Before starting my talk, I would like to compare two
radical different representations of female ageing: the first is the Portrait of an Old Woman by Giorgione
(1508-1510, Venezia, Galleria dell’Accademia) [Plate 1] and the second one is
the photograph of a 79 old swimmer, in a bathing costume, plate N.2 (1995). The
first painting by Giorgione is emblematic to highlight the Western stereotypes
on the representation of the female body. Western literature and iconography is
full of anthropomorphic representations of old age as a woman with grey hair,
withered, faded, pale and wan face, foul and obscene, with a gelid and wintry
landscape in the background. It is no coincidence that old age is represented
as an old woman because, right from the start, there have been strong attacks
by male writers and painters against the body of the ageing woman, the focus of
considerable misogyny. The old woman becomes a symbol of evil and an allegory
of time which completely corrupts everything. In Portrait of an Old Woman by Giorgione (1508-1510), the devastation
impressed on the curved figure, balding with few teeth and deep lines on her
face, her eyes pervaded by sadness, acts as a reminder of the transience of
beauty. It provides a terrible warning of what is to come, hence the scroll
laid on one of her hands reads: «with time».
The second one is the photograph of a 79 year-old
swimmer, in a bathing costume [Plate 2] [1].
The eye of the photographer is careful to capture the vitality in the body of
this woman, whose signs of time are clear in the face, and its inner balance.
Sport and physical activity are not ends in themselves but are tangible signs
of being able to accept old age, a proof of a serene and balanced relationship
between the body and the surrounding environment.
In my talk, I would like to deal with the following
issues:
Plate 3) Ageing is a crucial issue due to the
increasing number of aged people in our late-capitalist world. As ageing
involves various epistemological, biological and social problems, including the
relationships between different generations, women
need to study it from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Plate 4) Feminist critics of the first generation
discussing the problems and issues connected with ageing (Simone de Beauvoir,
Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer)
Plate 5) Women's critique and deconstruction of
socio-cultural stereotypes and clichés on ageing.
Plate 6) Women's awareness that ageing is strictly connected not only
with sex but also with class and race.
Plate 7) Stereotypes on menopause in post-modern society, linked to the
reproductive function of woman in our socio-political world.
Plate 8) Menopause not as a trauma but as an important stage for
reshaping women's life.
Plate 9) New ideas and images of women's ageing. Revaluation of the role
of the crone in women's life as a means for establishing a new relationship
between different generations and a tool for a mutual education.
From the start of the 1970's, we
have witnessed the unexpected phenomenon of considerable increases in life
expectancy which has led scientists and scholars from many fields to focus
their research on ageing. Also feminist critics of the first generation started
to discuss the problems and issues connected with ageing. They were aware that
ageing involves various epistemological, biological and social problems,
including the relationships between generations and therefore the need to study
it from an interdisciplinary perspective. These
studies are based on the idea that ageing is no longer an illness but that
there is, in this stage of life, a “remodelling”, in which some functions are
less powerful than they were before, while others are stronger. Ageing, from a
biological point of view, becomes a much more complex phenomenon which reflects
the continuous readjustment of the organism to reach ever-newer balances. This
new conception of ageing is consolidated by the Jungian reassessment of old
age: Jung considers the third age as a new period of development in which the
psyche is subject to continuous remodelling [2].
We must, therefore, reconsider old age as a stage in the evolution of the
psyche, that particular stage which, if well understood, allows us to
understand and to complete what we have been and, in the final analysis, what
we are.
In an important study by Betty Friedan, The Fountain of Age [3],
there is a chapter in which she criticises the Americana mystic of never-ending
youth in order to deconstruct the stereotypes which capitalist society has
created in relation to the concept of old age. Friedan's criticism of the USA
is ferocious: USA is a society which is founded on the visual aspect, on show, and deprives imagination of its
power[4].
The obsession which American society has with the body, the preservation of the
exterior appearance through artificial methods such as plastic surgery and the
cosmetics of beauty, are dismantled one by one by the scholar to emphasise the
vacuum of values in a society founded on consumerism and materialism. While in
the past the books full of dietary and hygiene advice were based on the idea
that a sober and moderated life-style in all things was the best recipe to
ensure healthy old age, (see Luigi Cornaro, Trattato
della salute e della longevità con i mezzi sicuri per raggiungerla [5]),
nowadays diets are completely unrelated to the idea of ascesis for purification
and have become a form of regulation of the body to preserve sex appeal, to have greater sexual and
erotic attraction.
Since the '70s in feminist studies, there is a new
awareness of this phenomenon, especially on the part of the historic feminists
who, in Europe and America, discuss the problem of old age: how do these women
who were young in the 1960's react to that which Marylin Pearsall, in her
interesting book: The Other Within Us:
Feminist Exploration of Women and Ageing of 1999, defines as "The most
stigmatised stage in women's life cycle: old age"?
Women intend to deal with this problem from several
perspectives and in an interdisciplinary manner and, above all, they want to
deconstruct the prejudices of the male gerontology in relation to women:
"feminist theorists deploying such discourses wish to dismantle the
structure of their masculinist bias. Women in later life have been massively
and familiarly objectified in gerontological literature". As S. De
Beauvoir says in The Second Sex, the
life of women is marked by a series of initiation rites because "women is
not born but becomes". Even to enter the third stage of life, women are
subject to an arduous and difficult process, because the dominant patriarchal
society, provides a series of strong stereotypes mainly based on the body of
the elderly woman. In her book The Coming
of Age, old age is perceived as a foreign body. Influenced by Sartre's
existentialism, Simone De Beauvoir emphasises the idea that the subject sees
old age, through the perception of others. "Old age is particularly
difficult to perceive, since we have always considered it as something
estranged from us (comme un espace étranger):
have I become then somebody else? Even though I still inhabit myself".
Women, therefore, must deconstruct a twin process of objectification: the look
of others who see you as an object and also the image which you have of
yourself, inside me, there is the body which has become old and different from
me, that is, the person which others see from outside.
This book, which has been an important starting point
for women, also became useful ground for comparison and discussion. There is,
in fact, a profound difference between the position of De Beauvoir writing in
the 1970's and the writing of women like Friedan, Greer or Kathleen
Woodward [6] who deal
with this theme ten years later, in the 1980's. The fundamental difference is
the fact that S. De Beauvoir does not see all the implicit links between being
a woman and being old and, above all, she does not relate the problem of old
age with the problems of gender, race and class. However, the biggest criticism
made by women of S. De Beauvoir is that she had a totally negative view of old
age and, above all, only saw menopause as a profound trauma in women's lives
which led to nothing constructive. To fully understand the pessimist attitude
of de Beauvoir in relation to old age, here is a quotation taken from her book The Mandarins: "Glass mirrors are
too indulgent. The faces of these women my own age, that flabby skin, those
blurred features, those drooping bodies, so obviously drooping under their
corsets, these were the true mirrors." As rightly emphasised by K.
Woodward in an interesting article, the theme of old age in S. de Beauvoir is
strictly linked to certain obsessions which tormented her all her life: the
theme of death and, above all, the theme of fear and phobia of any existential
change, especially in the life of the body. She does not believe in the
possibility of woman creating a new autonomous life for herself, dependent on
neither husband or children: it is too late for her to project herself into the
future.
From the 1980's on, scholars of all disciplines,
although starting from this seminal book by De Beauvoir, emphasised the biggest
limit of her thought which basically consists of starting from an
"existential conceptual framework". One important aspect of De Beauvoir's
book is the idea that the elderly are socially marginalised and that,
historically, society has always had an ambivalent and contradictory attitude
towards old age. Bearing this premise in mind, women tried to reveal the twin
marginality of the elderly woman and, above all, did their best to create new
models and to overcome the stereotype of the body in decline and the other
within us. A very interesting essay is one by Susan Sontag entitled
"The double standard of ageing" in which she very strongly emphasises
this twin marginality for women, related not only to the fact that woman, in
this stage of life, is no longer procreative but also the fact that her beauty
and physical appearance have withered and deteriorated. The phrase "for
the woman the calendar is the final arbiter" is emblematic because it
emphasises that woman in old age becomes invisible in a society founded on
beauty and sex appeal. On this matter, it is also interesting to discuss the
statement which Sontag makes in relation to gender difference in the process of
old age: "women feel the face-body dichotomy more profoundly than
men". For Sontag, the face becomes the emblem, the icon, a sort of flag
which one cannot change or which cannot be altered with age. For centuries,
women have been forced by patriarchal society to base their success on their
physical appearance; when woman's beauty and sex appeal are no longer, she becomes invisible. For centuries, the
idea of femininity was related to the attributes of fragility and thinness and
was, above all, centred on the face. While man is perceived by society as an overall entity, woman has always been
subject to a dichotomous process, separating the face from the body. The face
becomes a sort of emblem, icon and flag which cannot be changed or altered. Her
face on the stage of life must always be subject to a continuous make up so that it appears unaltered.
There are two other issues that I want briefly to deal
with, the first is the theme of menopause, and the second one is the theme of
women creativity during ageing. Betty Friedan recalls, that menopause has been
for too long considered by women as a shameful sexual illness, because the
cessation of the procreation function has for too long been experienced by
women as a definitive trauma. For B. Friedan and G. Greer, the identity of
woman must go beyond her sexual and biological role. It is important that women
accept the stage of menopause to try, to find other possibilities and new
dimensions to their personalities.
The anthropologist Margaret Lock has published an
interesting book entitled Encounters with
Ageing. Mythology of Menopause in Japan and North America, a comparative
analysis of menopause in Japan and North America. In the introductory chapter,
Margaret Lock reveals how menopause is an event which is difficult to define,
an event which must be punctually contextualised and historicised, because it
is not a universal concept but a concept profoundly linked to the history and
culture of a people and to the woman herself who is living it. At the base of
Margaret Lock's hypothesis is the idea that the body is the result and the
product of history and culture and that, therefore, its conception changes over
time and space. The strong body-mind dichotomy which has plagued Western
culture has led to the assumption of considering either culture as the dominant
element and biology, as something irrelevant or biology, as something
unchangeable over time and space and culture, as a sort of
"distortion", the diversifying, changeable element. According to
Lock, then, it is essential to have a new conception of biology which focuses
on its flexibility and its close interdependence with culture. For this reason,
Lock, in her book, emphasises the concept of "local biology", a
biology which must account for the culture of all areas and which must position
not only the biological subject but also the object which it has to study. The
idea of the body as "simultaneously and physical and symbolical artefact …
both naturally and culturally produced, and securely anchored in a particular
historical moment" is an idea which we also find expressed in the recent
important contributions of women on the subject of the body. (I am referring to
the thought of Rosy Braidotti, Nomadic
Subjects, and Donna Haraway, Situated
Knowledges. The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective (1988).
This book brings up a series of interesting questions
which are difficult to resolve and the idea that the use of several disciplines
may lead, if not to the resolution of these questions, perhaps to greater
clarification. How do we reconcile the objectivity of scientific research with
the different positions of the scientist and science in the various historical
and cultural contexts? In Lock's book, it seems to be clear that we have now
gone beyond the idea of a neutral and objective science and biology because,
after the teaching of Foucault, we are more than aware that the analysis and
medicalising of the body were, in industrial society, subject to a policy of social
control. Another point which appears to me to be controversial and which has
seen the position of women contrary to that of scientists and doctors is the
use of oestrogen to combat not only the symptoms of menopause but also the
dangers of old age.
This important clarification of the relativity of the
concept of menopause is strictly connected with the attempt to revise the
literary canon in representing old age.
The 1970's saw the rise of a new form of narrative
which focuses on the creativity of the elderly, as represented by novelists who
are themselves already quite old. They choose to focus their novels on the
elderly who are no longer marginal figures but characters with complex psyches.
The desire to revise the canon of the stereotypical representation of old age
aims to crush a series of prejudices in order to explore and discover this
mysterious and unfathomed “planet” of old age. Therefore, if the Bildungsroman was the novel of growth,
which followed the hero from infancy to maturity, a new term is now coined, Vollendungsroman, which Constance Rooke
uses to define a new narrative paradigm, the 'novel of completion' which is
concentrated on the last stage of life. Growing old implies a passage, a real
initiation which coincides with the abandoning and rejection of the previous
social roles and is always marked by a traumatic event, by a process of the
deconstruction of the I which may have a negative or a positive effect. The Vollendungsroman, then, is based not
only on the principle that old age is heterogeneous, that it varies, that is,
from individual to individual, but also on the principle that the psyche of the
elderly is in continuous movement. Interesting examples of this new genre are
found in the narrative of women involved in an overturning of the female figure
in the phase of menopause and in the affirmation of a new concept of the
elderly body, always cancelled and despised (Fay Weldon, Ursula K. Le Guin,
Constance Rooke, Germaine Greer, Mary Sarton). Some examples of this kind of women's
writing related to the controversial body of the old, are Endgame, A Journal of the Seventy-Ninth Year; Encore: A Journal of the Eightieth Year; Eighty Two, Mary Sarton's diaries which record, day by day, the
incessant inner search for an ontological profundity founded no longer on
«acting (as)» but on «being».
Within literature, it is mainly Ursula Le Guin, a
writer with a great knowledge of other cultures and anthropology, who has
emphasised, in her essay "the Space Crone" (in The Other within Us, ed. Pearsall), how menopause must be lived,
not passively, but as a challenge, an important rite of passage which women
must not let men control, especially doctors, as it is a very important event
in their lives. The passage consists of the awareness that menopause means
change. Women must be reborn within and, to emphasise this change, Le Guin uses
a very incisive phrase: "the woman must become pregnant with herself"
in the sense that she must take back her life and her body. Emblematically, the
science fiction writer tells us that
the inhabitants of another planet who have come to earth, when they decide to
return to their planet and find that they only have room for one person in
their spaceship, take the 'crone', the grandmother.
A complex issue which I think needs to be discussed is
the recent re-emergence in the formation of women's identity of the role of the
figure of the grandmother, who is capable of transmitting a historic memory,
values which last and pervade the new generations [FIG. 10] Jeannette, her
mother Agnes e the 102 year-old grandmother Susie Billie, from Wisdom's Daughters. Conversations with Women
Elders of Native America, Written and Photographed by Steve Wall, Harper
Perennial, 1994)].
Many women writers, including Italian ones, have
dedicated histories and novels to the parental figure of the grandmother, she
who is capable of setting up with the new generations a relationship of
complicity and intimacy, which at times appears to be a more complex and
difficult issue with the maternal figure. For many feminists, the grandmother
becomes the symbolic mother and incarnates both the figure of the great mother
and the genealogical transmission of knowledge (see In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens by Alice Walker). The figure of
the grandmother as 'story teller', also dealt with by Marina Warner in her
essays and short-stories, reassesses the oral tradition and the transmission
between generations of an ancient knowledge related to a folklore tradition
possessed by every nation.
In The Diary of
a Good Neighbour, Doris Lessing also deals with the same problem and
studies the interpersonal relationship between the young Joanna and Maudie, a
relationship which is rich and intense because of their reciprocal search for
identity. From this point of view, it is very interesting to reassess, using
the figure of the grandmother, the concept of memory, which is not only
historic memory related to the genealogy of women but also personal, individual
memory, which is very closely related to one's family tradition.
Opposed to the sweetened image of old age which much
sentimental literature and visual art [Plate 11 Vuillarde Portrait of Madame
Bernard] have propagated for centuries, women writers now overturn this
stereotype to offer the image of an eccentric old woman who wants to take back
her freedom which has been denied to her in the past by social constraints.
This is a positive rewriting of the theme of the witch. On this matter, I would
like you to look at an ironic and daring poem by Jenny Joseph, Warning, a poem which was selected
emblematically by the journal Science
as a sign of the new times for elderly women. [Plate 12]
A new imagery also emerges in the literature of the
multicultural writers who move between more than one literary tradition, which
emphasises the importance of multiethnic comparison for a new study of old age.
In Praisesong for the Widow (1983),
the Afro-American writer Paule Marshall emphasises the importance of memory in
the reconstruction of one's identity: as she reaches old age, the protagonist
decides to radically change her style of life, returning to the values of her
African tradition where the elderly were the depositories of the culture of the
forefathers. In Afro American literature (see for example Tony Morrison) there
are portraits of old black women who have a political spiritual significance as
foremothers. These older women are magical because of their will to survive,
because of their embodiment, of the mythology and wisdom of Africa. Considering
the prevalence of ageism in White America, one can see the African Tradition as
diametrically opposed to U.S. tradition.
The representation of old age in literature confirms,
contrary to common sense, how difficult it is to conceptualise. Old age is not
an immutable phenomenon but a process which changes over time and space because
it is the result of a continuous interaction between nature and culture,
between body and mind. A bigger challenge, perhaps, comes from the use which
women artists now make of the old body in photography and painting. There is,
in fact, a considerable number of paintings by women where the naked body of
the old woman is shown as a challenge to a culture which, as we have seen,
reduces woman, after the age of reproduction, to invisibility or to the
canonised role of the grandmother. Women painters, from Cindy Sherman to Claire
Prussian, show the elderly body in its excesses and its horror or represent the
old woman as a being with polymorphous sexuality. In this sense, women artists
see, in the old woman, a creature which incarnates the perturbing aspects in
the Sibyl, in the Pythia, in the Medusa: these beings emanate a charm and an
enchantment which can break down the boundaries and limits which patriarchal
society has wished to impose on them.
I would like to end my talk on
old age and women with a quotation from a woman writer Florida Scott Maxwell,
taken from one of her books which she wrote at the age of eighty The Measure of My Days: "Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were
interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more
intense as I age".
Selected
Bibliography:
Clark,
Etta, Growing Old is not for Sissies II: Portraits of Senior Athletes,
Pomegranate, 1995.
Friedan, Betty, The Fountain of Age, Touchstone Books,
1994.
Greer, Germaine, The Change: Women, Aging and The Menopause,
New York, Ballantine, 1993.
Jung,
Ernst, Gli stadi della vita
(1930-31), Opere, Vol. 8, Turin,
Bollati Boringhieri, 1982; Il divenire
della personalità (1934), Opere,
vol. 17, Bollati Boringieri, 1982.
Le
Guin, Ursula K., "The Space Crone", in Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, London, Victor Gollancz, 1989; A Wizard of Earthsea, New York,
Parnassus, 1968; The Tombs of Atuan,
New York, 1971; The Farthest Shore,
New York, 1972.
Marshall,
Paule, Praisesong for the Widow, New
York, Dutton, 1984.
Pearsall, M. (ed.), The Other Within Us, Boulder-Oxford,
1997.
Rooke, Constance, "Old
Age in Contemporary Fiction", in Thomas R. Cole, David D. Van Tassel,
Robert Kastenbaum, (eds.), Handbook of
Humanities and Aging, pp. 241-257.
Rooke, Constance (ed.), Night Light. Stories of Aging,
Toronto-Oxford, 1986.
Sarton,
Mary, At Eighty-two, London, 1996.
Von Dorotka Bagnell, and P.
Spencer Soper (eds.), Perception of Aging
in Literature: a Cross-cultural Study, New York, 1998.
Weldon,
Fay, The Cloning of Joanna May,
London, Harper Collins, 1999 [1989]; Le
amiche del cuore, Milan, La Tartaruga, 1994.
Woodward,
K.,and M. M Schwartz (eds.), Memory and
Desire: Ageing Literature Psychoanalysis, Bloomington, Indiana U. P., 1986.
Woodward,
K., Ageing and its Discontents,
Bloomington, Indiana U. P., 1991.
Wyatt-Brown, A.M. and J.
Rossen (eds.), Aging and Gender in
Literature, Virginia, 1993;
[1] Etta Clark, Growing Old is not for Sissies II : Portraits of Senior Athletes, Pomegranate, 1995.
[2] Ernst Jung, Gli stadi della
vita (1930-31), Opere, Vol. 8,
Turin, Bollati Boringhieri, 1982; Il
divenire della personalità (1934), Opere,
vol. 17, Bollati Boringieri, 1982.
[3] Touchstone
Books, 1994. Italian translation. L’età
da inventare.
[4] Ernst Jung, Gli stadi della
vita (1930-31), Opere, Vol. 8,
Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 1982; Il
divenire della personalità (1934), Opere,
vol. 17, Bollati Boringieri, 1982.
[5] Venice, 1558.
[6] K. Woodward, M. M Schwartz (ed.), Memory
and Desire: Ageing Literature Psychoanalysis, Indiana 1986; K. Woodward, Ageing and its Discontents, Bloomington
1991.