Ageing, Gender, and Illness in Anglophone Literature

Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman

Heike Hartung

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780367872724
• eBook ISBN: 9781317511502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This study establishes age as a category of literary history, delineating age in its interaction with gender and narrative genre. Based on the historical premise that the view of ageing as a burden emerges as a specific narrative in the late eighteenth century, the study highlights how the changing experience of ageing is shaped by that of gender. By reading the Bildungsroman as a 'coming of age' novel, the book asks how the telling of a life in time affects individual age narratives. Bringing together the different perspectives of age and disability studies, the book argues that illness is already an important issue in the Bildungsroman 's narratives of ageing. This theoretical stance provides new interpretations of canonical novels, visiting authors such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Samuel Beckett, and Jonathan Franzen. Drawing on the link between age and illness in the Bildungsroman 's age narratives, the genre of 'dementia narrative' is presented as one of the directions which the Bildungsroman takes after its classical period. Applying these theoretical perspectives to canonical novels of the nineteenth century and to the new genre of 'dementia narrative', the volume also provides new insights into literary and genre history. This book introduces a new theoretical approach to cultural age studies and offers a comprehensive analysis of the connection between narratology, literary theory, gender and age studies.

1 Introduction

Concepts of Age and the ‘Burden Narrative’ of Ageing

1.1 Perspectives on Ageing

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, for more and more people in western societies the age-old dream of a long life has become a real possibility. But this global demographic trend has not been coupled with a discourse on the emerging cultural significance of ageing and old age. Rather, the phenomenon of mass longevity has typically been accompanied by a public debate that sees old age primarily as a problem to be solved by social and scientific means.

On the one hand, growing older is an aspect of life’s temporal dimension and ageing an inevitable condition and experience of living bodies. As an anthropological condition, ageing challenges constructivist notions of the individual and social body by defining the limits of life in the finality of death. The temporal aspect of narrative with its progressive movement towards an ending expresses this general condition of physical ageing and makes it an adequate medium for life-storytelling. On the other hand, the concepts of life and the body, the medical technologies of ageing and the expectations of longevity which shape the individual and collective experience of growing old have changed across history to an extent that even the finitude of life and thus the inevitability of ageing has been challenged.¹ Michel Foucault’s notion of “bio-power” pinpoints these historical changes in the conception of life during the eighteenth century as part of a newly emerging form of political strategy (History of Sexuality 140). With the advent of the biological sciences in the late eighteenth century, a physiological and mechanistic model of the body was replaced by a concept of life as an abstract and dynamic principle. As one of the consequences of this replacement, the notion of human development became a central topic of such narrative genres as the Bildungsroman.² The changes in the definition of life have also affected the way in which ageing and old age are experienced and narrated.

The late eighteenth century will be my main point of departure for studying narrative representations of ageing and old age, because it is a period of shifting attitudes towards age, marking the emergence of its scientific management (Katz) and the beginning of the construction of old age as a social stage of life (Cole; Kohli; Thane, Old Age). The development of the two-fold political technologies of life – described by Foucault as the disciplining of the individual body and the regulation of the collective body (History of Sexuality, 139) – affect the experience of ageing in so far as they make late life less random, more controllable and more ‘normal’. In the late eighteenth century, demographic knowledge related to the observation and recording of births and deaths, life expectancy and the level of the population’s health began to assume some measure of control over life. Referring to the development of modern capitalist societies, Foucault describes the increase in productivity through economic and agricultural developments as a means of relief from the predominance of the biological in the ever presence of death in premodern societies (History of Sexuality, 142). This change from a random, biological existence to ‘biopower’, or the beginning of political control over life, affects the experience and representation of ageing.³

This emergence of biopower in the eighteenth century is of central importance for my study. Hence, I will trace the connection between the emergence of old age both as a scientific problem and a social stage of life in the late eighteenth century by focussing on the Bildungsroman, or novel of development. The German term Bildung brings together the idea of the autonomous individual with that of the individual life as a form of internal and organic movement which replaces that of an external and sacred order. I will read the Bildungsroman as an aesthetic phenomenon and narrative genre that is linked with pedagogical, medical and biological discourses. Bildung, or ‘formation’, as a pedagogical ideal of physiological self-development is also related to the embryological theories of epigenesis that were central to eighteenth-century notions of human development. These theories posit the successive self-formation of new life and sought to provide answers to the questions of the continuity of parental reproduction, inheritance and descent. An internal principle of development, or Bildungstrieb (formative drive), was believed to transform an organism into its completed form.⁴

These new ideas on life and its genesis as well as related innovative technologies of disciplining the individual body and regulating the collective body have left their mark on a specific form of age narrative. With the late eighteenth-century novel of development, ‘coming of age’ becomes a prominent theme of the realistic novel. The Bildungsroman demarcates the beginnings of age narrative as both an individual and a biological story of development. While the genre is in many ways concerned with youth (Moretti, Way), this must be seen in the context of a new and marked way of constructing youth and old age as binary oppositions in the late eighteenth century. Both youth and old age are idealised on the level of representation and for the purposes of philosophical and political debate, involving the control and management of both stages of life. The Bildungsroman, I will argue, defines how growing up can be told as an individual story and how the social dimensions of growing older are delimited for different genders. My principal focus in this study will, therefore, be on the questions of how older characters are treated within a genre which focusses primarily on the youthful hero(in)es as well as on how the possibilities and limits of growing old(er) are depicted for the male and female protagonists themselves.

The genre of the Bildungsroman can be read as a secularised version of the spiritual journey of the ageing “pilgrim’s progress” (Cole, Journey 34), which focussed primarily on the middle-class male individual’s possibilities of development and maturation. As life-course narrations, narratives of ageing are always gendered, differentiating the potential scope for development as well as the possible social and individual roles for men and women. Following the two basic insights that the ageing process unfolds in narrative structures and that it is a gendered experience, I will establish connections between the categories of age and gender, focussing on their interactions in narrative.

Whereas the late-eighteenth-century Bildungsroman marks the beginning of narrating age as an individual life narrative, its inherent concept of human formation shifts during the second half of the nineteenth century from epigenetic self-formation to Darwinian developmental thinking. The emergence of old age both as a scientific problem and as a social stage of life can be read as part of the aesthetics of this novel of development. By contrast, the introduction of fragile old age and dementia as themes and metaphors for the novel of the late twentieth century demarcates a different kind of age narrative. On the one hand, narratives of dementia mark the limits of development and of age narrative by representing the end of consciousness and the end of the liberal narrative of the autonomous subject, thus introducing a discourse of crisis. On the other hand, narratives of dementia push against this limit, questioning notions of progress, autonomy and personhood. In both its positive and negative aspects, advanced old age is narrated as part of an open-ended process of development or envisioned as life’s prolonged ending. In these contemporary narratives of ageing the question of biopower becomes significant in a different way, because contemporary biopolitics in the early twenty-first century has become individualised to such an extent that “[s]elfhood has become intrinsically somatic” (Rose 18). In consequence, ageing and the illnesses related to it such as dementia also become part of this reconfiguration of nature, life and the human body.

By looking at literary case studies of the Bildungsroman genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Chapters 2 and 3, and of narratives of dementia in the late twentieth and twenty-first century in Chapter 4, I will focus on exemplary aspects of the history of the novel in order to gain insights into the changing meanings and forms of narrating age.

1.2 The Temporal Dimension of Ageing: Age as the Difference Which Time Makes

My aim in this study is to contribute to a cultural analysis of age discourse based on an investigation of different dimensions of narrative. The first of these is the dimension of time, which provides a story with a beginning and an ending, progressing in a linear fashion from one event and point in time to the next. This chronological aspect of narrative makes it an adequate medium for the telling of lives. However, literary narrative frequently moves beyond linear chronology and the closure provided by its conventional ending by pointing out that “[e]very limit is a beginning as well as an ending” (Eliot, Middlemarch 890). Furthermore, chronology has been related to ideologies of progress, which link the eighteenth-century novel to the emergence of an institutionalised life course in modern capitalist societies (Kohli 273–76). The notions of development and progress, which form part of the aesthetics of the Bildungsroman, relate the structural aspects of temporality to the historical, ideological and gendered contents of these novels, as we shall see in more detail in Chapter 2. In this short overview, I will look at theoretical models which provide multilayered descriptions of narrative time as well as alternatives to the notion of linear time. This will serve as a reference frame for analysing the complex processes of narrating age, which move beyond progressivist notions of growing older.

With his concept of the chronotope, Mikhail Bakhtin relates the temporal dimension of the novel to its spatial aspects. In his essay “The Bildungsroman and Its Significance in the History of Realism”, Bakhtin distinguishes the Bildungsroman’s use of time from that of earlier forms of the novel, such as the biographical novel and the adventure novel. Whereas biographical time links the novel to historical durations in the form of generations and conceives of life as a passage through unrepeatable, individual stages which are no longer confined to a cyclical typicality, only the Bildungsroman as ‘the novel of human emergence’ introduces a new, spatial sphere of historical existence – the chronotope – into the realist novel (21). In contrast to the ‘empty time’ of the classical adventure novel in which “nothing changes […], people do not even age”, Bakhtin defines the individual emergence of man as being accomplished for the first time in literary history in “real historical time” (“Forms of Time” 91). This new type of historical time translates spatial simultaneity into temporal sequence, thus localising time in concrete space. Bakhtin distinguishes a number of different ways of representing time: the merging of time (past with present); the fullness and clarity of the visibility of time in space; the inseparability of the time of an event from the specific place of its occurrence (as the local aspect of history); the visible essential connection of time (present and past); the creative and active nature of time (of the past in the present and of the present itself); the necessity that penetrates time and links time with space and different times with one another; and the inclusion of the future on the basis of the necessity that pervades localised time (41–42).

Thus Bakhtin’s analysis of different ways of representing time in space opens up descriptive possibilities of representing time and ageing other than the linear model of chronology. The figure of the puer senex, to which I will turn later in this introduction, can be read, for instance, as a configuration of the merging of times. Drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope as space-time, I will distinguish between two meanings of age in my analysis of narrative structure, using this distinction as a heuristic tool: first, the temporal meaning of ageing as a process and as a relational term in the life course, and second, the spatial meaning of age constructed as a binary opposition between youth and old age.⁵ The first meaning of ageing as a process is important mainly for my analysis of the narrative genre of the Bildungsroman, in which I focus on the teleological components represented in these ‘coming of age’ narratives, analysing how they affect attitudes toward old age and ageing. The second meaning of age as a binary construction is relevant for the interpolated analyses of representations of old age. It will also be the focus of my readings, throughout this book, of the complex relationship between age, gender and illness as categories of difference.

From a narratological perspective, the temporal relations between the story and the discourse levels of narrative are constitutive. The binary construction of the terms ‘story’ as opposed to ‘discourse’ is crucial for the narratological treatment of chronology, which abstracts an ideal chronological order on the story level while analysing departures from it on the level of discourse. In Narrative Discourse (1972), Gérard Genette’s foundational analysis of the temporal relations in narrative, the author introduces a third constitutive level of narrative text: the level of ‘narration’. In so doing, the discourse level is further split into ‘narration’ as the telling or writing process, and ‘text’ as its linguistic product. Genette distinguishes three major subcategories of narrative temporality: first, the concept of ‘order’, signifying departures from chronology in the “connections between the temporal order of succession of the events in the story and the pseudo-temporal order of their arrangement in the narrative” (35); second, ‘duration’ as the variable speed or the “effects of rhythm” in narrative texts (88); and third, ‘frequency’, which concerns the relations of iteration and condensation between story and discourse (113). Duration is further divided into four measurements of speed: ‘summary’, which abbreviates elements of the story by narrating “in a few paragraphs or a few pages […] several days, months or years of existence, without details of action or speed” (95–96); ‘pause’, which refers to descriptions which dwell on a point in time in which the action does not move forward as a form of communication “between narrator and reader alone” (101); ‘ellipsis’, which leaves out events in the ideal chronological order of story time (106); and ‘scene’, which gives a seemingly one-to-one relation of event time and discourse time.

Under the category of voice, Genette further distinguishes four types of narration according to their temporal position: ‘subsequent’ narration as the “classical position of the past-tense narrative”; ‘prior’ narration as “predictive narrative”; ‘simultaneous’ narration as “narrative in the present contemporaneous with the action”; and ‘interpolated’ narration as “between the moments of the action” (217). The last of these categories, interpolated narration, is described as narration of the “tiniest temporal interval” exemplified in the eighteenth-century epistolary novel and its strategy of ‘writing to the moment’. Simultaneous narration is described by Genette as the simplest form of temporal relationship, “since the rigorous simultaneousness of story and narrating eliminates any sort of interference or temporal game” (218). The category of prior narrating is restricted to the genre of utopian novels or science fiction, described by Genette as “novels of anticipation” which “almost always postdate their narrating instances” (219). Genette thus describes “novels of anticipation” as temporally subordinated to the final narrative instance, the implied author. Subsequent narration, finally, is described as the most common type of narrative and is divided into third-person and first-person narrative. In third-person narrative, the past tense often marks an ‘ageless past’ in which the moment of the narrating is not distinguished from the moment of the story. In first-person narrative, a temporal convergence is evident from the beginning, where the narrator is presented as a character in the story. In spite of the ‘unmarked’ temporality of this type of narrative, Genette argues that subsequent narrating rests on a temporal paradox: “[I]t possesses at the same time a temporal situation (with respect to the past story) and an atemporal essence (since it has no duration proper)” (223). This paradox rests on the distinction between the temporal dimension of the story – the beginnings and ends that it encompasses and the duration which it narrates – and the “actual book”, which has no knowledge of its own length and “does away with its own duration” (224). Genette exemplifies this temporal paradox with reference to autobiographical narrative and the Bildungsroman. The ending of the narrative, as the point at which narrator and protagonist merge, is also the point at which two orders of the temporal coalesce.

Genette’s categories of narrative time are instructive for an analysis of ageing in narrative, because they allow us to measure the way in which the passing of time is narrated. They make it possible to distinguish departures from chronology in their significance and to illustrate their consequences for the ‘age identity’⁶ that is promoted in the narrative. The effects of temporal reversal will come to bear on my readings of the Bildungsroman, for instance, in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and George Eliot’s Middlemarch in Chapter 3.

An extended metaphor for a distinctive departure from the temporal order of the discourse is given in the accelerated ageing processes of Salman Rushdie’s narrators in his historical novels Midnight’s Children (1981) and The Moor’s Last Sigh (1995). In the earlier novel, Saleem Sinai experiences premature and accelerated ageing when “cracks” begin to appear in his body at the beginning of his tale, whereas the collapse of his body at the end of his story constitutes a gesture of prior narration when he almost reaches the age of t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Concepts of Age and the ‘Burden Narrative’ of Ageing
• 2 Early Stages of the Bildungsroman: Age, Genre and Illness in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
• 3 A Mature Genre: Ageing Processes in the Nineteenth-Century Bildungsroman
• 4 The Limits of Development? Old Age and the Dementia Narrative
• 5 Concluding Remarks
• References
• Index