The Aesthetics of Senescence

Andrea Charise

Description

Shortlisted for the 2020 BSLS Book Prize presented by the British Society for Literature and Science

The Aesthetics of Senescence investigates how chronological age has come to possess far-reaching ideological, ethical, and aesthetic implications, both in the past and present. Andrea Charise argues that authors of the nineteenth century used the imaginative resources of literature to engage with an unprecedented climate of crisis associated with growing old. Marshalling a great variety of canonical authors including William Godwin, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and George Gissing, as well as less familiar writings by George Henry Lewes, Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, Agnes Strickland, and Max Nordau, Charise demonstrates why the imaginative capacity of writing became an interdisciplinary crucible for testing what it meant to grow old at a time of profound cultural upheaval. Charise's grounding in medicine, political history, literature, and genre offers a fresh, original, thoroughly interdisciplinary analysis of nineteenth-century aging and age theory, as well as new insights into the rise of the novel—a genre usually thought of as affiliated almost entirely with the young or middle-aged.
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Aesthetics of Senescence

Abbreviations

1. William Godwin and the Artifice of Immortality

2. “In the condition of an aged person”: Mary Shelley and Frail Romanticism

3. George Eliot’s Aging Bodies

4. “The Century’s corpse”: Reading Senility at the Fin de Sičcle

5. Writing Twenty-First-Century Aging Populations

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

• Royaume-Uni
• Great Britain
• Stephen Ireland
• History of Europe
• History of medicine
• United Kingdom
• Ireland
• Reino Unido

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438477473
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Aesthetics of Senescence
SUNY series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

Pamela K. Gilbert, editor
The Aesthetics of Senescence
AGING, POPULATION, AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH NOVEL
Andrea Charise
Cover image: Thomas Rowlandson. “Medical dispatch or Doctor Doubledose killing two birds with one stone.” Published by Thomas Tegg, London, 1810.
© The Trustees of the British Museum. All rights reserved.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
Published in cooperation with the University of Regina Press
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Charise, Andrea, author.
Title: The aesthetics of senescence : aging, population, and the nineteenth-century British novel / Andrea Charise.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, 2020. | Series: SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019005904 | ISBN 9781438477459 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438477473 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. | Aging in literature. | Old age in literature.
Classification: LCC PR868.A394 C43 2019 | DDC 823/.809354—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005904
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things, Birth and the grave … are not as they were.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Alastor; or, The Spirit of Solitude,” 1816
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Aesthetics of Senescence
Abbreviations
Chapter 1 William Godwin and the Artifice of Immortality
Chapter 2 “In the condition of an aged person”: Mary Shelley and Frail Romanticism
Chapter 3 George Eliot’s Aging Bodies
Chapter 4 “The Century’s corpse”: Reading Senility at the Fin de Siècle
Chapter 5 Writing Twenty-First-Century Aging Populations
Notes
Works Cited
Index
List of Illustrations
Figure I.1 Anonymous. “The various ages and degrees of human life explained by these twelve different stages.”
Figure 1.1 William Blake. “Aged Ignorance.” From For the Sexes:The Gates of Paradise .
Figure 2.1 William Heath. “Burking poor old Mrs Constitution Aged 141.”
Figure 2.2 Thomas Rowlandson. “Medical dispatch or Doctor Doubledose killing two birds with one stone.”
Figure 3.1 Pieter Breughel the Elder. “Misanthrop” [The Misanthrope].
Figure 3.2 William Blake. “London.” From Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul [Songs of Experience].
Figure 3.3 William Blake. “The Ecchoing Green” [recto, Plate 1, and verso, Plate 2]. From Songs of Innocence and of Experience: Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul [Songs of Innocence].
Preface
E arly in the process of writing this book, I proposed to my department that I develop a seminar for our advanced undergraduates. Called “Reading Older Age,” its goal was to introduce students to representations of age and aging in a variety of literary genres, to better understand how such portrayals contribute to our perceptions of fleshly temporality. An obvious place to begin the curriculum, I thought, was with Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem “Growing Old”:
What is it to grow old?
Is it to lose the glory of the form,
The lustre of the eye?
Is it for beauty to forego her wreath?
—Yes, but not this alone.
The teacherly tone of Arnold’s opening question, I hoped, would prompt my students (all in their early twenties) to articulate exactly what growing old meant to them. I was right. Their answers—“frailty,” “65,” “white hair,” “Alzheimer’s,” and (my favorite) “cataracts and prune juice”—clearly expressed what age theorist Margaret Gullette describes as the “ideology of decline” ( DTD 7), that is, the naturalized assumption that old age is inextricably bound to illness, incapacity, lack, and diminishment. This did not inspire much confidence in what I could achieve in a semester to counteract or even complicate such ideas. But the seminar continued and, in the final class, I asked my students once again to reflect on Arnold’s question. This time, after twelve weeks of reading a spectrum of literary engagements with aging, older age, and late style (texts ranging from Shakespeare’s King Lear to David Markson’s The Last Novel ), those same readers for whom old age had been a largely insensible idea generated reflections that were considerably more complex and inventive than the first day’s. I was struck by the outcome of this unintentionally Wordsworthian exercise: by reading for age in and through literature, together we had begun to see into the life of things.
My own interest in the literary study of older age is prompted by nearly two decades of health research, primarily in geriatrics. In fact, I began working in geriatrics at about the same age as my undergraduates. Several years later, I decided to pursue graduate studies in English Literature, examining representations of old age in nineteenth-century British writing. Well-meaning inquirers from both medicine and literature found this puzzling: their response, when I told them, was usually a “What?” accompanied by a compensatory gesture (a tilted head, or a cupped ear), almost invariably followed by a baffled “Why?” I suppose it is no big mystery why the study of older age is perceived as somewhat unseemly. In the twenty-first century, there is much about older age that can feel off-putting or even repulsive. Gerontologist Harry Moody sardonically terms older people “the ill-derly” (135), referencing both literature and health policy’s stubbornly ageist conflation of aging with senescence and death—filled with dreadful visions of dementia and physical decline. This antipathy is a major barrier for the field of Age (or “Aging”) Studies, and for its researchers. It effectively brands the investigator of aging as peculiar, or even perverse; it is weirder still, apparently, when a younger scholar chooses to undertake such a study, like the eccentric aged child of a Dickens or Hardy novel. Reflecting on my own experience, the clearest indication of such aversion was expressed not so much in the mystified “Why?” but in the failure or reluctance to give ear to the words “old age” in the first place.
Since then, things have changed—at least in part. Age Studies is experiencing an ascendance in the form of professional networks of scholars in Europe and North America, major academic publications, and annual guaranteed convention panels at the Modern Languages Association. Literary and cultural critics such as Kathleen Woodward, Karen Chase, Devoney Looser, Stephen Katz, Teresa Mangum, Helen Small, Kay Heath, Thomas Cole, and Margaret Gullette have been instrumental in establishing the formal, thematic, and activist aims of the field. I am myself thoroughly indebted to these colleagues and other scholars.
My objective, in this book, is to extend and amplify this vital conversation. The novels I have chosen to examine here are drawn from a wide array of modes: gothic and speculative, pastoral, realistic, and naturalistic. I do not promise an exhaustive survey of a theme or complete genealogy of a phenomenon, nor should my selections suggest that the novels I discuss mark to the exclusion of all others decisive flashpoints in the history of thinking about older age during this period. Instead, I have chosen to focus on texts that exemplify what I see as especially interesting or provocative moments in the nineteenth-century imagination of older age, precisely because they re-present the profound multivocality of aging and older age at the moment of their textual production. The work continues.
In his 1925 thesis on German tragedy (later published as Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 1928), philosopher Walter Benjamin famously compared the relationship between ideas and their material expression to an astronomical constellation: a configuration that both groups together individual stars and is revealed by their cluster. Benjamin’s image is a valuable one in the context of my project, and of Age Studies in general. In many ways, the idea of “what it is to grow old” can only be conceived of as a motley assemblage of definitions, bodily symptoms, language, and representations, none of which, on their own, can be held up as fully exemplary. This is as true for health professionals as it is for literary critics and laypeople. Aging is not this or that alone, as Arnold recognized. In place of merely cataloguing instances of literary representation (an irksome critical mode I call “spot the old person”), my interdisciplinary approach aims to identify this constellatory essence of older age in the nineteenth-century British literary imagination and, importantly, in our own time as well. Just as the handle of one celestial cluster points to the belt of another, so the manifestation of an idea in one age points to its expression in another. As readers, we must not only be guided by these signals; we must also consider how they interact, and how they might be reconceived—a bright star abandoned for one that is not yet