‘Time to go. Fast not slow’: geronticide and the burden narrative of old age in Margaret Atwood’s ‘Torching the Dusties’

Abstract

This article argues for the centrality of the intersection of age and space to our understanding of what it means to grow old. It analyses the figure of the nursing home as a space of exclusion that contains the purportedly burdensome aspects of old age in Margaret Atwood’s apocalyptic short story ‘Torching the Dusties’. The story appeared as the closing tale of Atwood’s collection Stone Mattress (2014) and explores the marginalisation of old age and the ageism manifested in spatial segregation from the perspective of literary gerontology. The short story can be read as a ‘burden narrative’ of old age that reveals how a rhetoric of crisis disaffiliates (in discursive and spatial terms) the oldest old from the young, establishing a binary opposition that affects the identity construction of nursing home inmates. It focuses on the intersections of space, time and experience, and thus also on the social, cultural and biological dimensions of ageing.