The Great Novel of the Internet Was Published in 1925
In September, The Wall Street Journal published a report, based on leaked documents, describing Facebook’s awareness of the harmful effects one of its platforms was having on young people. “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse,” the company’s internal research revealed. “Comparisons on Instagram can change how young women view and describe themselves.” Here, though, is another finding: Many of the same young people who spoke of Instagram’s degradations kept returning to the service anyway. It’s where their friends are. It’s where they’re expected to be seen. Instagram, in that way, is both a choice and not a choice at all—a trap saturated in the language of easy freedoms: Post, comment, like.
Such transactions are not limited to the digital environment. (“I’m sick of being perceived,” one woman said this summer, explaining why she would keep wearing her face mask outside despite relaxed CDC guidance on the matter.) But the internet has brought new acuity to the old experience of watching oneself being watched. People are negotiating new ways of being in each other’s proximity. That helps to explain the currency of a nearly 100-year-old piece of literature—a book, fundamentally, about a party.
, Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel about a day in the life of a London society hostess, is enjoying a renaissance. of it, with a foreword by the author Jenny Offill. There’s also the recent publication of , from the Oxford professor and critic Merve Emre; and , which tells a -inspired story from the perspective of a plumber; and , which revolves around a dinner party and Woolf’s novel; and , the electrifying fiction debut that has been “a modern .” Essayists, too, have been revisiting the book, written in the aftermath of the 1918 flu pandemic, as on illness, as into loneliness, as with grief. “We are all Mrs. Dalloway now,” one writer , as it became clear that a plague would be yet another way that the past would repeat itself within the heedless present.
