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

uniformed selves. One soldier “had such an attack of nose-bleed during the night that the sergeant thought that he might die before they got it stopped.” - “There was almost no ventilation, and the air was fetid with sickness and swat and vomit.” - “Medical supplies are wholly inadequate, there are no nurses, and of the three doctors on board, one won’t see soldiers, one falls ill, and one is run ragged trying to attend to patients he can do little to help.” 33 Cather’s language is searing in its detail, as she depicts the last stages of one of Claude’s flu-afflicted men. 34 The echo of Wilfred Owen’s famous poem “Dulcet Decorum Est” (1920) that depicts the ghastly death of a soldier from a sudden effusion of poisonous gas is evident. Like Tannhauser, Owen’s soldier, with “white eyes writhing in his face,” is “guttering, choking, drowning,” while “the blood/Come(S) gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.” 35 Though one man is killed from a weaponized, human-inflicted gas, and the other from a non-human virus, the sensory details are strikingly similar- and doctors were, in fact, startled by the eerie similarities between the lung damage produced by the virus and by poisonous gas.” 36 One of the many cultural assumptions in that period regarding the virus was that it could be resisted with willpower and martial virtues like courage and bravery. Claude naively articulates such a belief as he says: “Vigorous, clean-blooded young fellows of nineteen and twenty turned over and died because they had lost their courage, because other people were dying, - because death was in the air.” 37 And his own unaffected health was an outcome of his will power rather than luck. Susan Sontag has pointed out the dangers of this sort of met- aphorizing, when character traits rather than microbes are thought to control illness. 38 In fact Claude thought that the situation granted him a new purpose as his persistent and patient caregiving could save some of his boys’ lives - with constant doses of eggs and orange juices he could defeat the virus’ damaging effects. He felt triumphant as he emerged as a heroic figure on board, “…enjoying himself all the while.” 39 He ruefully notes on Tannhauser’s flu death: “he only wanted to serve” but instead he ended up ill, emasculated, crying for his mother before finally getting wrapped up in a sack and vanishing into “a lead-coloured chasm in the sea. There was not even a splash”, as the ship “streamed without him-already forgotten within a few hours.” 40 Tannhauser’s pathetic and feeble end missed the higher ideal for Claude, falling outside the masculine, martial scope: “they were never to have any life at all, or even a soldiers’ death. They were merely waste in a great enterprise.” Claude voices the pandemic’s cultural denial as he plans to “forget this voyage like a bad dream.” 41 Eager to be a part of the grand combat, Claude marches ahead with the troops and reflects: “They were bound for the big show, and on every hand were reassuring signs: long lines of gaunt, dead trees, charred and torn; big holes gashed out in fields and hillsides…;winding depressions in the earth, bodies of wrecked motor-trucks and automobiles lying on the road, and everywhere endless struggling lines of rusty barbed wire.” Cather’s use of language in this passage depicting a war-ravaged wasteland, through Claude’s point of view, masterfully critiques his overtly romanticized views of war, indicts his naïveté at an individual level while implicating a whole generation living with similar ideology. However, Cather herself could not wholly escape from this ideological construct as she once declared that the female writers will be taken seriously only if they wrote; “a story of adventure, a stout Sea tale or a manly battle yarn.” 42 As the critic Sharon O’Brien has noted, Cather associated, “maleness with the power and autonomy she wanted for herself… finding in war and combat… the apotheosis of masculinity, a temporary refuge from social definitions of feminine identity, linked in her mind with passivity and victimization.” 43 So, not surprisingly, her narrative telos incorporated the sense that a soldiers’ death from the flu was a sad travesty of his expected role; so Claude, is accorded a manly death, and his final moments are in striking contrast to Tannhauser’s death : “The blood dripped down his coat,…but they were unconquerable.” 44 Willa Cather’s One of Ours is firmly set in the then cultural rubric when the momentum defined “war service as proof of manliness.” 45 Yet her vivid and graphic description of the viral spread along with its ghastly manifestations make her novel a valuable part of the early pandemic literature. Her novel’s emphasis makes amply clear the period’s dominant cultural ethic that constructed the war as a grand narrative, whose sovereign claim to nobility and purpose was tainted and frustrated by the arrival of a miasmic phantom which robbed men of their rightful chance of dying in duty, vindicating an encoded justification of the pandemic’s cultural denial and dismissal. The pandemic of 1918, or more famously the Spanish flu remains a dark and disruptive phenomenon, a scourge in the face of time and history. But what makes it most intriguing is its own oxymoronic entity- its own absent-presence, an experience that was simultaneously ubiquitous and hidden. Such exclusion, when understood as deliberate, remains at the heart of discourses of power and domination. Human civilization is rife with many such practices; be it indiscriminate exploitation of the environment, or the discrimination based on race, caste, colour, gender, sexuality, et al- all based on a systemic delegitimization of “discarded negatives” (Butler). Representation, when empowered with a disruptive force that can push through state sanctioned borders and mainstream interpretive constructs, can emerge as alternative frames that can “see” through the suppressed. Lifting the veil of the archival dust ambient upon long forgotten stories will Volume XXIII Issue V Version I 67 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