Abstract
This article explores ageing in the short, comic fiction of the Anglo-Jewish New Humourist writer Israel Zangwill. In a range of short stories, which reflect on the ways in which fin-de-siècle culture tends to align later life with decline and diminishment, Zangwill reveals the paradoxes of ageing by playing with such assumptions. These texts subvert conventional views on ageing, challenge the binary opposition of youth and old age, and critique the physiology of ageing through intergenerational difference and familial relations. The article argues that Zangwill’s texts emphasize the capacity for ageing — as a subjective experience, social identity, and means of elucidating the variable self through time — to be understood as a site of resistance or mode of subversion. In particular, his story ‘An Odd Life’ establishes creative ways to conceptualize age, as ageing is experienced by the protagonist outside the constraints of temporal realism. Willy Streetside’s anachronistic ageing — as he can be seen as simultaneously a child, in midlife, and an elderly man — manifests through a queerly asynchronous temporality, which operates beyond the expectations of reproductive futurism. Through this protagonist in particular, Zangwill establishes an alternative, non-normative model of age.
Highlights
This article explores ageing in the short, comic fiction of the Anglo-Jewish New Humourist writer Israel Zangwill
Popular novels of the period depict figures whose relationship to age is ominously mutable and unfixed, like the vampire count in Bram Stoker’s Gothic horror Dracula (1897). They represent characters who discover some mystical means to defer the onset of old age as in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) by Oscar Wilde, or those who manage to reverse the ageing process, as experienced by the title character of the farcical The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore (1897) by Hal Godfrey
A range of modern attitudes towards age and ageing were codified during the nineteenth century. These changes in outlook culminated at the fin de siècle through, for example, the establishment of old age state pensions, increasing attempts at age classification, studies in longevity, and the emergence of geriatrics and gerontology as disciplines, as well as a range of fiction which deals with ageing as a prominent issue
Summary
This article explores ageing in the short, comic fiction of the Anglo-Jewish New Humourist writer Israel Zangwill. In a range of short stories, which reflect on the ways in which fin-de-siècle culture tends to align later life with decline and diminishment, Zangwill reveals the paradoxes of ageing by playing with such assumptions. The article argues that Zangwill’s texts emphasize the capacity for ageing — as a subjective experience, social identity, and means of elucidating the variable self through time — to be understood as a site of resistance or mode of subversion His story ‘An Odd Life’ establishes creative ways to conceptualize age, as ageing is experienced by the protagonist outside the constraints of temporal realism. Streetside’s anachronistic ageing — as he can be seen as simultaneously a child, in midlife, and an elderly man — manifests through a queerly asynchronous temporality, which operates beyond the expectations of reproductive futurism Through this protagonist in particular, Zangwill establishes an alternative, non-normative model of age
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