Old Age and the Embrace of the Uncanny

Contextualizing Wharton’s old-aged fiction within depictions of a destabilized old age, or a senescence of decline and imperilled personhood, this chapter compares Wharton’s writing to that of Vorse and Hall. In contrast with visions of a defamiliarized, uncanny aged self, Wharton’s work posits an older age filled with motivating desires and ambitions. This is also fiction that deploys gothic tropes to reveal how completely interaction with the aged tends to destabilize others, especially younger viewers, who see only age’s vagaries and unsteadiness, and who find it fearful.

Watching the Flame of Youth

Focusing on the “flaming youth” figure of the 1920s, this chapter explores the prevalence of discussions about child marriage in works by Wharton and Fabian, exploring forms of generation-specific authority and the peculiar age-specific qualities of the “child-woman” at the center of these plots. Scenes of youthful teen girls’ slumber, which frequently overlap with middle-aged men’s sexual interests, predict many of the aspects of these relationships that interest Wharton, whose fictions imagine child marriage, then increasingly problematize the age-asymmetrical relationships involved in such unions.

Insult, Injury, and Age’s Redefinitional Violence

Tracing insults about aging, alongside perceptions of aging as injurious to the self, this chapter explores the spectacular nature of public insults, real and imagined in fictions by Wharton, Lewis, Fitzgerald, Hergesheimer, Glasgow, and Ferber. These scenarios, which stress aging’s painful visibility, appear throughout assessments of female beauty. Aging patriarchs, who transform their lives in efforts to reinvent their identities, however, are treated somewhat more sympathetically, even when they fixate on early youth, impossibly precious success, and romances with much younger women. When such exercises fail, the texts stress aging’s inevitability. More positive accounts of aging, understood here as a rich maturity, by contrast, appear across agrarian fictions, which circumvent social contexts and instead depict cyclical patterns of natural renewal, thereby rejecting linear conceptions of age and embracing aging as part of a life of accomplished productivity.

The Patriarchal Family Neurotic

Focusing on the continuance of the patriarchal family in modern narratives, this chapter explores Dell’s idea of a condition called “patriarchal family neurosis,” in which modern ideologies of family life are continually forestalled by patriarchal habits. Tracing contests over bodily forms and property, Wharton’s work repeatedly turns to the touchstone of Beatrice Ceni’s tragedy, while O’Neill invokes Greek myths to depict the patriarchalism infusing American culture and the infantilization of young adults.

Time and the Trauma of Witnessing

This chapter explores ocular assessments of aging within defined communities, one in rural Florida and one in modern Manhattan, by Wharton and Rawlings. The witnessing of age, in such contexts, creates unexpected trauma, so destabilizing are the effects of changing bodies, especially as witnessed by individuals who find their own aging implicated by comparison. The narratives that stress traumatic witnessing are also those that depict not only rapidly changing youth, but also the simultaneous aging of older individuals, who find their own changing lives difficult to confront. Theirs are also the changes that are less spectacular, but more consequential, given the way they disqualify the aging from active and romantic experiences. Witnessing aging, thus becomes a challenging enterprise, and one that depends upon doubled bodies, or forms that age in tandem with one another; aging thus engenders acts of translation, so challenging is its apprehension.

Introduction

The introduction begins with a narrative of the anxieties surrounding aging, including the crisis it was believed to usher into age-obsessed characters’ lives. Historically, changing demographic patterns allowed for narratives in which age classifications raised as many problems as they attempted to solve across literary modes that included society tales, agrarian novels, anti-aging romances, and coming-into-maturity stories. This chapter introduces several narrative strands that age-based narratives took: that of circumventing the decline narratives associated with aging so as to value the middle and older aged experiences, as well as all less defined experiences between. Stories of communal aging, wherein social roles are distinguished based on qualities rather than strict chronologies, and narratives of stark intergenerational competition, which end in violence, also permeate modern literature.

Rejuvenation, Unage, and the Authenticity of the Older Woman

Exploring two trends in the treatment of aging in Wharton’s and Atherton’s works, this chapter traces interests in medical rejuvenation, a practice called the Steinach procedure that combined hormonal and X-ray therapies. Wharton’s vision about resisting age is less sensational, but no less focused on socially privileged women’s resistance to aging as she reveals the emphasis on “unage” or remaining virtually the same across one’s lifetime, a practice traceable to New York’s high society women. At the same time, in these societies, the older woman was viewed as authentic, despite resisting age, in a way that raw youth was not.

Mourning, Melancholia, and the Loss of Youth

Interrogating youth’s cultural and symbolic meanings in the wake of the Great War, this chapter explores fictions of loss by Wharton and Cather rooted in depictions of mourning and melancholia, Freud’s constructs of grief. The loss of young soldiers encompassed not only the losses of particular young men, but also implicated the larger, cultural losses of youthful qualities at large, across a generation. In tales that focus on the older men, the losses of the young threaten to become overwhelming, so fully do the aging depend upon the idea of energized young men, who embody the ideals associated with youth. Articulating fears that the social fabric is forever rent by the loss of positive intergenerational bonds, these texts suggest that a healthy, coherent society depends upon cross-generational bonds of the sort severed by the war-time losses of young men, resulting in a society left to bereaved old men.