My research paper will explore a reading of Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf from the perspective of the experience of the pandemic within the novel.  Clearly a much more subtle presence than the war, according to Elizabeth Outka’s Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature, the “era’s viral catastrophe has been hidden since its arrival, drowned out by its overwhelming scope, by the broader ways outbreaks of disease are often muted, and by the way the human-inflicted violence of the time consumed cultural and literary attention” (2).  The cited author argues that deaths from disease are measured differently from casualties of war.  This resonates strongly at present, when deaths each day from COVID 19 can equal the number of fatalities on the one day of September 11 although the numbers carry completely different connotations.  It is only when pandemic deaths are compared to deaths in all recent wars combined that the gravity is felt.  How are Septimus and Mrs. Dalloway more similar if compared in this context̅—one being a victim of an external enemy and the other a victim of an internal one?  What is the connection between pandemic and modernism?

In William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South, John T. Matthews highlights how the modernist author “figures out the connection between the abuse of women and the abuse of agricultural laborers” during “the migration of this country’s agricultural work force to the cities” under “global capitalism” in a “Depression-era context” (Hubbs 461, 463).  A persistent lament throughout As I Lay Dying (1930) references this blunt reality in which families “like the Bundren [or the Tulls], “stayed in rural areas and continued to pursue farming,” even while they were aware of the changes brought about by “the sociocultural era called modernity,” as John T. Matthews explains extensively in “As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age” (Hubbs 461).  “Agriculture in Faulkner’s oeuvre is, under both slavery and the later sharecropping system, an exploitative regime that benefits the few through the sweat of the many,” describes Jolene Hubbs in her article titled “William Faulkner’s Rural Modernism” (Hubbs 472).  In fact, “Faulkner’s sweat economy[1] counters a makebelieve vision of the South that was deployed by conservative movements whose interests were served by [the] evocation of a system defined by leisure labor” (Hubbs 473).  The southern author presents the contrasting notion by “explor[ing] rural white poverty in one of his most formally innovative texts: AILD” (Hubbs 473).  The Bundrens, who are immersed in “a confluence of forms of statis―spatial, temporal, and social” are “frozen,” a state that affects the women even more harshly than the men because they are responsible for childbearing and house chores as well as field work (Hubbs 462).  The Burdens live on a small cotton farm on a hill in Yoknapatawpha, a forty-mile road trip by mule to Jefferson, where townspeople “regard rural poor whites” as “obsolete” (Hubbs 465).  Although it seems that there is no way of escaping the oppressive, confining and exhausting environment of the farm, Faulkner’s females such as Addie Bundren, who will be the focus of these brief comments, expand their interiority to resist the pressure forced on their minds and bodies as well as develop a personal connection to death in order to terminate their lives whenever they decide they have had enough (Hubbs 463-4).

Death is more an act of will than a natural cause, as unrelenting work leads to a depletion of energy which evokes the desire to be over with life.  For instance, Mr. Tull relates the story of his mother on these terms: “Some women, I mind my mammy lived to be seventy and more.  Worked every day, rain or shine; never a sick day since her last chap was born until one day she kind of looked around her and then she went that lace-trimmed night gown she had had forty-five years and never wore out of the chest and put it on and laid down on the bed and pulled the covers up and shut her eyes.  You all will have to look out for pa the best you can, she said.  I’m tired,” and, as simple as that, she passed away that same night (AILD 30).  When Doctor Peabody sees Addie on her deathbed, he realizes that there is nothing he can do to prevent Addie’s death as she is determined to seek relief from the hardships of the world.  The doctor has no doubt that Anse is the cause of Addie’s decision to die young, although her passing is not as quick as Tull’s mother: “He [Anse] has wore her [Addie] out at last” and “Addie’s long dying reminds Dr. Peabody of a regional fate: hangs on too long” as the tension between the rural and the modern symbolizes (AILD 41, Matthew 148).  Dying is an act of rebellion against male domination and control, which Tull’s mother and Addie stand against, even at the cost of their lives.

Inflicting abuse and being a victim of it can be intertwined to the point that it becomes difficult to discern where one starts and where the other ends.  Addie endures the abuse of her husband and Anse complains of the treatment given by town folks who not only take economic advantage of small farmers but also “look down upon” them in a way that “resonates with Evan Watkins’s formulation of obsolescence” (Hubbs 464, 465).  According to Watkins, “obsolescence is not at all a survival from the past” but rather something produced by and integral to the conditions of dominance in the present” (Hubbs 465).  Anse perceives and complains about this when, for instance, he refers to the devastating effect of the roads on him, the head of the Bundren clan (Hubbs 465).  At another point Anse reflects: “Nowhere in this sinful world can an honest, hardworking man profit.  It takes them that runs the stores in the towns, doing no sweating, living off of them that sweats” (AILD 110).  Even though Anse himself does not sweat as others (family and neighbors) do it for him, it “does not undermine its validity” as he “vents working-class resentment” (Hubbs 472, Matthew 146).  As John T. Matthews clearly explains, Anse is blind to the root of the problem, which is “a national economic system that historically positioned Southern agriculture as a colonized source of raw material for the Northern metropolises of global industrial and commercial empire” (146).  The fact that the Bundrens’ father finds a replacement for Addie hours after her burial speaks to his detachment from emotions, his concern with labor and his mastery over words as he uses them to manipulate others into toiling for him.  Just as the North colonized the South, the men colonize the women in a relentless chain in which the strongest apparently take advantage of the weakest who silently resist.

Expanding one’s interiority can be understood as a tactic of passive resistance against the oppressor.  Addie, who has been working as a teacher, sees Anse as a springboard to escape loneliness, sexual desire, destitution, and her job with children that she really hates.  The fact that he owns a property must have been a determining factor in her acceptance of his proposal of marriage.  However, after giving birth to her second child she becomes aware of her mistake, withdrawing from the outside world as she expands and explores her interiority.  Praying, writing, thinking, singing, silencing and imagining are activities that, even if soundlessly performed, can spark an effective defense, as countless stories from concentration camps and other forms of imprisonment have revealed.  Some of these coping mechanisms are the only tools at hand that Addie can employ as she tries to survive her entrapment within a world full of words without meaning and with a husband who is focused solely on himself, treating her as a child-bearing machine that can also be made to work the land on his behalf and for free.  In order to “recover a sense of her own self,” Addie gets involved in an affair with Rev. Whitfield in hopes that she can validate her identity by claiming “I would be I” as she simultaneously denies Anse (AILD 174, Matthew 151).  In the face of adversity (as this relationship does not work either), Addie retreats to her inner self where she develops a silent way of communicating that counters the empty meaning of words until she passes away.  Then, from inside the casket built by Cash and through the holes punched by Vardaman, Addie’s corpse starts talking aloud, from the perspective of someone with a life cut short, having left this earth with certain things unsaid (AILD 174).

Revenge is a way to rebel against subjugation.  Addie asks her husband to bury her among her own flesh and blood in Jefferson, a modern town whose inhabitants believe themselves to be better than the “archaic,” “poor whites” such as the Bundrens, whose path from rural to civic life of the town is compared to “a piece of rotten cheese coming to an ant-hill” (AILD 22, 203 and Hubbs 462).  Although the trip to Jefferson is undertaken “as a pretext of honoring” Addie’s request (every member of the family has their own desires about embarking on that journey), Addie’s last wish stands as a postmortem act of uprising against the patriarchal system that robbed her of her life (Matthews 150). 

Women oversee the domestic chores but are not spared from working the land as well.  The statements “It’s a hard life on women” and “it’s a hard life they have” are declared by two male characters representing the rural and urban realms, Vernon and Moseley, respectively, and clear up any doubt about women’s constant labor (AILD 30, 202).  Rural life encompasses tasks that go from giving a “hair cut” to attending the chickens to cooking and baking for a large family, as recognized by Cora who recalls that “[t]here’s not a woman in this section could ever bake [like] Addie Bundren” (AILD 8).  These arduous routines that females endure lead the matriarch to exhaustion and to secretly seek revenge (AILD 33). 

Although Addie is disempowered and oppressed, she knows that “the value of resistance is the reclaiming of the sacred and significant self” (167).  Faulkner “offers in As I lay Dying a social and economic critique of the society he depicts,” a society based on the brutal force of Western colonialism (Hubbs 462).  “Addie understands that a discourse of masculine power long precedes her arrival and is responsible for insisting that she yield to its authority” (Matthew 151).  Once aware of the impossibility of winning against this power structure in life she harnesses the omnipotence of death to defeat her oppressor, her physical body no longer his territorial possession and her corpse speaking words which have acquired a new meaning―the meaning of that left unsaid in life.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. As I Lay Dying. New York: Vintage International Edition, 1990.

Hubbs, Jolene. “William Faulkner’s Rural Modernism.” The Mississippi Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 3, pp. 461-475. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26476776.

Matthews, John T. William Faulkner: Seeing Through the South. Singapore: Wiley-

Blackwell, 2012.

—“As I Lay Dying in the Machine Age.” Duke University Press, vol. 19, no. 1, JSTOR,www.jstor.org/stable/303451.

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[1]   Sweat economy is defined as “a system for recognizing the work that inheres in objects in order to stave off the dissociation of the laborer from the fruits of his or her labor” (Hubbs 471). 

In the opening scene of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway walks the streets of London in anticipation of the chime of Big Ben, deciding that each new hour delineates past from present and holds the incredible power to “create[s] every moment afresh” (Woolf 4).  But in fact, the opposite is true for the English, post-war, on a Wednesday in “the middle of June,” “1923” (Woolf 5, 71).  Escape from the past is shown to be mere wishful thinking based on Clarissa’s desire to leave the horror behind.  “The War was over,” “it was over; thank Heaven―over,” the protagonist’s thoughts echo repeatedly as she walks the chaotic streets of Westminster, every stop evoking a prewar memory… Mrs. Dalloway “paus[es] for a moment at the window of a glove shop where, before the War, you could buy almost perfect gloves” (Woolf 5, 11).  Despite the middle-aged Mrs. Dalloway’s fervent wish that life would be renewed with each peal of the bell, it is not, and the British now inhabit an eternal present borne of trauma endured during World War I and the Influenza Pandemic (July 1914 to November 1918 and February 1918 to April 1920 respectively).

The trauma left by experiencing the decimation of the population leaves survivors with two inadequate choices: just carry on or obliterate the debacle by suicide.  “One reason that we need to understand the war as trauma is, of course, the dead and what they represent: a lost promise; a future never realized,” explains Tim Armstrong in Modernism (17).  For her part, Woolf explores, through many of her characters, the meaning of being a survivor among so many dead.  Lucrezia Warren Smith (Rezia) muses: “Everyone has friends who were killed in the War;” her former-combatant husband, Septimus Warren Smith, deals with shell shock, hallucinations and the inability to feel any emotion which, improperly treated, leads to his suicide (Woolf 66).  Clarissa Dalloway struggles with the lingering symptoms of influenza along with the stress left by years of international conflict; and Uncle William who, in the belief that they “have had enough,” kills himself (Woolf 11).  Through these characters, and others, Woolf shows how the scars left by war and illness impact minds and bodies in such a way as to lock past and present together and hopes for a future vanish into thin air.  “Everything had come to a standstill,” Clarissa notices during her walk on a “Wednesday morning” (Woolf 14, 16).  The observation transcends the moment as it describes English society petrified in trauma and seemingly incapable of coming back to life.  Clarissa’s words trigger a new inquiry: “[D]id it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?” (Woolf 9).

Although subtler than the presence of war and the mental illness caused by it, influenza permeates the deeper layers of the novel, concealed from the inattentive eye.  Woolf “contracted the virus repeatedly,” but also witnessed the passing of her mother “after complications from a severe case” (103-104).  This is the reason Outka argues that Woolf “centered [her] novel on influenza, though it is rarely read as such” (104).  “Woolf was plagued with influenza in the years surrounding the pandemic,” and it is believed that what she contracted in 1919 “was likely part of the pandemic strain” (Outka 104).  “I thought I was probably dying [conveys Woolf to her sister Vanesa] but Fergusson says it’s only the nerves of the heart go wrong after influenza” (Outka 104).  Clarissa Dalloway also experiences this symptom as she copes with the “long-term damage to the body’s systems” of the flu: “that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza;” Clarissa “was over fifty, and grown very white since her illness” notices Scrope Purvis when they run into each other at a crossing; and Peter’s first thought, after five years without seeing each other, is expressed in these terms: “She’s grown older,” a thought that he kept to himself (Woolf 4, 12, 40; Outka 105).  “Half alive,” “the death of the soul” and being left “feel[ling] nothing” are recurring phrases pronounced by Rezia, Peter and Septimus, respectively, which describe the present and the past as an indivisible unit (Woolf 23, 59, 90).  “Modernist literature gives expression to historical changes or historical traumas,” such as these two (war and pandemic) addressed by Woolf.  In a similar way, “[i]magist poetry and the experimental novels of the postwar decade reflect the fragmentation of consciousness and the disorder and confusion that a victim experiences in the wake of a traumatic event,” explains Karen DeMeester in “Trauma and Recovery in Virgina Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway” (650).  The reader of Mrs. Dalloway embarks on a journey to discover a new way to see the world facilitated, mainly, by Clarissa and Septimus.  This ride “allows for a new form of experimentation,” as the reader sees the characters’ world through the prism of sickness, delving into “humanity, humour, depth” (Scott 39).

Woolf explores the notion that the power of language has weakened as the result of World War I.  According to Henry James, the overuse of certain words and rhetoric during the war led to “a fraying of the power of language, and a haunted discourse” that leaves individuals to face “the depreciation of all [their] terms or, otherwise speaking, with a loss of expression” (Armstrong 17).  This idea is most obviously conveyed by Woolf in the scene when Londoners are looking up at the sky and trying to decipher what the “aeroplane overhead” is writing in “white smoke” (Woolf 4, 20).  The crowd is gathered under dissipating shapes whose meaning they attempt to grasp but fail to, as the words languis[h] and mel[t] in the sky” (Woolf 21-2).  “But what letters?  A C was it? an E then an L?” or “writing a T, an O an F” (Woolf 29).  Before anyone can read a single word (although Mr. Bowley mistakenly guesses the hopeful, sweet, “toffee”) letters “moved and melted and were rubbed out up in the sky” and the aeroplane slips over to a clear spot to start the guessing game all over again (Woolf 20-21).  “Glaxo,” said Mrs. Coates and “[k]remmo, murmured Mrs. Bletchley” incapable, like the rest of the multitude, of making sense of the message written in the heavens―an allusion, perhaps, to the coded language and jargon used during war and a metaphor for the inability to understand the purpose of the immense death brought by war and the plague.  Survivors are left without words while they all look straight to heaven, maybe in inquiry to God, maybe in hope that it becomes the destination of all souls (Woolf 20).

“This late age of the world’s experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears” that cannot cease, not even with the clangs of Big Ben “and the sound of all the clocks striking” the hours and half-hours (Woolf 4, 48).  A gentle movement of the hand holding a handkerchief cannot console the most vulnerable members of the postbellum British society: “Poor women, nice little children, orphan, widows,” along with the “old men and women, invalids, most of them in Bath chairs” (Woolf 9).  War creates “the mentally ill” whose cry to “[c]hange the world” does not stop, which Septimus’ “revelations on the back of envelopes” coming from an addled brain demonstrates (Woolf 20, 24).  “A well of tears” that knows no end (Woolf 9).  Not back then, not even now: for trauma knows no past.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Tim. Modernism: Themes in 20^th Century Literature & Culture. Polity: 2005.

DeMeester, Karen. “Trauma and Recovery in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Modern Fiction Studies: vol. 44, no. 3, 1998, pp. 649-673.

Outka, Elizabeth. “On Seeing Illness: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” In Viral Modernism: The Influenza Pandemic and Interwar Literature. JSTOR: www.jstor.org/stable/10.7312.

Scott, Bonnie Kime. “Transforming the novel.” In the Cambridge Companion to Modernist Women Writers, edited by Linett, Maren Tova, 17-32. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Florida: Harcourt, Inc., 1990. Print.

In What Maisie Knew (1897), Henry James, one of “the literary impressionists who led the novel’s transition from realism to modernism,” depicts how institutions, such as family or even extended family, are no longer the assured sanctuaries that they appeared to be in the Victorian era (Armstrong 66).  This position is reinforced by the advent of the “[un]suspected ordeal that awaited [Maisie Beale’s] little unspotted soul” when, as an only child, she becomes the “billiard ball” or the “little feathered shuttlecock” in Beale and Ida Farange’s vicious game to defeat one other (James 6, 12).  The little girl is compelled to prematurely bury her childhood (“poor little monkey!” becoming “an epitaph for the tomb”) due to the negligence of her divorced parents, of whom “neither [one] figured in the least as a happy example to youth and innocence” (James 4-5).  Maisie, in self-preservation, develops “an inner self”―which does not project but conceals― in order to exist in a toxic environment (James 13). 

Mastering the art of survival requires observation and imitation.  Theater and sport are two of the models Maisie uses to teach herself how to endure.  Maisie is becoming a talented performer and an aspiring “football” coach (James 81).  On one hand, as called for, she becomes a “little idiot;” the nickname signaling her success in the “pacific art of stupidity:” someone who “would forget everything [and] would repeat nothing” to avoid being entrusted to deliver nasty messages between her parents (James 6, 53).  On the other hand, Maisie, as “an old boy” and “a man of the world,” builds alliances among team players who are wrestling, as she is, with the game of life (James 60-61).  Nonetheless, her reach is limited as a partition stands between her and those she seeks to influence.  Maisie experiences “an odd air of being present at her history in as separate a manner as if she could only get at experience by flattening her nose against a pane of glass” from where she gains a distorted and partial view (James 81).  But her efforts at being a connector between those who have little chance of coming together, as in the case of Mrs. Beale and Sir Claude and others, allows the little girl to distance herself from her mother’s engagement in “billiards” ―a sport in which she displays her “ladyship’s game” while contestants, one at a time, “must just hold on like grim death” (James 6, 68).  In short, Maisie builds (or attempts to build) whereas Ida destroys. 

Modernism has the potential to turn a household into a war zone―a space where the contenders are not seeking refuge but are looking forward to fighting.  The narrator points out that “what marriage had mainly suggested to the Faranges was the high opportunity to quarrel,” an amusement that their breakup does not prevent them from achieving; on the contrary, it enhances it as “they felt more married than ever” (James 5).  Competing against each other, even after splitting up, continues to entertain not only them but those in their social milieu, as the former couple knows “divorce has many pains, but it has one pleasure, the pleasure vengeful” (Ricks xiii).  “There had been ‘sides’ before, and there were sides as much as ever; for the sider too the prospect opened out, taking the pleasant form of a superabundance of matter for desultory conversation” as their circle “drew together to differ about them” (James 5).  The British upper middle class “was a society in which, for the most part, people were occupied only with chatter” which turns out to be more entertaining when those who are the focus of gossip cause so much “social attraction” (James 5-6).  This is the case of the two “awfully good-looking” exes who are dueling over their daughter who “was provided for, thanks to a crafty godmother” on her father’s side (James 6-7). 

Modernism turns homes into farms.  The inhabitants belong to the animal kingdom and as such do not occupy a residence but seek refuge underneath a shelter.  Maisie alternates between her “mamma’s roof” and her “father’s roof,” a choice of words that purposely omits the idea of home and the building of a nuclear family (James 18, 24).  The opening of the novel introduces “the litigation” as a tipping point in the life of a child of “six years;” the litigation marking Maisie’s birth since there is nothing indicated prior to this event.  Maisie is “divided in two and the portions tossed impartially to the disputants,” a powerful image that alludes to the invasion of the ills of the world into what was once the sacred confines of a household―the invasion represented by a child as a dismembered object (James 3, 9).  Maisie, referred to as their “bone of contention,” soon becomes aware that home is far from a stable place, as it suffers continuous mutations, including the appearance and disappearance of parents, stepparents, governesses, friends and lovers who belong to all walks of life (James 4).  James employs the grotesque in his portrayal of characters who push and pull in order to succeed in their pursuits, which are connected with the “ball” of desire, Maisie.  For instance, the protagonist sees herself as “a mite;” others see her as a “poor little monkey,” “donkey,” “dozen magpies,” “clammy little fish,” “heartless little beast” and so forth (James 4, 9, 24, 68).  The description of Maisie as a mite, that is, a “minuscule insect” that can be “parasitic on plants and animals,” underscores her dependency on others (Online Oxford Language Dictionaries).  Her father, Beale, as seen through her mother’s eyes, is a “low brute,” “old brute” and “beastly papa” (James 4-5).  Upon arriving at Ida’s “limit of a passion for Sir Claude,” she refers to her second husband as a “butterfly” and “an idle beast” (James 67, 69).  Beale sees his former wife as “a nasty, horrid pig” whereas his second wife (Miss Overmore, the governess who becomes, per “her particular request,” Mrs. Beale) is depicted as a “dear old duck” (James 11, 24, 42).  Maisie’s first impression of her goggled second governess at her mother’s house, Mrs. Wix, is of “the polished shell or corslet of a horrid beetle” (James 21).  Meanwhile, the former Miss Overmore sees Mrs. Wix, her replacement at Ida’s once she moved to Beale’s, as “personally loathsome and as ignorant as a fish” (James 21, 43).  All these animal-humans, whom in one way or the other Maisie relies on, do not remedy her own sense of homelessness.  The legion of adults connected to Maisie’s world does not translate into a secure home for her, as she wonders how her future living conditions might be, especially after being rejected by both biological parents.  

Modernism brings new social conventions and dissolves the old ways.  Maisie’s surroundings expose her to a life in which the implicit agreement to follow rules and norms of propriety is broken, either openly or covertly.  For example, Miss Overmore threatens to leave Beale and Maisie unless her father and employer-lover-husband-to-be “t[akes] back his nasty wicked fib” about where the governess stayed during her pupil’s absence (James 25).  In response, the governess is quick to cite the British custom which establishes that “a lady couldn’t stay with a gentleman that way without some awfully proper reason,” a declaration that Maisie suspects is simply not true (James 25).  The alternative to a household disjointed from social rules is that Maisie is baptized “to life with a liberality” that brings her the “freshest, merriest start” although the fear of being abandoned is ever present, especially as she is exposed to constant discoveries that awaken her sense of alertness regarding her own safety (James 9, 25).  This fear is apparent in a scene in which Maisie is under the supervision of her nurse, Moddle, in Kensington Gardens, and she ponders “what would become of her if, on her rushing back [from playing], there [w]ould be no Moddle [waiting for her] on the bench” (James 9).  However, Maisie will soon learn to rely more on someone like Moddle rather than on her own flesh and blood: “parents had come to seem precarious, but governesses were evidently to be trusted” (James 20).  The protagonist, despite her young age, is fully aware that giving birth does not guarantee love for the child, a lesson she learns by observing three models: Mrs. Wix, who was “with passion and anguish, a mother” until her daughter was “killed on the spot;” Miss Overmore who is not; and lastly, her own mother “who is even less” than the other two.  To put it succinctly, the “larger freedom with which [Maisie] is handled” along with the variety of impressions of the unorthodox education she acquires and the influence of “the two far-from-perfect people who do respect her” (Mrs. Wix and Sir Claude) allow Maisie to avoid a prophetically dire future (Ricks xiii, James 9). 

Christopher Ricks in his introduction to the Penguin Edition points out that “Of all Henry James’s novels, What Maisie Knew may well be the one that “strikes its root deepest into the human heart” as a child is made the instrument or the pawn who is obliged to “serve their anger and seal their revenge” (Ricks xiii, James 5).  The lack of a “human heart” in Beale and Ida Farange regarding their own daughter beckons the reader to acknowledge that “James’s tragi-comedy of a novel unwincingly contemplates the selfishness, self-delusion and self-destruction infecting a family that yet is graced by the goodness of a daughter” (Ricks xiii). 

Works Cited

Armstrong, Paul. “What Is It Like to Be Conscious? Impressionism and the Problem of Qualia.” A History of the Modernist Novel, edited by Gregory Castle, Cambridge, 2015, pp. 66-85.

James, Henry. What Maisie Knew. Penguin, 2010.  

Oxford English Dictionary Online. lexico.com/en/definition/mite.

Ricks, Christopher. Introduction. What Maisie Knew, by Henry James, Penguin, 2010, pp. xiii-xxvii.