Shame and the Aging Woman

Confronting and Resisting Ageism in Contemporary Women's Writings

J. Brooks Bouson

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319317106
• eBook ISBN: 9783319317113
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This book brings together the research findings of contemporary feminist age studies scholars, shame theorists, and feminist gerontologists in order to unfurl the affective dynamics of gendered ageism. In her analysis of what she calls "embodied shame, " J. Brooks Bouson describes older women's shame about the visible signs of aging and the health and appearance of their bodies as they undergo the normal processes of bodily aging. Examining both fictional and nonfiction works by contemporary North American and British women authors, this book offers a sustained analysis of the various ways that ageism devalues and damages the identities of otherwise psychologically healthy women in our graying culture. Shame theory, as Bouson shows, astutely explains why gendered ageism is so deeply entrenched in our culture and why even aging feminists may succumb to this distressing, but sometimes hidden, cultural affliction.

© The Author(s) 2016

J. Brooks BousonShame and the Aging WomanPalgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism10.1007/978-3-319-31711-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Aging Women and the Age Mystique: Age Anxiety and Body Shame in the Contemporary Culture of Appearances

J. Brooks Bouson¹

(1)

Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Keywords

Shame and ageismShame and older womenBody shame and older womenAge anxietyThe age mystiqueShame theoryLearned cultural shameCulture of appearancesFeminist age criticsGendered ageismSexageismBody politics of shameGraying of societyDecline and loss view of agingDecline and progress scripts of agingSuccessful agingAge denialSecond-wave feminism and ageismAnti-aging ageismShame and stigmatization

End Abstract

Shame and the Aging Woman deals in a frank and unapologetic way with a distressing cultural affliction and unspeakable secret hidden in plain sight in contemporary Western society and first identified as a serious social issue by Simone de Beauvoir in 1970: the terrible toll that sexageism and what I call “embodied shame”—that is, shame about the aging female body—exacts on older and elderly women. ¹ Even those aging women who self-identified as feminists during and after the second-wave feminist movement, which promised women relief from their objectified body-based identities, find themselves succumbing to sexageism, a deeply entrenched and shaming ideology that devalues the bodies and identities of older women in our youth-loving and age-phobic culture. Because older women have learned that to get old is to become old and ugly, it is not surprising that they commonly express open disgust for their own aging bodies and the bodies of other older women or that they attempt to mask the aging process and pass as younger—that is, hide their shame—by dyeing their hair and using cosmetics and plastic surgery to try to minimize or erase the signs of aging on their faces. Older women have learned that they are hypervisible because they bear the visible signs of aging—gray hair, wrinkled skin, sagging bodies—and yet they are socially and sexually invisible and their lives are devalued and discredited. Older women have learned that, because old age is stigmatized in our culture, they may be treated with disrespect in public spaces and that younger people view them—if they see them at all—as little old ladies, as old bags, as useless nobodies. Sexageism, then, is an oppressive ideology, and internalized sexageism and the deep shame attached to it is a felt, lived experience for far too many older women in our twenty-first-century graying culture. As the demographers in Britain and the United States tell us, whereas in Britain ten million people, or around one-sixth of the population, are over sixty-five, in the United States there are forty million people, or around 13 % of the population, over sixty-five, and these numbers will continue to grow as the population ages. Yet as society grays, old age remains stigmatized. Indeed, the increase in life spans has “amplified rather than diminished social antipathy” toward the aging population even at a time in which there is an “aversion towards the very topic of ageing” (Segal, Out of Time 2).

The social shaming of aging and elderly women is a pervasive and insidious practice in our culture. Yet to name “shame” so openly, as I have just done, is to break a social taboo and thus may seem insensitive, even deliberately offensive, since even the word “shame” discomforts people in our shame-phobic culture. For although we live in what shame theorist Gershen Kaufman describes as a “shamed-based” culture, shame is “hidden” and “under strict taboo” (Shame 32). A “multidimensional, multilayered experience,” shame is an individual phenomenon but also a cultural phenomenon, and “each culture has its own distinct sources as well as targets of shame” (Kaufman, Shame 191). Yet because of the taboo on shame, shame is described as a “recently rediscovered feeling state” (S. Miller, Shame xi) since not until the 1970s did psychologists, psychoanalysts, and sociologists start to investigate and describe the shame experience. Interestingly, just as shame induces secrecy and a hiding response, so the study of shame has long been neglected even in those disciplines devoted to the study of emotions. As psychologist Carl Goldberg notes, only in recent times have the “emotional workings of shame” begun to receive “careful psychological investigation.” Indeed, “there has been a shame about studying shame in the psychoanalytic and psychotherapeutic fields,” and as a consequence of this, shame is one of the “most seriously neglected and misunderstood emotions in contemporary society” (x).

Because there is shame about shame and thus a natural tendency to look away from the other’s shame, telling the story of the older female body-in-shame is a risky, even unsavory, business, and yet, as shame theorists insist, the alleviation of shame first requires an awareness of shame’s ubiquitous presence in our society. While Beauvoir dared to take this risk, there has been a long cultural silence, even among feminists, about what Beauvoir described as our society’s dread of old age. Describing this feminist avoidance, age studies scholar Kathleen Woodward writes that although “the body has been the locus of attention for many years” in academic circles, “the older female body has been significant only in terms of its absence…. Ageism pervades American culture, and feminism in all its forms, as well as cultural studies in general, have not been exempt from it” (“Performing Age” 162). In a similar way, social gerontologist Julia Twigg observes that while the body is the “master theme of gerontology,” social gerontology has “tended to avoid the topic of the body,” in part because “emphasizing the bodily can seem demeaning,” in particular to women who have long been degraded in Western society by being associated with the body (“Body, Gender” 70, 60). But as Twigg remarks, “Aging ultimately is not optional, however much we may want to resist its more malign cultural meanings” (“Body, Gender” 63). Although the female body—in particular the aging female body—is the “site upon which many cultural anxieties are played out” (Bazin and White ii), there has been an odd invisibility of older women in our culture, who are doubly othered by both their gender and their age. Shame theory, as I will show, helps us understand the affective roots of this feminist avoidance of and cultural amnesia about what Beauvoir described as the “shameful secret” of old age—a secret hidden in plain sight. The recent and contemporary North American and British women authors that I examine in Shame and the Aging Woman dare to disclose this secret, even at the risk of shaming us and making us wince, as they expose to public view the impact of “learned cultural shame” on aging women—that is, the internalized sexageist shame that grows out of ageist decline ideology and the social denigration of the bodies and identities of aging and elderly women in contemporary culture.

The Feminist Avoidance of the “Shameful Secret” of Old Age

Like the investigation of shame, the study of old age is not for the faint-hearted or for those unwilling to break social taboos because they are afraid of offending others. When Beauvoir began to write about old age, she knew she was exposing a deep and dreadful cultural secret. Now viewed as a wise feminist foremother for her well-known, indeed, seminal analysis of women as “the second sex,” Beauvoir drew on her ideas about women as the marginalized Other in formulating her ideas about old age as she attempted to come to terms with her own dread of aging. Beauvoir’s own body loathing is evident in her description, when she was in her mid-fifties, of her age-altered face: “I often stop, flabbergasted, at the sight of this incredible thing that serves me as a face…. I loathe my appearance now: the eyebrows slipping down toward the eyes, the bags underneath, the excessive fullness of the cheeks, and that air of sadness around the mouth that wrinkles always bring” (Force of Circumstance 656). Beauvoir’s monumental but neglected book Old Age was originally published in French in 1970, when Beauvoir was in her early sixties, and was later translated into English and published in 1972 under the “euphemistically blurred” title The Coming of Age (Segal, “Forever Young” 42). The shame drama surrounding the publication of the English translation of Old Age is telling. For although Beauvoir’s stated intention in writing her book was to “break the conspiracy of silence” surrounding the taboo topic of old age, the title The Coming of Age used euphemism to partially hide the shameful subject matter of Beauvoir’s book and thus defend against shame (Old Age 8). In her book, Beauvoir describes old age as the “Other” but also “that which we must become,” and yet old age remains a “forbidden subject” and “shameful secret that it is unseemly to mention” (316, 10, 7). To age is to undergo the shame-inducing process of self-othering: “Within me it is the Other—that is to say the person I am for the outsider—who is old: and that Other is myself” (316). Striking at the very core of identity, the otherness of old age is deeply disturbing. “Thinking of myself as an old person when I am twenty or forty means thinking of myself as someone else as another than myself,” writes Beauvoir. “Every metamorphosis has something frightening about it” (11). Because to men “a woman’s purpose in life is to be an erotic object, when she grows old and ugly she loses the place allotted to her in society: she becomes a monstrum that excites revulsion and even dread” (138). That Beauvoir’s study has been largely “ignored by mainstream readers, feminists, and even scholars of Beauvoir” (Woodward, Introduction xi) is a sign of just how taboo the subject of aging remained years after Beauvoir set out to break the silence surrounding the “shameful secret” of old age in our culture. While Beauvoir focused on the damaging impact of aging on both men and women, cultural critic Susan Sontag, in a 1972 essay entitled “The Double Standard of Ageing,” offered an early account of the gendered experience of the aging process. “Growing older is mainly an ordeal of the imagination—a moral disease, a social pathology—intrinsic to which is the fact that it afflicts women much more than men,” asserted Sontag. “It is particularly women who experience growing older … with such distaste and even shame” (72).

Yet while authors like Beauvoir and Sontag dared to speak about the “shameful secret” of old age, there has been what Leni Marshall aptly describes as a “larger social amnesia” surrounding the issue of old age, which is reflected in the “limited size and influence of aging studies’ academic repertoire” (“Aging” viii). ² Cultural critic and literary scholar Kathleen Woodward, whose work is foundational to age studies, recalls how she was met with an “awkward silence” when she told people that she was working on a book about aging (Aging 21). Determined to break this silence and expose the social pathology intrinsic to ageism, Woodward, in her 1991 book Aging and Its Discontents, focused on the anxiety and fear that surround old age in our youth-oriented culture, explaining how “in the West our representations of old age reflect a dominant gerontophobia” (Aging 7). In Freudian psychoanalysis, which is “embedded in the fundamentally ageist ideology of western culture,” Woodward noted that “the preoccupation with the body, which in old age is figured in terms of incontinence and decline, is complicit with the general emphasis—if not obsession—in western culture on the appearance of the body as the dominant signifier of old age” (Aging 10). In the introduction to her 1999 critical collection Figuring Age, Woodward set out to break the silence once again not only in her remarks on our society’s denial of old age but also in her account of how “lethal” ageism can be for women in our society where “ageism is entrenched within feminism”—where feminists, too, have internalized the culture’s “prejudices against aging and old age” (Introduction xi). Like Woodward, feminist scholar Barbara Hillyer, in her 1998 essay “The Embodiment of Old Women: Silences,” expressed concern about the feminist avoidance of the experiences of older women, noting how, by the mid- to late 1990s, there remained “significant silences” about the embodiment of old women in the developing feminist theory about the body (48). Emphasizing the need for a “feminist theory about old age as an embodied phenomenon,” Hillyer asserted that the “body-awareness that pervades our culture” is an important issue and has “serious implications” not only for young women but also for older women (48, 49). But she also recognized that it is risky for older women to speak out and break the silence about their aging bodies since “to speak is to name oneself declining.” Thus many older women “remain silent” about aging “in some pretense that change is not occurring or is shameful” (53).

As second-wave feminists themselves started to grow older only to find that they were being devalued and marginalized, even by younger feminists, because they were aging women, scholars in the emerging field of age studies continued to investigate the damaging impact of ageism ³ on society in general and on women in particular. Margaret Morganroth Gullette, a scholar who first called for the development of the field of “age studies” and referred to herself as an “age critic,” commented in works like her 2004 book Aged by Culture on the necessity of the emerging field of age studies to combat the lethal effects of ageism, which Gullette described as a “cultural assault” (Aged 137) growing out of the shame-inducing aging-as-bodily-decline script. In a similar way, cultural critic and age studies scholar Margaret Cruikshank, in the second edition of her 2003 book Learning to Be Old, published in 2009, pointed to the insidious ways in which ageism works to make old women feel “ashamed of their age” (153). “We in women’s studies have averted our gaze from women over sixty, even if we are over sixty ourselves,” wrote Cruikshank. Noting the lack of scholarly interest in age studies, Cruikshank speculated that women’s studies scholars were “unconsciously avoid[ing] the topic, knowing that old people, especially women, are stigmatized. Internalized ageism may afflict us, in other words. Like others, feminists resist physical changes and the diminishment of our social power, and thus aging has not seemed to be a promising subject for study” (181). Feminist gerontologist and sociologist Toni Calasanti, in her 2008 essay “A Feminist Confronts Ageism,” also acknowledged the impact of ageism on women’s studies as she recalled the silence of other scholars and her own marginalization when she first began her work on aging and gender. “I am learning to embrace, rather than apologize for, my interests in both aging and gender,” remarked Calasanti, who, despite finding a sense of “comradeship” among other feminist scholars of aging, remained aware of the ways that ageism had fed into the marginalization of age studies even among women’s studies scholars (156). ⁴

It is telling that the works of feminist age studies scholars like Woodward, Hillyer, Gullette, Cruikshank, and Calasanti have been met with silence or have been noticed but then ignored, for the same thing happened when Beauvoir, years before, brought to public awareness what she called the “shameful secret” of old age. Feminist and critical gerontologist Martha Holstein, in her 2015 book Women in Late Life: Critical Perspectives on Gender and Age, sounds a more hopeful note as she reviews recent feminist work on women and aging. Although “old women, understood through feminist lenses, have not been well attended in gerontology or women’s or gender studies,” writes Holstein, the “situation is beginning to change, slowly” and thus there is a “growing interdisciplinary literature on gender and aging” (17). Yet in her book, Holstein documents extensively just how difficult it is for aging women—and feminists—to resist ageism and to proudly own the label “old woman.” While it may be “tempting” for aging women in our youth-loving culture to “assert that seventy is the new fifty, it is inevitably a failing strategy,” comments Holstein, who argues that “by denying age we actually call attention to its salience” and “join in the denigration of who we are” (16). In a similar way, feminist scholar Lynne Segal, in her 2013 book Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing, calls attention to our graying culture’s fear of aging. “‘You are only as old as you feel,’ though routinely offered as a jolly form of reassurance, carries its own disavowal of old age,” writes Segal (3). And yet Segal confesses to her own reluctance to discuss her age. “How old am I? Don’t ask; don’t tell. The question frightens me. It is maddening, all the more so for those like me, feminists on the left, approaching our sixth or seventh decade, who like to feel we have spent much of our time trying to combat prejudice on all sides. Yet fears of revealing our age … are hard to smother” (1). Why is it so difficult, as Segal and Holstein admit, for aging women—and aging feminists—to resist ageism and proudly profess themselves to be “old women” or even to admit their age to others? And why has it been so difficult for feminist scholars to break the social and academic silence surrounding the plight of the older woman in our graying culture? One of my aims as I bring together shame theory and feminist age studies is to uncover the affective sources of this cultural need to deny—or hide from awareness—the deep shame attached to the bodies and identities of aging and old women in our culture. That growing old, as Sontag remarked, is “mainly an ordeal of the imagination—a moral disease, a social pathology” that primarily afflicts women will become evident in the following pages as I draw on representative post-1960 writings by North American and British women novelists and memoirists who, perhaps emboldened by second-wave feminism, which encouraged women to find their own voices and tell their own stories, have refused to be silenced and thus have dared to publicly expose this shameful secret.

Embodied Shame and the Shaming of Aging Women in the Contemporary Culture of Appearances

“Shame, which is antithetical to the central value of human dignity, the heart of our ethical vision,” writes Martha Holstein, “is nonetheless a familiar experience for many aging women” (“On Being” 321). Yet while the shame experience is deeply familiar to many older women in our culture, only in recent years has shame—the so-called master emotion—become the subject of intense psychoanalytic and psychological scrutiny, most notably in the work of affect and shame theorists, such as Silvan Tomkins, Helen Block Lewis, Donald Nathanson, Andrew Morrison, Paul Gilbert, Gershen Kaufman, Thomas Scheff, and Léon Wurmser. In a similar way, “the recent turn to the emotions in the humanities has brought shame out of hiding and made it subject to critical reassessment” within both literary and cultural studies (McDermott 144). ⁵

An intensely painful experience, shame “follows a moment of exposure,” an uncovering that “reveals aspects of the self of a peculiarly sensitive, intimate, and vulnerable nature” (Nathanson, “Timetable” 4). Shame sufferers feel in some profound way inferior to others—they perceive themselves as deeply flawed and defective or as worthless or as failures—and for aging women this internalized shame script grows out of repeated interactions with contemptuous others. At once an interpersonal and intrapsychic experience, shame derives from the shame sufferer’s “vicarious experience of the other’s scorn,” and, indeed, what is central to the shame experie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Aging Women and the Age Mystique: Age Anxiety and Body Shame in the Contemporary Culture of Appearances
• 2. The Mask of Aging and the Social Devaluation and Sexual Humiliation of the Aging and Old Woman
• 3. Facing the Stranger in the Mirror in Illness, Disability, and Physical Decline
• 4. Confronting and Resisting an Unlivable Age Culture
• Backmatter