this work; the responsibility for any imperfections
rests on me alone.
I appreciate Canisius College's approval of the sabbatical leaves dur-
ing which much of this book was written. I owe a special debt of gratitude
to Johanna Fisher, who undertook administrative work for the College's
Women's Studies Program enabling me to complete this manuscript. My two
xii • Acknowledgments

editorial assistants, Alixandra Krzemien and Duyen Nguyen, also deserve

credit for their hard work. Alix merits particular recognition for her mastery
of Chicago citation format and her indexing skill. My many supportive col-
leagues in the larger Canisius community deserve more thanks than I can
express. My departmental colleagues Mark Hodin, Sandra Cookson, Mick
Cochrane, and Jennifer Desiderio have been especially encouraging over the
years; my generous colleague Justine Price is sorely missed.
My students deserve thanks for their unfailing presence, reminding me to
come to a conclusion and speak. I would particularly like to thank the two
honors "Literature, Illness, and Disease" seminar classes I taught during fall
and spring, 2011, as I was completing this manuscript for their insights.
I would be remiss to omit the Andrew L. Bouwhuis Library staff at
Canisius College from my acknowledgments. Their consistent professional-
ism and cheerfulness as they dealt with my many book orders and interlibrary
loan requests was impressive; Barbara Boehnke and Jessica Blum particu-
larly deserve mention. The Canisius Information Technology Service staff
have also been helpful as I worked through technological quandries; Estelle
Siener has been an unfailingly competent source of support.
I also have to thank several very different parties who remind me of the
harsh reality of the 1918 influenza pandemic, the absences it creates even
as we work to understand it better: my paternal grandmother Lula Walker
Fisher who first told me as a child of the pandemic and the staff of the Fort
Riley Kansas Army Base still searching for the Camp Funston Influenza
Memorial whose image provides the cover for this study.
Thanks are due to the Kansas Historical Society for permission to use the
photograph of the Camp Funston Influenza Memorial. Thanks also to the
Imperial War Museum, London, for their permission to use the John Singer
Sargent watercolor drawing of a French influenza hospital and the World
War I poster "Women of Britain say-GO!" Quotations from Ellen Bryant
Voigt's Kyrie appear with the permission ofWW. Norton & Co.
 Prologue: The 1918 Influenza
Pandemic and Modern Memory

T he 1918 influenza pandemic, World War I's lethal twin, has been
neglected in the Western world for almost a century, taking on the
aura of a cultural and scientific mystery. Paul Fussell begins his 1975
work The Great War and Modern Memory by noting "the Curious Literariness
of Real Life, ... the ways that literary tradition and real life transect and the
reciprocal process by which life feeds materials to literature." 1 By simply
juxtaposing literature and life, he neatly omitted the difficult and rather
inexact process of how real life becomes part of history or literature, where
it assumes a stable range of meanings open to debate and takes on a cul-
tural presence and solidity. When read by contemporary audiences, his bold
omissions beg questions central to his endeavor. His foundational work sug-
gests other historical events might also share the "Curious Literariness" he
describes, opening themselves to exacting interpretation and correspond-
ing with broader paradigms of narrative and meaning even if they remain
absent, invisible, or underinterpreted for many decades. This chapter traces
the complex processes of repression and recollection surrounding these for-
gotten parts of the 1918 influenza pandemic, allowing it to reemerge in the
last decade of the twentieth century as a vital part of public discourse.
Memories of traumatic events such as war or pandemic disease are noto-
riously both vivid and inaccurate, yet these fragmentary memories often
provide the most valuable information concerning the trauma itself. Fussell
found his literary material in poems by Owen, Brooke, and Sassoon but also
in the rawer, more personal form of letters, journals, interviews, and diaries
of ordinary soldiers. Much of the pleasure in rereading his work today lies in
the complexity of detail he fluently commands. His work reminds us of the
ongoing construction of meaning, how it must be literally "re-membered"
from a variety of origins. Meaning, like memory, is always a process, not
2 • Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War

a given, approached by different interpreters with a range of motives and

perspectives. 2
New generations of critics are illuminating gender, racial, and geographi-
cal gaps Fussell's work elided, with analyses relying on popular war songs,
propaganda posters, novels, diaries, and poetry by women and lesser-known
writers yielding particularly impressive resu!ts. 3 All are still processing World
War I's contradictory legacy of appalling physical destruction and astonish-
ing imaginative production, the way the war discredited inherited myths of
honor, duty, and patriotism while also generating "new myths that became
part of the fiber of our own lives.' 4
Most World War I critics and historians mention the 1918 influenza
pandemic only in passing, if at all, usually in relation to the death or
near-death of well-known figures. The French Symbolist poet Guillaume
Apollinaire died of influenza in 1918 just before the Armistice 5 ; the deca-
dent artist Egon Schiele also died of flu a week before Apollinaire; the poet
May Wedderburn Cannan's fiance Bevil Quiller-Couch returned from
the war to die from influenza in 1919. 6 (Fussell also ironically notes how
a safely demobilized Robert Graves "instantly catches Spanish influenza
and almost dies of it," 7 thus a common theme.) Freud's favorite daughter,
Sophie, died of pneumonia due to influenza during the cruel 1919 winter,
perhaps providing a somber inspiration for Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 8
Here, though, forgetting has trumped remembrance for several genera-
tions. It took five decades for Fussell to find the necessary distance to write
insightfully about the cultural meanings inherent in the gory mud of the
Somme and a decade more for critics with broader approaches to note his
omissions. The massive mortality of the 1918 influenza pandemic, perhaps
five times that of military deaths in World War J,9 seemingly has dictated
a longer temporal interval before historians, scientists, and literary crit-
ics have dared to approach it less fearfully and more objectively, working
to understand its intersection with multiple elements of early twentieth-
century history and culture.

Forgetting (and Forgetting) the 1918/nf/uenza Pandemic

Why was the 1918 influenza pandemic forgotten for most of the twenti-
eth century? What combination of agencies was required for it to reemerge
into open view again? In his philosophic work The Writing of the Disaster,
Maurice Blanchot associates disaster with forgetfulness: "The disaster is
related to forgetfulness-forgetfulness without memory, the motionless
retreat ofwhat has not been treated-the immemorial, perhaps. To remember
forgetfully ... " 10 Remembering forgetfully best describes the historic and
 Prologue • 3

scientific engagement with the 1918 influenza pandemic over the last six
decades. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag notes the "near total historical
amnesia regarding the influenza pandemic of 1918-19 in which more people
died than in the four year of World War 1." 11 The 1918 pandemic was
intermittently forgotten in terms of public and cultural discourse for most
of the twentieth century until its "rediscovery" first by medical historian
Alfred W. Crosby in his 1976 work Epidemic and Peace (reissued in 1989 as
America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918) and then by American
mass culture and media in the late 1990s when both a best-selling book by
a New York Times science reporter and a Public Broadcasting Service doc-
umentary were released; the subsequent newspaper and magazine articles
established past, present, and future influenza outbreaks as ongoing media
stories worthy of attention. 12 Several literary works immediately preceded
Kolata and PBS's popular histories-a children's book, Karen Hesse's 1995
novel A Time of Angels, and Ellen Bryant Voigt's sonnet sequence Kyrie:
Poems, a 1996 finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award-also
drawing on the charged material provided by the 1918 influenza pandemic.
John M. Barry's 2005 historical study The Great Influenza: The Epic Story
of the Deadliest Plague in History offers the most comprehensive historical
overview of the pandemic. 13 Clearly, American culture had recovered from
the "near total amnesia" Sontag had noted and was finally ready, even eager,
to recall the 1918 influenza pandemic.
Of course the 1918 influenza pandemic was never completely forgotten,
but those who remembered it had differing agendas and goals. One set was
scientific in nature, engaging those who focused on the disease itself and
strenuously worked to isolate, identify, and eventually treat it. Immediately
following the pandemic, medical and scientific communities in both the
United States and Europe made exhaustive efforts to determine the pan-
demic's origin and extent as well as what medical and public health tech-
niques worked best to contain or treat the disease. 14 Simply classifying the
microbe causing the 1918 pandemic took 15 years. In 1933, the English
scientists Smith, Andrewes, and Laidlaw definitively proved that the 1918
influenza outbreaks, initially thought to be bacterial in nature, were in fact
caused by a virus. 15 Throughout the twentieth century, parallel groups of
research scientists and public health physicians continued to research the
complex nature of influenza and work to contain influenza strains that
remain endemic in both animals and humans. 16
The other focus of those who remembered the 1918 influenza pandemic was
harder to quantify because it grew out of the human experience of the illness
itself, with emphasis falling on remembering those who died rather than the
disease that killed them. Autobiographically inspired accounts of mourning
4 • Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War

dead family members provided the most visible traces of the 1918 influenza in
literature but most of these accounts either personalize or universalize {and thus
sentimentalize) the experience of death and mourning without emphasizing
the cause of death. For example, the 1937 novel They Came Like Swallows by
William Maxwell is a moving account of the impact of a mother's death from
influenza, narrated from Maxwell's childhood perspective. Similarly, Thomas
Wolfe in chapter 35 of his autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel nar-
rates his brother's death from pneumonia during the 1918 pandemicP Mary
McCarthy also dramatically recalls how her parents' deaths altered her own
life in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, but she doesn't discuss the cause of
their deaths during the fall of 1918-which was influenza. 18 John Dos Passos,
who nearly died during the 1918 influenza pandemic, barely mentions it in his
U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel/1919/The Big Money trilogy except when a character
who is a physician notes in a massive understatement "This Spanish influenza
is tricky stuff!". 19 Relatively few writers had the will or insight to understand
the emergent cultural meanings implicit in such a catastrophe.
Oral tradition certainly did not neglect the 1918 influenza pandemic. I
first heard of the 1918 influenza from my paternal grandmother who told of
an entire family dying of influenza alone, with no one finding them until
days later. John Oxford, a virologist specializing in influenza, estimates that
at least 100 million people died in the 1918 pandemic, leaving 100 million
untold stories: "One person dies and there are repercussions through the
next generation. Multiply that by 100 million and then you begin to see
the effects of the flu." 20 Another influenza researcher, Ann Reid, marveled
at both the pervasive extent of the 1918 pandemic and the cultural silence
surrounding it: "I was also amazed as I talked to people outside. Anybody
over the age of about sixty had a story to tell about the flu ... How could
this huge thing happen and nobody ever talked about it?" 21 Although oral
history projects today contain a few recorded personal narratives related by
survivors of the 1918 influenza pandemic, oral tradition has its limitations
and can be quite fragile, as Barry notes:

The disease has survived in memory more than in any literature. Nearly
all those who were adults during the pandemic have died now. Now the
memory lives in the minds of those who only heard stories, who heard
how their mother lost her father, how an uncle became an orphan, or
heard an aunt say, "It was the only time I ever saw my father cry." Memory
dies with people. 22

The more severe limitation of oral tradition, however, lies in the power and
status of those who are remembering; working-class people, minorities, and
 Prologue • 5

women and children of working- and middle-class status would remember

the disease that killed their families, friends, and neighbors, but had no social
forms validating these memories. As Kolata observes the 1918 "flu epidemic
profoundly affected the lives of ordinary people whose voices are seldom
heard." 23 While the ripple effects of the 1918 influenza pandemic in individ-
ual lives were extensive, memories of pandemic survivors were fragmented,
distributed among far-flung individuals who did not have the perspective or
social power to make connections and observe causal relationships.
Popular historians mustered their energies and tried to interest a larger
audience in the 1918 influenza pandemic with relatively little success. 24 The
medical historian Alfred W Crosby deserves credit for doing the first sys-
tematic study of the pandemic. Crosby's work attempted to estimate the
enormous historical dimensions of the 1918 influenza pandemic, arguing
that a disease infecting so many people in so many different countries
deserved public recognition:

The important and almost incomprehensible fact about the Spanish flu is
that is killed millions upon millions of people in a year or less. Nothing
else-no infection, no war, no famine-has ever killed so many in as
short a period. And yet it has never inspired awe, not in 1918 and not
.
smce ... 25

Twenty years after its initial publication, Crosby's book had its desired
rhetorical effect among scientific audiences, inspiring medical researchers
Jeffery Taubenberger and Ann Reid, ideally situated among centuries of
preserved tissue samples at Walter Reed Army Hospital, 26 and independent
scholars such as Kirsty Duncan "driven by a passion to solve the mystery of
the 1918 flu" to search Arctic graveyards.U Both were seeking samples of
the deadly 1918 influenza virus itself. Media coverage of Duncan's search
combined with the 1997 publication of Tautenberger's article in Science
magazine about his success in recovering the original 1918 influenza virus
brought the 1918 pandemic back into public discourse. 28 Subsequent sci-
entific announcements concerning the genetic sequencing of the recovered
samples of the 1918 influenza virus and the recreation of the deadly virus
itself made international headlines. 29 Yet for most of the twentieth century,
the second title of Crosby's book was accurate: the 1918 influenza pandemic
remained forgotten for almost 80 years, a historical footnote writ small
beneath the bolder analyses of World War I.
The obvious question lingers: given its scale and deadliness, how could
the 1918 influenza pandemic be passed over for four generations? Its tim-
ing provides the simplest reason why the 1918 pandemic was historically
6 • Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War

marginalized for so long. The initial audiences who would have been inter-
ested in the pandemic were already consumed by other pressing tasks related
to the grim work of war recovery. Erich Remarque, in his classic World
War I novel All's Quiet on the Western Front, noted the interdependency
of influenza and combat during World War I: "We have almost grown
accustomed to it; war is a cause of death like cancer and tuberculosis, like
influenza and dysentery ... Shells, gas clouds, and flotillas of tanks-
shattering, corroding, death. Dysentery, influenza, typhus-scalding,
choking, death ... 30 Similarly, Fussell has argued that the relative absence
of accurate narratives about trench warfare was due to the "gentility and
optimism" of European and American audiences who did not want to read
about unpleasant topics:

One of the cruxes of the war, of course, is the collision between events
and the language available-or thought appropriate-to describe them.
To put it more accurately, the collision was one between events and the
public language used for over a century to celebrate the idea of prog-
ress ... The problem was less one of"language" than of gentility and opti-
mism ... The real reason [infantry soldiers so seldom wrote about trench
warfare] is that soldiers have discovered that no one is very interested in
the bad news they have to report. What listener wants to be torn and
shaken when he doesn't have to be? We have made unspeakable mean
indescribable: it really means nastyY

Like disgusting details from wartime trenches, where soldiers lived in mud
mixed with excrement and human remains, reports of the 1918 influenza
pandemic conflicted with attempts to maintain post-war public optimism.
Coming at the conclusion of a grimly demoralizing war, the influenza pan-
demic piled trauma on top of trauma, leading to an exhaustion of public
attention, compassion and resources. Barry describes the American reasons
for forgetting the 1918 pandemic in terms of compassion fatigue and lowered
morale: "The world was still sick, sick to the heart. The war itself ... The
senseless deaths at home ... Wilson's betrayal of ideals at Versailles, a betrayal
that penetrated the soul." 32
Another reason for the cultural amnesia surrounding the 1918 influenza
lies in how its very ubiquity made it invisible, leaving relatively few historical
and social traces. In his work Explaining Epidemics, the medical historian
Charles Rosenberg argues that influenza in general "is not ordinarily stud-
ied by the social or economic historian; it is too easily transmitted, too uni-
versal, and insufficiently lethal or disfiguring." 33 Kolata similarly contends
that this influenza pandemic was forgotten by audiences because it had