Midlife Heroines, "Older and Freer"

Author(s): Margaret Morganroth Gullette

Source: The Kenyon Review, New Series, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring, 1996), pp. 10-31
Published by: Kenyon College
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4337336
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 A KENYON REVIEW COLLAGE: Later Lives

MARGARETMORGANROTHGULLETTE

MIDLIFE HEROINES, "OLDER AND FREER"

From CULTURALCOMBAT,
THE POLITICSOF MIDDLE LIFE
? 1996 by the author

PART ONE. CONSTRUCTING THE FEMALE MIDLIFE

IN CONTEMPORARY ANGLO-AMERICAN FICTION

I think that in almost any culture the older women really begin to
have a certain power. So, I'm getting older, so I really feel freer
than I ever felt. I probablywill feel even more so. I think some
of it comes from being partof a movement but some of it comes
really from just getting older and also making my own living.

GRACEPALEY

P ALEY, interviewed at the age of fifty-eight,was providinga miniature

historyof a majorsocial trendin late twentieth-centuryNorthAmerica.
Her interviewer,Ruth Perry,coming back to fiction, responded,"And
yet therearen'tmany writers[in 1983]-I can only thinkof you-who have
given us imagesof older,freerwomen."And Paley said, in her simplegnomic
way, "Well,it's just becausethat's whereI am and I seem to alwaysbe where
I am" (Perry38).

I0

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 Even in 1983, Anglo-Americanliteraturealreadyhad a few novelists
representingheroineswho becameolderandfreer,anda decadelaterthe culture
can boast of a splendidnew liberatorygenre-the midlife women's progress
novel. In 1988 I wrote a book that describedMargaretDrabble'sand Anne
Tyler's separateinventionsof the form. At that time, it was an occasion for
celebrationto have any optimisticdepictionsof women's-or, for thatmatter,
men's-aging into the middle years.1In the euphoriaof the discovery, and
in homage to life-coursedevelopmentand countercultural narrative,I called
my book Safe at Last in the Middle Years. In Safe at Last I alluded to other
womennovelists,butdidn'tattemptto describethe universeof midlifeheroines
being representedin fictionor the ideologicalimplicationsof so widespreada
revisionistgenre. It's time to begin to do both.
Until the second wave of feminism, only isolated novels-like Mary
Austin's Woman of Genius (1912), Willa Cather's Song of the Lark (1915),
Robert Herrick's Homely Lilla (1921), Virginia Woolf' s Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
and To the Lighthouse (1927), Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes WereWatching
God (1938), E. H. Young's ChattertonSquare (1947)-had disturbed a
mainstreammale culture of stereotypeslaced with malice. At a bad period
for the midlife, F. Scott Fitzgeraldfamouslysaid, "Thereare no second acts
in Americanlives." But therewere in fact at the time some ugly second acts,
and midlife women got bad partsin them:the overbearingmother-in-law,the
wretchedsexual has-been,the maternalnag.
Since the mid-seventies,however,we have been blessed with conditions
favorableto the representation of midlife femaleprotagonists.A broadconver-
sationhas gone on among majorwomen writerswho have been aging within
a more pro-femaleenvironment.They made available, and women readers
eagerlybought,morepositive narrativesand morevariedtones of voice about
the middleyearsof women(Palmer7).2 Not enoughtones of voice, but enough
so that anyone who wants to can see the energy, subjectivediversity,range
of possibility.Drabble'snarratorin The MiddleGroundrepudiatesthe prior
trainingthat led her to believe that only exceptionalwomen had interesting
midlives."Howhad she managedto acquirethe deadlynotionthat everything
she did or thoughthad to be exemplary,had to meansomething,not only for
herself,but also for that vast quakingseethingtenuousmass of otherness,for
otherpeople. 'WomanAppointedAmbassador.WomanFlies to Moon. Woman
Killed in Bank Raid. Womanof Forty-six Has Twins.' Well, no wonder,of
course, one couldn'tbe all those women at once, nor was there any possible
way of being all the things that women might be, in one lifetime"(229). In
Anglo-Americanrepresentation, the novel has been democraticallyconstructing
a plethoraof middlelifetimes, quietlylocatingordinaryheroinesin all classes
and regions, colors and sexual orientations,across a very wide swath of
mid-adulthood.

II

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I2 A KENYON REVIEW COLLAGE:LATERLIVES

Although not yet clearly recognized as a genre, the female midlife

progress novel boasts popularand influentialproducers:Nadine Gordimer,
Doris Lessing, Paule Marshall,Toni Morrison,May Sarton, Alice Walker,
amongothers,have also contributedto it. They have inventednotjust heroines
but plausible narrativesof psychologicaland ethical success, ignoringboth
male patternsof success3and stereotypicalfemale midlifepatternsof decline.
(The first popular midlife romance, Bridges of Madison County, suggests
that even romance,that impervioustradition,can be alteredby the cultural
proximityof the midlife progressnovel.) Movies like Fried GreenTomatoes,
Breathing Lessons, and Foreign Affairs (the last two from novels by Tyler and
Alison Lurie, respectively),fighting conventionswithin the far more ageist
visual media, suggest that the large female audiencealso has some power to
redirectthe representations of televisionand film in a way more favorableto
midlife women. The midlife women's progressnovel not only led the way,
historically;of all the media it still provides the most effective strategies
for antisexist and antiageist resistance.I want to treat these novels as a
genre,emphasizingcommonfeaturesand the limits withinwhich divergences
operate.
Collectively,I believe the genreconstructsa new female midlife subject
and thus helps its readers construct their own midlife identities. In the
postwar period critics have seen this psycho-culturalprocess at work via
novels aboutJews, African-Americans, gays and lesbians, native Americans,
Chinese, Chicanos/as.Now it's the turn of the "middle aged." When a
previouslymisrepresented groupacquiresenoughconvincingfictionalprotag-
onists-diverse, compelling,counterstereotypical-peoplein that group can
begin these transformingprocesses,using the fictionsinteractively.
Most readers of novels still assume that fiction is mimetic: it ".... is read,
in otherwordsaccepted,at a particularhistoricalmomentas an accurateand
of the experienceit refersto" (Ebert93). This trustallows
'true'representation
narrativeto workon us. Narrative,as theoristNancyArmstrongputs it, works
not by "... mere reflection, effect, reproduction, or distortion of some more
primaryterrainof events, but ratheras the very stuff by which we come to be
whoeverwe are."4We do not slavishly imitatefictional"models";we choose
some elementsof the modelintuitivelyanduse themcreatively."Atstakein all
imaginativeactivityis the questionof who we becomeby virtueof the roles we
try on and the struggleswe enter"(Altieri 16). Midlifeprogressnovels permit
readersto comparethe values and optionsof heroines,stabilizing,expanding,
altering,and/or overthrowing(partsof) their own sense of self; developing
their dreams,ambitions,decisions;revisingand renamingtheir very feelings;
theirlife-course.5The operationsthatreaderscan perform
finally,narrativizing
on liberatoryfictionshave become more possiblethanever before for midlife
women.
Genresarealwaysin process.Theachievementsof this genrearedescribed
in Part One of this essay; Part Two identifiesits possible-desirable-next

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 MARGARET GULLETTE I3

moves. This sequence enables me to bring curious evolving news from the
culturefront.

How progressnovels treatthe issue thatwomen'smagazinewritersmight

have us thinkthe single most dreadfulproblemfor "older"women, the "loss
of beauty,"displays the genre's strategiesof resistance.None of the novels
I refer to treatsthe body as the single most dreadfulproblem:at worst, the
protagonist'spreoccupationwith her body takes up a small place in the text,
and no protagonistcontemplatesgetting a face lift. And they all eschew the
romanceapproach,whichis not to noticeaging at all. The progressnovel is too
hardheadedandtoo knowledgeableaboutthe culture'ssexist ageismto fall into
thatsilly trap.Theremay not be a "beautiful"womanin the whole canon.But
there'san amazingrangeof appreciationsof the midlife face and body. Doris
Lessing's Jane Somers declaresin If the Old Could, "I saw in the looking-
glass this rathergood-lookingwoman,not badly made, solid ratherthanslim,
with a face redeemedfrom ordinarinessby the greatgrey eyes, and the pretty
silverychunksof hairthatmakepeoplelook: Is she grey, or is it a dye?"(285)
Jane is momentarilyshocked by an early photograph,but concludes,"I saw
somethingelse as I stood there, looking from the photographto me-it was
me as I mustseem to [a youngerwoman].The unreachableaccomplishmentof
it, this womanstandingthereso firmon the pile of herenergeticand successful
years. What a challenge,what a burden,the middle-aged,the elderly, are to
the young" (285-86). Jane Somers is fifty-five.
Hannah Burke, a psychiatristin Lisa Alther's Other Women,is first
describedby a youngerwomanclientas a "gray-haired housewifein a polyester
pantsuitwith a gaze like a police interrogator" (7). Hannah Burke'sexact age
is not given, but she is havinghot flashes.When she gets a proposition from a
"charming" young male colleague,she's surprised, "now that she was into the
heavymaintenancedecades"(25). The reader
is not surprised,however, because
her presence-her aliveness, which includes her sexuality-is sufficiently
representedin more importantsectorsof her life.
Liz Headleand,a psychiatristin Drabble's Natural Curiosity,thinks,
"Liz is withering,the veins stand up on the back of her hands, and she is
even developingdarkfreckly spots. She is puttingon weight, but she is also
withering.It is an interestingprocess, and she watches it with an amused
fascination"(22). Liz is fifty. In Drabble'sRadiantWay,Alix Bowen, kissed
by a marriedman she loves, thinks "Ridiculous...a grey-haired,middle-
aged woman in an apron.But she knew she was not ridiculous,it was not
ridiculous;extraordinarily handsomeshe knew herselfto be, as she stoodthere
in Caroline'sblue stripedbutcher'sapron"(300-301). Alix is aboutforty-five.
Middle-agedCelie, in Alice Walker'sThe Color Purple, having been told all

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I4 A KENYON REVIEW COLLAGE:LATER LIVES

her life that she is "ugly,"sums up, "Nothingspecialhere for nobodyto love.
No honey coloredcurly hair,no cuteness.Nothingyoung and fresh. My heart
mustbe young andfreshthough,it feel like it bloomingblood"(220). And the
womanshe loves comes backto her, observingjealouslyhow "fine"she looks.
HarrietHatfield,in a novel by May Sarton,explains why she's better
looking than ever before: ". . . at sixty one comes into one's own face at last.
I was, you have to admit,a ratherplain person in the old days" (Education
of HarrietHatfield158). Alison Lurie's Vinnie Mineris anotherplain person
who has benefitedfrom aging. "Butjust as she was resigningherself to total
defeat,the oddsbeganto alterin Vinnie'sfavor.Withinthe last couple of years
she has in a sense caughtup with, even passed, some of her betterequipped
contemporaries.... She is no betterlooking thanshe ever was, but they have
lost more ground.... Her features have not taken on the injured,strained
expressionof the formerbeauty.... She is not consumedwith rage and grief
at the cessationof attentionsthat were in any case moderate,undependable,
and intermittent" (Foreign Affairs 11).
One of the heroinesof BarbaraKingsolver'sPigs in Heaven is sixty-
one-year-oldAlice, a formercleaningwoman."Itdawnson her with a strange
shock that she is still the same person she was as a nine-year-old.Even her
body is mostly unchanged.Her breastsare of a small, sound architectureand
her waist is limberand strong;she feels like one of those Californiabuildings
designed for an earthquake"(8).
In popularculture,the body (especiallythe face) is presented,and meant
to be felt as, the sinisterindex of aging. In midlife progressnovels, whatever
happens,the declinethe cultureteachesus to expect doesn'toccur.Alice feels
the same;continuitymattersmorethanchange.HarrietHatfield,VinnieMiner,
andCelie are handsomerthanthey used to be. In an earlierJaneSomersnovel,
Jane's losing an obsessive interestin the cleanlinessof her body-giving up
her long, self-absorbedhot baths-is a sign of maturityandinvolvementin the
lives of less fortunatewomen.Or some loss of beautyhas slowly occurredbut
the process is a source of interestratherthan despair.Physicalaging doesn't
entailotherlosses-doesn't, for example,meanthata womanwill not be loved
or not be able to work well. In some novels, attractivenesshas nothingto do
withage: it's a questionof life energy,or well-being,or a historyof sharedlove.
Or somethingthatmightbe labeledugly doesn't repel. In general,appearance
simplylooms less largein midlifeprogressnovels thanit does in novels written
in anxious young-adulthoodabout (and by) youngerwomen. This technique,
changingthe ratios,may be the most convincingstrategyof all.
The varietyof positive attitudesthese fictions provideis like an array
of enlightenmentsfor dealing with the-body-as-the-dial-of-time. All together
(becauseproliferationmatters),thesenovelsteachwomento look at one another
with new eyes. This is the first psycho-culturaleffect I want to notice. Any
midlife progressnovel revises the norm that we might call "patheticallyor
despicably aging." All together, they weaken the effects of the corrosive,

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 MARGARET GULLETTE I5

powerful,negative ideology of aging we all grow up submergedin. It's as

if all these women writersgive us a chance to comparenotes aboutwhat we
have been up to over the past twenty/thirty/forty
or more years, and to say
to one another,as if we were at one vast cohort reunion,"How have you
come through?"Youdon't have to have gone to the samecollege to participate
in this reunion,you don't need to have gone to college at all. You join in
the conversationat this reunionsimply by readingthe rightbooks. In an era
in which fewer people read, and in which few films providecountercultural
images, the novels of the midlife women's progressgenre ought somehowto
be requiredreading.

The genre typically elevates members of a group we might call the

once-poor-in-spirit. It rescuesthem-shows them rescuingthemselves-from
situationsof continueddepletion.One of the genre's unspokenpsychological,
ethical,and culturalfunctionsis to redefineheroismat midlifeto includeself-
rescue.Ordinaryheroinesare not heroicin a fatal classicalway, like Antigone
or Cleopatra,who defy state power. (The genre does containpotentialspace
for resistingthe state.)They need only survive,cope, or resistwhateverbatters
them.The authoris free to choose theirvicissitudes:financialhardship;racism,
sexism, homophobia;loss of partner,child, friends;psychic self-ravagingthat
has gone on a long time. Middle-ageismis the hidden vicissitude they are
all subjectedto. Not necessarilyin the text: It is buriedin the reader'sown
thought,"How can she overcomethis, now, at her age?" The genre answers
the culture'sreiteratedmotto,"No secondchances,"with plots thatare nothing
if not new starts.
In TheRealmsof Gold(1975), Drabblechose a famousarcheologistwhose
sisterhas committedsuicideand who thinksher own depressivenesshas come
from a family curse. In ForeignAffairs (1984), Luriebuilt her versionof the
genre arounda self-pityingmiddle-agedNew Englandacademicwho doesn't
believe in her own lovableness. In The Color Purple (1982), Alice Walker
restoreda homely, poor, Southernblack woman whose childhoodand young
adulthoodhave been a series of losses and degradations.
One difficultset of novels-the most sparein termsof recovery-deals
with women who have lost children.In OtherWomen,Alther'sself-protective
analysthas lost two childrenin a fire.In Disturbancesin theField,LynnSharon
Schwartz'smusicianloses two childrenin a bus accident;her marriagefalls
apartas the husbandand wife discoverhow differentlythey grieve.In the most
dreadfulset of circumstances,as told in Toni Morrison'sBeloved,an escaped
slave, years before the EmancipationProclamation,kills her newbornbaby
daughterwhen the slavers come to capturethem all.
Progressnovels by womenlead us by the handthroughthe psychological
processesof survivaland at least the early stages of recovery.6HannahBurke

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i6 A KENYON REVIEWCOLLAGE:LATER LIVES

in OtherWomen,whose childrendied severaldecadesbefore,findsthatshe has

been punishingherself unknowingly.She has deprivedherself of the risk of
new relationships,becauseof an unconsciousfearof "theinevitableaftermath":
loss. Her cure is to take the risk of makinga friend who is the age her lost
daughterwould have been, despitethe fact that the woman is a patient.As a
therapist,she arguesmost wryly and explicitly for the value of time. "What
about her own despair?It didn't seem to be aroundmuch anymore.... The
older she got, the less anythingcould upset her for very long. Maybethe only
real cure for her clients was the aging process. But that could take years."It
does indeed.Sethe in Belovedkilled her baby when she was nineteen;having
punishedherself for eighteenyearsby solitude,celibacy, and forgetfulness,at
thirty-seven,with the help of a lover,she findscourageto makea good wish for
herself.She decidesshe wants"tolaunchher newer,strongerlife with a tender
man"(99). It takes a long novel to chroniclethe process:she mustremember,
over-expiate,forgive herself for her innocentcrime, exorcise the ghost of the
murderedbaby, and begin to recover.Only on the very last page does it look
like she might,when her lover, touchingher face, assuresher, "Youyour best
thing, Sethe. You are"(273). The first stage in recoverywould be self-trust,
believing we are worthyto survive.Time is a friend in recoverynovels, but
friendshipcan work slowly.
Midlife heroines have emergingstrengthsthey haven't known to use;
sometimesthey can do much more than cope. To evaluatethe genre, we also
need to ask the morepositivequestion,"Howmuchcan she attain?"Heroines
do not always get everythingthey want, or everythingwe could think of to
want for them. But the genre shies away from the fictionalpunishmentsthat
feel like comeuppance.It disowns,by definition,a storyof timebalancedmore
towardloss than gain. Balanced,at times precariously,astridea judgmentof
what the life course brings,such novels tip in subtle ways towardgrantinga
charactera good wish or two.
Again, the plots resist unspoken(but everpresent)middle-ageism.Char-
acters,althoughno longer "young,"are capableof loving and inspiringlove,
and this stateseems naturalto them.(The privilegedstate of mutuallove used
to be reservedin fictionfor the young alone.) Sometimesreal love comes for
the first time in midlife, as it does to Celie in The Color Purple or Vinnie
Minerin ForeignAffairs.Sometimesit's the best of all loves thatcomes then,
as in TheRealmsof Gold:WhenFrancesWingatemarriesthe love of her life,
both her reasonsfor doing it and the prognosisfor happinessare betterthan
they were the first time around.If love can come after divorce, it can also
surprisea widow, as it does in PenelopeLively's PerfectHappiness.Midlife
fiction can give a second chance even to that most dubiousand deridedof
heterosexualconditions,the long-termmarriage.JustinePeck, the wispy seeker
of Anne Tyler'sSearchingfor Caleb,discoverslate in a long marriagethat it
has been the right situationfor her, not just one she wanteddesperatelyfor
the wrongreasonswhen she was young. In Tyler'sBreathingLessons,despite

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 MARGARET GULLETTE I7

the husband's ruinous depressiveness, the optimistic wife finds a bare margin
of benefit in continuing the relationship. If some of these conclusions seem
unpalatable,perhaps we are being taught not to overrule whatever idiosyncratic
thing a midlife woman might be able to want.
Midlife heroines are free from the age-graded plot need either to eschew
or endorse marriage. The romance plot, ending in marriage, used to be
obligatory for young women even in "high" fiction; then, in feminist fiction
of the seventies, abandoning her marriage became a semi-obligatory plot for a
young-adult woman who had walked naively into the romance. Midlife plots
break both molds. In the middle years, women can be free of heterosexual
mystification or the related belief (which lesbians might hold as well) that a
woman is not complete except in a couple. Harriet Hatfield, the widow in
a lesbian relationship that lasted twenty-five years, feels without regret that
the coupled part of her life is over. Nadine Gordimer's Vera Stark, in None
to Accompany Me (1994), married for forty years to a man she has loved
passionately, finds that she needs him very much less than he needs her, and lets
him learn this and slip out of her life. In The Middle Ground, Kate Armstrong
at forty-plus says this explicitly at the very end of the novel. The man who
loves her asks,

"Do you think you will ever fall in love again, Katie?"
"I doubt it. Why should I?"
"Why should you indeed."
"I've done all that. Once or twice too often, in fact." (259)

Many Drabble heroines come to this conclusion. Liz Headleand goes through
a divorce in The Radiant Way, and in its sequel, A Natural Curiosity, although
mildly pleased to have an encounter with a man in his thirties that is "tinged
with sex" seems to have no inclination to begin the sexual life again. She it
is who congratulates herself that

having given up sex and contraception,her bodily existence had been of an exemplarycalm
and regularity.Odd to think of, almost impossible to remember,the tormentinganxieties
of those earlier decades: whether one was or was not pregnant... whether or not one was
bleeding irregularly,whetherthe pill was maskingreal illnesses, whetheror not one's partner
was losing interest, was too interested, was inadequate,was faithless. Tempestuoustimes.
So much anxiety, about one's reproductivesystem.
(Radiant Way244)

If novels begin to give accounts of menopause more frequently they

won't be able to improve much on this vision of the transition to a less anxious
time in the life of the body. Of course, given the pro-sex features of our
culture, there are plenty of images of exciting, loving sexuality (occurring,
presumably, during or after menopause): Celie. Vinnie Miner. Hannah Burke.
The difference is that sexuality in the middle years doesn't oblige a woman
to be totally dependent on someone else; she maintains her autonomous life,

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I8 A KENYON REVIEW COLLAGE:LATER LIVES

achievements,pleasures, selfhood. The midlife heroine has many tracks to

her life.
Whatsome midlife heroinescan also attain,it turnsout, is workattuned
to theirtalentsand interests,meaningfulwork-sometimes in a cause. Harriet
Hatfieldwill be able to make a (modest) living for the first time, from her
women's/lesbianbookstore.Formanywomen,however,suchworkis a fantasy,
and some novelists representthat. Beloved's Sethe will still be a cook. The
Middle Ground'sKate Armstrong,a workingjournalist,can't afford to take
the time to attendclasses and upgradeher scholarlyskills. But there's some
roomfor fantasyin midlife,or, putbetter,enoughachievementaroundthatisn't
fantasyfor readersto relishwork-successwhenrepresentedin fiction.Celie had
been a housewifeuntil she left for Memphiswith her lover, Shug. She makes
a pair of pantsfor Shug, beautifuland comfortable;then she makes a man's
pair;then she goes into businessand opens a factoryfor unisex "Folkspants."
Jane Somers, befriendinga very old lady, listens carefullyto her stories of
young-adultgaiety andpoverty,and startswritinghistoricalromancesandthen
sociology of women,giving up her full-timejob as a woman'smagazineeditor
to do so. In Paule Marshall'sPraisesongfor the Widow,Avey Johnson,sixty-
four, a woman whose family fought hardto get into the middle class, has a
kind of visionaryritual experiencein which she renouncesher dry, bloated,
prosperouslife of excess in White Plains;her plan at the end is to returnto
the South Carolinaisland she used to visit as a child, to spreadto another
generationher great-aunt'sgrandmother'sstory of how the Ibo slaves walked
away over the water to freedom.

Midlife progressnovels by definitionfind a way to let the heroinelive

where she is. That may mean downgradingyoung-adulthood,not a difficult
task for this genre. In many of these novels heroines recall their pasts as
youngerwomen,or the novels tell theirstoriesstartingthemyoung,as if giving
theirbiographies.(Only meaningfullives-representative lives-deserve such
long biographies.And unlikefilm flashbacks,which tend to glamorizeat least
the looks of youth, fictionalflashbackscan't privilegethe bodily past uncon-
sciously.) By this means, we have depictionsof the social historyof women
in Englandand America,as life was lived by women who moved throughthe
decadesduringthe post-warera,particularlysince the late sixties. Whenfemale
characterslook back in midlifeor as the novelisttells theirstory,we see early
adulthood,on the whole, as a dangerousage. We learn of fear of pregnancy
in the pre-pill days, homemade abortion,dreadful marriages;the wearing
responsibilityof raisingvery youngchildren,sometimesaloneandin economic
deprivation;the coming of sexual liberation,and then the runningaway from
"sexualliberation"(puttingit into quotationmarks);the divorce revolution;
male infidelityand inadequacyand meanness;the long-termeffects of having

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 MARGARET GULLETTE I9

been neglectedor abusedin childhood.It wasn'tmuchfun being young.Some-

times these glimpsesof the past servethe heroinesby settlingold scores,or at
least settingaccountsstraightaboutparents,siblings,ex-spouses.The passage
of timeis usedto practicerevengeor transcendit; or firstone andthenthe other.
Formanyreasons,memoryis importantto midlifefiction.The memoryof
youthwas a discoverythatcould be madeonly by midlife narratives.Virginia
Woolfsaid she didn'tknow-or reallylike-Mrs. Dallowayuntil she invented
her memories.Currentnovelistshave anotherreasonfor wantingto writeabout
theircharacters'recollectionsof theirtwenties,thirties,forties,and fifties.This
is wherethe untoldstoriesare. (Withmidlifefictionsas models, manywriters
must be asking themselves why they tell a woman's story from eighteen
to thirty-or a man's-and call it quits just when it's getting interesting.)
Memoriesthicken a character'slife, justify it, explain her identity up to a
point.The main effect is to providea contrastbetweenyouththen and "where
I am" now. If these are developmentstories-which risk naive optimism-a
skepticalfeminist slant can wardoff sentimental,too-easy resolutions.These
novels are not nostalgic;nostalgiawouldbe a suspectemotion.As urgentcases
like The Color Purple or Beloved, or Other Women show, a woman must be
able to get free of her past. She has survivedit, living on into the present.
The past has been bornein orderthatthe presentmightbe different.After the
sufferingcome relief and understanding, maybe power and wisdom. Thus, in
progressnarratives,recallingbeingyoungeris a way of expressinggratitudefor
having moved on in the life course.The "progress"such novels convincingly
model is that it feels betterto be older than younger.

Implicitly, any narrativetells a story of life-over-time.The story that

mainstreamcultureinsists on is that midlife aging is a disasterto be feared
and wardedoff: dangerousor boring,banalor risky, mainly the onset of the
decline into old age. A current"oppositional"discourse(visible in women's
magazinesand self-help books) promotesa peppy message of easy recovery
that minimizes internalizedobstacles, ignores socioeconomic disadvantage
and offers solutions brought-to-you-by-the-advertisers. The midlife women's
progressnovel sends out altogetherdifferentsignals. These can be read as
lessons in the encounterbetween grave risk and brave response.Life in the
middle is rich and complicated,dense and perplexed,situated in particular
specificconditionsof income,status,relationships,psychichistory.The midlife
for heroines is dangerouslike any other part of life, and more dangerous
because of middle-ageism.But it is also safer because the heroineis herself
a site of power, intelligence,learning,pleasure,expectation,intention.Name
any good thing (except for mereyouth-in-itself)and it pertainsto the midlife.
The momentfor being astonishedaboutthis is over. How is it, though,that

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20 A KENYON REVIEW COLLAGE:LATERLIVES

growingnumbersof women'snovels can resistthe dominantcultureandmodel

this complex kind of progressthroughthe life course?
Credithas to go first to the social revolutionsof our time-feminist,
racial-ethnic,and lesbian movementsin law and culture.These movements
have been making legal gains and/or winning discursive market-sharein
the same decades in which these heroines came into being. Many women
derivedstrengthdirectlyfrom the movements.In general,change and choice
and growth-"progress"-have been much-theorizedvalues of the last three
decades, promotednot just by the civil rights movementsbut by therapeutic
communities,life-spandevelopmenttheorists,midlife stage-theorypopulariz-
ers, gerontologists;even to some extentby liberalhumanistsandpost-Marxists
and postmodernistsin culturalstudies.Severally,each of these fields requires
some versionof the sameidea:thatthe life spanof an individualmustcontainat
least some potentialfor "progress,"howeverdefined.Even if personalprogress
could be proven to be an illusion (which I doubt), it would be a necessary
illusion.No politicsis possiblewithoutthe ideaof individualchangesupporting
the idea of communitiesthatintendchange.Despitetheirdiverseagendasand
some indifferenceto or contemptfor the rationalesof the others,the overlap
of the discourseshas had a powerfulimpacton everyonein the culturewho
has been listeningfor it and some impacteven on thosejust overhearingit.
Economic independenceprobablyenabled some women to read them-
selves into progressnarratives.Even thoughon averagewomen's wages peak
earlierin the life coursethanmen's (thirty-fiveto forty-fiveratherthanforty-
five to fifty-five),they have grown slightly over the past twenty years while
men's have dropped.In the middle classes, the curve of wages rises through
the middle years, and many freedomslinked with the midlife are possible:
re-education,changes in jobs and careers,renunciationsof hated kinds of
work,adventuresin postponedareas(travel,social service).Eachof the women
who have writtenprogressnovels must have a complicatedrelationshipto the
opportunitiesof the postwarera.
But many women are less touchedby either economic advancesor the
discoursesof empowerment.If we all narrateour life stories, to each other
in conversation,or mutteringto ourselves in the subway, or waking up at
3:00 A.M.,suchwomenaremorevulnerableto midlifefemaledeclinenarratives
in fiction and other media, having fewer sourcesof resistanceto them.7The
dangerof decline novels, with their own powerfulclaim to mimesis, is that
they foreclose the future,expunginghope, making effort seem superfluous,
and too often confusing"aging"with bad men, bad children,bad government
policies, and bad luck.
So if "women"(amongothercategories)were granteda generallicense
to "write"theirown lives, not all could easily narratethem as progresses.The
contributionof the midlife women's progressgenre has been to broadenthe
possible definitionsof life-course"progress"and make them seem accessible
andplausiblein a way thattheory,or exhortationto change,or psychotherapy,

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 MARGARET GULLETTE 2I

or even a decent job with a future, each by itself or all together, cannot.
Heroines don't have to earn more money. Survival or recovery first; then the
sense of expanded value-new psychic ambitions-growth in the sense of
one's usefulness, spiritual redemption. Without humbug, the genre teaches that
a woman can make a good wish for herself and get it and dare to call it good.
In print, heroines model resistance, make abstracttheory make sense. The
straight-talking Shug Avery of The Color Purple retorts, to a man advocating
submission to the conventions, "Albert. Try to think like you got some sense.
Why any woman give a shit what people think is a mystery to me" (171). Only
a woman sheltered by a solid subgroup, and trusting the genre, could read
that without trembling for Shug's future. But once a reader learns she needn't
tremble, she can pick up a new tone of voice. Every free speech invented for a
novel's scenes of private life could ultimately be uttered in real life and have
an impact on the whole social text.
Like other heroines, Drabble's Esther Breuer in A Natural Curiosity brings
the news to women who might not have formulated it for themselves. "One
would think... that options would have diminished to nothingness. Instead of
opening up. As they do. Odd, isn't it, the way new prospects continue to
offer themselves?" (306). In tones from mild surprise to wild exhilaration to
cautious disbelief, women who read fiction or have other access to a progress
narrative plausible to them are led to wonder why they used to think that life
would close down into the old cul-de-sac of middle age. Women have found
many ways to read midlife progress narratives as allegories of their own life-
course experience. The counter-culturaleffect has been that the progress novel,
whether explicitly feminist or not, has made change and choice and growth
seem accessible via-not in spite of-aging.
Accessible to midlife women. Men, unfortunately, have had fewer and
weaker messages of this kind, and many more messages about midlife male
decline, failure, and loss-which is why women sometimes feel that they are
living in some other decade than the men in their lives, or that the men are
acting as if they were twenty years older than their chronological age. And
why some men feel jealous of their female partners, uncertain about how to
benefit from a revived midlife. We need a parallel study of midlife men in
fiction, to ascertain how age and gender have intersected for men over the
same twenty-year period. I suspect that men who read the midlife women's
progress novel may also benefit, insofar as they can take personally the genre's
generic message that aging need not be a decline.8
The greatest gift of the genre is that-most of the time, only im-
plicitly-it appreciates aging into the middle years. (The uppermost age of
the progressive heroine, now in the mid-sixties, will probably rise.) Every
progress plot uses its time to move the protagonist toward a greater degree of
empowerment. "Empowerment" can be a vague and empty word. Narrative,
though, makes real what it feels like to move toward being more autonomous
and active and successful. A particular novel might move the evolving

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22 A KENYON REVIEW COLLAGE:LATER LIVES

protagonistfroma miserablechildhoodor young-adulthood to a richermidlife,

frombewildermentto meaningfulness,fromconflictto resolution,fromdespair
or inertiato hope, pain to serenity,defect to fulfillment,drive to freedom,
loss to acquisition.As an older adult, a readercan note that her desire for
a "post-genderedworld of greaterequality,in which the traitsand privileges
now assignedto men and women on a dichotomousand unequalbasis would
circulatemore freely" (Ryan and Kellner 160)9 is likelier to come true at
midlife. (Althoughnot all the novelists call themselvesfeminists,and none, I
think,has a heroinegive creditto feminismfor her growth,these are central
values of any feminist-influencedvision.) A midlife woman, like a fictional
heroine,can makebiggerclaims in the real worldto achieveher goals. "I used
to be a differentperson,"a woman will say, with impatienceand pride. And
withoutdisowningher young self, she means that she likes herself better,as
workeror mother,lover or friend,speakeror thinker,now. In such a woman's
thinking,any evolutionover time can be generalizedas age-enhanced.
In effect, the genreisolatesaging in itself and gives it creditfor progress.
It occurs to me that a midlife woman aficionadaof such novels can testify
better than a younger woman (or a nonreaderof her own age) to her own
resilienceand that of other women. Asked whethershe'd ratherbe a midlife
woman now or at some previousera, even duringa roughpatch of life she
might answer, "Unquestionably,now." The very length of a heroine's time
line and the techniquesshe has masteredto solve her youngerproblemsseem
to her assurancesthat she (heroine?reader?both?) is a substantialperson.
Watchingheroinesrecoverfrom earliertraumas,readersare remindedof their
own psychologicalstrategies,reinforcethem, or pick up new life skills. Such
a readerhas been trained-in the way that living with charactersin fiction
trains us-to constructlife stories as ameliorativesequences, startingwith
her own.
I see no reason not to praise these empoweringeffects as effects of
time; and, theorizingwhat the genre usually only implies, I want the whole
culture to call them "aging."Not to minimize the roles of other agents of
empowerment,and not to deny that these stories too are narratives,and not
to deny the existence of decline, but for political and psychologicalreasons:
to deconstructthe mainstreamconnotationsof "aging"as a passive, natural,
biological, pre-narrativized, ahistorical,universaldecline.
It's a puzzlerthat the empoweringdimensionsof aging can be so easily
overlookedby theory,even by feminists,culturalcritics, narratologists.10 But
it may be only a matterof time until theoristsfind they mustincludeage as a
vital category,and culturalhistoriansand criticsdiscoverwhat'shappeningto
the middleyears.The women'smidlifenovel may kick in (throughits age-wise
readers)to influencenot only men's narrativebut nonfictionaldiscoursesabout
aging. The midlife progressnovel has been proliferatingeven in our troubled
era, and shortof a nationalcataclysm,we can expect more midlife heroines.
Anthropologistsone hundredyears hence, readingthe genre, might conclude

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 MARGARET GULLETTE 23

that midlife women had come so far that they had become a special, prized,
age-and-gendercategoryin the late twentiethcentury.

PARTTWO. THE FREER HEROINECOMBATING

MIDDLE-AGEISM

"Not far enough."This could be the motto of fictionoperatingwithin a

generictradition."The novels I've talkedabouthave done importantwork in
creatingthe conditionsfor an evolved Midlife Woman.But all of it, massive
an achievementas it is, only cleared the ground.Inevitably.Writersmove
beyond what they and othershave alreadyaccomplished,eitherbecause they
have been compelledto solve their own life-courseproblems,because they
are awareof otherwriters'representations of problem-solving,or becausethe
culturechums up new challenges. It is hardto definea taskbeforea numberof
writershave accomplishedit (and some would say, futile and presumptuous).
No one should constrainthe future by imaginingit too particularly;on the
otherhand,the powerof utopianthinkinglies in its lack of respectfor givens,
its urgentinsistencethat certainthings must change.'2
At best, in the nineties, we are not uncontaminatedby ageism in its
culturalforms nor untouchedby its economic forms. Even feminists who
do age studies stumbleupon clots of self-hatredthat come from untheorized
internalizations. We are all recovering ageists. Our advanced Midlife Woman
had a nightmareafter seeing Death Becomes Her. She doesn't know why
Bridges of MadisonCountyobscurelylet her down, even thoughthe midlife
man was so besottedwith the heroine.She's begun to feel "There'snot a lot
of good time left," but she doesn't connect this with the hostile atmosphere
she lives in (menopausediscourse,movies, TV shows, jokes, books, the cult
of youth).
The invisible cultural challenge right now is "aging"-in quotation
marks- "aging"understoodas a mainstreamideology, a culturalconstruct,
a set of narrativeoutcomes.(Womenof thirty-and men-should be paying
attentiontoo, because this is their future.)"Aging"does not mean gray hair,
laughlines, back pain, or any othervisible/imaginedphysiologicalchangeson
or in thebody -the kindsof changesa popularwriterlike JudithViorstrefersto
when she publishes a book with the title How Did I Get to Be Forty, and Other
Atrocities.I got to be fortyby not dying beforehand,anddamnif I'm going to
considerthatan atrocity.The real atrocityis culturalandeconomicdeprecation
of women (and men) who are "past"youth. As a Fay Weldoncharactersays,
at a little over fifty-five, Is "... this my punishment? To believe that I am still
alive, and live as a useless old woman in a Westernindustrializedsociety?"
(Praxis 25).
This is a bitterbut wised-upremark.It hints thataging is not something
thatbefallsme in my bodybecauseI don't exerciseenoughor buy skin creams

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24 A KENYON REVIEW COLLAGE:LATER LIVES

or get a face-lift.Ourproblemis not primarilybiological-not for manymore

years,at least-but out therein the discoursesandinstitutions.We areagedby
the culture.This kind of aging shouldbe put in quotationmarks,like "race,"
untilwe get the point aboutthe middleyears.'3"Midlifeaging"is a set of fears
thatsociety teachesus to internalizebeginningin adolescence,a set of material
conditionsit inflictsunevenly,anda set of attitudestowardthe entireage class.
A case in point: Althoughthe midlife culturalimaginaryis now full
of empoweringfictions,the socioeconomicfacts can be grim. The wonderful
womandoesn'talwaysget thejob-and sometimesshe loses herjob-because
of her age. "Olderjob applicantsare likely to confrontage discriminationone
of every four times they apply for availablejobs," says AARP lawyerCathy
Ventrell-Monsees,using a small samplethat includesmen (Lewis 2).14 In the
postindustrialtransnationaleconomy of late capitalism,there are alreadynot
enoughjobs to go around.Superannuation is going to be one way the market
sorts out the "undesirable." Nor does the wonderfulwoman'sjob successes
matterif she dies prematurely,as so many poor people do, especiallywomen
and men of color.'5
How should midlife progress fiction respond to superannuationand
women's midlife cancersand heartattacks,and the internalizationsof aging
and ageist propaganda-the full range of problemsspecific to the midlife?
The temptationfor mainstreamrepresentations will be to go backto portraying
midlife women as ugly and obese, or frail, emotionallyweak, intellectually
inadequate,repeatedlyfailing in the work force. Run on corporatemoney,
mainstreampopularculture,is becomingsaturatedwith victimsguilty of being
"too old," because victim-blamingmakes social evils appearirremediable.In
such circumstances,midlife fiction and culturalcriticismshould not fall into
the trapof eschewingthe progressplot. The positive characterand entitlement
and skills and hope and communitythatprogressnovels help to constructmay
be essential in facing futureevils.
Locatingthe problemof midlifeaging in cultureandeconomicpractices,
while an enormousachievement,opens up yet more challengingproblems.As
the same Fay Weldoncharactersays, "In the middle portionof my life ... I
was preparedto believe, how I wantedto believe, that I had to cure myself to
cure the world.Now I believe I have to cure the worldto cure myself. It is an
impossibletask. I am bowed down by it" (Praxis 48). Withoutcountingon a
worldcure, we need to move frompsychologicalsurvivalor recoveryinto age
politics. We need to go back and forthinteractively,from individualsalvation
(such as it is) to collective understandingsand action. Eventuallywe will be
able to look to age theoryto providedeconstructionsof the sourcesof midlife
"aging."But even thenwe will need fictionto makethese deconstructionsreal.
Thereis much more that writersof progressfictioncan do to dismantle
the systems that supportage characterizations-once they can demystifyand
destroywhat they themselveshave internalizedof the decline view of the life
course.One of the subtleweaknessesof the genre is thatit often inadvertently

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 MARGARET GULLETTE 25

fetishizesyoung-womanhood("beingyoung").Havinginventedmemory,and
needingthe past to be thereto be recoveredfrom,the midlifenovel can't seem
to give up the retrospectivemood.Heroinesoftenhavetoo muchpast.It maybe
angst-filled,it may be deplorableand deplored,but it takesup room thatcould
be used for present-tenseactivities.The practiceis implicitly nostalgic. Out
of a relatedbias, the heroine'sfuturecan seem skimpy-an effect produced
by Praisesong for the Widow, by Breathing Lessons (perhaps intentionally),
by Toni Morrison'sJazz. Prolepsis-the techniqueof lettingthe readerknow
whatthe character'sfutureis likely to be-needs to be animatedby the writer's
knowledgethatfor readers"thefuture"alwaysmeans"beingolder yet."In the
endingof every novel there's a furtherimpliednarrativeaboutaging.
Some midlifefictionsarebeginningto tryto "cure"the world-that part
of the worldthatproducesage stereotypesand mythsand misery.The midlife
is currentlythe best "place"in the life courseto examinehow cultureages us.
The first baby step was to recognizefear of aging, as Doris Lessing does in
the intenseDiary of a Good Neighbour.FortyishJane Somers startsoff as a
woman who has failed her husbandand her motheras they lay dying, feels
her failure acutely, and sets out to "learnsomethingelse": how to "behave
like a humanbeing and not like a little girl" (11). Her developmentis told
as a storyof her learningto care for an old woman:initially"an old crooked
witch"(30), thena very poor,frail,dirty,smelly, sordidbeing of ninety;thena
womanwithherown stories,a presentsense of self, intentions:MaudieFowler.
Initially,it's hardfor Janeeven to be with her, feeling "so trapped"(26); she
has to force herself to visit, help, come close, feel empathy.By the end, as
a friend, she accompaniesMaudieto the hospital,holds her, helps her die.
JaneSomersundergoesan initiationwith complicatedstages, from selfishness
to empathy,from aversionto connection.By makingSomersfifty ratherthan
young, Lessing went way beyond those sentimentalfictions in which an old
womanis treatedby a youngone as a being of uncomplicatedbeauty,wisdom,
and power-a genre that might be called the romanceof old age.
Moraldevelopmentrequiresus to deal with some of the unbendableiron
of life: pain thatdoes not go away by reconceptualizing it, chronicillness, the
deathof a parent.But in makingMaudieFowler at ninety the object that we
must learnto love because she is us, Lessing misled us aboutthe sourcesof
fearof aging. In our culture"aging"is no longera synonymfor "old age."16 If
we dreadold age as earlyas ourthirtiesor forties,it is not because"revulsion"
is natural,or because we "know"what we'll be like in forty years. The old
age of manywomen has been activelyimmiseratedby genderedandracialized
andageist inequalitiesthroughoutthe life course,by inadequatepensions,bias
in Social Security,and such factors.Becauseof this, old age in generalcan be
representedas lonely, terrified,boring, sickly, and costly to society. But it's
midlife aging that repels women first.We are taught"fearof fifty."
Alison Lurie's Foreign Affairs took the next steps. Lurie saw midlife
aging as intimate-about me; a questionnot of naturaldreadbut of settled

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26 A KENYON REVIEW COLLAGE:LATERLIVES

unexpectation,habits of self-demeaning.She placed the blame implacably

whereit belongs:with men who carry"theculture"like a virus,with literature
and the media, with internalization.The heroine,Vinnie Miner, is "fifty-four
years old, small, plain, and unmarried-the sort of person that no one ever
notices" (3). Even today there are disproportionately few older charactersin
fiction,"Luriewrote,editorially(ignoringLessing,Drabble,Tyler,and others,
but makinga generalpoint that still holds good a decade later.) "Vinniehas
accepted the convention;she has tried for years to accustomherself to the
idea thatthe rest of her life will be a mere epilogueto what was never,it has
to be admitted,a very exciting novel" (207). "In this culture,where energy
and egotism are rewardedin the young and good-looking,plain aging women
are supposedto be self-effacing,uncomplaining" (5). "In books, plays, films,
advertisements,only the young and beautifulare portrayedas making love.
That the relativelyold and plain do so too, often with passion,is a well-kept
secret,"Lurie'snarratorreveals (213), as Vinniestartsdoing so with passion.
If only the belief that "people over forty have no life" were widely
recognizedas middle-ageism,Vinniemighthaveusedhertwist of resentmentto
combatit openly. As it is, she acceptsthe convention,and her self-pampering,
kleptomania,self-pity, and fantasies of revenge (the methods that Lurie, a
sympatheticmoralist,gives her at the beginningof the novel) reinforceher
isolation.Her rigiditiesshow the readerhow culturalstereotypesmay almost
become"true."Self-pity,to whichall humanbeingsareproneat times,can be a
culturally-constructeddiseasefor midlifewomen.In herplot, self-pityprevents
Vinnie from noticing that the unsuitableman who courts her is actually in
love with her;preventsher from seeing thatshe loves him; and thus prevents
her from relishing (except for sex) the one true love affair of her life. The
experienceis slowly changingher, however:she acts unselfishlyand he tells
her she's a good woman,"andfor the firsttime Vinniealmost believed him"
(270). She has one momentalone on a parkbench when she "notonly feels
happy but curiouslyfree" (206). After her lover dies of a heart attack, she
can convince herself only by logic that he has loved her. That mitigatesher
grief and alterssomewhather sense of self. Not much,however,becauseLurie
does not choose to describewomen who change very much, and she has an
aversionto happyendings.But the novel may havea culturaleffect thatis quite
differentfrom what happenson the last page to its main character;this often
happens.ReadingForeignAffairscouldconvincea readerthatthe world"is full
of people over fifty who will be aroundand in fairly good shape for the next
quarter-century; plentyof time for adventureandchange,even for heroismand
transformation" (207). It doesn'tjust give experienceto an extremelylimited
woman;it explains,and thus demystifies,her limitations.
Fearof midlifeaginghas beengiven a particularfocus in a clusterof inter-
reverberatingnovels. These describewhatI call the "postmaternal 17 A
years."
heroine'schildren,so centralfor so long, are seen to need less care or even to
have grown up and left home, and thereare no more on the way. Realmsof

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 MARGARET GULLETTE 27

Gold, The Middle Ground, Tyler's Searchingfor Caleb and Breathing Lessons,
Beloved, all "answer"the twentieth-century'ssexist question. Can a woman
bear to release her children?So much for the old ornithologicalmetaphor:
All the novels but BreathingLessons show that life doesn't empty out like
a nest, because it has become clutteredwith accumulations.Drabbleputs the
heroine of Middle Ground(1980) explicitly in a "draughtyspace" to begin
with, but shows how her busy life engages and enrichesher;by the end she's
holdinga huge ragtagparty,which her almost-adultchildrenhelp her prepare
for. She has a man in the wings who wants to marryher; she takes in strays.
(Drabble'snovels lend themselvesnicely to summarieslike this: the heroine's
life soundsweirdbutnot dangerous,interesting,desirable,not too implausible.)
Kateanticipatesthe futureexplicitly."Anythingis possible,it is all undecided.
Everythingor nothing.It is all in the future.Excitementfills her, excitement,
joy, anticipation,apprehension.Somethingwill happen.... It is unplanned,
unpredicted.Nothing binds her, nothing holds her.... She hears her house
living. She rises"(277). Reachingmidlife, the genretells us, a womanis still
and always centralto her own life.
But we dare not second-guessthe ways of being that progressnovels
will valorize,becausetheircounter-cultural waywardnesscan lead anywhere.
In None to AccompanyMe, VeraStarkactuallysheds the accumulationsof her
life-responsibility for returningher husband'slove, for grandchildren,for
a house that always felt borrowed.Unlike almost all other free and favored
midlifeheroines,she has "less"by the end. But whatshe has is hersby choice.
Gordimermakes Vera'spolitics active, explicit;politics is her lifework,not a
new start;and it's law, which can alter nationalstates as well as individual
lives. Vera's desires may puzzle and disappointreaderswho expect the rich
possessiveness of the ends of The Middle Ground or The Color Purple. But
Gordimerhas openedup midlife possibilitiesonce again.
Far from weakening its sense of midlife possibility if the socioeco-
nomic/culturalsituationfor midlifewomenworsens,the genreneedsto become
moreinventiveaboutits heroines'ambitions,morepoliticalabouttheirchoices,
andless timidabouttheiractions.The trickworkswhen writersinventheroines
who are smartersooner,moreoutspoken.Can a heroinedecide to disseminate
anti-ageistrhetoricwithouttakinga whole novel to come to this decision?Can
she work on a "psychological"problemand discover how it was set off by
age cues? And if one midlife heroinecan dare such things, anothercan take
partin a federalsting operationdesignedto test whetherretailersare rejecting
womenapplicantsover fortywithouteven readingtheirresumes.Or six friends
can redesigna majorAmericancity by spray painting"AVENGEAGEISM"
or "GUERRILLAMATRONS"on ad billboardsthat promote anorexia in
thirteen-year-oldgirls.
Why not? Readersof the genre are preparedfor a gamut of worldly
obstaclesand a gamutof initiatives.Trustingwhat the midlife womanreader
has already become, writers of the genre could become braver in their

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28 A KENYON REVIEW COLLAGE:LATER LIVES

representations.And such deeds will have dense histories;a heroine will be

given a biographythat containsage-relatedmemories.Youth will mean the
time when she was exposed to ageism and acceptedit shudderingly("I won't
look like that!"),adulthoodwill be the time when she learnedto apply ageist
conceptspersonally("There'smy firstwrinkle").But the middleyears will be
the time when she first resentedageism consciously.
If novelists want to try to "cure"their culturemore rapidly,they may
need to editorializemore explicitly about midlife ageism than fiction usually
sees its way to doing. To achievethe radicalgenrethatthe cultureneeds now,
writersneed a centralcharacteror narrativevoice positioneda little more in
the vanguardof the culture,a teacherratherthanthe slow learnerwho is often
the subjectof feminist fiction. They may need to foregroundfear of aging.
In the following excerptfrom a memoirby Alix Kates Shulman,the heroine
confrontsher own fear and names it. Shulman'sstory doesn't feel the need
to providemuch in the way of flashback.Present-minded withoutnostalgia,it
treatshectic youth in a few pages, rushingto get the heroineto fifty.
I had long expected-indeed, hadpromisedmyself-to be rebornat fifty. For a number
of yearsI hadbeennoticingthathereand therein ouryouth-focused
culturesome defiant
one embracedfifty not as doom or disasterbut as an opportunity,a staging area from which
to begin an ascent. At fifty MotherJones, after losing her entire family to the yellow fever
epidemic of 1867, was rebornas a union organizer;at fifty Emma Goldman was deported
in the Red Scare of 1919 to the Soviet Union where she hoped to create the New Society;
after one life, Scott Nearing, knocked off balance by the Depression, moved to Vermontto
begin his great homesteadingexperiment;and at fifty,my friendMargaretF. left her famous
philanderinghusbandto become a midwife in a birthingcommunein Mexico. Why not me?'8
The unnamedheroinemoves to an island in Maine, alone, into a little
underfurnished shack withouta phone. "Timeitself settleddown-or, rather,
my relation to it mended.... On the nubble there was time enough for
everything,in fact, all the time in the world.... My new rules were few and
simple. Follow my interest.Go as deep as I can. Changethe rules whenever
I like."

People often ask me when the middle years begin, indicating not
neutralcuriositybut trepidationabout the onset of a bad, unavoidableevent.
Contemporary Anglo-Americanfictionhas alreadymadeclearthatthe "middle
years"do not have the same connotationsfor all. Underthe frown of vulgar
capitalism,some will find them years of "heavy maintenance";they'll be
vulnerableto decline cliches about age and gender,learn to try to buy their
way out; the passingyears will make them only more desperate.ObviouslyI
wantwomen(andmen too) to resistthatfrown,anduse fiction,andfriendship,
and feminism,and any otheraids, to help them do it. It is a massive cultural
task. Think:when a woman does somethingadventurous,how long it might

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 MARGARET GULLETTE 29

be-if ever-before we hear, as the admiringresponse,"How middle-aged

of you!" Let no one believe that the mere aging of the Baby Boomers will
bring automaticimprovements;every gain will have to be fought for against
powerful interestsas well as ingrainedhabits of thought.Yet for the well-
preparedand culturallyresistant,with luck the middleyearscan be the "most
peaceful and exciting, as GertrudeStein said of Paris"(Educationof Harriet
Hatfield).Midlifeprogressfictionhas its workcut out for it: to try to makethe
midlifenothingless thana "stagingareafromwhichto begin [ournext]ascent."

NOTES

'I also wrote aboutJohn Updike and Saul Bellow.

2Palmerwas not discussingthe midlife.

3This frees a critic from the patriarchalpressureto call a genre focused on women a
"feminizedgenre"(as, e.g., DanaHellerdoes in TheFeminizationof QuestRomance[1990]).

4She arguesthat "narrativeappearsto be catchingthe attentionof scholarsonce again"

in this new way (Armstrong437-38).

5The large feminist critical literatureon how women read includes Janice Radway's
Reading the Romance (rev. 1991) and Rachel Brownstein's Becoming a Heroine (1982).

6Foran expandedaccountof recoveryin midlifefiction,see Gullette,"PerilousParenting."

Morewomenin my RadcliffeSeminarsclass hadread-and loved-Beloved thananyothernovel
on the readinglist. In the most painfulstoryof loss and the slowest trajectoryof recovery,they
had found an allegory of their own lives.

autobiographieswritten by working-classmen and women, a

7In nineteenth-century
progressplot was nearlyinconceivable.Progresswas a bourgeoisemplotment."Thebourgeois
modelpresupposedan activeandreactiveworldnot
climax-and-resolution/action-and-interaction
alwaysaccessibleto working-classwriters,who oftenfelt themselvespassivevictimsof economic
determinism"(Gagnier104).

8Nobody's Fool (1994), the RobertBentonmovie based on the RichardRusso novel, is

not just a mixtureof (say) It's a Wonderful
Life and Ironweed.It is probablyinfluencedby the
self-forgivenessandsecondchancesof the adjacentmidlifewomen'sprogressnovel.AnneTyler's
novels aboutmidlife men may have helped too: e.g., Saint Maybe.

9A heroine'smove towardbeing whatthe cultureconsidersless "feminine"anddependent

may prove to a readerthe indeterminacyof gender-even if she doesn'treadtheory,even if in
other respectsshe thinksof "woman"as an essentialcategory.

?0SeeGullette,"On Doing Age Theory."

"This mottois also the title of a newsletterput out by the Women'sCommissionof the
DemocraticSocialistsof America.

12Based on a sentencein Aronowitz(55) thathas nothingto do with fictionbut is about

utopianthoughtin general.

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30 A KENYON REVIEW COLLAGE:LATER LIVES

'3See Gullette,"CulturalCombat."

14Testingfor age bias is new. The AARPcalls the studythey financed"innovative."

The
MassachusettsCommissionAgainstDiscrimination just did a similartest with women only and
found considerableage discriminationagainstwhite women over forty-five.See Gullette,"The
WonderfulWomanon the Pavement."

15Prematurephysiologicaldeclines can be distinguishedfrom declines inflictedby age

ideology (presumablyon all social subjects),by clarifying the sources of the former (e.g.,
exploitativework, environmentalracism) and their actual effects (stress, high blood pressure,
stroke,heartattacks).The relationshipsbetweenthe two kindsof "aging"deservefullertreatment.

16See Gullette,"Age/Aging."

17See Gullette,"TheInventionof the 'Postmaternal'

Woman."

18Alix KatesShulman,the authorof Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen andBurning Questions,

made availableto me sections of this work. Almostevery line of it undoessome middle-ageist
cliche. The passage appearsin her fictionalizedmemoir,Drinkingthe Rain (6) in a slightly
differentform.

Thisessayowesmuchto theengagedparticipants in "MidlifeHeroines,"

a courseI taughtin thespring
of 1993at the RadcliffeSeminars.An earlierversionwas givenat a conferenceat Radcliffein 1990.
As suggestedon pageone, theessaydevelopsthegenderaspectsof my 1988book,Safeat Lastin the
MiddleYears.It uses a few paragraphsof thatbook.

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