“It was very, very dangerous to live even one day”: Revisiting Mrs. Dalloway in the Age of the Post-COVID-19

This paper delves into Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, which vividly dramatizes society suffering from the aftermath of World War I and the Spanish flu, in the context of our post-COVID-19 era. Reading Clarissa Dalloway, a victim of the Spanish Flu, and Septimus Smith, a veteran, side by side, with examining inhumane practices of doctors and power subjects toward the infected, the sick and outsiders, I draw attention to Woolf's criticism of the mechanism of controlling power, utilizing Michel Foucault's discourse of discipline and power. I examine the violence inherent in the coercion of 'proportion' and 'conversion' by doctors working as agents of state power, and also look closer to the situation of the marginalized, being alienated in the aftermath of the pandemic and wartime situation. Resisting the practice of limiting disease to the trivial, private realm and not treating it as an important subject of fiction, Woolf challenges against masculine, imperial, and public-centered narratives by depicting the aftermath of a plague as deadly as war in this story. In addition, I seek to find the political significances of Woolf's viral narrative in the system of aesthetics by borrowing Jacques Rancière's term, "distribution of the sensible." Making us see and hear the invisible and the unheard through resistance, genuine empathy and communication, Woolf subverts the controlling gaze and delivers a hopeful message of recovery. Woolf's story, a reminder of the politics of art, conveys a great resonance to the profound task of restoring our daily lives and humanity in the age of the post-COVID-19 and also in the midst of wars and conflicts currently going on around the world.