UC Davis

ABSTRACT

This dissertation, “Porter, Maxwell and O’Hara: Reading Pandemic Trauma in 1918 Influenza Literature in the Time of COVID-19,” offers a novel examination of three literary texts written in the wake of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic: Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939); William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows (1937); and John O’Hara’s The Doctor’s Son (1935). This fresh look is only possible because another pandemic, COVID-19, crashed the planet a century after the 1918 influenza virus arrived, allowing for a unique comparison of both events. A detailed discussion of pandemic trauma precedes a close reading of these semi-autobiographical texts in which I interweave the texts with the authors’ personal histories and their experience with influenza. Applying a Health Humanities approach, I assess these texts for both their literary wealth and the medical chronicles embedded within them. As illness narratives specific to Influenza, their themes lend themselves for extrapolation to COVID-19. I put the texts in conversation with each other and with narratives gleaned thus far from COVID-19 victims, survivors and witnesses mining them for evidence of pandemic trauma and illustrating how the traumas evident in 1918 influenza narratives are similar to, and yet different from, COVID-19 narratives. In Chapter 1, I explore Porter’s text, the only narrative written by a 1918 influenza survivor who endured a near-death experience as a young adult. Her text is a primer on the psychological and pathophysiological traumas the influenza virus perpetrated on the human mind and body, a trauma echoed today in victims of COVID-19. In Chapter 2, I focus on Maxwell’s text, a treatise on the twin traumas of child grief after the loss of a primary caregiver and the subsequent orphanhood that pandemics leave in their wake. Maxwell survived the 1918 influenza as a young child; his pregnant mother did not. His text also opens a discussion of the morbidity and mortality tolls extracted by both influenza and COVID-19 on the maternal–fetal dyad during pregnancy. In Chapter 3, I consider O’Hara’s text, which illustrates the physiological and emotional traumas the 1918 pandemic inflicted on healthcare professionals, who were inundated with desperately sick and dying patients they were ill-equipped to treat. I broaden the discussion to reflect on the fragility of healthcare systems when they are overwhelmed by an unexpected pandemic assault, the dilemma of recruiting medical students to assist overburdened healthcare professionals, as well as on the plight of vulnerable and disenfranchised populations seeking medical care during times of crises. I conclude with a personal reflection on the COVID-19 crisis, I address the compelling need for readiness in anticipation of the next pandemic that is now almost certainly lying in wait, and I speculate on what the definitive COVID-19 narratives will look like after COVID-19 is finally relegated to historical status like its antecedent, influenza.