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14 - Literary portrayals of ageing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

By
Diana Wallace
Edited by
Ian Stuart-Hamilton
Diana Wallace
Affiliation:
University of Glamorgan
Ian Stuart-Hamilton
Affiliation:
University of Glamorgan
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Summary

OVERVIEW

This chapter examines the artistic representations of ageing and old age, concentrating upon literary portrayals. The subject is examined through key topics, including old age as motif and metaphor, changing representations of ageing in post-1970s fiction, creativity and the life course, life writing, gender and ageing, anthologies, theorizing age, and new directions in the literature of ageing.

Artistic representations of older people both shape and have the potential to counter our ideas about age and ageing. Old age may be conceived of as ‘Other’ in youth-obsessed Western culture, ‘a foreign country with an unknown language’ in May Sarton's suggestive phrase (1973, p. 17), but it is an/other country in which most people will, barring accidents, eventually come to live. A novel, poem, play, painting or photograph, film or television series, or, less obviously, a piece of music may allow us imaginatively to engage with the fact of our own ageing. It may also help us to recognize the subjectivity of those who are already ‘older’ (since age is often understood relationally) and to understand the ways in which age and ageing are culturally constructed.

In her still neglected study, Old Age (1972, first published as La Vieillesse and translated as The Coming of Age in the USA), Simone de Beauvoir set out to break the ‘conspiracy of silence’ around what she called this ‘forbidden subject’ (1972, p. 21).

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An Introduction to Gerontology , pp. 389 - 415
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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