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As Time Goes By
As Time Goes By:
Portraits of Age
Edited by
Joy Charnley and Caroline Verdier
As Time Goes By: Portraits of Age,
Edited by Joy Charnley and Caroline Verdier
This book first published 2013
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright © 2013 by Joy Charnley and Caroline Verdier and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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ISBN (10): 1-4438-4245-1, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4245-7
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Joy Charnley and Caroline Verdier
The Ageing Mother
The Veiled Mirror: Epiphany and Epicalyptry in Contemporary French
Women’s Writing about Ageing.................................................................. 9
Jean Anderson
Memories and Nostalgia: Discovering the Mother in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s
Sur ma mère............................................................................................... 27
Nancy Arenberg
To Break the Looking-glass: Writing a Mother’s Ageing, Illness
and Death in Annie Ernaux’s Une femme and “Je ne suis pas sortie
de ma nuit”................................................................................................ 45
Marzia Caporale
Women Facing Old Age
La vieillesse menaçante: Female Ageing in Latterday Nineteenth-century
French Society ........................................................................................... 65
Danielle Bishop
Learning to be Old: Laure Wyss’s Literary Reflections on the Challenge
of Ageing................................................................................................... 83
Barbara Burns
As Time Goes By: Old Age and the Elderly in Maria Judite de Carvalho’s
Seta Despedida ........................................................................................ 101
Juliet Perkins
The Quest for Leonora Carrington: The Older Role Model in Monika
Maron’s Novel Ach Glück ....................................................................... 121
Juliet Wigmore
vi
Table of Contents
Fatherhood and Age
Le Père Goriot: The Depiction of Old Age and of Obsession? ............... 139
Maureen Ramsden
Life Begins at Sixty: Representations of Old Age in Emile Zola’s
Le Docteur Pascal ................................................................................... 153
Barbara M. Stone
Ageing ‘Heroes’
Memories and Old Age: The Old Goethe, as seen by Thomas Mann...... 173
Hans Hahn
Respect or Ridicule? The Representation of Old Age in Cervantes’s
Works ...................................................................................................... 193
Idoya Puig
Exploring Sexuality
Future Age and Children: A Compensatory “Trope of Vulnerability”
in Llorenç Villalonga’s Fiction?.............................................................. 211
P. Louise Johnson
Ageing, Masculinity and Sexuality in Serge Doubrovsky’s
L’Après-vivre and Un homme de passage ............................................... 229
Patrick Saveau
Creativity and Positivity in Old Age
“Silent Transformations”: Ageing and the Work of Writing
in Robert Pinget’s Théo ou le temps neuf ................................................ 243
Debra Kelly
“In my end / is my beginning”: Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Last Works
and Old-Age Creativity ........................................................................... 263
Eleanor Parker
As Time Goes By: Portraits of Age
vii
Towards a Positive Psychology of Ageing: A Discussion
of the Representation of Old Age in the Writings of Gabrielle Roy........ 289
Julie Rodgers
Contributors............................................................................................. 305
INTRODUCTION
JOY CHARNLEY AND CAROLINE VERDIER
The challenges represented by ageing, often linked to illness and death, are
long-standing concerns for many societies, which continue to disturb and
even terrify. 1 Nowhere is this more evident than in our youth-obsessed
western civilisations, which appear torn between recognising the
inevitability of an ageing population whilst remaining unwilling to
embrace age and all it entails.2 Life expectancy, often taken as one of the
indicators of a country’s level of development, is steadily increasing, but
concern is now turning more and more to quality of life aswell, along with
an awareness that more needs to be done to ensure that older people are
respected and looked after appropriately. 3 Ageing is very occasionally
reported and discussed in positive and respectful terms: some elderly
figures are lauded and admired, 4 psychologists and economists have
posited that people become happier as they get older,5 and the sexuality of
1
Barbara G. Walker, The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets (San
Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), pp. 213-17.
2
See for example Simone de Beauvoir, La Vieillesse, 2 vols (Paris: Gallimard,
1970); Old Age, trans. by Patrick O’Brian (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972).
3
See work done by the ‘Action conjointe européenne sur les espérances de vie en
bonne santé/European Joint Action on Healthy Life Years’, which found that it
was in Sweden that men lived the longest and retained their good health for the
longest (life expectancy 79.6 years, 71.7 in good health) whilst women had the
highest life expectancy in France and Spain (85.3 years) but conserved their good
health for the longest in Malta (71.6 years). See <http://www.inserm.fr/espacejournalistes> [accessed 22 July 2012]; also reported in Valeurs Mutualistes, 279
(July/August 2012), pp. 21-24. See also Elisabeth Gordon, ‘En santé jusqu’à 150
ans. Promesse ou utopie ?’ L’Hebdo, 16 February 2012, pp. 40-44 and Michael
Wolff, ‘Let my mother go’, The Observer Magazine, 22 July 2012, pp. 24-32.
4
Witness the considerable success of ninety-four-year-old Stéphane Hessel’s book
Indignez-vous! (Montpellier: Indigène Editions, 2010) and the national celebration
in South Africa of Nelson Mandela’s ninety-fourth birthday (19 July 2012).
5
‘The U-bend of life. Why, beyond middle age, people get happier as they get
older’, The Economist, 18 December 2010, pp. 33-36.
2
Introduction
older men and women is openly acknowledged.6 Yet in spite of all this,
omnipresent advertising and ‘celebrity culture’ constantly feed individual
worries by emphasising the need to look as young as possible for as long
as possible and the process of ageing continues to be surrounded with a
great deal of fear and denial.
Commentators who are critical of our attitudes to age argue in favour
of the acceptance and integration of older people, condemn the lack of
care often observed and campaign for improved attitudes.7 This belief that
we can and must change the way we approach ageing and care for those in
the final years of their lives rejects the usual discourse of exclusion and
inevitable decline and foregrounds the possibility of new opportunities,
intergenerational understanding and cooperation.8 Indeed, although change
in this field can feel painfully slow, its speed and nature can often surprise,
a fact that is particularly well illustrated by a recent project to build a
retirement home near Madrid specifically for lesbians and homosexuals.9
In a country where, under Franco’s regime, laws against homosexuality
were severe, and where attitudes are slowly beginning to change, this is an
interesting indication of the ways in which ‘old age’ and our experience of
it are being radically transformed.
But the emergence of new opportunities in response to a perceived
‘market’ is not always so potentially positive and in some instances
evacuating a problem is preferred to tackling it and transforming the
situation. Witness the development of the ‘market’ for British retirement
to Southern Europe, especially Spain, which in recent years has expanded
to include countries in South-East Asia such as Thailand. Although
providers there emphasise the cheaper costs, the warm weather and
traditional Thai respect for elderly people, the phenomenon can nonetheless
also be interpreted as a way of ‘exporting’ an unwanted, ageing population
6
See for example Philippe Brenot, Les Hommes, le sexe et l’amour (Paris: Les
Arènes, 2011) and Les Femmes, le sexe et l’amour (Paris: Les Arènes, 2012);
Régine Lemoine-Darthois and Elisabeth Weissman, Elles croyaient qu’elles ne
vieilliraient jamais. Les filles du baby-boom ont cinquante ans (Paris: Albin
Michel, 2000) and Un âge nommé désir. Féminité et maturité (Paris: Albin Michel,
2006).
7
See for example Laetitia Clavreul, ‘Fin de vie: la France néglige toujours ses
mourants’, Le Monde, 16 February 2012, p. 11.
8
On intergenerational solidarity see Sandrine Blanchard, ‘Plaidoyer pour les
vieux’, Le Monde, 16 February 2012; Mike Pinches, ‘We have our spats, don’t
we?’, The Guardian Weekend, 17 March 2012, pp. 41-45.
9
See reports of this on <http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/02> [accessed
20 July 2012].
Joy Charnley and Caroline Verdier
3
who will be cared for cheaply, far away from their country of origin.10
Such ‘avoidance tactics’ sit alongside more sinister developments, such as
the constant reminders, in these times of ‘austerity’, about the rising costs
of pensions and future care and claims that ‘babyboomers’ are selfishly
enjoying life while younger generations suffer.11 In this environment, it is
not difficult to see why some might feel that, rather than being a choice to
be exercised or not, euthanasia could all too easily become a threat, an
obligation, a duty to one’s family and to society.
Academic work in a range of disciplines has been making an important
contribution to this fraught, divided and confusing debate, and alongside
economics, psychology, history and sociology, literature too can provide
valuable insights into the attitudes, prejudices and fears that are prevalent
in society, refracted through writers’ consciousness and experience.12 This
10
See for example the website <http://www.retirement-home-thailand.com/index.
php> [accessed 20 July 2012]. Such ‘exportation’ of the ageing population, the
mirror image of the ‘importation’ of foreign workers to rich industrialised
countries to care for elderly people, has been reflected in popular literature in
novels such as Deborah Moggach’s These Foolish Things (2004), set in India,
which inspired the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012).
11
The titles of recent books are for example indicative of this: Francis Beckett,
What did the babyboomers ever do for us? Why the Children of the Sixties lived the
Dream and Failed the Future (London: Biteback Publishing, 2010); Shiv Malik
and Ed Howker, Jilted Generation: How Britain has Bankrupted its Youth
(London: Icon Books Ltd, 2010); David Willetts, The Pinch: How the Baby
Boomers Stole their Children’s Future and How to Give it Back (London: Atlantic
Books, 2010).
12
For example Prisca von Dorotka Bagnell and Patricia Spencer Soper (eds.),
Perceptions of Age in Literature. A Cross-Cultural Study (New York: Greenwood
Press, 1989); Andrew Blaikie, Ageing and Popular Culture (Cambridge University
Press, 1999); Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: a Cultural History of Aging in
America (Cambridge University Press, 1992); Oliver Davis, Age Rage and Going
Gently. Stories of the Senescent Subject in Twentieth-Century French Writing
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006); Amelia DeFalco, Uncanny Subjects. Aging in
Contemporary Narrative (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010); Margaret
Morganroth Gullette, Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of
the Midlife (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997); Julia Johnson
(ed.), Writing Old Age (London: Centre for Policy on Ageing, 2004); Laurel Porter
and Laurence M. Porter (eds.), Aging in Literature (Troy MI: International Book
Publishers, 1984); Janice Sokoloff, The Margin that Remains: A Study of Aging in
Literature (New York: Lang, 1987); Kathleen Woodward, Aging and its
Discontents. Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1991); Kathleen Woodward (ed.), Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
4
Introduction
volume thus aims to build on and add to a burgeoning field by providing a
varied spectrum of literary analyses that draw on a range of approaches
(Freud, Lacan, Kristeva and feminist theory amongst others) and cover a
wide geographical area (France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain and
Switzerland but also Francophone Canada and Morocco). Major writers
such as Balzac, Cervantes, Goethe, Mann and Zola are discussed here, as
well as a number of important twentieth-century writers (Ben Jelloun,
Cixous, Doubrovsky, Ernaux, Roy, Ungaretti) and less well-known figures
(Carvalho, Châtelet, Fleutiaux). In this wide coverage of the subject,
novels predominate but autofiction also figures, as do the genres of poetry
and the short story.
Within the broad themes which structure the volume, many others, also
key to any consideration of ageing, emerge, overlapping and often
recurring in several sections. The constant echoes between essays remind
us that, whatever the geographical location or the period in history, similar
issues remain pertinent across time and space, whether it be family
relations (Anderson, Arenberg, Caporale, Ramsden, Rodgers), generational
solidarity (Anderson, Kelly, Rodgers, Stone), sadness and loneliness
(Perkins), memory and dementia (Arenberg, Hahn), class differences
(Bishop, Ramsden), gender differences (Bishop, Burns, Puig, Wigmore) or
sexuality (Johnson, Parker, Saveau, Stone).
In her analysis of the specific position of women in the nineteenth
century, when old age, especially for women, was a frightening prospect,13
Danielle Bishop makes an unexpected connection with the twenty-first
century, when longer working lives, smaller pensions and reductions in
state benefits in many countries are once again raising questions about
how best to cope with old age. These gender-specific concerns are echoed
by Barbara Burns in her study of a Swiss-German writer living a century
later, Juliet Wigmore in her discussion of an East German writer, and Julie
Rodgers studying a French-Canadian author, all demonstrating the ways in
which female characters react to retirement, loss and physical ageing.
Equanimity and acceptance of passing time are not easy to achieve and
Jean Anderson in her study of several twentieth- and twenty-first-century
French women writers reminds us that it can be difficult or even
impossible to face up to one’s own ageing, a similar point emerging from
Hans Hahn’s exploration of Goethe and Mann. Of course men too can be
13
As many have commented, ‘la vieillesse a toujours été redoutable pour les
femmes. Elle signifie souvent la solitude et la misère’ [‘old age has always been a
frightening prospect for women. It often means loneliness and poverty’]. Françoise
Héritier, Michelle Perrot, Sylviane Agacinski, Nicole Bacharan, La plus belle
histoire des femmes (Paris: Seuil, 2011), p. 136.
Joy Charnley and Caroline Verdier
5
made vulnerable by age, as we see in Maureen Ramsden’s discussion of
Le Père Goriot, the story of a man weakened by age and his overpowering
love for his daughters, Idoya Puig’s essay on Don Quixote and Juliet
Perkins’s study of several short stories by Carvalho. The gloomy picture
of ageing that emerges from this latter work is a good reflection of the
more negative portrayals of age prevalent in society, an emphasis on
solitude and physical and mental decline that is also central to Marzia
Caporale’s discussion of Ernaux, Nancy Arenberg’s essay on Ben Jelloun
and Patrick Saveau’s contribution on Doubrovsky, where the protagonist,
energised by a relationship with a young woman, is nonetheless forced to
realise his physical limits. Old age as a period of possible renewal and
discovery (and without the obstacles encountered by Doubrovsky) is
further explored in the essays by Barbara Stone, who looks at the way in
which the central protagonist of Le Docteur Pascal is reinvigorated by his
marriage to a young woman, Eleonor Parker, who discusses the Italian
poet Ungaretti’s refound energy following the beginning of a new
relationship and Debra Kelly, who studies the way in which Pinget’s
character is influenced by his interaction with a young boy. If all of the
essays included here reflect aspects of old age that are still current and
relevant in contemporary society, Louise Johnson’s study of Villalonga’s
fictional society, where youth is all-important and age has been ‘erased’,
eerily (and scarily) reflects and foreshadows our own obsession with
consumerism and youth.
Together then, these essays seek to contribute to the existing body of
critical work by providing another varied picture of what age is, has been
and might be in the future. Collectively they demonstrate once more the
power of literature to reflect or even prefigure social trends, encouraging
us to pay more attention to what we think, how we live and how we might
shape our future societies.
Glasgow, July 2012
THE AGEING MOTHER
THE VEILED MIRROR:
EPIPHANY AND EPICALYPTRY
IN CONTEMPORARY FRENCH WOMEN’S
WRITING ABOUT AGEING
JEAN ANDERSON
It is widely critically accepted that identity is constructed, and that such a
construction may be negatively influenced, whether this be through
external influences that depict the so-called variant (woman, queer,
ethnically diverse, etc) as Other, or by the internalisation within the subject
of these beliefs. Ageing is an important aspect of identity. As the
population of the Western world ages, so too does the market increasingly
insist on rejuvenation via cosmetic intervention of many kinds: in short,
there is a growing pressure on women especially to mask or avoid the
effects of the ageing process. This essay looks at some examples of both
epicalyptry (deliberate efforts to disguise such effects) and epiphanic
moments of realisation of age in work by French women writers, arguing
that the physical signs of ageing, whether viewed by others or the self
(often but not always via a mirror) constitute a challenge, sometimes of
traumatic dimensions, to the subject’s notion of self. Looking outward
from behind the physical persona, ‘you are only as old as you feel’, as
popular wisdom would have it. But faced with the external mirrored
reality, as Sylvia Plath notably puts it in ‘Mirror’, ‘an old woman / Rises
toward her day after day, like a terrible fish’.
Je pense qu’il est nécessaire […] que nous affirmions qu’il existe une
généalogie de femmes. Généalogie de femmes dans notre famille: après
tout, nous avons une mère, une grand-mère, une arrière-grand-mère, des
filles. […] Essayons de nous situer pour conquérir et garder notre identité
dans cette généalogie féminine.1
1
Luce Irigaray, Le Corps-à-corps avec la mère (Montréal: Editions de la pleine
lune, 1981), pp. 29-30. All translations are my own. [‘I believe we must affirm that
there is a genealogy of women. A genealogy of women in our family: after all, we
have a mother, a grandmother, a great-grandmother, daughters. [...] Let us try to
position ourselves to claim and to keep our identity within this female genealogy.’]
10
The Veiled Mirror
An increasing number of French women writers are turning to issues of
ageing and intergenerational influences, particularly down the
(grand)maternal line, to such an extent that a comprehensive study is well
beyond the limits of this chapter. An informal survey of recent
publications in French bookshops in September 2011 confirms that this is
very much an expanding market: where ten years ago old women as
central characters in novels were relatively rare, at least half a dozen of the
books on featured display were focused on aged or ageing female
characters. These included Céline Minard’s So Long, Luise; Véronique
Ovaldé’s Ce que je sais de Véra Candida; Fanny Saintenoy’s Juste avant,
which features no fewer than five generations; Claudie Gallay’s Dans l’or
du temps and Delphine de Vigan’s widely-acclaimed Rien ne s’oppose à la
nuit.2 Not only are these books being written and published, they are also
being reprinted, making the all-important movement to paperback in many
cases. Nor should we forget the work of some of the more established
names in French literature: the vastly divergent Benoîte Groult’s La
Touche étoile (2007) and Hélène Cixous’s Ciguë: vieilles femmes en fleurs
(2008), Ève s’évade: la vie et la ruine (2009) and Revirements: dans
l’Antarctique du cœur (2011) add their own stamp of authority to this
emerging area of literary investigation.3 In short, writing about ageing and
ageing female characters is an area of increasing interest and importance.
While many of the works mentioned focus on mothers, and can be said to
follow the example of Simone de Beauvoir in some respects, particularly
of Une mort très douce (1964),4 a closer examination of the representation
of ageing and its effects will allow us to revisit some of the issues found in
Beauvoir’s work and already well-documented by critics, 5 along with
others which feature only tangentially in her writing.
2
Céline Minard, So long, Luise (Paris: Denoël, 2011); Véronique Ovaldé, Ce que
je sais de Véra Candida (Paris: Éditions de l’Olivier, 2011); Fanny Saintenoy,
Juste avant (Paris: Flammarion, 2011); Claudie Gallay, Dans l’or du temps (Paris:
Livre de poche, 2011 [2008]); Delphine de Vigan, Rien ne s’oppose à la nuit
(Paris: Robert Laffont, 2011). Vigan’s novel was shortlisted for the Prix Renaudot
(2011).
3
Benoîte Groult, La Touche étoile (Paris: Grasset, 2006); Hélène Cixous, Ciguë:
vieilles femmes en fleurs (Paris: Galilée, 2008), Ève s’évade: la vie et la ruine
(Paris: Galilée, 2009) subsequently referred to as EE followed by the page number,
Revirements: dans l’Antarctique du cœur (Paris: Galilée, 2011).
4
Simone de Beauvoir, Une mort très douce (Paris: Folio, 2008 [1964]).
Subsequent references are given in the text as MTD followed by the page number.
5
Une mort très douce and Les Mandarins (Paris: Gallimard, 1954) for example, as
analysed by Sally Chivers in From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary
Culture and Women’s Narratives (Columbus OH: Ohio State UP, 2003).
Jean Anderson
11
To Age, or not to Age…
It is generally accepted that identity is not fixed but fluid and constructed,
and that such a construction may be negatively influenced, whether this be
through external influences that depict the so-called variant (woman,
queer, ethnically diverse, and so on) as Other, or by the internalisation
within the subject of these beliefs.6 Ageing, too, is an important aspect of
identity, and one that is still highly vulnerable to stereotypical ideas and
expectations, arguably less mitigated by ideas of political correctness. To
be old, in these ‘uncorrected’ terms, is to be incompetent, irrelevant, an
unattractive encumbrance, or even invisible.7 As the baby-boom population
of the Western world grows older, the age-avoidance market increasingly
benefits from the resultant demand for rejuvenation via cosmetic
intervention of many kinds. The desire to deny the signs of age is not
specific to this current period, for Colette writes in Les Vrilles de la vigne
(1908) of a young client saying: ‘je me maquille très fort, de manière à
avoir la même figure dans vingt ans. Comme ça, j’espère qu’on ne me
verra pas changer’8 [‘I wear lots of make-up, so I will look the same in
twenty years’ time. That way, I hope no one will notice me changing’].
6
We should be wary, however, as J. Brooks Bouson has pointed out, of taking
such theories as gospel: ‘even as critics have come to view the body as
“discursively constructed and therefore open to (voluntary) resignification and
change” (Hanson 16), the social meanings assigned to the female bodies as deviant
and inferior – that is, as shamed – still have real consequences in the lived
experiences of many women’ (J. Brooks Bouson, Embodied Shame: Uncovering
Female Shame in Contemporary Women’s Writings (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
2009)), p. 13.
7
See Groult, La Touche étoile, ‘[…] toi, femme, à mesure que ta beauté ou ta
jeunesse s’estompent, tu t’apercevras que tu deviens peu à peu transparente.
Bientôt on te heurtera sans te voir. Tu dis par habitude: “pardon”, mais personne ne
te répondra, tu ne déranges plus, tu n’es plus là’ (p. 14) [‘you, woman, as your
beauty or your youth fade away, you will notice that you are gradually becoming
transparent. Soon people will bump into you without seeing you. You say “sorry”,
out of habit, but no one answers you, you’re no longer a disturbance, you’re not
there any more’].
8
Colette, ‘Maquillage’, Les Vrilles de la vigne, ed. by Claude Pichois, Œuvres
complètes, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1984-2001) I, pp. 1005-1008, (p. 1008). Or see
Beauvoir, La Vieillesse (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) commenting on women who
‘[p]ar leurs toilettes, leur maquillage, leurs mimiques, […] cherchent à abuser
autrui, mais surtout à se convaincre hystériquement qu’elles échappent à la vie
commune’ (p. 313) [‘through their dress, their make-up, the faces they pull, [...] try
to fool others, but also to convince themselves in a hysterical way, that they are
spared the common fate’].
12
The Veiled Mirror
However, there is clearly a growing pressure on women especially 9 to
mask or avoid the effects of the passage of time, a blocking strategy
known as epicalyptry.10 I propose here to apply this term to any behaviour,
including gaze avoidance, that seeks to deny the realities of the ageing self
or other.
Despite such efforts however, or perhaps because of them, there can be
epiphanic moments of realisation of age. 11 Although part of a process
occurring over time, changes are here apprehended as (crisis) points where
the physical signs of ageing, whether viewed by others or the self (often
but not always via a mirror) constitute a challenge, sometimes of traumatic
dimensions, to previously taken-for-granted notions of identity and
selfhood. I will demonstrate that specific confrontations with change,
focused principally on the face but extending at times to the whole body,
one’s own or one’s mother’s or grandmother’s in what we might call a
‘matryoschka [‘Russian doll’] effect’, provide a rich field for literary
exploration. With some reference to Beauvoir and Groult, my analysis will
focus principally on Pierrette Fleutiaux’s autobiographical Des phrases
courtes, ma chérie (2001) [Short Sentences, Darling], Annie Ernaux’s Une
femme (1987) [A Woman’s Story] along with its companion non-fiction
piece ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ (1997) [‘I Remain in Darkness’],
and Noëlle Châtelet’s two non-fiction works La dernière leçon (2004)
[‘The Last Lesson’] and Au pays des vermeilles (2009) [‘In Elderland’], as
well as her novels La Dame en bleu (1996) [‘The Lady in Blue’] and La
Femme coquelicot (1997) [‘The Red Poppy Woman’].12 The focus of this
9
Andrew Morrison in Shame, the Underside of Narcissism (London and New
York: Routledge, 1997) points out that body shame in men focuses on
performance, whereas in women it is appearance-oriented and related to the
ensuing social consideration, or lack of it: ‘While certainly not innate, cultural and
biological factors have conspired to instill in women feelings of passivity and
inferiority, which frequently engender a sense of shame’ (p. 198).
10
Term apparently invented by writer and Michigan State adviser on ageing
Michael Sheehan to refer to the deliberate blocking or masking of a realisation,
<http://verbmall.blogspot.com/2008/10/epiphany-and-epicalyptry.html> [accessed
9 September 2011].
11
I use the term ‘epiphanic’ here as both positive and negative, more frequently
the latter, since there is no antonym for the word.
12
Pierrette Fleutiaux, Des phrases courtes, ma chérie (Arles: Actes sud, 2001)
subsequently referred to in the text as DPC followed by the page number; Annie
Ernaux, Une femme (Paris: Gallimard, 1987) subsequently referred to in the text as
UF followed by the page number, ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ (Paris:
Gallimard, 1997) subsequently referred to as JNSP followed by the page number;
Noëlle Châtelet, La dernière leçon (Paris: Seuil, 2004) subsequently referred to as
Jean Anderson
13
study will be twofold: on the daughter’s realisation (or epicalyptric nonacknowledgement) of her own evolution from youth to old age as this
relates to her mother’s decline and on the older woman’s awareness of
herself as ageing.
Whether this shocking revelation can be mitigated is a moot point: in
her comprehensive study focusing mainly on novels by Canadian women
writers but including analysis of several of Beauvoir’s works, Sally
Chivers has looked closely at representations of the body and seen a
positive trend away from the looking-glass:
The trope of mirror-gazing pervades negative fiction of aging because
characters struggle with a new self-identification in connection with a
changed physical form […however] the increasingly constructive
depictions of aging […] move away from the mirror to the reflection in
younger people surrounding the aging characters.13
While this seems highly positive, Katheeen Woodward, a leading theorist
in the representation of ageing, would disagree: for her, younger people
function ‘as mirrors to older women, reflecting them back half their size,
shamed by their critical gaze’.14
For the present analysis, I will examine a range of these moments
where either fictional or more autobiographical characters respond to their
mother’s or grandmother’s ageing appearance, or, conversely, confront
their own mirror, somewhat as Snow White’s stepmother did, anxiously
seeking the reassurance that inevitably comes to an end. For Beauvoir, this
external reflection is essential, since we are incapable of realising
internally that we have aged: ‘La vieillesse est particulièrement difficile à
assumer parce que nous l’avons toujours considérée comme une espèce
étrangère: suis-je donc devenue une autre alors que je demeure moimême?’ 15 [‘Old age is especially difficult to accept because we have
LDL followed by the page number, Au pays des vermeilles (Paris: Seuil, 2009)
subsequently referred to in the text as APV followed by the page number, La
Dame en bleu (Paris: Stock, 1996), La Femme coquelicot (Paris: Stock, 1997).
13
Chivers, p. xlv.
14
Kathleen Woodward, Aging and its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1991), p. xii.
15
Beauvoir, La Vieillesse, p. 301. See also the concept of the ‘mask of ageing’ as
elaborated by Mike Featherstone and Mike Hepworth, ‘The Mask of Ageing and
the Postmodern Lifecourse’, in Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, Bryan S.
Turner (eds.), The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory (London: Sage
Publications, 1991), pp. 371-89: the term refers to the disparity between the
subject’s external appearance and his or her sense of self as younger.
14
The Veiled Mirror
always considered it to be another species: have I now become a different
woman, although I am still myself?’]. In both cases, mirror or
(grand)mother, we are either forced to take stock of a new reality, or, in an
attempt to block it out, to look away in shame, avoiding a change that is
negatively connoted in society.
Mothers as Mirrors
As D.W. Winnicott insisted, the mother functions as a mirror in early child
development: the protracted eye contact we now refer to as part of the
‘bonding’ process is for him essential to the child’s identity formation and
future independence.16 Marianne Hirsch has underlined the importance of
this mirroring function, particularly in the case of female children.17 I will
argue here that this mirroring can also constitute one of those epiphanic
moments where the daughter sees her own ageing reflected in her mother
or grandmother.
In Des phrases courtes ma chérie Pierrette Fleutiaux discusses with a
friend not just her mother’s, but also her own ageing process:
Nous savons tout l’une de l’autre, de la misère de nos parents vieillissants,
de la détresse que nous cause le délabrement progressif, inexorable, de leur
vie. Nous savons qu’au-delà du fardeau qu’il nous fait porter au jour le
jour, c’est l’image de notre propre vieillissement que nous contemplons, à
cru et en pleine lucidité. (DPC 57)
[We know everything about each other, about the misery of our ageing
parents, and the distress that their progressive, inexorable decline makes us
feel. We know that beyond the burden this brings to our daily lives, it is
our own ageing we are looking at, directly and with absolute lucidity.]
Fleutiaux’s autobiographical text, then, strongly stresses the visual
connection (‘image’, ‘contemplons’) between the elderly other and the
(also-ageing) observing subject. Even more intensely, the ageing body of
the mother, however well-preserved for its age, is at the same time the
16
D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London and New York: Routledge, 2005
[1971]). See chapter 9, ‘The Mirror-role of Mother and Family in Child
Development’, pp. 148-159: ‘In individual development the precursor of the
mirror is the mother’s face’ (p. 149). Emphasis in the original.
17
Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory
(Cambridge MA and London: Harvard UP, 1997). See Chapter 5, ‘Maternal
Exposures’, pp. 151-87.
Jean Anderson
15
body of the daughter: the shock of realising this can cause ‘removal of
face’:18
Ses jambes nues, ses bras. C’est un choc, un vertige […] Je détourne les
yeux, ne dis plus rien, ne demande plus rien.
Je suis avec elle, je suis elle, dans sa peau […] (DPC 78)
[Her bare legs, her arms. It is a shock, it makes me dizzy […] I look away,
say nothing, ask nothing further.
I am with her, I am her, inside her skin].
Gaze avoidance is a key reaction in the shame affect. The twinningbonding effect that is particularly strong in a same-sex parent-child
relationship clearly survives long past infancy, and identity projection
occurs on both sides of the mother-daughter relationship: as a child, the
narrator was primped and fussed over, wearing ringlets and pink velvet
ribbons: ‘sa coquetterie, c’était moi’ (DPC 101) [‘her pride in her
appearance was me’]. The daughter is required to ‘porter la féminité’ [‘to
uphold femininity’] on behalf of the mother:
Et maintenant qu’elle est vieille, elle me le demande encore plus, elle n’a
plus que moi pour être femme, il faut que je sois son visage, pour qu’elle
gagne ses batailles à elle, ses toutes petites batailles de petite vieille. (DPC
101)
[And now that she is old, she asks it of me even more, I am the only way
she has to be a woman, I have to be her face, so she can win her battles, the
tiny little battles of a little old lady].
Roles are reversed, in what Pierre-Louis Fort, in discussing Ernaux’s ‘Je
ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’, refers to as a ‘filiation inversée’:19 ‘Je suis
fière de ma mère. C’est moi qui l’ai habillée’ (DPC 120) [‘I’m proud of
my mother. I’m the one who dressed her’]. But there is more happening
here than a simple parent-child reversal. At the hairdresser’s (with its
décor of mirrors and the obligation to inspect one’s appearance), the
18
Affect theorist S. S. Tomkins, in Affect, Imagery, Consciousness: Vol. 2: The
Negative Affects (New York: Springer, 1963) developed the idea of shame as a
motive for the interruption of the gaze: the first mode of communication is ‘the
sharing of facial affect display between infant and mother’, but if the expected
display is disrupted, either by an unexpected expression or some other
unfamiliarity, the gaze will be withdrawn (p. 123): see also Donald Nathanson
(ed.), The Many Faces of Shame (New York and London: Guilford, 1987), p. 29.
19
Pierre-Louis Fort, Ma mère, la morte. L’écriture du deuil au féminin chez
Yourcenar, Beauvoir et Ernaux (Paris: IMAGO, 2007), pp. 95-106.
16
The Veiled Mirror
daughter realises in a moment of shock that the unrecognised old woman
who comes in from the street is her own mother, ‘cette vieille femme
sagement assise, attendant sa vieille petite fille’ (DPC 107) [‘that old lady
sitting there quietly, waiting for her old little daughter’]. In other words,
maternal age reflects back onto the daughter, and as Fleutiaux sums it up:
‘Vases communicants nous sommes, éternellement’ (DPC 112) [‘We are
communicating vessels, for all eternity’].
Yet the impossibility of ever truly being equal is clear: in a chapter
entitled, significantly, ‘Miroir’, which opens with a reference to the Snow
White story, the daughter remarks ‘Elle est devant, toujours plus vieille
que moi’ (DPC 151) [‘She is ahead of me, always older than me’]. Clearly
at this stage of life the mother-daughter roles are confused and confusing.
The resemblances reflected back to the daughter by the mother-mirror are
also elements of difference, as the ‘désastre de ce corps’ (DPC 164) [‘the
disaster of this body’] has yet to imprint itself fully on the younger
woman. In essence, then, while the two women are bound by the mirrored
effects of ageing, they are at the same time separated. The face-to-face
bonding which is the child’s first and lasting affective link in life is
disturbed by the growing disparity caused by the ageing process (wrinkles,
thinning hair). The expected face is replaced by something unexpected:
this resembles the mask effect that is sometimes seen when the subject
looks at herself in a mirror, as we shall see later.
In Une femme, Annie Ernaux gives an account of her mother’s life
with an emphasis on her declining years as an Alzheimer’s sufferer, and
appears to strongly stress the differences between the two women:
differences of background, upbringing, education, social status and
personality. As a teenager, Annie found her mother ‘voyante’ [‘loud,
common’]: and yet the mother-mirror shame effect is there: ‘Je détournai
les yeux… J’avais honte de sa manière brusque de parler et de se
comporter, d’autant plus vivement que je sentais combien je lui
ressemblais’ (UF 63) [‘I looked away... I was ashamed of her brusque way
of talking and behaving, all the more so because I could tell how much I
was like her’]. The same inversion of roles is described: ‘Je ne voulais pas
qu’elle redevienne une petite fille, elle n’en avait pas le “droit”’ (UF 93)
[‘I didn’t want her to turn back into a little girl, she had no “right”’]. While
these aspects of the work have been commented on by Fort, he gives
relatively little consideration to the notion that the mother’s decline can
also be reflected, as in a mirror, onto the younger woman, and that this is
Jean Anderson
17
an important aspect of the daughter’s personal vision of ageing. 20 This
aspect is stressed even more in Ernaux’s journal version of the same
period, entitled ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’, and published a decade
later: ‘C’est à cause du temps, d’autrefois. Et c’est aussi mon corps que je
vois’ (JNSP 20) [‘It’s because of time passed, because of the old days.
And it’s also my own body that I see’]; ‘Aveuglant: elle est ma vieillesse,
et je sens en moi menacer la dégradation de son corps, ses rides sur les
jambes, son cou froissé […]’ (JNSP 36) [‘Blindingly clear: she is my old
age, and I can feel within myself the threat of her body’s degradation, the
wrinkles on her legs, her creased neck…’].
As the mother continues to decline, ‘Elle me pousse aussi vers la mort’
(JNSP 74) [‘She is pushing me towards death aswell’]. Here again the
sense of maternal lineage, the matryoschka effect, is clearly expressed,
now going beyond a two-generational link to something larger: ‘je suis
maintenant un être dans une chaîne, une existence incluse dans une
filiation continuant après moi’ (JNSP 86) [‘now I’m one part of a chain, an
existence included in a line that continues after me’]. This is by no means
an exhaustive list of instances in the second work where the daughter sees
her own ageing through the lens of her mother’s physical alteration,
something which is much more evident here in the journal than in the
earlier text.
Noëlle Châtelet, in her nonfiction works La dernière leçon (2004),
which tells the story of the last weeks of her ninety-two-year-old mother’s
life prior to her carefully planned suicide, and Au pays des vermeilles
(2009), an account of the joys of grandmotherhood,21 puts considerable
emphasis on female lineage, even though this deviates, through her having
had a son rather than a daughter. Despite this (or perhaps because of it),
the matryoshka effect is particularly strong: in La dernière leçon, looking
at a photograph of herself held by her mother, she comments on ‘l’emboîtage
20
Fort’s argument in this respect centres mostly on the difference between the
death of the mother for son and daughter: ‘Tuer la mère n’a pas le même sens pour
la fille et le garçon. Tuer la mère dans ces textes, c’est donc également, pour les
auteurs, se tuer un petit peu’, p. 159 [‘Killing off the mother means different things
for son and daughter. Killing off the mother in these texts is therefore also, for the
women writers, killing themselves a little’].
21
We should note in passing both the Lewis Carroll / Alice reference and the fact
that Benoîte Groult entitles chapter IX of La Touche étoile ‘Alice au pays des
vermeilles’, with the same evocation of a positive old age. Note also the use of the
term ‘vermeil’ as an equivalent to ‘troisième âge’, as in ‘carte vermeille’, now
renamed ‘carte senior’, entitling the elderly to discounted train fares.
18
The Veiled Mirror
de nos deux corps gigognes’ (LDL 22)22 [‘the way our two Russian doll
bodies fit together’]. There are traces here too of the role reversal
encountered in the previous examples: ‘C’est une drôle de chose quand on
a été la petite d’une mère qui vous a dominé de toute sa puissance de la
sentir si chancelante, si près de défaillir’ (LDL 42) [‘It’s a funny thing,
when you used to be the daughter of a mother who dominated you with all
her power, and now you sense that she is so shaky, so close to failing’];
‘Tu t’es lovée en moi. […] C’est moi qui désormais te porte, comme
l’enfant’ (LDL 68) [‘You curled up inside me. […] I’m the one who
carries you from now on, like a child’]. There is also awareness that the
mother’s death will bring the narrator closer to her own: ‘Ce matin-là, j’ai
dû pleurer ma mort en même temps que la tienne’ (LDL 57) [‘That
morning, I must have wept over my own death as well as yours’]. Initially
rejected, an understanding of the mother’s situation brings a kind of fusion
state: ‘Ta fatigue me déchirait, me rendait malade’ (LDL 123) [‘Your
tiredness exhausted me, made me ill’]. This realisation is all the more
difficult because of Châtelet’s two previous works of fiction, La Dame en
bleu, in which she imagines a fifty-two-year-old woman temporarily
adopting habits more fitting for an old woman and enjoying the less
pressured lifestyle that results from these changes, and La Femme
coquelicot, which tells the story of a romance developing between a
seventy-year-old woman and an eighty-year-old man, bringing her sensual
and sexual satisfaction for the first time. The author comments on this in
La dernière leçon:
Moi, qui m’étais offert le luxe d’honorer la vieillesse, d’en célébrer, non
sans angélisme, la beauté, je me sentais mortifiée […] La vieillesse, la
vraie, je l’avais devant moi et la trouvais abominable. (LDL 76)
[I who had allowed myself the luxury of honouring old age, of celebrating
its beauty, in a high-minded and abstract way, I felt mortified […] Old age,
the real thing, was right in front of me and I found it abominable].
The impact of the matryoshka effect, of intergenerational transmission,
is nowhere more clearly expressed than in Châtelet’s most recent work, Au
pays des vermeilles. Here, too, the ‘chaîne’ referred to by Ernaux becomes
a source of comfort and constantly renewed delight. The narrator finds
herself increasingly behaving like her own mother:
Il m’arrive de prendre ta voix, ton intonation, ta manière de dire, comme si
j’avais besoin de m’identifier à ton modèle, en quelque sorte, toi la grand22
This expression is repeated throughout the text, see pp. 29, 46, 68, 87, 166.
Jean Anderson
19
mère de mon enfant, pour comprendre qui je suis, où je suis dans cette
nouvelle configuration des choses. (APV 27)
[Sometimes I speak in your voice, with your intonation, your way of
putting things, as if I needed to copy you, you, the grandmother of my
child, in order to understand who I am, where I am in this new
configuration of things].
Equally importantly, the new granddaughter is quickly identified as the
continuation of this (grand)maternal line: ‘Besoin de t’inscrire d’emblée
dans une filiation, de te reconnaître en même temps que je fais
connaissance’ (APV 17) [‘The need to place you immediately into this
lineage, to recognise you at the same time as I first get to know you’],
something on which the text lays a great deal of stress: ‘L’enfant de
l’enfant n’est-il pas un autre soi-même possible?’ (APV 12) [‘Isn’t the
child of your child another possible self?’]; ‘[…] tu me ressembles
irréfutablement. Indéniablement’ (APV 42) [‘you look like me, irrefutably.
Undeniably’]. The book ends with the stunning coincidence of the
granddaughter filmed on a beach playing with her shadow in exactly the
same way the grandmother had remembered playing herself at the same
age.
The identification of the ageing process shared with the mother, for
example via the same kind of slightly detached observation of what is
happening around her – ‘Ce regard que je t’ai vu avant que tu nous quittes
et que j’ai surpris déjà chez moi-même’ (APV 154) [‘That look I’ve seen
on your face before you leave us, and that I have already caught on my
own face’] – is somehow balanced by the ability to move between past,
present, and future, like Alice passing through the looking-glass (APV 43).
The ‘filiation inversée’ noted by Fort, whereby the older woman
becomes younger and the younger woman older, is here merely a part of
this chain of maternities that takes shape more clearly the more one ages.
This mirroring of roles and the casting forwards and backwards in time
can be a source of balance and perspective that allows the ageing woman
to situate her life in the context of an ongoing cycle. The narrator’s
understanding of this in relation to herself allows her to better understand
her own mother’s decision, faced with increasing fatigue, to end her life.
We might here briefly note the difference between Beauvoir’s mother
and grandmother on this point: where Françoise de Beauvoir seems to
deny or be unaware of her approaching death, the narrator comments:
Ma grand-mère s’est vue partir. Elle a dit d’un air content: ‘Je vais manger
un dernier petit œuf à la coque, et puis j’irai retrouver Gustave’. Elle
20
The Veiled Mirror
n’avait jamais mis beaucoup d’ardeur à vivre; à quatre-vingt-quatre ans,
elle végétait avec morosité: mourir ne la dérangeait pas. (MTD 131)
[My grandmother foresaw her end. She said, with a happy expression: ‘I’m
going to eat one last little boiled egg, and then I’m going to join Gustave’.
She had never put much energy into living; at eighty-four years of age, she
was vegetating in gloom: she didn’t mind dying].
The effect of this description of a willing death is to underline through
difference the similarity between the narrator and her mother Françoise, to
which we will return.
Separate Lives
The identification noted by Fleutiaux, Ernaux and Châtelet is, however, by
no means universal in women’s writing about their mother’s ageing. It is
useful here to briefly consider two other writers’ treatments of the issue, in
order to clarify the differences. Indeed, neither Beauvoir nor Cixous fully
adopts this approach to the intergenerational. Although the fundamental
attachment to the mother in Une mort très douce is undeniable, and its
discovery is one of the core threads of the work, Beauvoir does not readily
perceive resemblances. She does make the comment, ‘Maman aimait la vie
comme je l’aime, et elle éprouvait devant la mort la même révolte que
moi’ (MTD 143) [‘Mum loved life the way I love it, and faced with death
she felt the same revolt that I do’]. This denial in the mother extends to the
rejection of the image she sees of herself in the mirror: ‘Elle n’avait plus
demandé de miroir: son visage de moribond n’existait pas pour elle’
(MTD 109) [‘She didn’t ask for a mirror again: her dying face no longer
existed for her’]. But it is left to Sartre to note specifically the physical
mother-daughter mirroring: ‘Je parlai à Sartre de la bouche de ma mère,
telle que je l’avais vue le matin […] Et ma propre bouche, m’a-t-il dit, ne
m’obéissait plus: j’avais posé celle de maman sur mon visage et j’en
imitais malgré moi les mimiques’ (MTD 43)23 [‘I talked to Sartre about
my mother’s mouth, the way I had seen it that morning [...] And my own
mouth, he told me, wasn’t under my control any more: I had put mum’s on
my face and was copying her grimaces in spite of myself’].
23
Curiously, in her article comparing Beauvoir’s Une mort très douce and
Ernaux’s Une femme, Catherine Montfort elides the attribution to Sartre, thereby
implying a greater awareness on the narrator’s part than is actually the case. See
Catherine Montfort, ‘”La vieille née”: Simone de Beauvoir, Une mort très douce
and Annie Ernaux, Une femme’ French Forum, 21 (1996), 349-64 (p. 355).
Jean Anderson
21
In the case of Cixous, while there is an intense closeness and intimacy
with the mother that is not present in Beauvoir and that we also find in
Fleutiaux and Ernaux, it is rare to find examples of the daughter projecting
herself into her mother’s state. In fact, the opposite is true: ‘Je suis à la
première personne du singulier, ma mère aussi de son côté’24 [‘I am in the
first person singular, as is also my mother’]. Instead, the narrator insists on
physical difference: ‘Ses très grosses mains. Deux fois les miennes. Sa
force. Dix fois moi’ (CVF 54) [‘Her great big hands. Twice the size of
mine. Her strength. Ten times mine’]. A year later, in Ève s’évade: la
ruine et la vie, Cixous even writes: ‘[…] je fis vite comme si ce n’était pas
moi, qui pensais, et qui remplaçais maman’ (EE 11) [‘… I was quick to
behave as if it wasn’t me who was thinking, who was replacing Mum’].
This focus on separation comes close on the heels of impressions of
another matryoschka effect: the mother’s increasing resemblance to her
own mother, German grandmother Omi, in an effect referred to as
‘l’Omification de maman’ (EE 14). We might interpret this as a way of
seeing age as something that belongs only to preceding generations, rather
than reading one’s own ageing through the mother’s, and indeed the text
speaks to this very issue, although in a thoroughly ambivalent way: ‘Je me
meurs de ta vieillesse. Ce que me donne ta vieillesse: une terrible
jeunesse’ (EE 47) [‘I am dying from your old age. What your old age
gives me: a terrible youth’].
There are no episodes of mirror-gazing, other than a symbolicallyloaded reference to the cancer that resulted in Freud’s death, following a
visit to the cemetery with her mother to see the grave (‘le trou’ [‘the
hole’]) where both women will be buried in due course:
Quand Freud vit son os dénudé dans le miroir il passa sans un mot par le
trou de sa mâchoire de l’autre côté. […] Certes on connaîtra d’autres
aventures avant la nuit, mais rien ne pourra faire qu’on n’ait pas vu le trou.
Je vis dans le miroir le trou que faisait ma mère dans ma joue en passant de
l’autre côté. (CVF 199)
[When Freud saw his bone laid bare in the mirror he passed without a word
through the hole in his jaw to the other side. […] Obviously there will be
other adventures before night comes, but nothing can undo the fact that the
hole has been seen. I saw in the mirror the hole that my mother made in my
jaw as she passed to the other side].
24
Hélène Cixous, Ciguë: vieilles femmes en fleurs, p. 107. Subsequently referred
to in the text as CVF followed by the page number.
22
The Veiled Mirror
This is arguably a Cixousian formulation of the mother-daughter projection
seen in previous authors’ work; however it remains an exceptional
example of this kind of shared, projected experience of approaching death.
By the end of the most recent book, Revirements: dans l’Antarctique du
cœur, the mother’s decreasing physical strength and size, her reduction to
mere existence (‘Aujourd’hui, je n’ai fait que manger et exister’25 [‘Today,
I have done nothing but eat and exist’]) and her distress at the death of
another of her contemporaries begin to cast a harsh light on the narrator’s
desire that the old woman stay alive as long as possible, almost to the
point of lack of empathy or any ability to project herself into her parent’s
position. It is perhaps not surprising then that reflections on the narrator’s
own ageing are rare.
The Woman in the Mirror:
Affect and the Shame of Ageing
As Sylvia Plath once put it, a woman’s reflection over time can betray her
image of herself, turning from a fresh young face to something that ‘rises
toward her day after day, like a terrible fish’.26 Beauvoir, in La Vieillesse,
notes the shock she felt looking at herself thus: ‘Je suis restée incrédule
quand, plantée devant un miroir, je me suis dit: “J’ai 40 ans”’ 27 [‘I
couldn’t believe it when, standing in front of a mirror, I told myself: “I’m
forty years old”’]. Winnicott also cites a female patient who ‘looks in the
mirror only to remind herself that she ‘looks like an old hag’ (patient’s
own words)’. 28 The troubled relationship between the ageing individual
and the mirror has been the object of considerable study, particularly, as
we have noted, with regard to the ‘mask of ageing’, the disparity between
outward appearance and inner sense of self.29
Hélène Cixous, in the somewhat paradoxically titled Ciguë: vieilles
femmes en fleurs, refers in the opening chapter, entitled ‘Maman n’est pas
dans maman il y a quelqu’un d’autre’ [‘Mum isn’t in Mum there’s
someone else’], to this mismatch between inside and outside: ‘les gens la
prennent pour son apparence, ils la regardent avec surprise, sous
25
Cixous, Revirements: dans l’Antarctique du cœur, p. 229.
Sylvia Plath, ‘Mirror’, Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems, ed. by Ted Hughes (New
York: Harper, 1981), p. 173.
27
Beauvoir, La Vieillesse, p. 301. See Chivers and Brooks Bouson for in-depth
analysis of this issue in the works of a number of women writers, including
Beauvoir.
28
Winnicott, p. 155.
29
See for example Featherstone, Hepworth and Turner; also Woodward.
26