"Women's Time": Women, Age, and Intergenerational Relations in Doris Lessing's the Diaries of Jane Somers
2006; Volume: 39; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2165-2678
Autores Tópico(s)Architecture, Design, and Social History
ResumoOld age exposes failure of our entire civilization.--Simone de Beauvoir, Old Age (543) In Western society, obsessed with youth and youthfulness, old age is Other--but is also that which we must become. In this differs radically from gender, race, and even class as categories of otherness. Old age is, in Simone de Beauvoir's phrase, forbidden subject in Western culture. Society, she writes in her monumental study Old Age, upon old age as kind of shameful secret that is unseemly to mention (1). As her language suggests, in twentieth century old age and mortality replaced sexuality as that which cannot be spoken about. Indeed, Old Age (originally published as La Vieillesse, 1970, and translated in US as The Coming of Age, 1972, itself somewhat euphemistic title) was, as Kathleen Woodward has remarked, ignored by mainstream readers, feminists, and even scholars of Beauvoir (xi). Even within feminism ageism has proven difficult to confront. The anxiety that attends process of aging is correspondingly intense. For women, so often judged on their appearance, onset of aging can be acutely painful. We also need to consider in relation to this women's enforced position as men's within Western culture. As Beauvoir famously put it: He is Subject, he is Absolute--she is Other (Second Sex 16). The old woman is doubly Othered by gender and age. She is hag, crone, old maid, evil stepmother, wicked witch of folklore and fairytale. Lastly, as Beauvoir remarks, the old woman looks like death (Old Age 150). Yet process of aging is often an experience that leads aging woman back to first in child's life, mother. Looking at her mother's face, woman sees not only where she came from but where she is going, her past and her future. The place of her birth thus becomes memento mori of most intimate kind. The aging maternal body is also reminder that, as Beauvoir suggested, is old age, rather than death, that is to be contrasted with (539). For many, as phrase second childhood implies, old age is period of increasing dependence on others for basic bodily functions which suggests circular rather than linear life pattern, culminating in return to ma(t)ter. Doris Lessing, now herself in her eighties, is one of only handful of women writers who have addressed forbidden subject of women's old age in any depth. (1) Lessing is still probably best known for The Golden Notebook (1962), book which broke taboos about female experiences, such as menstruation, and anticipated second-wave feminism. Published over two decades later, Lessing's The Diaries of Somers (1984) is similarly taboo-breaking in its depiction of old age. An impassioned protest against way our society treats old, book's radical nature was, however, initially obscured by fact that was first published as two books--The Diary of Good Neighbour and If Old Could ...--under pseudonym Jane Somers. This ruse and Lessing's reasons for initially attracted more attention than its actual content. (2) Lessing's text, however, offers highly suggestive exploration of aging process and its complex relations with identity, femininity, body and decay, and abjection. The diaries are written in first person by Somers, usually called Janna, a handsome, middle-aged widow with very good job in magazine world (17). Janna is forced to reassess her life when she befriends Maudie Fowler, an old lady of over ninety whom she meets by accident. Using immediacy and realism of diary format, book documents poverty and loneliness to which many old people, particularly working-class women like Maudie, are abandoned. Janna's fury after Maudie's death--'Tm so angry I could die of it (261), she says--is an expression of moral outrage at failure of our civilization to care for old. …
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