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Culture Documents
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Article history:
Received 13 September 2015
Received in revised form 20 October 2015
Accepted 1 December 2015
Available online 30 December 2015
Keywords:
Female aging
Contemporary fiction
Cultural gerontology
Narrative gerontology
Literary gerontology
a b s t r a c t
Penelope Lively is a well-known contemporary British author who has published a good number
of novels and short stories since she started her literary career in her late thirties. In her novels,
Lively looks at the lives of contemporary characters moulded by specific historical as well as
cultural circumstances. Four of her novels, published from 1987 to 2004, present middle-aged and
older women as their main protagonists. Through the voices and thoughts of these female
characters, the reader is presented with a multiplicity of realities in which women find themselves
after their mid-fifties within a contemporary context. Being a woman and entering into old age is a
double-sided jeopardy which has increasingly been present in contemporary fiction. Scholars
such as Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and Susan Sontag (1972) were among the first to point out a
double standard of aging when they assured that women were punished when showing
external signs of aging much sooner than men. In Lively's four novels, the aging protagonists
present their own stories and, through them, as well as through the voices of those around them,
the reader is invited to go beyond the aging appearance of the female protagonists while
challenging the limiting conceptions attached to the old body and, by extension, to the social and
cultural overtones associated with old age.
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Introduction
Being a woman and entering into old age is a double-sided
jeopardy which has increasingly been present in contemporary
fiction. Feminist scholars Simone de Beauvoir (1997) and Susan
Sontag (1972) pointed out a double standard of aging when
they condemned the punishment of women for showing signs
of aging much earlier than men. More recently, Kathleen
Woodward (1999) and Jeannette King (2012), among others,
have investigated the limiting options still present for women
as they age by analysing representations of older women both
in fiction and art. In Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations
and Discourses of Aging in Fiction and Feminism: The Invisible
Woman, Woodward and King, respectively, agree on pointing
out that women after their fertile years still occupy an invisible
position. They either conform to the traditional roles within the
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That is why Claudia's main aim before dying is the retelling her
story, the piece of history through which she has lived, by
entangling her story with the story of others. Actually, she
considers that as long as one can name things and tell stories,
one is in control of one's situation. In the same way as naming is
essential to Claudia's keeping of independence, the retelling of
her own story on her deathbed allows the reader to get into
Claudia's thread of thought and extensive life experiences. Thus,
Lively sets the focus of the novel in Claudia's life experiences and
trajectory rather than her old external appearance and fragile
body. By consciously retelling her story without following a
chronological order, Lively, through Claudia's voice, is challenging both personal and collective history since the reader is asked
to make his or her own interpretations of Claudia's life
experiences. As Moran argues, whenever Lively renders an
episode from a particular character's point of view, she carefully
hones the scene to fit the consciousness of that character,
including only those details he or she registers and employing a
style that simulates the character's unique voice and thought
processes (1993: 103).
Words are important elements in Claudia's understanding
and contribution to her world. For Claudia, words define who
she is and what things are. Words can either make you free or
enslave you, as it is shown in the episode with which the novel
opens, in which the nurse defines Claudia as a demented poor
old lady. To give an example, Claudia does not allow her
daughter Lisa to call her Mummy; neither when she was a
child nor as an adult. As her daughter Lisa explains when she
was a child, Claudia is really Mummy, but she does not like
being Mummy so you have to say Claudia. Granny Hampton and
Granny Branscombe both like being grannies so it is all right to
say Granny. Mummy is a silly word, whereas Claudia is my
name (1988: 45). Claudia rejects establishing a dependency
relationship with her daughter; and, actually, Lisa is brought up
by her grandmothers more than her mother. Motherhood is a
controversial issue in Moon Tiger and also in The Photograph, the
two novels where the aging female protagonists are mothers.
The female protagonist in The Photograph, Elaine, is presented as
a sixty-year-old successful gardener, married and with a
daughter. The Photograph starts when Glyn, Elaine's brotherin-law, finds a photograph of his late wife and Elaine's only
sister, Kath, holding hands with Elaine's husband Nick. Despite
the fact that twenty years separate that photograph from the
present moment of the novel, the finding of the photograph
triggers a crisis between Elaine and her husband at the same
time as Elaine goes back to her past to try to understand her
sister's feelings just before she committed suicide. Even though
Elaine's relationship with her daughter is more fluid than
Claudia's relationship with Lisa in Moon Tiger, Elaine admits that
she found it difficult to connect with her daughter Polly when
she was a child.
Both Claudia and Elaine are presented as self-assured, selfmade women who did not really need men or children to feel
fulfilled. Claudia never married, although she had two longterm relationships. In the case of Elaine, despite having been
married to Nick for a long time, their relationship is closer to
that of flatmates than husband and wife. As Nick himself admits,
[j]ust occasionally, Nick looks at Elaine and is disconcerted. He
gets this odd feeling that she is someone else, a person he
doesn't know all that well. Which is absurd, she is the woman
with whom he has been getting into bed every nightwell,
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the bitter solitary spinster, the wicked oversexualized stepmother or the sweet grandmother prevalent in fairy tales and
fiction up until the last decades which are portrayed by
Sleeping Beauty's stepmother and Cinderella's godmother, in
the case of fairy tales, or by Charles Dickens' Miss Havisham and
Louisa Alcott's aunt, in the case of fiction. Contrarily, by defining
their own voices after a crisis, through their narratives, the four
protagonists are ready to see their last years as an open road,
to use Waxman's expression.
Overcoming the mirror, overcoming chronology
A common feature expressed by the four aging protagonists
and present in all the novels is the fact of confronting the
mirror and not recognizing their real selves in their present-day
faces and bodies at the same time as they start noticing that
those around them also interact with them differently due to
their increasingly aging appearances. In this respect, cultural
gerontology critics highlight the capacity of fictional texts to look
into the most inner recesses of aging protagoniststheir feelings,
emotions and thoughtsat the same time as they account for the
relationships established between aging protagonists and their
family, friends and acquaintances. Kathleen Woodward (1991,
1999), Munson Deats and Tallent Lenker (1999) and Mike
Hepworth (2000) were among the first critics who considered
fictional texts as valuable sources to discern the ways in which
the aging process is perceived at a social and cultural level.
According to Munson Deats and Talent Lenker, literature,
the arts, and the media not only mirror society's conventions,
but also create them (1999: 1); thus, a reciprocal response is
constantly established between fiction and everyday reality.
In his Stories of Ageing, sociologist Mike Hepworth analyses
conceptions of certain stereotypes through the analysis of
contemporary novels. For Hepworth, [w]hatever variation
they may adopt, stories of aging always invite us to relate self to
others; to imagine our own and the implications of this mental
vision for the way we treat other older people. There is a sense
in which stories of aging never really stand on neutral ground
(2000: 28). In this respect, fictional texts are valuable data
to analyse and understand how the mirror stage of old age,
defined by Woodward as the horror of the mirror image of the
decrepit body [] understood as the inverse of the pleasures of
the mirror image of the youthful Narcissus (1986: 104), is
experienced by late middle age female protagonists and, thus,
how identity is managed throughout the aging process when
confronting the mirror.
Mike Hepworth (2000) and Julia Twigg (2004) identify
mirror scrutinizing as the result of a society based on constant
production and consumption in which youth is valued whereas
the signs of aging should be kept at bay and disguised when
they start to show. According to Twig, [t]echnologies for selfmonitoring and surveillance, such as photographs, mirror, or
bathrooms where the whole body can be observed naked,
allow for a new form of reflexive self-scrutiny in which the
body and its changes become the focus for acute attention
(2004: 61). For his part, Hepworth argues that the mirror is
not a device for discovering the truth about the body (2000:
44); rather, through the mirror, we construct a self-image of
ourselves and the way others see us. When focusing on female
aging and the mirror, Kathleen Woodward (1999) and Nancy K.
Miller (1999) consider that after a first shock of recognition
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