Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 23 Issue 5

III. S ymptoms, M anifestations and A fter- E ffects The 1918 virus produced an unusual and memorable constellation of symptoms. 15 Typical flu symptoms like fever, headache and cough misled the doctors initially to take it lightly. The more alarming symptoms gradually emerged with conditions like a deadly form of pneumonia resulting in total lung damage with profuse bleeding from nose, mouth, and ears. A survivor recounted, “Blood would shoot out of orifices as though kept under high pressure and spray till the end of the bed; and this happened for about thirty times a day for about 8-9 days until I thought I could have no blood left.” 16 The severity of cough was sufficient to produce a sensation of bone-breaking and a rattling of rib cages, with an accompanying body odour, made the experience haunting for the survivors. In fatal cases patients mostly developed heliotrope cyanosis, a condition where the lungs were filled with fluid, turning the body blue or purple in the last stages of the illness. The pandemic was strongly associated with sensory markers as aural and visual manifestations in the form of bells and corpses-funerals have overwhelmed the suffering population, intensifying the associated horror and gloom. The American and European survivors have talked about how their loss reverberated through the continuous sounds of tolling bells as they sounded like laments for the dead victims: “The Church bells(the Dead Bells) were almost continuously tolling”; “the bells tolling all the daylong” 17 One American documentary on the pandemic is even titled “We Heard the Bells”. 18 The visual manifestations included a constant array of funerals-(coffins and bodies) that the roads and graveyards held up: “There were so many dead that the funeral processions from the hospital mortuary… were like a long Lord Major’s show.” 19 . One of the many laments of the survivor accounts have been on the scarcity of coffins and the gravediggers’ never-ending task. An English witness remembered: “They just could not make coffins quickly enough so the bodies were collected and taken somewhere…and buried in a communal grave.” 20 A gravedigger noted that: “at one time we had 500 bodies waiting for burials and no coffins…so we got the Territorials to help us to dig mass graves.” 21 Lingering legacies of the pandemic were many and diverse. The most immediate aftereffect seen in many survivors was a hallucinatory disorientation plunging slowly into permanent madness. Several historical and literary accounts have spoken of a delirium in recovered patients, whose nervous system seemed to be affected by the virus generated neurotoxin resulting eventually in confusion, depression, even schizophrenia. Karl Meninger in a widely cited study published in 1919, examined the dramatic links between psychoses of various kind and the 1918 virus. 22 Research even suggested that the flu, more than the war, was behind the rash of suicides after 1918. 23 Since the virus was airborne, its contagious quality being both miasmic as well as spreading from person to person; doctors, nurses and volunteers who sought to alleviate suffering frequently caught the virus and also brought it home. 24 People in their attempts to care and administer, unknowingly gave it to one another. This produced a widespread and inexplicable sense of guilt that haunted survivors even long after the pandemic was over. The survivors battled against this oppressive sense of guilt, more so, because it was difficult to express it through confession or narration. Hallucination, delirium, fragmented memories served as (in)visible markers of this lingering trauma. Scholars like Dorothy Ann Pettit and Janice Bailie have listed some other physiological aftereffects: “the virus left a train of ailing victims with…cardiac irregularities, vascular problems, pulmonary tuberculosis, and a host of nervous and paralytic afflictions.” 25 But the deepest and saddest aftereffect left by the pandemic was the grief and hardships caused by the loss of parents and other family members; “by November 8(1918), it produced millions of orphans;…31,000 children from 7,200 families had lost one or both of their parents.” 26 The pandemic, as recollected by a medical officer, “left widows and orphans and dependent old people. It has reduced many of these families to poverty and acute distress. This havoc is widespread, reaching all parts of the United States and all classes of people.” 27 Innumerable letters of survivors have contained a constant refrain of their never-forgotten trauma, and how they as (un)lucky survivors were left to lead a life of eternal lament. Despite the larger cultural silence, the pandemic as a trauma was never forgotten and got inscribed in peoples’ memories and existences as a permanent scar. The pandemic may not have had sufficient representation in literature, but historians in the past few decades have offered detailed explanation of the event. Alfred. W. Crosby’s classic text America’s Forgotten Pandemic and Nancy k. Bristow’s American Pandemic explore the outbreak and its diverse facets with respect to United States. Whereas, Niell Johnson’s Britain and the 1918-1919 Influenza Pandemic and Honigsbaum’s Living with Enza offer the British scenario. But it is John. M. Barry’s bestseller The Great Influenza that takes a more wider and cosmopolitan perspective providing central accounts of the struggle undertaken by the scientists and the doctors as they battled the virus and its overwhelming spread. The journalist Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider examines the broad historical effects of the pandemic, from its effect on the first and second world wars, to its shaping of the Indian independence. 28 But however much the pandemic might have been a marginal presence in twentieth century Anglophone Volume XXIII Issue V Version I 65 Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2023 ( ) A © 2023 Global Journals The Submerged Scope of the Spanish Flu: Negotiating Representational Challenges in Willa Cather's One of Ours