The Aesthetics of Senescence Aging, Population, and the
Nineteenth Century British Novel
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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 ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: The Aesthetics of Senescence xix
Abbreviations xlv
Chapter 1 William Godwin and the Artifice of Immortality 1
Chapter 2 “In the condition of an aged person”: Mary Shelley
and Frail Romanticism 33
Chapter 3 George Eliot’s Aging Bodies 63
Chapter 4 “The Century’s corpse”: Reading Senility at the
Fin de Siècle 101
Chapter 5 Writing Twenty-First-Century Aging Populations 141
Notes 151
Works Cited 167
Index 185
List of Illustrations
Figure I.1 Anonymous. “The various ages and degrees of human
life explained by these twelve different stages.” xxxix
Figure 1.1 William Blake. “Aged Ignorance.” From For the Sexes:
The Gates of Paradise. 9
Figure 2.1 William Heath. “Burking poor old Mrs Constitution
Aged 141.” 43
Figure 2.2 Thomas Rowlandson. “Medical dispatch or Doctor
Doubledose killing two birds with one stone.” 43
Figure 3.1 Pieter Breughel the Elder. “Misanthrop” [The
Misanthrope]. 82
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]. 86
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]. 88–89
ix
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 “Read-
ing 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
xi
Z
xii Preface
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 out-
come 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 puz-
zling: their response, when I told them, was usually a “What?” accompanied
by a compensatory gesture (a tilted head, or a cupped ear), almost invari-
ably 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 conver-
sation. 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
Z
Preface xiii
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 astro-
nomical 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 cata-
loguing 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 seen.
Acknowledgments
T his book was shaped by my doctoral studies at the University of Toronto,
where I was encouraged to conduct interdisciplinary research as a PhD
candidate in English and the Collaborative Program in Health Care, Tech-
nology, and Place. While I was there, Alan Bewell, Cannon Schmitt, and
Elizabeth D. Harvey were exemplars of generous, challenging, and respectful
mentorship. I am profoundly grateful for their confidence in the initial
phases of this work, and to have had the chance to learn alongside them.
With the support of a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Human-
ities Research Council of Canada, my work continued as a postdoctoral
researcher at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of
Iowa. Hearty thanks to Teresa Mangum, Director of the Obermann Center,
for some of my fondest memories of writing, researching, and developing ideas
in such an intellectually generative, supportive, and sustaining environment.
I am honored to have received the John Charles Polanyi Prize for Literature
as a result of the new avenues opened up by my postdoctoral experience.
Sometimes it is possible to point to a decisive moment in one’s life
where one path diverges from another. For me, it was the opportunity to
work in the Division of Geriatric Medicine at Parkwood Hospital, London,
Ontario, in my early twenties. I owe a significant debt of gratitude to the
geriatricians who first encouraged my research in aging and nurtured my
interests in arts-based health research—in and among all of the clinical
care, education, and advocacy they do on a daily basis on behalf of older
people: Drs. Laura Diachun, Jennie Wells, Monidipa Dasgupta, and Michael
Borrie, as well as Judy McCallum and Wendy Parisian. You have my lasting
admiration and thanks.
More recently I have had the support of outstanding colleagues in the
Interdisciplinary Center for Health & Society at the University of Toronto
xv
Z
xvi Acknowledgments
Scarborough (UTSC), including Holly Wardlow, Jessica Fields, Michelle Silver,
Suzanne Sicchia, and Cassandra Hartblay. Thanks also to Paul Stevens, Linda
Hutcheon, Katie Larson, Michael Lambek, Karen Weisman, Ian Balfour,
Terry Robinson, Danny Wright, David Francis Taylor, Michael Trussler, and
Michelle Flax for their sage advice and heartening insights.
I have been lucky enough to get a sneak peek at the next generation
of teachers, scholars, and activists in the fields of Age Studies (and Health
Humanities more generally) in the form of my marvelous undergraduate
students, past and present, at UTSC; I am so excited to see how you will
transform our collective experience of aging in the years to come. My expe-
rience working with graduate students in University of Toronto’s Graduate
Department of English has been a precious source of joyful intellectual
exchange; I have especially appreciated the energetic provocations of Dimitri
Pascaluta, Olivia Pellegrino, Katherine Shwetz, Stefan Krecsy, and Nicole
Dufoe, who taught me how to read what I thought were familiar things, anew.
Colleagues in the North American and European Networks of Aging
Studies have been encouraging from the early days, especially Margaret
Morganroth Gullette, Stephen Katz, Kathleen Woodward, Erin Gentry
Lamb, Sally Chivers, Pia Kontos, Cynthia Port, Ulla Kriebernegg, Tom Cole,
Valerie Lipscomb, Leni Marshall, Aynsley Moorhouse, Julia Gray, Danny
George, Andy Achenbaum, and Peter Whitehouse. I have found genuine
community among a range of Health Humanities associations, including the
Health Humanities Consortium, International Health Humanities Network,
and the Modern Languages Association’s forum on Medical Humanities and
Health Studies. Special nods to Paul Crawford, Tess Jones, Rebecca Garden,
and Nehal El-Hadi for the flourishing interdisciplinary nuclei they have
established and continue to foster.
Deep appreciation goes to SUNY Press for their interest in this book,
especially Amanda Lanne-Camilli, Acquisitions Editor, and Pamela Gilbert,
“Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century” Series Editor. My thanks to
Jenn Bennett-Genthner, Production Editor, and Fran Keneston, Director
of Publicity & Marketing, for shepherding the manuscript into book form;
copy editor James Harbeck for his careful review of the finer details; and
Ellen L. Hawman for synthesizing a thoughtful and comprehensive index.
My appreciation extends to the University of Regina Press—Karen May
Clark, Duncan Campbell, and Jonathan A. Allan especially—for producing
an exquisite Canadian English-language paperback edition of this book.
Anonymous readers helped improve the manuscript via their thoughtful and
encouraging commentary; special credit is due for this crucial yet invisible
task. I promise to pay it forward.
