Coda

The coda brings together the concerns of the book via a reading of Charles Chesnutt’s “The Wife of his Youth.” Through an examination of this story, the coda pursues some of the questions raised in the final two chapters about the representation of elderly characters and about caregiving, individualism, and autonomy. I argue that the story’s treatment of age markers in relation to social hierarchies and historical trauma suggests ways not only to read them critically but also to engage them ethically. That is, the story urges its resistant readers toward an accountability to vulnerable populations, a responsibility that can seem onerous, even grotesque, in an age in which ideals of individualism, autonomy, and acquisition prevail. Ultimately, the coda positions the book in relation to contemporary concerns about growing old in a neoliberal climate that stigmatizes dependence and repose.

Beyond Mastery

The final chapter turns to Henry James, often hailed as the “Master” and the only mature American novelist, and yet, James’s fiction actually unsettles the notion of adulthood, complicating rather than consolidating this category. In What Maisie Knew (1897), James exposes the various inflections that compromise the autonomy of the adult subject, suggesting that age alone does not produce independence, rationality, or maturity. Indeed, the notion of adulthood as an epoch of independence and self-determination may be a fiction not unlike that of childhood innocence. His work highlights how adulthood derives much of its cultural authority through an enduring association with independence, particularly financial independence, and suggests that interdependence and caregiving may entail forms of maturity that are not rewarded, sanctioned, or made legible in a culture that confuses coming-of-age with class assent and individualism.

Peculiar Forms of Aging in the Literature of US Slavery

The second chapter examines slavery’s distorting effects on age. It reveals how racism and slavery operate through age, buttressing a system that distributed maturity, and humanity, according to an invented logic that age discourse helped to naturalize. The chapter explores the vexed status of age under slavery Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and my Freedom (1855) and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) as well as Federal Writers’ Project interviews with former slaves who seem to defy the boundaries of human longevity. These narratives acknowledge not merely the corruption of childhood but the exclusion from adulthood as among the most troubling aspects of slavery. Ultimately, they lament slavery’s use of age as a metric of economic value and a tool for dehumanization, and their narratives stage willful refusals to accommodate this logic.

Little Women, Overgrown Children, and the Problem of Female Maturity

The third chapter exposes the exclusionary status of adulthood and the disciplinary work of age from a gendered perspective. Women were, in the words of one historian, “perpetual minors,” and this uneven distribution of rights perverted female development and preoccupied one of the most celebrated novelists of the century. Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868) reveals the rhetoric of age as a core disciplinary idiom in the lives of girls and women, who must constantly calibrate their behavior and appearance to their chronological age. In Work: A Story of Experience (1873), she ventures that numerical age might serve as a viable measure of maturity for women, but she denaturalizes the seeming inevitability of gendered norms and the developmental teleology that underwrites them. For Alcott, it was essential to envision alternative versions of female maturity, departing from linear models of aging as decline.

Introduction

The introduction makes the case for age as a crucial—and overlooked—analytic for reading nineteenth-century American literature. It offers a brief historical overview of how chronological age became a key rubric in the organization of social and political life. Over the course of the century, age was added to the census; schools were organized around age groups; birthday cards were mass-produced; geriatrics became a medical specialty. The chapter argues that American literature serves as a rich, critical account of this modern culture of age, demonstrating how our most well-known writers registered––and often resisted—age expectations, particularly as they applied to women and people of color.

Over the Hill and Out of Sight

The fourth chapter reads New England regionalism as a response to this pathologization of old age. The old maids, spinsters, and widowers that populate the short fiction of Mary Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett stage a subversive dialogue with the scientific and cultural denigration of the elderly, particularly elderly women, and resist the homogenizing effects of this discourse. While much scholarship acknowledges the prevalence of elderly people in regionalism, linking old age to the passing of old modes of living, this chapter urges us to see the elderly characters in this genre not as metaphors for dying ways of life but as representations of elderly bodies and subjectivities in their own right. These authors force us to question the celebration of independence and autonomy imbricated in fantasies of adulthood and in American identity itself.

“May I Never Be a Man”

The first chapter reads Herman Melville’s semi-autobiographical novel Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) as an anti-coming-of-age novel that exposes maturity as profoundly ideological, tied to capitalist and nationalist agendas. Published during a moment in which calls proliferated for individual Americans and the nation at large to grow up, Redburn rejects the trajectory toward adult masculinity defined exhaustively in this moment as the basis of American development. The chapter positions Melville’s work amidst the cultural preoccupation with linear life-course trajectories, represented in popular broadsides and lithographs enshrining the stages of life. Melville’s career, which took a well-known plunge after Moby-Dick, might be recast as a refusal to embrace the terms by which market society defined adulthood and success.