Abstract
Referencing Diana Athill's memoir, Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter (2015), this article organises an analysis of the BBC television dramas A Cream Cracker under the Settee (1988) and She's Been Away (1989) through the frame of Robert Butler's concept of the life review (1975) which, he argues, is a process through which unresolved conflicts and past experiences return to reflective consciousness, thus enabling resolution and recalibration of relationships and past events in the elderly. Viewed in the light of Butler's ideas, Athill and the 75-year-old female protagonist of each narrative suggest rarely depicted levels of agency and ongoing identity formation in the elderly. Although very different in tone, aesthetic appeal, narrative structure and class location, each drama similarly explores the inner lives of elderly women and reveals personal truths hitherto unacknowledged by them which also offer a reflection on wider society. In each case, the elderly protagonist can be seen as a subject in process with an identity formation that does not end in late life, while the life review also works to lift the veil between the dominant culture that largely wants to deny processes of ageing, and therefore death, and the lived experience of those undergoing the process.
Highlights
This paper explores the TV representations of two old women through the lens of Butler’s concept of the life review and the role of reminiscence in old age
Athill describes the pleasure of reflecting on her life from the vantage point of advanced old age, or as the interviewer/presenter Mariella Fostrop puts it, ‘a couple of weeks shy of her 98th birthday’
What is interesting about this interview is the ways in which it reveals a tension between dominant understandings of vulnerable old age, registered in Fostrop’s frequent references to Athill’s periodic wheelchair use, as much as a move into a retirement home, and the actuality of Athill’s text
Summary
This paper explores the TV representations of two old women (both in their mid-70s) through the lens of Butler’s concept of the life review and the role of reminiscence in old age. While in She’s Been Away Lillian (Peggy Ashcroft) undergoes the life review as an internal process so that we are not the interlocutor, Doris (Thora Hird) in A Cream Cracker Under the Settee talks directly to us, the viewer, drawing us into her world through a series of reminiscences that place us as the social other with whom those memories are shared.
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