Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War

"Katherine Anne Porter survived a severe case of influenza in 1918, but later observed, "[I]t simply divided my life, cut across it." The 1918 influenza pandemic spanned the end of World War I and the granting of female suffrage in the Western world, forcing changes in gender roles and subjectivity itself during the volatile early twentieth century. Focusing on major novels and essays by Willa Cather, Katherine Anne Porter, and Virginia Woolf, this work examines how narratives by women writers engage the1918 influenza pandemic, emphasizing vision as compensation for the apocalyptic losses of both war and disease. While male characters-- at double jeopardy due to combat and pandemic-- inevitably die, female characters develop an appreciation of their ownendurance, envisioning and accepting transformed futures. Drawing on World War I posters, poetry, songs, drawings, and photographs, Fisher's argument offers a persuasive framework connecting war, disease, and gender innovation to the shock of the modern in early twentieth-century culture. The book's last chapter extends her argument to late twentieth-century women authors such as the Canadian fiction writer Alice Munro, the American poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, and the Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta, whoseworks also evoke the 1918 influenza pandemic. Contemporary representations of the pandemic, however, do not grant it innovative power, regressively connecting it instead to conventional marriage and limited vision"--