Old Ageing

Abstract

Aging, Duration, and the English Novel examines the intimate bind that exists between duration and the conventions of realism in the English (primarily Victorian) novel. It explores this through representations of old age, although the title reveals a fascination with the process of ageing as a verb, rather than old age as a static phase of life. Jewusiak argues that the ‘Victorian novel … constructs a modern sense of duration by grafting the biological process of aging onto the era’s most elongated form’ (p. 1). Simply put, it recognises the novel as a potentially embodied form which readers mine for its replication of the experience of biological ageing. The study challenges accounts of narrative duration by theorists such as Gérard Genette and Nicholas Dames, which conceptualise it as a deep, background rhythm. Instead, Jewusiak attends to the ways ageing is represented as a surface detail, with writers tending to represent it in shorthand – for example years of ageing are compressed in a wrinkle or a grey hair. The novel’s ‘temporal realism’, as Jewusiak defines it, demands a sense of correspondence between narrative and real time – thus we have to see characters age. But in a politicised reading of the abasement of old age in an increasingly industrialised society, Jewusiak argues that a formal disappearance of ageing from the novel parallels the ideological pressure to identify as young (p. 3) and the emergence of a class of elderly men and women as a social problem (p. 5).