3rd Meeting - Introduction - Heather Ingman - Ageing in Irish Writing - Strangers To Themselves-Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

Ageing
Heather Ingman
Irish in
Writing
Strangers to Themselves
Ageing in Irish Writing
Heather Ingman
Ageing in Irish
Writing
Strangers to Themselves
Heather Ingman
School of English
Trinity College Dublin
Dublin, Ireland
ISBN 978-3-319-96429-4 ISBN 978-3-319-96430-0 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96430-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948657
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Aydin Aksakal/EyeEm
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
This book is dedicated to my parents, gallantly sailing into their nineties
Acknowledgements
I am, as always, grateful to staff and students in the School of English,

Trinity College, the University of Dublin, for their writing and many
conversations that have deepened my understanding of Irish literature. I
would particularly like to thank Eve Patten and Margaret Robson. I also
thank the staff of Trinity College Dublin library and Aberdeen University
library for their helpfulness in facilitating my studies.
Part of the material in chapter four has been published as ‘“Strangers
to Themselves”: Ageing, the Individual and the Community in the
Fiction of Iris Murdoch, John Banville and John McGahern’ in the Irish
University Review issue 48.2 (2018) and I am grateful for the encour-
agement of its editor, Emilie Pine, and for the permission to reprint.
I am grateful also for the support of all in Palgrave, particularly to
Commissioning Editor, Tomas René, and to my editor, Vicky Bates, and
to the two anonymous readers whose observations allowed me to make
substantial improvements to the book. The faults of course remain my
own.
Although this is the first full-length study of ageing in Irish writing, it
is important to acknowledge the inspiration I have drawn from pioneers
in the field of literary gerontology such as Kathleen Woodward, Anne
Wyatt-Brown, Barbara Frey Waxman and, more recently, Jeannette King.
The initial impetus for this book came not from the world of scholarship,
however, but from my admiration for the courage and civility displayed
by my parents, David and Elizabeth Ingman, and my mother-in-law,
Irene von Prondzynski, in confronting the adversities but also the joys
vii
viii Acknowledgements
of ageing into one’s nineties. I would also like to thank Ferdinand von
Prondzynski for his patience in listening to more about the trials and
consolations of ageing than he would perhaps have wished.
Contents
1 Introduction: Gerontology and Its Challenges 1
2 Ageing, Time and Aesthetics: Dorian Gray, W. B. Yeats

and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Little Girls 29
3 Resisting the Narrative of Decline: Molly Keane, Time

After Time, Deirdre Madden, Authenticity and Anne
Enright, The Green Road 59
4 Ageing, the Individual and the Community in the Fiction

of Iris Murdoch, John Banville and John McGahern 91
5 A Voice of Their Own: Portraits of Old Age in the Irish

Short Story 125
6 Frail Old Age 153
7 Epilogue: The Bedbound and Dying 181
Index 203
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Gerontology
and Its Challenges
Ageing is a worldwide phenomenon but it is also a sociopolitical identity

that varies according to different cultures and, with predictions that by
2030 one in five people resident in Ireland will be aged fifty or over, the
study of ageing in Ireland is growing apace.1 However, as we will see,
Irish literary gerontology has been slower to develop and, given recent
demographic shifts and the growing cultural visibility of older people,
age is arguably a missing category in Irish literary criticism, as once was
the case for class, gender and race. This study, investigating the advan-
tages of looking afresh at a range of familiar and not so familiar Irish
texts through a gerontological lens, is intended as an early intervention
in the field rather than a comprehensive survey, and aims to provide
stimulus for further discussion. This introduction will look first at general
theories of gerontology, then at literary gerontology, before going on to
discuss ageing in the Irish context.
Gerontology and Its Challenges

The fact that gerontology has been gaining in importance since the
1970s is scarcely surprising since most of us, at least in the more afflu-
ent western societies like Ireland, are living longer, giving us all a stake
in understanding the specific problems of ageing. Age studies, look-
ing at the implications of age differences across the whole of the life
course with particular emphasis on age-based discrimination, have
also been developing rapidly and seeking best practice for promoting
© The Author(s) 2018 1

H. Ingman, Ageing in Irish Writing,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96430-0_1
2 H. INGMAN
intergenerational understanding.2 We in the west live in a highly

age-specific culture where, from the moment we enter primary school,
we are conditioned to be evaluated, and to evaluate others, according
to age and these labels, as Jan Baars has pointed out, are often highly
arbitrary: ‘Adult persons are transformed into aged or older bodies at a
particular chronometric age without any evidence that such changes are
actually taking place at that age.’3 Age-related generalizations are popular
because the complexity of ageing identities is so difficult to comprehend.
Moreover, we live in a culture that rewards youth and penalizes old age.
Thomas Cole has highlighted the extent to which a liberal capitalist cul-
ture contributes to ageism by esteeming only those who are productive
in terms of power, money and success and he argues that the ideological
and psychological pressures to master old age have generated an unhelp-
ful gerontophobia in the west.4 Chris Phillipson agrees that, because its
priorities relegate social concerns and individual needs behind the quest
for profits, ‘as a social system capitalism can have a disastrous impact on
the lives of older people’.5 In the final chapter of her husband’s The Life
Cycle Completed (1982), Joan Erikson argues that western society is not
the best culture in which to grow old because it is unable to find a cen-
tral role for older people: ‘Lacking a culturally viable ideal of old age,
our civilization does not truly harbor a concept of the whole of life. As
a result, our society does not truly know how to integrate elders into
its primary patterns and conventions or into its vital functioning.’6 The
relevance of the notion of a whole life vision has increasingly been ques-
tioned in view of the fragmentation of postmodern societies in which, in
the absence of traditional frameworks, the onus is on individuals to shape
their own ageing experience. Nonetheless, as we will see, some notion of
harmony and integration over the course of a life remains vital for suc-
cessful ageing.
In the context of diseases of the mind such as Alzheimer’s and demen-
tia, John Swinton identifies a particular problem in western liberal cul-
tures that isolate the intellect, reason, memory and learning capability as
the core constituents of the human personality: ‘Thus there is an explicit
and implicit negative cultural bias toward diseases which involve deteri-
oration in intellect, rationality, autonomy, and freedom, those facets of
human beings that Western cultures have chosen to value over and above
others.’7 Cognition and memory are seen as crucial to the designation
of social personhood and Swinton argues that living in such a society
1 INTRODUCTION: GERONTOLOGY AND ITS CHALLENGES 3
becomes a significant problem for people with dementia who risk not
only social exclusion but also being regarded as no longer fully human.
In humanistic gerontology, concerned with the philosophical mean-
ing of later life experience, ageing has often been seen as a time of
getting back to essentials, a journey towards a more authentic self. As
Henri Nouwen and W.J. Gaffney commented in their study, Aging: The
Fulfillment of Life: ‘When hope grows we slowly see that we are worth
not only what we achieve but what we are, that what life might lose in
use, it may win in meaning.’8 The eight stages of ageing famously drawn
up in ego psychologist Erik Erikson’s The Life Cycle Completed have been
influential in this respect. Employing a Hegelian model in which suc-
cessful resolution of the central crisis of each life stage involves a syn-
thesis of two dialectical qualities, Erikson delineates the first seven stages
moving from infancy to middle adulthood, while the eighth stage, which
he labelled maturity, spans the years from sixty-five till death. This stage
involves a tension between the thesis integrity (awareness of life’s whole-
ness) and the antithesis despair (horror at life’s fragmentation) leading
to, if all goes well, a synthesis in wisdom, self-acceptance and a sense of
fulfillment. Expanding on Erikson’s stages, Lars Tornstam employs the
term gerotranscendence to suggest the serenity, the desire for solitude
and meditation, and increased attentiveness to the world around us that
may come with age: ‘The gerotranscendent individual … typically expe-
riences a redefinition of the self and of relationships to others and a new
understanding of fundamental, existential questions.’9 Unlike Erikson’s
end-stopped integration, gerotranscendence in Tornstam is an open-
ended process. Raymond Tallis argues that ageing provides the opportu-
nity for creating the story one wants for one’s life as compared with ‘the
traditional, largely unchosen narratives of ambition, development and
personal advancement; and the biological imperatives of survival, repro-
duction and child-rearing’.10 Time, he argues, may even operate differ-
ently, with less emphasis on the constraints of clock time, more on an
intensification of the moment, as our awareness of the transience of life
deepens our appreciation of it.
The positive view of ageing in Erikson, Tornstam and Tallis has been
challenged by other gerontologists and in fact Erikson’s own account
became more nuanced when, as a result of her observations of her hus-
band in his nineties, Joan Erikson added a ninth stage covering advanced
old age when loss of capacities may command all one’s attention,
4 H. INGMAN
emphasizing that the ageing process is only partly controllable and that
to promote positive ageing in terms of health and self-reliance may
result in a superficial optimism not borne out by the facts.11 Several writ-
ers have questioned Erikson’s notion that a ‘life review’, a term intro-
duced by Robert Butler in 1963, necessarily leads to integration and a
more accurate understanding of life-long conflicts. The life review was
intended to provide a therapeutic opportunity for the older person to
explore the meaning of his/her life through autobiographical reminis-
cence, thereby allowing for the possibility of personal transformation
while also countering the impersonality of data collection and demo-
graphic monitoring. Butler describes the life review as a ‘naturally occur-
ring, universal mental process characterized by the progressive return
to consciousness of past experiences, and particularly, the resurgence of
unresolved conflicts; simultaneously, and normally, these reviewed expe-
riences and conflicts can be surveyed and integrated.’12 The difficulty
is that reviewing one’s life may produce not integration and transcend-
ence but a new sense of instability and uncertainty around identity, and
Betty Friedan has suggested that integration of one’s past life is not nec-
essarily the answer since it cuts off the possibility of future change and
development.13 In his discussion of life narratives, Jan Baars also chooses
to emphasise reflection as on-going and always liable to re-evaluation
over completion and integration.14 Nevertheless in providing a bridge
between gerontology and literature, the notion of a life review or narra-
tive has played an important function.
These conflicting arguments around old age echo the debate between
Freud, who regarded old age as akin to castration and argued that
adult development is fixed in middle age with no possibility of further
change,15 and Jung who emphasized the special developmental tasks of
old age and suggested that ageing is a time of potential for growth and
self-realisation, when one gains a new sense of freedom from society’s
constraints and becomes less conformist: ‘The afternoon of life is just as
full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are differ-
ent.’16 The danger of limiting the complexities of the ageing experience
to such positive-negative polarities is evident and, as discussed below, lit-
erature may do much to bring nuance to the debate.
Similarly polarising attitudes to ageing are, however, to be found in
the work of those few second wave feminists that took up the subject.
Simone de Beauvoir made a significant intervention with La Vieillesse
(1970) translated as The Coming of Age (1972), a mammoth survey
of attitudes towards ageing going back to Roman times, drawing on

ethnology, psychology, medicine, sociology and the arts. The Coming of
Age stresses the poverty, ill-health and neglect of older people and is now
often criticized for being too orientated towards the narrative of decline
found in Freudian psychology and towards a Marxist sociological analysis
of western capitalist consumerist society that fails to find value in ageing:
‘The aged do not form a body with any economic strength whatsoever
and they have no possible way of enforcing their rights.’17 De Beauvoir’s
study emphasises the importance of keeping busy, active and useful as
one ages; in essence, advocating continuing as far as possible the polit-
ical, social and intellectual engagements of one’s earlier life. Giving no
special meaning to the final years or to the hidden world of private life,
The Coming of Age finds none of the compensatory moral or intellectual
gains of ageing, only an increasing sense of loneliness and lack of pur-
pose. Also published in 1972, Susan Sontag’s influential essay on ‘The
Double Standard of Aging’ in The Saturday Review, focuses more par-
ticularly on society’s gendered attitudes towards ageing and sexuality that
lead the ageing woman to be judged more harshly than the ageing man.
Despite these early interventions by de Beauvoir and Sontag (or per-
haps disheartened by their pessimism around ageing), second-wave
feminism largely displayed indifference towards the problems of older
women. In Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Ageing and Ageism (1984),
Barbara Macdonald and Cynthia Rich highlight second-wave feminists’
lack of interest in ageing women like themselves.18 This indifference
continued until the 1990s when two second-wave feminists, themselves
ageing, published important works in the field. In The Change: Women,
Ageing and the Menopause (1991), Germaine Greer critiques the med-
icalization of the menopause, particularly the use of HRT designed,
as she sees it, to keep older women attractive to men: ‘In the guise of
immense chivalrous sympathy for women destroyed by the tragedy of
menopause, a group of male professionals permitted themselves to give
full vent to an irrational fear of old women, which I have called, from
the Latin anus, meaning old woman, anophobia.’19 Greer argues that
the menopause may lead to a re-ordering of priorities and her book cele-
brates the freedom from pleasing others, either in the family or the work-
place, that ageing may bring for women: ‘The climacteric marks the end
of apologizing. The chrysalis of conditioning has once for all to break
and the female woman finally to emerge.’20 ‘There are positive aspects to
being a frightening old woman,’ she adds drily.21
6 H. INGMAN
Like Greer, Betty Friedan in The Fountain of Age (1993) believes that
the myth of the menopause is based on an outdated view of the lives of
older women, no longer defined by their historic roles of housewives and
mothers. With women now living many years after the menopause, they
are experiencing the menopause in their prime (51 is the average age in
the west) and, like Greer, Friedan argues that, released from social pres-
sures around femininity, the ageing woman may find different strengths
and new abilities. More generally, Friedan resists the narrative of decline
for both women and men, arguing that it is often our own fear of age-
ing that leads us to focus on ageing as a problem, while neglecting the
developmental possibilities of later life: ‘It is time to look at age on its
own terms, and put names on its values and strengths as they are actu-
ally experienced, breaking through the definition of age solely as dete-
rioration or decline from youth.’22 This, she argues, may be harder for
men than for women since the former often remain attached to cultur-
ally stereotyped definitions of masculinity that revolve around career, sex,
and physical strength. Ageing is hardest, she observes, in those people
who try to cling to the values that drove their youth and she challenges
‘the attempt to hold on to, or judge oneself by, youthful parameters of
love, work, and power. For this is what blinds us to the new strengths
and possibilities emerging in ourselves and in the changing life around
us, and thus makes a self-fulfilling prophecy out of the expectation of
decline.’23
Greer and Friedan have been followed more recently by another sec-
ond wave feminist, Lynne Segal, who in 2013 published Out of Time:
The Pleasures and the Perils of Ageing, a lively personal reflection on the
psychology and politics of ageing that includes discussion of a wide range
of fiction, art and poetry by both men and women with the aim of seek-
ing richer and more positive images of ageing. For Segal herself, contin-
uing political activism is a way of retaining value and purpose as she ages.
One criticism that might be brought against the emphasis in Friedan
and Segal on positive ageing, and indeed against Greer’s focus on the
middle-aged woman, is that such accounts, although a welcome coun-
terbalance to pathologising discourses of old age, gloss over the fact that
those who age successfully are often healthy, well-off and educated, and
thus such studies may inadvertently contribute to the marginalization of
frailer, disabled and dependent older people.
The introduction of gender into discussions of ageing goes some
way towards countering the abstractions and even essentialism found
in earlier writing on gerontology and forms part of the recent cultural

turn in gerontology working across the social sciences and the human-
ities to formulate new theories and new methodologies in the study of
later years, taking into account the social structures in which ageing
takes place. Whereas humanistic gerontology places the emphasis on the
existential experience of ageing, cultural gerontology recognizes that
ageing, like gender and sexuality, is complex and more shaped by social
and institutional forces than earlier accounts, based on chronological or
medical definitions, acknowledged. There are some overlaps between
cultural gerontology and the more narrowly focused critical gerontol-
ogy, which does valuable work in examining political and economic
structures that operate on the ageing experience in a disadvantageous
way. As Jan Baars notes: ‘We can never find aging in a pure form; aging
can only be experienced or studied in specific persons and specific situa-
tions or societal contexts that influence and co-constitute the processes
involved.’24
This is where literary gerontology comes in since many of the theo-
ries, postmodernist and poststructuralist, that have enabled gerontol-
ogists to destabilize and deconstruct previous normalizing accounts of
ageing were already widely in use in literary criticism. Gerontologists
have recognized that, since the experience of ageing varies with each
person and is influenced by such factors as biology, culture, gender and
social class, literature, with its focus on individual cases within specific
social contexts, is ideally placed to present the complexity of the ageing
process and its difficult interaction between body, self and society. A dia-
logic relationship is developing between gerontology and literary studies
as gerontologists acknowledge literature’s power not only to reflect but
also to shape cultural understanding of the ageing experience.
Literary Gerontology
The process of ageing is often difficult to grasp until we begin to experi-
ence it ourselves and the study of ageing in fiction has been recognized
as a useful balance, not only against cultural constructions of old age, but
also against the abstractions and theorization of humanistic gerontology
by placing the subjectivity of older people at the centre in an attempt to
counter depersonalizing images of old age. Nevertheless literary geron-
tology was relatively slow to develop. General studies of ageing in fiction
began to appear from the end of the 1980s but as late as 1993 Anne
8 H. INGMAN
Wyatt-Brown was lamenting that, compared with discourses around race,

class, gender and sexuality, ‘aging is a missing category in current literary
theory’.25
Methodologically, some early studies of ageing in literature paral-
leled feminism’s early emphasis on images of women in literature, for
example, Janice Sokoloff’s The Margin that Remains: A Study of Aging
in Literature (1987) is an untheorised discussion of representations of
middle-aged characters in a diverse range of literary texts, including Moll
Flanders, Persuasion, Jane Eyre, Middlemarch, The Ambassadors, and
Mrs. Dalloway. Despite its lack of a theoretical basis, Sokoloff’s study was
valuable in challenging the paradigms proposed by Erikson and others
that suggest neat, linear stages of growth over the course of a human
life. Literature, Sokoloff suggests, paints a deeper and more complex pic-
ture of the ageing process that is often at variance with society’s chron-
ological measure of time: ‘Literature … appears to be the richest source
we have for representations of aging, and for the effort to understand
the contradictory and complex ways in which the human psyche’s expe-
rience of time shapes character.’26 In Safe At Last in the Middle Years
(1988) focusing, as the title suggests, on middle-aged protagonists’ con-
sciousness of ageing in fiction by Saul Bellow, Margaret Drabble, Anne
Tyler, and John Updike, among others, Margaret Gullette, like Sokoloff,
takes issue with the decline narrative of ageing, suggesting that fiction
also produces stories of change and development in later years. In a later
work, Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of Midlife
(1997), Gullette notes feminism’s reluctance in this period to engage
with the combined effect of sexism and ageism on women. Feminism’s
silence on the subject of age and its impact on female identity was con-
tributing, she argues, to the cultural erasure of the ageing female body.
In From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in
Contemporary Literature (1990) Barbara Frey Waxman adopts a posi-
tive approach to literature and ageing, coining the term Reifungsroman
(‘novel of ripening’, as opposed to the more youthful Bildungsroman)
to describe fiction that reflects a concept of ageing as a time of growth,
a journey towards a more realized self. Waxman particularly finds
this in fiction portraying women characters who may be less trapped
than men in capitalist structures and the patriarchal hierarchy, and she
focuses on literary portraits of ageing by and about women in different
English-speaking countries, including Doris Lessing, Elizabeth Taylor,
Barbara Pym, Paule Marshall, May Sarton, and Margaret Laurence.
Less concerned with others’ approval, no longer burdened by society’s

expectations around gender or professional roles and relinquishing
power and competition, women during the ageing process, Waxman
argues, may focus on different priorities—friendships, community,
nature, and creativity—in order to reclaim buried aspects of the self.
Noting that the authors she discusses recreate their accounts of later life
using techniques such as interior monologue, personal confession and
excerpts from journals, Waxman compares their free-flowing narratives to
the écriture féminine of French feminists like Hélène Cixous who seek
new representations of women’s consciousness.
One of the most significant pioneers in the field of literary gerontol-
ogy is Kathleen Woodward who, in Ageing and Its Discontents: Freud and
Other Fictions (1991), argues that psychoanalysis, particularly Freudian
theory, has been complicit in and even formational of the west’s geron-
tophobia. Her study pairs psychoanalytical concepts, such as narcissism,
introjection, and mourning, with literary texts that, on account of their
interiority, lend themselves particularly well to psychoanalytical readings,
in order to show that while some literary texts reproduce Freud’s pessi-
mism about ageing, regarding it as a punishment that must be stoically
endured, others demonstrate the richness and complexity of the age-
ing process. Lacan’s mirror stage illuminates, for example, Woodward’s
reading of Marcel Proust’s The Past Recaptured (1927) where Marcel’s
recognition of his ageing comes to him through the mirror of oth-
ers’ reactions to him. Woodward sees the mirror stage of old age as the
inverse of Lacan’s mirror stage of infancy in which the infant (mis) rec-
ognizes himself as whole. In old age, Woodward argues, the mirror stage
reveals the disintegrating self, leading the older person to reject the mir-
ror image rather than embrace it: Marcel experiences old age as uncanny
and repulsive. In other chapters, Woodward employs Heinz Kohut’s the-
ories of narcissism to read Eleanor Pargiter in Virginia Woolf’s The Years
(1937) as a positive portrayal of ageing, and Donald Winnicott’s theories
of transitional objects in infancy to illustrate Malone’s transition from life
to death in Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, which is accompanied by the
progressive removal of objects from his environment.
The essays in another seminal study, Aging and Gender in Literature:
Studies in Creativity (1993) edited by Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and
Janice Rossen, focus particularly on late life creativity in individual
authors such as W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Colette,
Dorothy Richardson, and Roland Barthes, in order to highlight the way
10 H. INGMAN
in which writing careers may change as a result of the ageing p rocess,

with bereavement, late life depression, and anxieties about death all
affecting literary creativity and the psychological development of writ-
ers. Of particular note is Constance Rooke’s coining of the word,
Vollendungsroman, to denote a novel of completion or winding up
depicting an older protagonist looking back over the whole of his/her
life: Rooke situates John Cheever’s final novel, Oh What a Paradise It
Seems, in this category.27 Rooke explains that the Vollendungsroman may
have a special intensity due to the felt proximity of death though it does
not necessarily imply that all such novels end with a definite sense of clo-
sure; nor are they all written by authors who are themselves nearing the
end of their life. Rooke’s Vollendungsroman is a potentially fruitful cate-
gory and this study will attempt to locate some examples in Irish fiction
but, unlike Waxman’s concept of the Reifungsroman, which is frequently
cited, it has had less impact so far on literary studies, possibly because of
its association with affirmation and a kind of serenity in ageing that is
often in short supply in literary texts.28
Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity contains many
insightful discussions of individual authors and their reaction to ageing
but the emphasis is on biographical, rather than theoretical approaches,
and the equation of age with creativity is problematic since it obviously
does not apply to all ageing writers. The whole notion of ‘late style’ has
been subjected to a searching critique in another volume of essays, Late
Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature and Music (2016),
where the editors, Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles, point out in their
introduction that the term is too often used uncritically to denote the
final production from an individual of extraordinary talent, which some-
how transcends its immediate cultural and historical context. This vol-
ume is an important correction to earlier romantic understandings of
lateness and its association with genius (generally male) as found, for
example, most famously in On Late Style: Music and Literature Against
the Grain (2006) by Edward Said. Consonant with the turn to cul-
tural gerontology, and relevant to Chapter 2 of this study, McMullan
and Smiles argue that it is best to avoid transcendent and transhistorical
implications of the term and concentrate on the social and cultural con-
text in which individual late works are produced.
The scouring of fiction for images of ageing continues in sociologist
Mike Hepworth’s largely untheorised (from the literary point of view)
Stories of Ageing (2000), which discusses portrayals of older people in a
wide range of contemporary fiction by such authors as Anita Brookner,

Doris Lessing, Penelope Lively, Pat Barker, Margaret Foster, Elizabeth
Taylor, Paul Bailey and Kingsley Amis, with the aim of encouraging read-
ers to explore literary texts as an imaginative resource for understanding
the experience of the ageing process. Hepworth finds fiction address-
ing the new awareness of the body that ageing may bring as it makes
itself felt through pain or illness, the strengthening of personal identity
through memories of the past, including the dead, vulnerability to cul-
tural stereotyping, loneliness, social exclusion, and the importance of
friends, family and relationships between the generations.
A collection edited by Maria O’Neill and Carmen Zamorano Llena,
The Aesthetics of Ageing: Critical Approaches to Literary Representations
of the Ageing Process (2002), includes some essays that provide more
theorised approaches to representations of ageing in fiction, poetry and
drama across a range of different cultures, including Canada, Australia,
Ireland, South Africa, Nigeria and the Caribbean. The theories and
approaches vary widely, though there is a sustained interest across the
volume in gender differences in the ageing process, and the collection is
as much creative as scholarly with the stated aim of providing more posi-
tive and optimistic accounts of ageing.
Also published in the first decade of the new millennium, Zoe
Brennan’s The Older Woman in Recent Fiction (2005) looks at post
1960s fiction by female authors such as Margaret Laurence, Doris
Lessing, May Sarton, Margaret Foster, Fay Weldon, and Angela Carter
among others, which challenge the prevailing discourse of age as stagna-
tion and decline. Brennan presents these authors as countering the mar-
ginalization of older women by placing them at the centre of their fiction
and emphasizing the diversity and freedoms of older women’s lives with
identity never static but subject to constant change and negotiation.
Paying attention to this body of fiction is one way, Brennan argues, that
literary criticism can help challenge reductive and dehumanizing images
of old age.
Jeannette King’s approach in Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and
Feminism: The Invisible Woman (2013) is more nuanced and con-
textualized, reflecting the move away from the abstractions of earlier
gerontologists and the turn to cultural gerontology. By juxtaposing lit-
erary representations of older women from the late nineteenth-century
onwards with contemporary medical, psychological and social discourses
around ageing, King reveals the dynamics at work between literary texts
12 H. INGMAN
and social contexts. Her study demonstrates the advantages of limiting

the scope of analysis to a particular area, such as gender, in order to
explore more fully the impact of cultural perceptions of ageing on lit-
erary texts and the ability of the latter to resist and even subvert cul-
tural stereotypes. This challenge to cultural discourse around ageing is
particularly evident in her discussion of Angela Carter’s novel, Wise
Children (1992), where King applies Judith Butler’s concept of gender
performativity to the ageing process, reading Dora’s narrative as a per-
formance through which she constructs an identity undetermined by her
ageing body and challenges the stereotype of the asexual older woman.
Such readings demonstrate the power of gender theory to revitalize our
understanding of the ageing process and an especially fruitful example
of this has been Sarah Harper’s suggestion that Elizabeth Grosz’s work
on the sexed body, in a study such as Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporate
Feminism (1994), might also be applied to the ageing body in order to
investigate the way in which the ageing body has been inscribed with
various medical, cultural and social discourses that may be at variance
with the phenomenological lived body.29
Two interdisciplinary volumes are welcome interventions in the field,
namely Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminism: Harleys
and Hormones edited by Imelda Whelehan and Joel Gwynne (2014),
looking at the representation of ageing in popular culture, includ-
ing fiction for the mass market, and Ageing Women in Literature and
Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings edited by Cathy
McGlynn, Margaret O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Früh, published in
2017. Like Jeannette King’s study, this latter collection of essays, aris-
ing out of an international conference on ‘Women and Ageing’ that
took place in 2015 in the University of Limerick, follows the turn to
cultural gerontology, employing gender theory to explore the chal-
lenge to cultural constructions of the ageing woman in international
literature, drama, film, television, celebrity culture, art, performance art
and fashion. In the context of Irish fiction, Michaela Schrage-Früh’s
reading of Clare Boylan’s novel, Beloved Stranger (1999), as an exam-
ple of Reifungsroman, and Margaret O’Neill’s discussion of Joseph
O’Connor’s Ghost Light (2010) in the light of Lynne Segal’s observa-
tion of the psychic layering of our inner lives that comes with ageing, are
especially insightful.30
It is clear, even from this short survey, that there has been a par-
ticular emphasis in literary gerontology to date on the ageing woman.
This focus on women has arisen partly because of the influence of

feminist studies on recent developments in gerontology, partly because
of the rich body of English and American fiction by women depict-
ing middle-aged or older female protagonists, and partly due to a
wish to challenge western society’s all too visible prejudice against the
older woman, played out daily in the workplace and in the media. The
twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish canon however contains a sub-
stantial number of male writers who portray deep conflicts around the
ageing process. My book aims to redress the gender balance in literary
gerontology by looking at a range of work by both male and female writ-
ers, while retaining the advantages of a study like King’s which narrows
the focus to a particular angle on the ageing process, in this case Irish
writing where, to date, little critical work on ageing has been published.
The Irish Context

Ageing is a global phenomenon but the turn to cultural gerontology,
emphasizing the social construction of identity in old age, is an impor-
tant reminder not to homogenise the ageing experience which has too
often suffered in the past from generalisations that elide individual expe-
rience and erase the cultural, class and gender diversity of the ageing
experience. Fiction, with its accent on the individual, has been regarded
as one way of overcoming this problem; focus on ageing in a specific cul-
tural context, here Ireland, is another important way of avoiding gloss-
ing over the individuality of older lives by bringing to the fore individual
experience shaped by a particular environment. Looking at fictional pres-
entations of ageing in a particular social context is a means of providing
a bridge between humanistic gerontology, with its emphasis on individ-
ual experience, critical gerontology, where the emphasis has been on the
structural mechanisms, economic and political forces that hinder suc-
cessful ageing and cultural gerontology, which looks at the wider social
environment.
Until the nineteenth-century, care for the aged and poor in Ireland
was sporadic and dependent on the wealthy and charitably disposed. The
origins of social policy towards older people in Ireland date back to an
Act not drawn up with old age in mind, namely the Poor Relief (Ireland)
Act of 1838, the first statutory provision for the poor which established
institutions for the poor, the sick, and orphan children, among others.
Since this Act was not specifically designed for older people, in practice
14 H. INGMAN
when workhouses were set up in Ireland priority was given to the

destitute.31 The 1906 Report of the Vice-Regal Commission on Poor
Law Reform therefore recommended the establishment of almshouses
to cater specifically for the aged and infirm. Its recommendations were
not followed but workhouses became consolidated into county homes,
which had as their aim care of the aged and infirm poor, though in prac-
tice they continued also to provide for other groups in need of shelter
and assistance.32 In this period, unless a destitute older person had family
or neighbours to help out, he or she faced entering a workhouse or a
county home. In 1908, the Old Age Non-Contributory Pension (means-
tested and given to people aged 70 or over) came in under British law
but the Old Age Contributory Pension was not introduced in Ireland
until 1961 and the national pension scheme was not really consolidated
till the mid 1970s. After Independence, state-run county homes con-
tinued to be responsible for people with a wide range of disabilities and
ages, and there was low level provision of residential care, which was
means tested and not of good quality. The widespread assumption, rein-
forced by the Catholic church, was that family members and, failing that,
religious and voluntary associations, would assume care of older people.
The voices of older people themselves were rarely heard and there was a
tendency to speak for them.
In the beginning change was slow and tended to be from the ground
up, piecemeal, and prompted by local people and voluntary organisations
rather than by government policy. 1978 saw the formation of the first
branch of Active Retirement Ireland, a national network of groups sup-
porting older people to lead active and healthy lives for as long as pos-
sible. The Alzheimer Society of Ireland was inaugurated in 1982 and in
1986 Dr. Mary Redmond established the Irish Hospice Foundation. In
1992, Age Action was founded to promote the concerns of older peo-
ple, to counter negative stereotypes and to enable them to continue to
live active lives. Their stated mission is: ‘To achieve fundamental change
in the lives of all older people by empowering them to live full lives as
actively engaged citizens and to secure their rights to comprehensive
high quality services according to their changing needs.’ Finally, in 1997,
the National Council on Ageing and Older People was set up to advise
the government on issues of health and welfare relating to the older
population.
In 2000, a European Council Directive highlighted age alongside
gender and race as a potential for discrimination but in Ireland any gains
for older people made during the previous decade were undercut by the
recession of 2008. The intervention of the EU-IMF troika and subse-
quent austerity budgets led to reductions in funding for groups repre-
senting older people, loss of key health and social care supports for older
people, and impacted significantly on the poorest and most vulnerable
older population through cuts in relation to the state pension and asso-
ciated household benefits packages.33 The Property Tax and the Carbon
Tax, along with a substantial increase in energy prices, put enormous
pressure on older people, there were cuts to the Telephone Allowance,
and the Free Travel Scheme was frozen at 2010 levels and remains under
threat. In light of the growing percentage of older people in Ireland, a
2017 report from the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Social Protection
advised scrapping the mandatory retirement age of 65 for public sector
employees (this is set to increase gradually and reach 68 in 2028). These
changes were in line with the rise in the age at which the State Pension
could be received, previously 65 but changed to 66 in 2014 as part of
an agreement with the troika as a condition of the State’s bailout, and
the Irish government continues to monitor retirement age in line with
increasing life expectancy.
Recent years have seen a growing acknowledgement that Ireland’s
demographics are radically changing. In October 2009, TILDA (The
Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing), based at Trinity College, the
University of Dublin, produced its first reports. TILDA is intended to
be a large-scale, nationally representative study of ageing in Ireland,
collecting information on all aspects of the health, economic and
social circumstances of Irish people aged fifty and above in a series of
data collection waves occurring every two years. So far there have been
three waves between October 2009 and October 2015. The study was
prompted partly by the dramatic projected rise in the ageing popula-
tion in Ireland over the coming decades: the number of over sixty-fives
in Ireland is expected to increase from 11.4% of the total population in
2011 to 14.1% in 2021 and the projected increase from 2011 to 2041
is 160%, while the number of people aged 80 and over is expected to
rise by over 45% from 2.8% of the population in 2011 to 3.5% in 2021
and by 250% over the thirty years till 2041. As the first TILDA report
observed: ‘Ageing on this scale is an unprecedented phenomenon in
Irish history.’34 Information for evidence-based policy and planning is
therefore essential and TILDA is modeled on studies in the US (HRS)
and England (ELSA).
16 H. INGMAN
In an article marking the opening of Mercer’s Institute for Successful

Ageing in Dublin in 2016 Paul Cullen, the health correspondent
of The Irish Times, wrote: ‘After decades of rejoicing in our relative
youth – remember our boasts about being the youngest people in
Europe – we now have to grapple with the challenges posed by an
increasingly older, and potentially dependent, population.’35 It is impor-
tant that gains in longevity are matched by advances in quality of life,
and the gathering of accurate data on the health, social, economic sit-
uation of those growing old in Ireland is urgently needed. The Third
Act Conference held in Dublin November 2017 heard experts point out
that Ireland has been slow to adapt to increased life expectancy, with the
founder of Third Act, Dr. Edward Kelly, observing: ‘The facts on human
longevity have undoubtedly changed and as a result, so must we. Society
assumes you are retiring at 60, and checking out, when really you are just
moving on to a new period of life that could last 25 to 30 years – both
the individual and society in general has a role to play in ensuring people
get the most from their third act.’36
The TILDA surveys so far completed found that the highest quality
of life in Ireland for those over fifty was amongst the 60–69 age range,
married people in good health with tertiary education and still engaged
in some kind of employment or voluntary work. Women experienced a
slightly better quality of life in later years than men, possibly because of
wider social and familial networks. Quality of life was found to increase
with greater social integration, either through family, friends, volun-
tary work or other leisure activities. Not surprisingly, social isolation,
declining physical or mental health, and increased dependency lowered
the quality of life. Family members still played important roles as carers.
Large-scale emigration due to low levels of economic growth at various
points during previous decades was found to have resulted in a high pro-
portion of returning emigrants amongst Ireland’s ageing population.
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the Irish govern-
ment began to take more of an interest in promoting active ageing. The
National Positive Ageing Strategy was launched in 2013, the National
Dementia Strategy in 2014 and there was a continuing roll-out of the
Age Friendly Counties Programme. In June 2017, the HSE (Health
Service Executive) published its ‘Healthy and Positive Ageing for All’
Research Strategy for 2015–2019 with the purpose of supporting
and promoting research that aims to improve older people’s lives and
thereby better inform policy responses to Ireland’s ageing population.
However, rather than a concern for older people themselves, there is a

danger that this focus on positive ageing is driven by a desire to perpet-
uate for as long as possible the ideal worker-consumer in an economy
eager to encourage grey purchasing power. The pressure on older citi-
zens to volunteer may be a convenient way to plug shortfalls in public
spending let alone, in the absence of reasonably priced child care, the
vital role the older generation often plays in looking after grandchildren
so that their parents can continue to work.
Life in a rapidly secularizing Ireland, with its erosion of tradi-
tional frameworks and shared values, can bring its own stresses as age-
ing individuals are presented with a bewildering array of options and
possibilities pressurizing them into exercising constant choices over
their lifestyles. Mainstream Irish media has been much focused on the
so-called ‘third age’, a cohort of people in their middle and early old age
whose income and health have permitted them to extend their active
lives for a longer period than previous generations due to healthier life-
styles, anti-ageing products, cosmetic surgery, exercise regimes and so
on. Fit and healthy pensioners are portrayed as engaging in a multitude
of activities—volunteering, informal teaching and mentoring, garden-
ing, childcare, travel, pursuing further education. An article in The Irish
Times 24 October 2017 recorded the setting up of a Dublin branch of
the University of the Third Age,37 while another commented on the for-
mal expansion of Age-Friendly universities in Ireland, starting with DCU
in 2012 and now incorporating Trinity College, Dublin and the Royal
College of Physicians.38 Newspaper articles urge older people to keep
up their fitness levels (‘Get moving: how to get fitter at any age: Dodgy
knees, an aching back or stiff shoulder should not be used as excuses to
avoid exercise’)39 and give advice on starting a business after the age of
fifty.40 Such celebrations of positive ageing, while welcome, risk equating
consumerism with empowerment and choice, and locking older people
into new disciplinary discourses around the body and consumption.
Ageism continues to be the subject of newspaper articles and may
even be on the increase in Ireland due to the economic recession of
2008 that pitted one generation against another in terms of the scramble
for resources, and created resentment against older people for using up
scarce health resources, ‘blocking beds’ in hospitals, or living in prop-
erties that were too large for them. Between September 2015 and June
2016, Jackie Jones published a series of articles in The Irish Times with
headings like ‘Ageism is so ingrained we don’t even spot it’, ‘Empty
18 H. INGMAN
nesters, bed blockers, old farts or biddies – ageist terms are not the right
fit’ and ‘Most people are sharp and fit – so why the growing ageism?’41
In a 2016 article, Fiona Reddan noted the way in which financial services
discriminated against older people by promoting web-only deals, and
refusing them travel insurance, mortgage loans and car insurance.42
Focus on healthy, active and independent ageing and on holding back
the ageing process can itself lead to ageism in a wish to differentiate one-
self from the truly old and frail, sometimes known as the ‘fourth age’.
Emphasis on active ageing depoliticises problems of poverty and physi-
cal frailty and risks further marginalizing those who cannot afford such
affluent lifestyles. Loneliness in older people continues to be a problem
which volunteers for ALONE, founded in 1977, work hard to mitigate.
It has been estimated that one-third of Irish people over the age of 65
live alone, rising to 60% for those over the age of 80.43 More recently a
darker side to the treatment of the elderly in Ireland has been revealed in
the growing number of robberies and burglaries that deliberately target
older people, particularly those living in rural areas.44 Older returning
migrants, often in poor health and economic circumstances, are a par-
ticular issue for Ireland, highlighted in Elizabeth Malcolm’s 1996 report
on ‘Elderly Return Migration from Britain to Ireland: A Preliminary
Study’ for the National Council for the Elderly and confirmed more
recently by the data from TILDA. In 2000, Safe Home Ireland was set
up to help ageing Irish emigrants to return home and settle, accessing
the services that they need. A new and growing issue for Ireland will be
ageing immigrants from other cultures.
There have been calls too for greater visibility in Ireland for peo-
ple suffering from dementia and Alzheimer’s. An article by Padraig
O’Morain, ‘Society’s attitude to dementia needs to change’, noted that
in 2017 about 55,000 Irish people had been diagnosed as suffering from
some form of dementia and that this was projected to rise to 77,000
in the following ten years. Highlighting the secrecy still surrounding
dementia in Ireland, O’Morain pointed out how little Irish society had
adapted for this growing group of people and posed the pertinent ques-
tion: ‘What would it be like if society saw dementia and other illnesses
and disabilities as more or less normal aspects of the human condition,
approached them with acceptance and even built itself around them?’45
The study of ageing in Ireland reminds us that attention to the day to
day context of growing old in Ireland is as important as the theorizing
of gerontologists and provides valuable information about practical issues
such as physical and mental health, income, transport, social life, and so
on. However, though demographic monitoring plays an important part
in developing policies and planning facilities for an ageing population
over an extended period of time, it does nothing to address the unique
experiences of each ageing individual and the particular challenges
s/he faces, something that literature, with its focus on the individual and
on the emotional and psychological aspects of ageing, has the potential
to supply. Yet, despite the richness of literature on ageing by writers as
diverse as Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, John McGahern
and William Trevor, with the exception of work on Beckett and Yeats, lit-
tle critical attention has been paid to the topic in Irish writing.46 Where
Irish authors are discussed, for instance Kathleen Woodward on Beckett
in Ageing and Its Discontents, Margaret Gullette on Yeats in Aging and
Gender in Literature, Maria O’Neill on the ageing Anglo-Irish in The
Aesthetics of Ageing, Heike Hartung on Maria Edgeworth and Beckett
in Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature, and Margaret
O’Neill and Michaela Schrage-Früh on Clare Boylan and Joseph
O’Connor, respectively, in Ageing Women in Literature and Visual
Culture, it is in the general context of literature in English, thus effacing
the specific Irish context. Bridget English’s Laying Out the Bones: Death
and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel (2017) does deal with Irish writing
but, as the title suggests, is focused on the moment of death rather than
on the ageing process and therefore its discussion of death and dying in
five twentieth- and twenty-first-century Irish novels belongs properly to
the field of thanatology rather than to gerontology.
Much literary gerontology, by Kathleen Woodward, Zoe Brennan,
and Jeannette King, drawing on feminist, psychoanalytical and cultural
theory already familiar in literary studies, has centred on older women,
underlining their social invisibility in later life. This is crucial work, but
the advantage of examining ageing in Irish writing is that it allows the
focus to shift back to a balance between the sexes. Many of the writ-
ers discussed here (Wilde, Beckett, Iris Murdoch, John Banville, Deirdre
Madden) portray male protagonists and their experience of ageing, and
study of their work chimes in with the growth of masculinity studies.
The recent turn to cultural gerontology has facilitated a breaking away
from chronological accounts of ageing towards a more fluid definition
of age. Age is in any case a notoriously mobile category, not only across
cultures and historical periods, but even in the day to day life of a single
individual. As Mike Hepworth has observed: ‘ageing is never simply a
20 H. INGMAN
fixed biological or chronological process, but an open-ended subjective

and social experience.’47 There are wide disparities between biological,
chronological, social and even psychological age: one may feel old at
forty or young at eighty. The advantage of literary gerontology is that it
places subjective experience of ageing at its centre and, for the purposes
of this study, the focus is on protagonists facing into, or having already
reached, the latter part of their lives and who are conscious of undergo-
ing the ageing experience in themselves.
Literature also has the advantage of being able to highlight the disad-
vantaged or the overlooked, and this study aims to move beyond media
focus on the fit and healthy older population to study those whose disa-
bility, mental or physical, impedes their participation in mainstream Irish
life, while a final section takes the logical step further of moving into
thanatology and looking at work that presents the even more culturally
invisible, namely the bedbound and dying. The final part of this intro-
duction is devoted to an introductory overview of the subsequent chap-
ters in this study.
Overview of Chapters
Chapter 2, ‘Ageing, Time and Aesthetics: Dorian Gray, W.B. Yeats and
Elizabeth Bowen’s The Little Girls’ brings together three very differ-
ent writers, reading Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, The Little Girls (1964),
in the context of the work of Oscar Wilde and W.B. Yeats, two signifi-
cant earlier Irish writers on ageing. In The Little Girls, the central char-
acter’s resistance to maturity recalls Wilde’s Dorian Gray (1891) and, as
in Wilde’s novel, the theme of time is interwoven with questions of aes-
thetics and the capacity of art to freeze time, a subject that also preoccu-
pies the later Yeats. The chapter discusses the way in which, for all three
authors, themes of ageing and time initiated artistic innovation.
The following chapter, ‘Resisting the Narrative of Decline: Molly
Keane, Time After Time, Deirdre Madden, Authenticity and Anne
Enright, The Green Road’, discusses how these three novelists succeed in
challenging the narrative of ageing as decline by drawing out new skills
and strengths that may be gained during the ageing process. The chap-
ter will argue that their novels fall into the category of Reifungsromane,
a term coined by Barbara Frey Waxman in From the Hearth to the Open
Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature (1990)
to denote fiction that portrays ageing as a process of change and even
growth. Since it is part of Waxman’s argument that women show more

resilience than men during the ageing process because they have less
invested in power structures and the patriarchy, her study concentrates
on portraits of ageing by and about women. In this chapter, the discus-
sion is more evenly balanced between male and female characters. In all
three novels cultural pressures around ageing are explored amidst the
protagonists’ struggle to find their own voices in an Ireland depicted as
oppressive.
Chapter 4, ‘Ageing, the Individual and the Community: Iris
Murdoch, John Banville and John McGahern’, discusses ageing in fiction
by three writers whose treatment of the topic invites discussion of the
conflict between the individual and the community and of the extent to
which involvement in a meaningful social network contributes to a posi-
tive experience of ageing. Ageing is a theme that extends throughout Iris
Murdoch’s oeuvre and the chapter will begin with a survey of her work
before focusing on The Sea, The Sea (1978) in which Charles Arrowby’s
unreliable life review is dominated by his fear of ageing. A comparison
may be drawn with John Banville’s solipsistic and dissembling narra-
tors who, as part of the ageing process, also embark on reviews of their
lives. Discussion of Banville’s fiction will include The Sea (2005), but the
specific focus will be on Eclipse (2000) and Shroud (2002), initially one
novel. One of the criticisms that has been brought against Banville’s fic-
tion is that it neglects meaningful social relationships; by contrast, John
McGahern’s novels are very often rooted in a particular community. In
The Barracks (1963) Elizabeth Reegan, for whom the ageing process
is accelerated in her final year, finds herself frequently at odds with her
community’s values, yet she is not cut off from people like the solipsistic
and narcissistic narrators in Murdoch and Banville. In McGahern’s That
They May Face the Rising Sun (2002), the ageing community possesses
sufficient cultural resources to make the ageing process meaningful and
represents the kind of social interconnectivity regarded by gerontologists
as essential to successful ageing.48
The following chapter, ‘A Voice of Their Own: Portraits of Old Age
in the Irish Short Story’, looks at the Irish short story in which age-
ing has been a dominant theme as far back as the early twentieth cen-
tury with the stories of Liam O’Flaherty and his portrayal of old age
as part of the natural cycle. In the hands of writers like O’Flaherty,
Daniel Corkery, Frank O’Connor and Sean O’Faolain, the short story
excelled in describing the frail elderly from the outside, often using older
22 H. INGMAN
characters as a way of exploring social change in Irish society, but leaving

their emotional state of mind to be deduced only from external actions,
gestures and dialogue. Michael McLaverty’s stories marked a turn-
ing point by entering into the consciousness and frame of mind of his
older protagonists, and the growing interiority of the Irish short story
under the belated influence of modernism gave space to the flashback,
which allowed for increasing reflection on the part of ageing protago-
nists in stories by John McGahern and William Trevor. If the Irish short
story of previous decades often used older characters as convenient pegs
on which to hang observations about changing social circumstances in
Ireland, the contemporary short story has focused more directly on their
world. Stories by Colm Tóibín and Anne Enright portray older people
through the sympathetic eyes of their younger relatives while others by
Desmond Hogan, Mary Dorcey, Christine Dwyer Hickey, and Bernard
MacLaverty, enter directly into the consciousness of the old and con-
fused, countering society’s tendency to write off the inner world of the
demented as of no importance. This chapter traces the progression in the
Irish short story from external portraits of older people via modernist
interiority to the contemporary story giving them a voice of their own.
In Chapter 6, ‘Frail Old Age’, consideration of the frail elderly brings
us into what is often designated as the ‘fourth age’, linked to people in
their eighties and nineties, decades that bring new difficulties and chal-
lenges as the body weakens, independence diminishes and the elderly
person has less control over his or her daily life, leading often to a loss
of confidence and self-esteem.49 The chapter discusses the way in which
sexist and ageist stereotypes combine to deny the ageing women in
Norah Hoult’s There Were No Windows (1944), Julia O’Faolain’s No
Country for Young Men (1980), and Edna O’Brien’s House of Splendid
Isolation (1994) a voice and a sense of identity, and the novels provide
an insight into the power mechanisms that weigh against ageing women.
Two later novels by Jennifer Johnston, Two Moons (1998) and Foolish
Mortals (2007), include fine portrayals of elderly women on the brink of
death and, by conveying the lively inner thoughts of women believed by
others to be fading fast Johnston, like all the novelists discussed in this
chapter, forces her readers to reconsider their attitudes towards socially
marginalized older people.
Discussion of advanced or frail old age inevitably brings us closer to
death and, for the sake of completeness, in a brief epilogue the book
moves from gerontology into the relatively new science of thanatology
to look at portraits of the bedbound and dying in Iris Murdoch’s Bruno’s

Dream (1969) and John Banville’s The Infinities (2009), with a prefatory
discussion of Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies (1951) for comparison. This
end stage is all too easy to write off as a redundant period in people’s
lives when not very much seems to be happening. Reading these nov-
els in the light of Allan Kellehear’s The Inner Life of the Dying Person
(2014), which argues that the prospect of imminent death may prompt
fresh inspirations, new experiences and renewed outlooks and commit-
ments, the epilogue argues that, though the world of the bedbound and
dying is in many ways the most alien to the busy consumerist world of
western democracies, the three novels discussed here show the ability of
even the bedbound to change and develop in rich and complex ways.
The theme of ageing in Irish writing remains an open topic, ripe for
further investigation in the light of current demographical shifts in Irish
society and the consequent conflicting and often uncertain attitudes to
ageing. Until ageing is regarded as more than just senescing, that is,
deterioration of physical functions over time, it will be impossible to
develop a culture of ageing well, one that pays attention to the personal
experiences of ageing individuals. Irish writing, with its rich exploration
of the subjectivity of older people, revealing the potential for change and
development even in those on the threshold of death, is an important
factor in giving deeper meaning to the ageing process and it is hoped
that this book will act as a catalyst for further work in this field.
Notes
1. One notable example, discussed later in this chapter, is TILDA (The Irish
Longitudinal Study on Ageing), set up in October 2009 and based at
Trinity College, the University of Dublin.
2. One example is the MLA age studies subgroup that publishes scholarly
work in this area on-line at mla.hcommon.org.
3. Jan Baars, Aging and the Art of Living (Baltimore: The John Hopkins
University Press, 2011), 47. See 12–57 for his discussion of the way in
which chronometric time rules late modern societies.
4. Thomas R. Cole, ‘The “Enlightened” View of Aging: Victorian Morality
in a New Key’, in What Does It Mean to Grow Old? Reflections from the
Humanities, ed. Thomas R. Cole and Sally Gadow (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1986), 115–30. See also, Thomas R. Cole, The Journey
of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992).
24 H. INGMAN
5. Chris Phillipson, Reconstructing Old Age: New Agendas in Social Theory

and Practice (London: Sage, 1998), 7.
6. Erik Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed (1982; New York: W. W. Norton
and Co., 1998), 114.
7. John Swinton, Dementia: Living in the Memories of God (Grand Rapids,
MI: William B. Erdmanns, 2012), 81.
8. Henri Nouwen and W. J. Gaffney, Aging: The Fulfillment of Life (New
York: Doubleday, 1976), 71.
9. Lars Tornstam, Gerotranscendence: A Developmental Theory of Positive
Aging (New York: Springer, 2005), 3. On this topic, see also, Robert
C. Atchley, Spirituality and Aging (Baltimore: The John Hopkins
University Press, 2009).
10. Raymond Tallis, ‘Old Faces, New Lives’, The Times Higher, 9 July (1999):
230, quoted in Mike Hepworth, Stories of Ageing (Buckingham: Open
University Press, 2000), 125–26.
11. Erik Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed, 105–14.
12. Robert N. Butler, ‘The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in
the Aged’, Psychiatry 26 (1963): 65–76, 66. For critical thinking around
Erikson and Butler, see Harry R. Moody, ‘The Meaning of Life and the
Meaning of Old Age’, 11–42; and Kathleen Woodward, ‘Reminiscence
and the Life Review: Prospects and Retrospects’, in What Does It Mean to
Grow Old? Reflections from the Humanities, ed. Cole and Gadow, 135–61.
13. Betty Friedan, The Fountain of Age (New York: Vintage, 1994), 569–638.
14. Baars, Aging and the Art of Living, 169–97.
15. See Kathleen Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other
Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 26–52 for an
extended discussion of Freud’s negative view of the ageing process.
16. Carl Jung, Collected Works, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), vol. 7, 61.
17. Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, 10–11.
18. Barbara Macdonald and Cynthia Rich, Look Me in the Eye: Old Women,
Ageing and Ageism (London: Women’s Press, 1984).
19. Germaine Greer, The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), 2.
20. Greer, The Change, 440.
21. Greer, The Change, 2.
22. Friedan, The Fountain of Age, 33.
23. Friedan, The Fountain of Age, 144.
24. Baars, Aging and the Art of Living, 53. See also the volume Ageing,
Meaning and Social Structure: Connecting Critical and Humanistic
Gerontology, ed. Jan Baars, Joseph Dohmen, Amanda Grenier, Chris
Phillipson (Bristol: Policy Press, 2014), bringing together humanistic and
cultural approaches to gerontology.
25. Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, ed. Anne M.

Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen (Charlottesville and London: University
Press of Virginia, 1993), 1.
26. Janice Sokoloff, The Margin That Remains: A Study of Aging in Literature
(New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 1987), 130.
27. Constance Rooke, ‘Oh What a Paradise It Seems: John Cheever’s Swan
Song’, in Aging and Gender in Literature, ed. Wyatt-Brown and Rossen,
204–25.
28. An exception is Carmen Zamorano Llena’s essay on Anita Brookner,
‘Making for Ithaca in Late Life: Representations of Successful Ageing
in Anita Brookner’s A Start in Life and Brief Lives’, in The Aesthetics of
Ageing: Critical Approaches to Literary Representations of the Ageing
Process, ed. Maria O’Neill and Carmen Zamorano Llena (Lleida:
Universitat de Lleida, 2002), 163–74.
29. Sarah Harper, ‘Constructing Later Life/Constructing the Body: Some
Thoughts from Feminist Theory’, in Critical Approaches to Ageing
and Later Life, ed. Anne Jamieson, Sarah Harper, and Christina Victor
(Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997), 160–72.
30. Michaela Schrage-Früh, ‘“Embarking, Not Dying”: Clare Boylan’s
Beloved Stranger as Reifungsroman’, in Ageing Women in Literature
and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings, ed. Cathy
McGlynn, Margaret O’Neill, and Michaela Schrage-Früh (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 55–72; Margaret O’Neill, ‘“This Is How
Time Unfolds When You Are Old”: Ageing, Subjectivity and Joseph
O’Connor’s Ghost Light’, in Ageing Women in Literature and Visual
Culture, ed. Cathy McGlynn, Margaret O’Neill, and Michaela Schrage-
Früh, 289–303.
31. Ageing and Social Policy in Ireland, ed. Patricia Kennedy and Suzanne
Quin (Dublin: UCD Press, 2008). This volume is a valuable source of
information on social policy towards older Irish people in earlier periods.
32. Virpi Thompson and Martha Doyle, ‘From the Workhouse to the Home:
Evolution of Care Policy for Older People in Ireland’, International
Journal of Sociology and Social Policy 28, 3/4, (2007): 1–19 (4).
33. Age Action Ireland: Strategic Plan 2016–2018 ageaction.i.e., 7.
34. Tilda.tcd.i.e.
35. Paul Cullen, ‘It’s All Downhill from 38: Why Ageing Is Not Just for the
Old’, The Irish Times, 6 December 2016, 10.
36. See The Irish Times, 10 November 2017, 7.
37. Arlene Harris, ‘Older, and Wiser, Students: Colleges with Life Long
Learning Programmes Are Catering to a Rapidly Growing Section of the
Population: Retirees’, The Irish Times, 24 October 2017, 11.
38. ‘The Opportunity of Age: Why Diversity Must Include the Elderly’, The
Irish Times, 26 September 2017, 16.
26 H. INGMAN
39. Rose Costello, ‘Get Moving: How to Get Fitter at Any Age: Dodgy
Knees, an Aching Back or Stiff Shoulder Should Not Be Used as Excuses
to Avoid Exercise’, The Irish Times, 19 September 2017, 14.
40. Jennifer O’Connell, ‘Third Act, Second Career’, The Irish Times, 5 August
2017, 11.
41. Jackie Jones, ‘Ageism Is So Ingrained We Don’t Even Spot It’, The Irish
Times, 22 September 2015, 16; ‘Empty Nesters, Bed Blockers, Old
Farts or Biddies—Ageist Terms Are Not the Right Fit’, The Irish Times,
22 March 2016, 16; and ‘Most People Are Sharp and Fit—So Why the
Growing Ageism?’, The Irish Times, 14 June 2016, 16.
42. Fiona Reddan, The Irish Times, 12 April 2016, 5.
43. h ttp://www.thejournal.ie/older-people-living-alone-3708722-
Nov2017/.
44. See Conor Lally, ‘Elderly Targeted in Series of Violent Attacks at Home’,
The Irish Times, 18 December 2017.
45. Padraig O’Morain, ‘Society’s Attitude to Dementia Needs to Change’,
The Irish Times, 24 October 2017, 15.
46. For Yeats, see Daniel Allbright, The Myth Against Myth: A Study of Yeats’s
Imagination in Old Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972); for
Beckett, see Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other
Fictions, 131–45.
47. Hepworth, Stories of Ageing, 2.
48. See Swinton, Dementia, 142–44. See also Anja Machielse and Roelof
Hortulanus, ‘Social Ability or Social Frailty? The Balance Between
Autonomy and Connectedness in the Lives of Older People’, in Ageing,
Meaning and Social Structure, ed. Baars et al., 119–38.
49. See the study by Paul Higgs and Chris Gilleard, Rethinking Old Age:
Theorising the Fourth Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Bibliography
Age Action Ireland: Strategic Plan 2016–2018. http://www.ageaction.ie.
Baars, Jan. 2011. Aging and the Art of Living. Baltimore: The John Hopkins
University Press.
Baars, Jan, Joseph Dohmen, Amanda Grenier, and Chris Phillipson, eds. 2014.
Ageing, Meaning and Social Structure: Connecting Critical and Humanistic
Gerontology. Bristol: Policy Press.
Brennan, Zoe. 2005. The Older Woman in Recent Fiction. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland and Co.
Butler, Robert N. 1963. The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in
the Aged. Psychiatry 26: 65–76.
Cole, Thomas R. 1992. The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in

America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cole, Thomas R., and Sally Gadow, eds. 1986. What Does It Mean to Grow Old?
Reflections from the Humanities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
De Beauvoir, Simone. 1972. The Coming of Age, trans. Patrick O’Brian. New
York: Norton.
English, Bridget. 2017. Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern
Irish Novel. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.
Erikson, Erik. 1998. The Life Cycle Completed. New York: W. W. Norton.
Friedan, Betty. 1994. The Fountain of Age. New York: Vintage.
Greer, Germaine. 1991. The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause.
London: Hamish Hamilton.
Harper, Sarah. 1997. Constructing Later Life/Constructing the Body: Some
Thoughts from Feminist Theory. In Critical Approaches to Ageing and
Later Life, ed. Anne Jamieson, Sarah Harper, and Christina Victor, 160–72.
Buckingham: Open University Press.
Hartung, Heike. 2016. Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature:
Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman. New York and London: Routledge.
Hepworth, Mike. 2000. Stories of Ageing. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Higgs, Paul, and Chris Gilleard. 2015. Rethinking Old Age: Theorising the Fourth
Age. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jung, Carl. 1966. Collected Works, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and
R. F. C. Hull, vol. 7. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kennedy, Patricia, and Suzanne Quin, eds. 2008. Ageing and Social Policy in
Ireland. Dublin: UCD Press.
King, Jeannette. 2013. Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: The
Invisible Woman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Llena, Carmen Zamorano. 2002. Making for Ithaca in Late Life: Representations
of Successful Ageing in Anita Brookner’s A Start in Life and Brief Lives. In
The Aesthetics of Ageing: Critical Approaches to Literary Representations of
the Ageing Process, ed. Maria O’Neill and Carmen Zamorano Llena, 163–74.
Lleida: Universitat de Lleida.
Macdonald, Barbara, and Cynthia Rich. 1984. Look Me in the Eye: Old Women,
Ageing and Ageism. London: Women’s Press.
McGlynn, Cathy, Margaret O’Neill, and Michaela Schrage-Früh, eds. 2017.
Ageing Women in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions,
Reimaginings. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
McMullen, Gordon, and Sam Smiles, eds. 2016. Late Style and Its Discontents:
Essays in Art, Literature, and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Nouwen, Henri, and W. J. Gaffney. 1976. Aging: The Fulfillment of Life. New
York: Doubleday.
28 H. INGMAN
Phillipson, Chris. 1998. Reconstructing Old Age: New Agendas in Social Theory
and Practice. London: Sage.
Said, Edward. 2006. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain. New
York and London: Bloomsbury.
Sokoloff, Janice. 1987. The Margin That Remains: A Study of Aging in
Literature. New York and Bern: Peter Lang.
Swinton, John. 2012. Dementia: Living in the Memories of God. Grand Rapids,
MI: William B. Erdmanns.
Thompson, Virpi, and Martha Doyle. 2007. From the Workhouse to the Home:
Evolution of Care Policy for Older People in Ireland. International Journal of
Sociology and Social Policy 28 (3/4): 1–19.
http://www.tilda.tcd.ie.
Tornstam, Lars. 2005. Gerotranscendence: A Developmental Theory of Positive
Aging. New York: Springer.
Waxman, Barbara Frey. 1990. From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist
Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature. New York: Greenwood Press.
Whelehan, Imelda, and Joel Gwynne, eds. 2014. Ageing, Popular Culture and
Contemporary Feminisms: Harleys and Hormones. New York and Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Woodward, Kathleen. 1991. Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M., and Janice Rossen, eds. 1993. Aging and Gender in
Literature: Studies in Creativity. Charlottesville and London: University Press
of Virginia.
CHAPTER 2
Ageing, Time and Aesthetics: Dorian Gray,

W. B. Yeats and Elizabeth Bowen’s
The Little Girls
Elizabeth Bowen’s lover, Charles Ritchie, noted in his diary that Bowen’s
novel, The Little Girls (1964), was originally to be called ‘Race With
Time’, and he observed that conversations with Bowen at this point in
their relationship in 1957, when Ritchie was fifty-one and Bowen fif-
ty-eight, seemed ‘always to be circling round the subject—which is per-
haps Time—that we are getting older, that we see each other for a few
days or at most a week, that months come in between, that in another
five to ten years we must think of being finished or dying’.1 This chap-
ter reads The Little Girls in the context of the work of Oscar Wilde
(1854–1900) and W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), two earlier Irish writers
who have significant things to say on the subject of time and ageing.
In The Little Girls, the central character’s resistance to maturity recalls
Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and, as in Wilde’s novel, the
theme of time is interwoven with questions of aesthetics and the capacity
of art to freeze time, a subject that also preoccupied the later Yeats.
Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray (1891)

The Picture of Dorian Gray was published at a key point in the his-
tory of attitudes towards ageing. The Victorians, with their pursuit of
hard work, productivity and self-help, emphasized the importance of
ageing well and remaining healthy and self-reliant for as long as pos-
sible. Their era was dominated by older people in public life—Queen
Victoria who had seemingly aged overnight on Prince Albert’s death

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96430-0_2
30 H. INGMAN
in 1861, Gladstone, Disraeli, and Palmerston, among others. Victorian

morality emphasized that those who lived a life of self-discipline and
faith would preserve their health and independence into old age.
Thomas Cole describes the Victorians as unique in their belief that:
‘God’s laws of morality and health enabled all to live to a healthy old
age, die a natural death, and enter the kingdom of heaven’.2 Such
unrealistic attitudes to ageing led to an unhelpful tendency to blame
older people themselves for illness and decline, rather than regarding
these things as an inevitable part of the human condition. Physical
frailty was looked upon as indicative of a shameful lack of self-control
and a personal moral failure.
The fin de siècle was notable for its turn towards youth in the
Decadent and the New Woman movements, both anticipating early
modernists’ repudiation of the Victorian age as outmoded evident, for
example, in the writing of Lytton Strachey and Virginia Woolf. At the
same time, as Karen Chase observes in her study of old age and the
Victorians, the rise in longevity meant that the ageing population was
becoming visible as a separate category to be investigated and studied,
and what was discovered was far from the Ciceronian ideal of old age as
a period of serenity and wisdom promoted in De Senectute. Researchers
uncovered a series of communities of the frail elderly filling work-
houses, hospitals, asylums and almshouses, revealing old age to be a
time of misery, poverty, ill-health and isolation. Government-sponsored
investigations into the lives of older people, led by Charles Booth,
and statistics gathered by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, underlined the
link between old age and poverty. The term ‘gerontology’ was coined
in 1904 by Elie Metchnikoff and ‘geriatrics’ in 1909 by Ignatz Leo
Nascher.3 Old age as a category was shifting from the private sphere
to the public domain, confirmed by the passing of the UK Old Age
Pensions Act in 1908.
At the time of writing The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde moved
in fin de siècle circles of artistic innovators but at thirty-five, married, and
a father he felt himself considerably older in years and experience than
the artists and young men with whom he surrounded himself. Richard
Ellmann refers to ‘Wilde’s circle of young men’ in the late 1880s and
early 1890s, which included John Gray, Lionel Johnson, Max Beerbohm,
John Barlas, among others.4 In the company of these young men and of
avant-garde artists, Wilde often felt and was regarded as old:
2 AGEING, TIME AND AESTHETICS … 31
Feeling middle-aged in a period dominated by middle-class prejudice,

Wilde felt stuck in the wrong historical moment. Finding himself at the
end of a century rather than in the vanguard of the new must have seemed
an absurdity.5
‘British aestheticism was emphatically young’ pitting itself against a

symbolically old Victorian culture.6 Where was Wilde to place himself?
Dorian Gray’s attempt to resist time and the ageing process had a per-
sonal resonance for him.
Wilde’s culture’s association of youth with purity, innocence and
beauty, and conversely, the prematurely aged with ugliness, weakness,
sickness and even wickedness is evident in his novel, which portrays the
distancing of the old as objects for mockery. ‘Youth is the one thing
worth having’, Lord Henry Wotton tells Dorian Gray.7 At the end, per-
haps echoing Wilde’s own feeling of straddling two ages, Lord Henry
repeats: ‘Youth! There is nothing like it. It’s absurd to talk of the igno-
rance of youth. The only people to whose opinions I listen now with
any respect are people much younger than myself. They seem in front
of me’. By contrast, older people are ignorant and behind the times: ‘As
for the aged, I always contradict the aged. I do it on principle. If you ask
them their opinion on something that happened yesterday, they solemnly
give you the opinions current in 1820, when people wore high stocks,
believed in everything, and knew absolutely nothing’.8
This society’s reverence for youth crosses the gender divide. The
Duchess of Harley, ‘a lady of admirable good-nature and good temper,
much liked by everyone who knew her’,9 laments her menopausal age:
‘When an old woman like myself blushes, it is a very bad sign. Ah! Lord
Henry, I wish you would tell me how to become young again’.10 The
cult of youth also crosses the class divide. Hetty, the village girl Dorian
courts, refuses to believe he is a bad person: ‘he had told her once that
he was wicked, and she had laughed at him, and answered that wicked
people were always very old and very ugly’.11 Dorian Gray’s bid for eter-
nal youth, offering his soul in exchange, is very much part of his society’s
negative attitudes towards ageing.
Wilde is frank in the novel about the physical effects of ageing.
Lord Henry delineates them to Dorian: ‘You will become sallow, and
hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly … The pulse
of joy that beats in us at twenty, becomes sluggish. Our limbs fail, our
senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets’.12 Awakened from his
32 H. INGMAN
innocence, Dorian acknowledges the effect of Lord Henry’s words: ‘Yes,

there would be a day when his face would be wrinkled and wizen, his
eyes dim and colourless, the grace of his figure broken and deformed.
The scarlet would pass away from his lips, and the gold steal from his
hair’.13 Arguably, Wilde’s novel, together with the research of Booth and
the Webbs, became part of a process that contributed to the greater visi-
bility of the ageing subject in this period.
In Dorian Gray, the discourse around ageing is largely unhelp-
ful because of its association of age with sin, in itself an inevitable out-
come of the Faustian bargain Dorian strikes that involves transferring his
soul and conscience to the portrait Basil Hallward has painted of him
so that the portrait takes on Dorian’s ageing process while he himself
remains eternally fixed in youth. Since this society associates youth with
purity and innocence and since Dorian retains his youthful appearance,
he appears as ‘one who had kept himself unspotted from the world’.14
Conversely, gazing at his changed portrait, ‘the hideous lines that seared
the wrinkled forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth’,
Dorian wonders, ‘which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the
signs of age’. In passages such as this, wickedness and old age are inter-
changeable; growing old is criminalized. The face in the portrait is both
‘evil and aging’.15 Alan Sinfield regards this view of ageing, correlating
‘corruption with loss of youth and beauty’, as not necessarily specific
to Victorian culture but linked to the general atmosphere of ‘queer-
ness’ that pervades the text without ever being quite spelled out, at least
in the revised 1891 volume: ‘The ageing process is made to represent
moral degeneracy; then, as now, this is a proposition that seems unethi-
cal in mainstream culture but which answers to a fantasy in gay male
subculture’.16
Nevertheless, there is evidence in the novel of resistance to this neg-
ative view of ageing. For a start, as Karen Chase has pointed out, the
ageing human being may not be valued but the antiques that Dorian
surrounds himself with are.17 Unlike humans, the older an art object
becomes, the more its value increases. Yet some older characters are
also attractive, such as the aforementioned Duchess of Harley, the witty
Lady Narborough ‘a very clever woman’,18 the lively Madame de Ferrol
who remakes her life as a widow and Mr. Erskine, ‘an old gentleman of
considerable charm and culture’ who avoids the garrulity of old age.19
As an eternal youth, Dorian becomes trapped in subjectivity and sensa-
tion-seeking to such an extent that even he wonders: ‘What was youth
at best? A green, and unripe time, a time of shallow moods, and sickly
thoughts. Why had he worn its livery? Youth had spoiled him’.20 In
an astute passage, conveying Basil’s feelings on the announcement of
Dorian’s engagement, Wilde links the ageing process to something more
complex than physical appearance, namely emotional loss:
A strange sense of loss came over him. He felt that Dorian Gray would
never again be to him all that he had been in the past. Life had come
between them … His eyes darkened, and the crowded, flaring streets
became blurred to his eyes. When the cab drew up at the theatre, it
seemed to him that he had grown years older.21
The very act of placing a Faustian bargain at the centre of his novel inevi-
tably invited ethical interpretations. Wilde himself acknowledged that the
choice of this particular story—an extraordinarily beautiful young man
selling his soul in exchange for eternal youth—made it difficult for him
to suppress a moral. In his letter of 26 June 1890 to the editor of the
St James’s Gazette, responding to criticism of the original version of the
novel in thirteen chapters published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine on
20 June 1890, Wilde asserted that the novel does have a moral: ‘And the
moral is this: All excess, as well as all renunciation, brings its own pun-
ishment … Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure,
tries to kill conscience, and at that moment kills himself’.22 In his letter
of 30 June 1890 to the editor of the Daily Chronicle, he admitted: ‘I felt
that, from an aesthetic point of view, it would be difficult to keep the
moral in its proper secondary place; and even now I do not feel quite
sure that I have been able to do so’.23 And to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
he wrote in April 1891: ‘My difficulty was to keep the inherent moral
subordinate to the artistic and dramatic effect, and it still seems to me
that the moral is too obvious’.24
Letters such as these reveal Wilde’s reluctance to accede to moral
interpretations of his novel. He tried to subordinate didacticism to aes-
thetics by arguing that Dorian’s end may be ethically satisfying but that
it is only one element in the overall patterning of the novel. His letter of
30 June 1890 continues: ‘this moral is so far artistically and deliberately
suppressed that it does not enunciate its law as a general principle but
realizes itself purely in the lives of individuals, and so becomes simply
a dramatic element in a work of art, and not the object of the work of
art itself’.25 He designed the 1891 preface to his novel to reinforce this
34 H. INGMAN
separation between ethics and art through a series of aphorisms such as

‘all art is quite useless’ and ‘no artist desires to prove anything’.26
Nevertheless, scholars have drawn lessons from Wilde’s novel.
Ellmann reads Dorian Gray as a warning against the dangers of exces-
sive devotion to aestheticism: a life of Paterian sensation lived out in an
uncontrolled way is self-defeating.27 ‘Life is terribly deficient in form’,
remarks Gilbert in Wilde’s essay, ‘The Critic as Artist’ (1890),28 as part
of his general argument for the superiority of art over life, but Dorian
Gray reveals the danger of trying to impose on life a form it does not
have, particularly in Dorian’s attempt to hold back time. Karen Chase
reads Dorian as tempted from his original state of Edenic innocence by
Lord Henry to become trapped in a life of endless and destructive sen-
sation-seeking that prematurely ages him. In Chase’s paradoxical reading
of Dorian Gray, the moral she draws runs counter to the novel’s celebra-
tion of youth by reinforcing the need to age gracefully: ‘the obligation to
age, and the difficulties of aging gracefully, with ease and style, these are
the lessons one learns from the languor of Henry, the death of Basil, and
the failure of Dorian Gray’.29
For Angela Bourke, the dangers of eternal youth are underpinned by
the echoes of Irish folklore in the novel. Through the researches of his
parents and his holidays in the west of Ireland, Wilde became familiar
with Irish folklore and the oral tradition and his use of these in his work
has been documented by David Upchurch, Davis Coakley and Richard
Pine, among others.30 In the context of Dorian Gray, Upchurch observes
that ‘the desire to remain young has also long been a concern in the Irish
folklore tradition’.31 He cites legends of the sidhe (sinister fairies) who
steal beautiful human children and transport them to Tír na nÓg (the
Land of Youth) to remain youthful forever, while the changelings left in
their place age and wither away. Bourke comments that the sidhe may
offer eternal youth and freedom from social constraint but at a cost:
The fairy otherworld … in the stories of the West of Ireland offered eter-
nal youth and freedom from social constraint; but the price was high
– if not for the protagonist, then for the wider society. We are inevitably
reminded of Wilde’s Dorian Gray, in which a beautiful young man is led
astray, becomes a ‘fairy’ and in his turn leads young people to perdition.32
In The Faiths of Oscar Wilde (2005), Jarlath Killeen finds Dorian Gray
imbued with Cardinal Newman’s arguments, expressed in his sermon,
‘The Second Spring’ (1852), that it is not to science (as Lord Henry
argues) but to the actions of grace on the soul that we should look to
resist the effects of age and decay. According to the Darwinian material-
ism expounded by Lord Henry, it should be possible to live in the body
without reference to such supernatural hypotheses as the soul but Dorian’s
subsequent degraded life, chained to the senses yet nagged by conscience
and in the end despairing of ‘the living death of his own soul’,33 reveals
the failure of this theory. Despite Lord Henry’s insistence that ‘we have
given up our belief in the soul’,34 Dorian continues to believe he has a soul
and that is what destroys him in the end as he seeks to ‘kill this monstrous
soul-life’.35 Killeen argues: ‘it is Lord Henry Wotton’s theories which fall
foul of the structure of the novel, and not Henry Newman’s. It is Lord
Henry’s banishing of the soul which comes to be seen as a sick joke, while
Henry Newman’s focus on the importance of the soul is vindicated’.36
Whatever way one reads Dorian Gray, it is clear that the effort to stave
off the ageing process ends in disaster. In an inversion of Lacan’s mir-
ror theory, Dorian cannot bear to see his true character and age reflected
in Basil’s portrait of him: ‘The quivering, ardent sunlight showed him
the lines of cruelty round the mouth as clearly as if he had been looking
into a mirror after he had done some dreadful thing’.37 Dorian’s bid to
live in the ageless, but lifeless, world of art fails. Despite his attempt to
evade time, time in fact speeds up for Dorian—he can never have enough
pleasurable sensations—whereas one of the benefits of the ageing process,
according to writers such as Barbara Frey Waxman and Lars Tornstam,
is that time may operate differently, with less emphasis on clock time,
more on the intensification of the moment.38 Dorian’s Paterian effort to
extract as much pleasure as possible from every passing moment ironically
leads not to a slowing down but to a speeding up of time which is in the
end self-defeating. Dorian Gray is constructed around what Chase calls a
characteristically Wildean paradox that ‘the best way to master age is to
live in time’.39 Robbed of a normal ageing process, Dorian lacks the ben-
efit of what Waxman has termed the journey towards a more realized self.
Stylistic innovation is linked to Wilde’s use of the ageing theme in
Dorian Gray, something Wilde himself underlined in his letter to The
Daily Chronicle of 30 June 1890: ‘… I first conceived the idea of a
young man selling his soul in exchange for eternal youth – an idea that
is old in the history of literature, but to which I have given new form’.40
He went on to describe his novel as a refutation of ‘the crude brutality
of plain realism’.41 The new form, ironic and self-conscious, arose from
36 H. INGMAN
Wilde’s resistance to Victorian realism, choosing instead to set his novel

in the contemporary context of aestheticism and debates around art ver-
sus life. Realism is not entirely absent from the novel but realistic ele-
ments, such as the subplot of James Vane seeking revenge for his sister’s
honour and the scenes in the East End of London where Dorian first
courts Sibyl and the docklands where he goes to purchase opium, com-
bine with other elements of magic, the Gothic, and the decadent to chal-
lenge the mimetic Victorian novel with its opposition to the falsifications
of fantasy and its ambitions towards scientific materialism. In his study of
Irish and Catholic resonances in Wilde’s work, Killeen sets Dorian Gray
in the general context of Victorian views about the underpinning of fic-
tion through scientific observation of society, emphasizing Wilde’s resist-
ance, as an Irishman conversant with folklore and sympathetic to the
supernatural resonances of Catholicism, to mimetic realism.42 The fact
that the 1891 preface, designed to shift attention away from considera-
tions of morality to considerations of form, was originally titled ‘Dogmas
for the Use of the Aged’,43 underlines Wilde’s association of aestheticism
with modernity and realism with outmoded Victorianism.
Wilde’s very choice of a magical plot whereby Dorian takes to heart
Lord Henry’s praise of the beauty of youth and the degradations of age
to the extent of vowing to give his soul in exchange for perpetual youth
while Basil’s portrait of him takes on the ageing process, and the sub-
sequent miraculous restoration of the portrait at the end, constituted
a challenge to Victorian realism. As Ellmann observes: ‘After this date
Victorian literature had a different look’.44 The idea of artistic innova-
tion is embedded in the novel when Basil heralds his portrait of Dorian
as the inauguration of ‘an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new
mode of style’, based not on ‘vulgar’ realism but on a ‘harmony of soul
and body’, a harmony that Dorian only momentarily embodies.45 Dorian
Gray, though not a late work in Edward Said’s meaning of the term,
employs themes of time and ageing to initiate artistic innovation through
Wilde’s challenge to the Victorian realist novel.
Yeats’s Later Poetry

W. B. Yeats dined with the Wildes on Christmas Day 1888 and was
inspired both by Wilde’s belief that a man should invent his own mythol-
ogy and by Wilde’s elevation of art over life, of imagination (‘lying’)
over observation, and of form over content in ‘The Decay of Lying’,
which Wilde read to Yeats from proofs.46 The aestheticism of the 1890s
encouraged Yeats, even more fervently opposed than Wilde to the mate-
rialism of the age, towards creating a personal myth that served him
well throughout his earlier lyrical phase. These years were dominated
by Yeats’s pursuit of esoteric spiritualism, the occult, Irish fairy tales and
folklore in order to develop his highly personal vision of the life of the
artist as prophet, magus and Nietzschean hero. His late poetry, however,
demonstrates a change in style and emphasis that lends itself to inclu-
sion as an example of that much-vexed term, ‘late style’. In an article
that examines Yeats’s poems on old age from the beginning to the end
of his career, noting the later revisions Yeats made to his early poems,
George Bornstein comments: ‘Protesting against old age in the derivative
language of late Victorian romanticism was one thing, but doing so in
the reinvigorated language and form of early twentieth-century modern-
ism was something else’.47 Bornstein notes Yeats’s renewed poetic energy
and his tendency to strip his language of archaisms as he grew older,
thus suggesting the possibility of associating Yeats with Edward Said’s
group of artists in On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain
(2006) whose work acquires a new idiom towards the end of their lives.
The term ‘late style’ has become increasingly problematized. In
the past, ‘late style’ was used by Said and others to denote the last few
years of a great artist marked by a change of style, tone and content that
seemed to transcend the immediate context and look to future develop-
ments in the field while offering, at the end of life, profound insights
into life and creativity. Inevitably, this became a way of conferring privi-
leged status on a select canon of artists, usually male. This romantic and
transcendent understanding of late style has been critiqued in a series of
essays, Late Style and its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music
(2016), edited by Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles, which seek to
avoid generalizations in favour of concentrating on the particular histor-
ical and personal contingencies that drive the various forms of late-life
creativity.48 In similar spirit, this chapter attends to the specific personal
and cultural context of Yeats’s later poetry without attempting to corral
it into any transhistorical, transcultural definition of late style.
The development of gerontology and geriatrics in the early twen-
tieth century encouraged the view of old age as a medical rather than
a religious or philosophical problem. The years 1890–1925 saw efforts
at rejuvenation through diet, medicine and various bogus tonics.49
38 H. INGMAN
There was a belief in this period that as sex hormones declined in old age
so also did one’s mental capacities and one’s creativity.50 Yeats was very
much part of this Zeitgeist. The winter of 1924 saw the poet’s health
begin seriously to interfere with his daily life: his sight in one eye was
almost gone, and he suffered from slight deafness, was overweight and
breathless, and had raised blood pressure.51 From this date, his fears of
creative and sexual impotence were exacerbated by recurrent illnesses.
In April 1934, he underwent the Steinach rejuvenation operation adver-
tised to restore failing sexual powers, a solution of sorts to Lord Henry’s
problem of the aging body’s continued lustfulness. In this, the oper-
ation, which was in fact a partial vasectomy, may have been only mar-
ginally successful physically, but emotionally it gave the poet enormous
psychological encouragement as he felt his creative powers, which he had
always associated with sexual prowess, return.52 In the last five years of
his life, he embarked on a series of affairs that seem designed to illustrate
that it was through the erotic rather than the occult that he now sought
wisdom:
In sexuality Yeats was seeking, as death drew closer, the transcendental illu-
mination of consciousness that ritual magic had once seemed to promise.
In his late poems of sexual daring, danger, suffering and exalted ecstasy, in
poems such as ‘Supernatural Songs’, Yeats was developing a personal sexual
mysticism in which the body was the way of wisdom.53
Seamus Heaney commented on Yeats’s belief in the intertwining of his

sexual and creative powers in his final years: ‘The recklessness and “caro-
ling”, as Hardy might have called it, of those last poems, the extravagant
success of them, have to do with the extravagance and carry-on of the
wild wicked old man’.54 Yeats’s ‘Crazy Jane’ and ‘Wild Old Man’ poems
run directly counter to the Victorian emphasis on mastering old age
through self-discipline and self-control. Yet his late poetry also insists, as
in the famous lines from ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, that old age is nothing
without spiritual development: ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A
tattered coat upon a stick, unless/Soul clap its hands and sing’.55
Yeats’s late poetry reflects a movement parallel to the develop-
ment of public discourse around ageing in this period, namely the turn
inwards towards personal experience of ageing as evident, for example,
in the diaries of Beatrice Webb (1858–1943) with their insight into the
decline and depression she experienced in old age.56 In his commentary
on ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ for the BBC, not subsequently used, Yeats

explained: ‘Now I am trying to write about the state of my soul, for it
is right for an old man to make his soul, and some of my thoughts upon
that subject I have put into a poem called “Sailing to Byzantium”’.57
We may liken Yeats’s later poetry to Robert Butler’s notion of the ‘life
review’, referred to in the previous chapter, denoting a review of past
experiences, a reassessment of past values and, particularly appropriate in
Yeats’s case, ‘the resurgence of unresolved conflicts’.58
Unlike Dorian Gray’s abandonment at the outset of the attempt to
perfect his soul on the grounds that, ‘The life that was to make his soul
would mar his body’,59 the emphasis in Yeats’s poetry from The Tower
(1928) onwards is on stripping away the masks that ever since his first
encounters with Wilde had been a stay against the heterogeneity of the
self and an aid to self-discipline.60 In a change of emphasis from his ear-
lier poetry, which concentrated on the interaction between the natural
world and the spiritual world and on the borders between the material
world and the world of the imagination, Yeats’s life review poems from
‘The Tower’ onwards are more concerned with earthly life, with ripping
off the masks and presenting himself directly. For Yeats, authenticity in
old age lay in unveiling the secrets of the human heart so that a poem
like ‘Among School Children’ enacts a modernist movement away from
the external ‘sixty-year-old smiling public man’ into his inner reflections
on past loves and multiplicity of selves.61
Dorian Gray’s attempt to freeze time in order to resist the ageing pro-
cess is reflected in the first poem in The Tower, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’,
written before the Steinach operation. Surrounded by lovers in youth-
ful, fertile Ireland, the ‘aged man’ feels like an outsider, ‘a paltry thing’,
plagued by sexual desire but impotent: ‘sick with desire’, yet ‘fastened to
a dying animal’, his body.62 He yearns to escape the limits of the flesh by
taking on the permanence of a work of art; later in the collection, how-
ever, art is shown to provide insufficient protection against the turbu-
lent events recorded in ‘Meditations in Time of Civil War’ and ‘Nineteen
Hundred and Nineteen’. If these external events impede the poet’s
efforts to create permanent works of art, there are internal obstacles
too, for how is an aged man to continue creating? In ‘The Tower’, the
speaker rages against old age that has left him tied to a decaying body
while his ‘Excited, passionate, fantastical/Imagination’ still desires to
deal in passions of the heart, as it did in the past in his poems of lustful
Hanrahan.63 Abstract thought, as practised by Plato or Plotinus, is often
40 H. INGMAN
accepted as more suited to an ageing man since it is related to the mind

and therefore ageless. The poet rejects this solution for himself but reluc-
tantly decides he must leave poetry to younger men and turn inwards to
concentrate on memory and forge his soul in the wreck of his body. At
this stage, Yeats hints that the aged body may be a theme for poetry, but
he has not yet fully developed his vision of pursuing wisdom through the
body; indeed, he despairs of the capacity of, in Daniel Albright’s words,
‘a passionless ravaged body’ to sustain ‘the passionate imagination of a
poet’.64 In this and other parts of The Tower—‘My Descendants’, ‘The
Wheel’ and ‘The New Faces’—Yeats anticipates his death and the col-
lection ends with him communing with dead occultist friends from his
youth in ‘All Souls’ Night’.
After The Tower’s pessimism, The Winding Stair (1933) is more tol-
erant of the ageing process and more committed to life. If ‘Byzantium’
seems a continuation of the earlier poem on that city as an emblem and
endorsement of the world of art and artifice (‘A starlit or a moonlit
dome disdains/All that man is’),65 this later poem struggles to control
the teeming life of the natural world that threatens to encroach upon the
city itself and is only with difficulty contained by the art of ‘The golden
smithies of the Emperor’, standing in for the poet himself.66 In ‘A
Dialogue of Self and Soul’, the emphasis is on acceptance: reviewing his
life, the poet says, ‘I am content to live it all again’. The final lines of the
poem, which may be read as an answer to the Byzantium poems, suggest
that the natural world is sufficient in itself: ‘We are blest by everything,/
Everything we look upon is blest’.67 Yeats’s life review seems to be lead-
ing to the sort of serenity, integration and sense of fulfilment antici-
pated by Butler. However, this is not the end of the story, for Yeats’s
later poetry constantly turns back on itself. In ‘Blood and the Moon’,
the wisdom of the intellect or even of the spirit is seen as entailing ste-
rility, for life is perpetually changing and a perception that may be accu-
rate one moment is false the next: wisdom, the poet says, ‘is the property
of the dead,/A something incompatible with life’.68 Yeats’s later poetry
suggests he is not aiming for a final resolution, totality or gerotranscend-
ence, in Lars Tornstam’s terms.69
The desire to reflect the onward movement of time is central in
Yeats’s later poems. ‘Vacillation’, a turning point in Yeats’s later evo-
lution, advocates accepting the conditions of life rather than seeking
to impose a scheme on it, as he did in his early years with his pursuit
of spiritualism and occult knowledge. In ‘Vacillation’, Yeats makes his
choice for this world, preferring earthy pagan Homer to the Catholic
scholar Friedrich Von Hügel. This development is confirmed in the
‘Crazy Jane’ poems and in the sequence of poems under the heading
‘A Woman Young and Old’ where, abandoning the romantic lyricism of
his earlier work, the deliberate earthiness of the language used to con-
vey transgressive female desire affirms the primacy of the life of the body.
Yet this life of the body is given added urgency in the light of old age
and death and so the pursuit of bodily wisdom becomes intertwined with
an insistence on the sacredness of life. Encountering these poems, some
readers felt that as Yeats aged his muse was growing younger. On receiv-
ing a copy of The Winding Stair AE (George Russell) wrote to Yeats, on
11 October 1933: ‘Why do you growl about your age when you never
were so vital in youth? … actually you seem more packed with psychic
vitality than you were forty years ago’.70
The burst of energy he derived from the Steinach operation confirmed
Yeats in his belief in the wisdom of the body, expressed in ‘A Prayer for
Old Age’ (A Full Moon in March 1935): ‘God guard me from those
thoughts men think/In the mind alone;/He that sings a lasting song/
Thinks in a marrow-bone’. If he is not ‘a foolish, passionate man’, he
prays he will at least seem so ‘For the song’s sake’.71 The suggestion here
that the Wild Old Man may be another mask, belied in fact by Yeats’s
pursuit of numerous sexual affairs in his last five years, does not vitiate
the inspiration the poet derived from it and the new emphasis it gave
to his late work. To Lady Dorothy Wellesley, he wrote: ‘I thought my
problem was to face death with gaiety, now I have learned that it is to
face life’.72
In New Poems (1938) and in his posthumous Last Poems (1940), Yeats
explores the body’s wisdom, choosing life and the body over the soul
and paradise in poems such as ‘The Wild Old Wicked Man’ and ‘Why
Should Not Old Men Be Mad?’ If poems like ‘The Municipal Gallery
Revisited’ depict old age’s consolations of memory and nostalgia in a
manner that might be expected of a respected public figure, others con-
vey the poet’s frenzied struggle to hold onto creative and sexual passion
despite his body’s decay. The question he posed in ‘The Tower’ as to
how an aged body can sustain the passions of a poet is answered in his
Wild Old Man poems suggesting he needs chaos and sexual frenzy to
create: ‘You think it horrible that lust and rage/Should dance attend-
ance upon my old age;/… What else have I to spur me into song?’
(‘The Spur’).73
42 H. INGMAN
Yet, as Heaney has observed, writing the body for the later Yeats is
not solely physical but becomes another route to spiritual knowledge:
The lesson must be that staying alive in the body is a sure-fire way of not
becoming a dead-head. But the great thing is that – as ever with Yeats –
you could argue the counter-truth – say that, body or no body, this poet
was deeply concerned with ‘making his soul’.74
In ‘An Acre of Grass’ and ‘Are You Content?’ the emphasis is on rein-
venting himself, for what Yeats, like Virginia Woolf, dreaded above all
was the rigidity of old age.75 He knew that the temptation to retreat into
the known and the familiar had to be resisted:
A poet, when he is growing old, will ask himself if he cannot keep his mask
and his vision without new bitterness, new disappointment … Surely, he
may think, now that I have found vision and mask I need not suffer any
longer … Then he will remember Wordsworth withering into eighty years,
honoured and empty-witted, and climb to some waste room and find, for-
gotten there by youth, some bitter crust.76
These late poems are remarkable for their lack of resolution and easy
answers. Yeats’s life review in ‘What Then?’ leads to discontent and
insecurity about the future, rather than, as might have been expected
at this stage, self-satisfied contemplation of a Nobel prize-winning
body of work. In marked contrast to the oriental calm of the ancient
Chinamen on the stone carving in ‘Lapis Lazuli’, the positioning of ‘Are
You Content?’ at the end of New Poems audaciously leaves this volume
open-ended, on a note of an old man’s unresolved rage and self-ques-
tioning. And even the seemingly stable and eternal art world of the aged
Chinamen is under threat from ‘Every discoloration of the stone,/Every
accidental crack or dent’.77
One of Yeats’s final poems, ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’,
reviews his life’s work through a lens that exposes the dangers of eva-
sion, whether in myth, nationalism, idealized love or the artifices of the
stage, and suggests the poet was envisaging a new beginning and new
techniques, rooted in the human heart and the everyday: ‘Having spent
his mythopoeic life exploring the desolation of unreality, Yeats was now
ready to embrace the “desolation of reality”’.78 In this poem, as in all
his late poems on the body’s wisdom, the theme of ageing, as in Dorian
Gray, becomes linked with artistic innovation. In Yeats’s case, this

involves a wish to strip off the masks, to abandon abstract philosophies,
‘the ladders’, that impose schemas on life and to write from the ‘the foul
rag-and-bone shop of the heart’.79 In ‘The Circus Animals’ Desertion’,
Yeats sweeps away all vestiges of the romantic poet and enters the mod-
ern age. As Albright has commented: ‘it is astonishing that Yeats wanted
to put at the end of his last book a poem which dedicated a new begin-
ning to his poetry, which promised an infinity of new poetic themes, new
techniques, a rebirth’.80 Yeats himself wrote to Dorothy Wellesley in the
last year of his life: ‘I have grown abundant and determined in my old
(age) as I never was in youth’.81
This ‘dying with life’, to borrow a phrase used by Betty Friedan,82
adds Yeats to the number of artists whose late work bears out Said’s
observation that with certain artists their work acquires a new idiom
towards the end of their lives, ‘a late style’, so that their final works,
rather than crowning and concluding their achievements, point to new
directions and new styles that in turn give rise to new questions and new
challenges.83 These works may be perplexing, unsettling, unresolved
and angry, the opposite of the serenity we might expect from an artist
in the late phase of his or her career and which Said finds, for example,
in Sophocles and Shakespeare. In his late poems, Yeats rejects the notion
of seeking to hold back time; instead, it is by surging forward with time
that the poet can most deeply experience and most thoroughly express
the full complexity of human experience. ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’,
suggesting that a world of art preserved from pain and death is both ster-
ile and infantile compared with the richness of life in time, provides a
convincing and witty answer to ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and corroborates
the warning of the dangers of uncontrolled aestheticism, the moral that
Wilde was so anxious to suppress in readings of Dorian Gray.
Elizabeth Bowen, The Little Girls (1964)

Elizabeth Bowen’s decision to place three ageing women at the centre
of her ninth novel was, in the context of the 1960s with its emphasis
on youth and sexual liberation, mildly subversive. Even feminism, faintly
stirring in the early 1960s, would take several decades to engage pos-
itively with the ageing woman in works such as Germaine Greer’s The
Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991) and Betty Friedan’s
The Fountain of Age (1993). Simone de Beauvoir’s earlier work,
44 H. INGMAN
The Coming of Age (1972), presented a largely negative portrayal of age-

ing without a specific focus on gender issues while, as we saw in chapter
one, scholarly studies of the older woman in fiction are of even more
recent date.84 As Imelda Whelehan and Joel Gwynne have observed:
‘Since the late 1960s and the emergent women’s movement, older
women have earned patchy attention in feminist writings’.85 Bowen
always denied she was a feminist but by placing the focus on the lives of
three women in their early sixties The Little Girls, a critically underrated
work in the Bowen canon, is an important counter to the invisibility of
the ageing woman both in society and in fiction.
Unusually for a Bowen novel, there is no central love affair in The
Little Girls. Instead, the emotional force of the book comes from the
relationship between three middle-aged women, Dinah, Clare and
Sheila, who were friends at school, lost touch in the intervening fifty or
so years and have now reached ‘the days after’ love.86 The Little Girls
is dedicated to one of Bowen’s oldest women friends, Ursula Vernon,
and in its middle section recreates the years between 1906 and 1912 that
Bowen (1899–1973) spent with her mother wandering from villa to villa
on the Kent coast, making each new place ‘pavilions of love’ until her
mother’s death brought this childhood idyll to an end.87 Though Dinah
has a loyal male friend, Frank, male characters are marginal in The Little
Girls and Bowen’s long-term lover, Charles Ritchie, read the novel as
shifting the focus of Bowen’s imaginative life away from the preoccupa-
tion with their love affair that had been so central to her earlier novel,
The Heat of the Day (1949). Ritchie, who had married his cousin in
1948, saw ‘the chilly exhilaration’ of The Little Girls as ‘revenge on love.
Revenge on me’.88 Possibly, he was right. The editors of Bowen’s let-
ters to Ritchie note: ‘She had many “girl-friends” of a certain age, mainly
in Sussex and Kent, some of them emotionally linked, whom she met
frequently. CR was not told much about this aspect of her social life’.89
Bowen did tell him, however, about a trip she made to Jordan in March
1964, before the book’s publication, with her friend, Jean Black:
I’ve never seen Jean happier, handsomer or more thoroughly in her ele-
ment. I am devoted to her, I must say, and am having a roaring time in
her company. She and I are both very childish characters. In a way, this
time here is being like an additional chapter to The Little Girls. I mean, our
vocabulary and our recreations and our mental level seem to be about the
same (as those of the Little G’s, I mean).90
At this point in her life, female friendships appear to have represented

for Bowen a means of turning back the clock, to the days before mar-
riage, when she played with girl friends, notably her cousin, Audrey
Fiennes, in the holidays and attended all girls’ schools such as Lindum
House in Folkestone, Harpenden Hall in Hertfordshire and Downe
House in Kent, all of which she drew on for her portrait of St. Agatha’s
in The Little Girls. In 1964, Bowen had all the more reason to welcome
this carefree, almost childish interlude with Jean since the past decade
had been a turbulent time for her. Early in 1952, financial considera-
tions, combined with the poor health of her husband, Alan Cameron,
had obliged Bowen to give up her London home. She and Alan moved
to Ireland intending to settle there permanently, but in August of the
same year Alan died leaving Bowen, who until then had mostly turned
over financial affairs to her husband, with sole responsibility for run-
ning the Big House, Bowen’s Court, that had been in her family since
Cromwell’s time. The late 1950s was a time of personal crisis for Bowen.
Instead of concentrating on her fiction, she spent her energies accepting
offers of magazine publication, journalism, broadcasting and lectures in
order to make ends meet: ‘doping myself with non-stop hard work’, was
how she described it in a letter to Ritchie.91 There are ominous refer-
ences in her letters to meetings with her bank manager about her over-
draft. By 1958, she was selling silver and jewellery to make ends meet,
and in a letter of 16 June from Rome, she was obliged to ask Ritchie to
send money.92 A week later, she wrote to him about giving up Bowen’s
Court: ‘One fact I’m facing: I can’t go on carrying Bowen’s Court.
I’ll have to get out of it somehow … the house has become one great
barrack of anxiety’.93 By selling up not only was she, as she felt, letting
down the generations of Bowens who had lived in Bowen’s Court, she
was also ending the dream that one day she and Ritchie would live there
together.
For a few months in 1959, Bowen drifted from place to place staying
with friends. She was to all intents and purposes homeless and, until the
sale of Bowen’s Court went through, in financial difficulties. Friends ral-
lied to her support, but, despite the jaunty façade she tried to maintain in
her letters to Ritchie during this time, Bowen’s loneliness and vulnerabil-
ity break through. As a woman brought up in an age when women’s pur-
pose was to marry, and having relied on Alan’s practical help throughout
their marriage, Bowen found it difficult to cope with organizing her life,
as she admitted to Ritchie:
46 H. INGMAN
I sometimes wonder whether even you, knowing me as well as you do,

really realise my horror of my state as a femme seule (legal definition).
It seems to me abnormal, it fills me with a sense of ghastly injury, that I
should have to organize my own life. It seems abnormal that any woman
should have to do so … Look at my life since Alan died – when I’m not
with you I simply go drifting from one orbit of influence to another … I
am slightly independent in my mind, that is, in my intellectual part – but
quite outstandingly the reverse in disposition and temperament.94
She added tellingly: ‘People make a mistake when they identify the per-
formance I give with my real being’.95 The sale of Bowen’s Court went
through at the end of 1959, while she was teaching at the American
Academy in Rome, and the editors of her correspondence note that
Ritchie did not keep any of her letters written between December
1959 and November 1960. As it was Ritchie’s habit to suppress letters
he felt were too exposing, one can only guess at the emotional turmoil
expressed in Bowen’s correspondence at this time. Outsiders may have
seen a successful and capable professional woman, but Bowen needed
someone to organize her life. Eventually, friends and relations helped
sort out her financial affairs while Isaiah Berlin found a flat for her in
Oxford. It was here that she finished The Little Girls, a novel that in its
Proustian working out of the theme of involuntary memory and the
destruction of the past provides an analogy to the series of losses Bowen
had sustained in recent years.
The theme of time, highlighted by Ritchie in the quotation from his
diary in the opening sentence of this chapter, is apparent from the start
of The Little Girls where Dinah and Frank are preparing to bury objects
that have personal significance from their past in a time capsule, a cave,
to be discovered and deciphered by posterity. The cave where they are
engaged in this work seems suspended between past and future: ‘Down
here, however, it was some other hour – peculiar, perhaps no hour at
all’.96 The suspension of time is reinforced by the drowsy atmosphere in
Dinah’s Somerset garden, as filled with warmth and sweet-scented flow-
ers as Lord Henry’s London garden in Dorian Gray. In this Tír na nÓg,
Dinah moves as though in a ‘trance’.97 The attempt to freeze a
moment in time for posterity gathers further Dorian Gray overtones
in the description of Dinah and Frank, both tall, rangy and androgy-
nous, as ‘a pair of ageless delinquents, whose random beauty was one
of the most placid of their effronteries, or cheats: a cheating of Time.
Nobody of their ages, it might be said, had any business to look as these
two still did. It could be that looking as they did was the something in
common which had brought them together’.98 It becomes evident in
the novel that these two are indeed trying to resist time, demonstrated
in Frank’s fear of becoming a grandfather and Dinah’s inability until
right at the end to let go of her childhood self. If, during the traumatic
parting from Clare at the end of the picnic in July 1914 that concludes
Part Two, it seems as though Clare has been spirited away by the sidhe,
on the contrary it becomes clear that it is Dinah who has remained
trapped in endless youth.
Dinah’s project of burying objects expressive of people’s personal
obsessions is ‘a race with time’, an attempt to evade extinction of indi-
viduality in the future and to live on after death. It is in the midst of this
project that she experiences a Proustian flashback to a moment at school
when she and two friends buried objects significant to them in a coffer
for posterity to find. Frank warns her that her school friends will now
be ‘decidedly well-grown ladies’ to which Dinah, still intent on evad-
ing time’s erosions, responds ‘Don’t be too sure’.99 The novel endorses
Dinah’s belief in continuity with the past to the extent that when Dinah
catches up with Clare and Sheila, all three revert to childhood roles and
nicknames. ‘Here they were, back where they had left off – how long
ago? Not a day might have passed’.100 It is as if, in some senses, their
lives have been suspended since burying the coffer.
The Little Girls uses a tripartite structure often employed by Bowen
in her novels, moving from the present in the 1960s to the past (1914)
and back again to the present, in order to portray, in Bowen’s words,
three ‘encaged, rather terrible little girls battering about inside grown-up
(indeed, almost old) women’.101 However, continuity with the past is
shaken when, after Dinah has suggested digging up the coffer now that
time has caught up with them and they themselves have become poster-
ity, Sheila informs them that St. Agatha’s was bombed during the Second
World War and no longer exists. Part One ends ominously on Clare’s
echo of The Tempest Act 4, scene 1: ‘Into thin air’.102
When Dinah, helped by Sheila and Clare, unearths the coffer buried
in the grounds of what was formerly St. Agatha’s, the loss of its contents
propels her into a nervous collapse similar to that Bowen herself appar-
ently experienced in the period leading up to the sale of Bowen’s Court
(traumas in Bowen’s work always emerge obliquely):
48 H. INGMAN
‘Yes, but I have to get back.’

‘Your home,’ pointed out Sheila, ‘won’t run away.’
Dinah examined the speaker, before saying: ‘That’s what it has done,
Sheikie’. She took a shaky gulp at her drink. She added: ‘Everything
has. Now it has, you see. Nothing’s real any more … We saw there was
nothing there. So, where am I now?’103
As Frank later explains to Clare: ‘This life of hers here. This place. She’s
come unstuck’.104 Dinah’s disorientation is shown through her attempt,
in Sheila’s house that same evening of the discovery of the empty cof-
fer, to cling to anything that seems changeless—Clare, Ravenswood
Gardens—but it is at Sheila’s that she also discovers that more of the past
has vanished and is forced into the Yeatsian realization that art is a sterile
counter to the richness of life in time.
Standing in front of Sheila’s bad watercolour of Southstone Old High
Street, where the little girls used to spend their Saturday afternoons,
Dinah learns that the street, bombed during the war, has been com-
pletely torn down and replaced. The painting seems to her a lie ‘because
it’s here when the street is not’, in the same way as Dorian Gray feared
his portrait would come to seem more and more of a lie as his face
revealed time’s depredations on his beauty. ‘It might be better to have
no picture of places which are gone’, Dinah remarks. ‘Let them go com-
pletely’.105 Recalling the lessons of Yeats’s ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’
art, which petrifies the image over time, comes to seem to Dinah unnat-
ural. It was precisely literature’s capacity to include time that led Wilde,
pursuing his argument with Whistler, to argue, in ‘The Critic as Artist’,
for the superiority of literature over painting:
The statue is concentrated in one moment of perfection. The image

stained upon the canvas possesses no spiritual element of growth or
change. If they know nothing of death, it is because they know little of
life, for the secrets of life belong to those, and those only, whom the
sequence of time affects, and who possess not merely the present but the
future, and can rise or fall from a past of glory or of shame. Movement,
that problem of the visual arts, can be truly realized by Literature alone.
It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its
unrest.106
Unlike the painting of Southstone, Bowen’s novel, by employing a tri-

partite structure, is able to capture the passage of time.
Her two friends mirror, in a minor key, Dinah’s struggle with time,
ageing and death. Clare’s sturdy body and ageing face proclaim a woman
who has not tried to resist the marks of time: ‘Bags underhung her eyes;
deep creases, down from the broadened lobes of the nostrils, bracketed
her mouth’.107 Yet even she reveals a wish to cling to the past, with her
questions about Dinah’s mother, whom she loved, and about her china,
which has played such a part in influencing the direction of her life and
career to the extent that she has suspended time by recreating the atmos-
phere of Feverel Cottage in each of her Mopsie Pye shops where cus-
tomers move around, as if in a trance. Sheila shows more of a wish to
hold back time, in her face (‘The flesh of her face had hardened, per-
haps through the effort involved in resisting change’),108 her fashionable
clothes, dyed hair and sporty car and her flirtatious manner, yet she has
weathered sufficient setbacks in her life—the thwarting of her dreams of
becoming a dancer, the death of her lover, unwanted infertility—to make
her realistic about death and loss and to regard Dinah with envy as hav-
ing ‘never yet outgrown being a selfish child’.109
Though initially suspicious that Dinah is playing another of her emo-
tional blackmail games, Clare eventually comes to understand the rea-
sons for her friend’s breakdown. She learns that Dinah’s life has not
been as safe as she had imagined: her father committed suicide, she and
her mother never returned to Feverel Cottage, she never replaced St.
Agatha’s with any other school, her mother died in the Spanish flu epi-
demic at the end of the First World War, she herself was widowed early
and, as becomes clear, her unimaginative sons have no empathy with
mental fragility. While Frank does possess insight into the sources of
Dinah’s trauma, handsome, selfish and over-imaginative like Dinah her-
self, he too much resembles her to be able to help. Clare finally com-
prehends her crucial anchoring role in Dinah’s life: ‘And now, nothing.
There being nothing was what you were frightened of all the time, eh?
Yes. Yes it was terrible looking down into that empty box. I did not com-
fort you. Never have I comforted you. Forgive me’.110 Commentators
have suggested that behind these words lie not only Bowen’s breakdown
after the sale and subsequent demolition of Bowen’s Court but also the
earlier loss of her mother, whose funeral she had not been allowed to
attend and all mention of whom she had suppressed for years.111 Indeed,
following Ritchie’s observation that Bowen split herself into two when
50 H. INGMAN
writing The Death of the Heart (into the younger Portia and the older
Anna),112 so in this novel Bowen’s physical appearance and lesbianism
find its echo in Clare, her childlessness, never worn on her sleeve, in
Sheila, and the early loss of her mother and the mental fragility, inherited
from her father, in Dinah.
Ironically, Clare’s final recognition of her importance in Dinah’s life
comes too late. The ending of The Little Girls suggests that Dinah’s col-
lapse eventually produces a belated maturity, an acceptance that the past,
her childhood self, her mother, Feverel Cottage and the contents of the
coffer have gone forever and Clare will never be Mumbo again. Telling
Clare, ‘the game’s up’,113 Dinah abandons what Hermione Lee has
called her ‘self-protective infantilism’114; the spell of childhood is broken
and Dinah must start to grow into her adult identity. Like Dorian Gray
at the end of Wilde’s novel and Yeats in his later poetry, Dinah is precip-
itated into the onward thrust of time. As a little girl, she had attempted
to influence the future by burying objects in a coffer, meeting her two
school friends again she had tried to recapture the past, now she must
abandon the ‘race with time’ and live in the present accepting that pos-
terity will not know her.
The term ‘late style’ is applicable to The Little Girls, a late work in
Bowen’s career that reveals the author’s growing dissatisfaction with the
style of her previous novels, imbued with influences ranging from Henry
James and E. M. Forster to the modernism of Woolf and the interwar
fiction of Henry Green, Rosamond Lehmann and Graham Greene.
Bowen’s reading of contemporary writers like Evelyn Waugh and Muriel
Spark led her, in a shift that disconcerted her critics, to move away in
The Little Girls from modernist interiority towards dialogue and action
as revelatory of character. The reading experience is complicated in
Bowen’s case since her characters remain of a Jamesian subtlety but now
their complex feelings, instead of being explained to the reader in pas-
sages of controlled commentary, have to be revealed through gesture
and pared-down, contemporary dialogue. The term ‘late style’ is rarely
applied to works by women but seems appropriate for this penultimate
novel in Bowen’s career which, far from providing a rounded summation
of her work, explores new directions, new themes and raises new ques-
tions for her readers. The style is fragmentary, provisional, often uncer-
tain and open-ended and deliberately experimental and exploratory.
As with the other two writers discussed in this chapter, Wilde and
Yeats, the theme of ageing brought with it a change of style in Bowen’s
work, leading on to the fractured postmodernism of her final novel, Eva

Trout (1968), in which the reliability both of language and of human
identity will be put under pressure. All three writers discussed in this
chapter become suspicious of the capacity of art to freeze time and come
to acknowledge in different ways the importance, and richness, of ageing
through time. As Yeats wrote in a letter to Dorothy Wellesley April 20,
1936, after a severe illness: ‘… perhaps the French saying is true “It is
not a tragedy to grow old, the tragedy is not to grow old”’.115
Notes
1. Victoria Glendinning, ed., with Judith Robertson, Love’s Civil War:
Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Letters and Diaries from a Lifetime
(London: Simon and Schuster, 2009), 259. In fact they both lived
longer than the five or ten years Ritchie envisaged, Bowen dying in
1973 and Ritchie in 1995.
2. Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in
America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 110.
3. Cole, The Journey of Life, 195.
4. Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London and New York: Penguin Books,
1988), 305.
5. Karen Chase, The Victorians and Old Age (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 214.
6. Glenn Clifton, ‘Aging and Periodicity in The Picture of Dorian Gray
and The Ambassadors: An Aesthetic Adulthood’, English Literature in
Transition, 1880–1920 (January 2016): 283–302 (286).
7. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Joseph Bristow (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2006), 21.
8. Wilde, Dorian Gray, 181.
12. Wilde, Dorian Gray, 22–23.
16. Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century (London: Cassell, 1994), 103–4.
17. Chase, The Victorians and Old Age, 214.
52 H. INGMAN

22. Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, ed., The Complete Letters of
Oscar Wilde (London: Fourth Estate, 2000), 430.
23. Holland and Hart-Davis, ed., The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde, 435.
27. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 297.
28. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, in Plays, Prose Writings and Poems
(London: J. M. Dent, 1972), 35.
29. Chase, The Victorians and Old Age, 214.
30. David A. Upchurch, Wilde’s Use of Irish Celtic Elements in the Picture of
Dorian Gray (New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 1992); Davis Coakley,
Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish (Dublin: Town House,
1994); and Richard Pine, The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern
Ireland (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1995).
31. Upchurch, Wilde’s Use of Irish Celtic Elements, 23.
32. Angela Bourke, ‘Hunting Out the Fairies: E. F. Benson, Oscar Wilde
and the Burning of Bridget Cleary’, in Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha
McCormack (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998)
(36–46), 39.
36. Jarlath Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and
Ireland (Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 94.
38. Barbara Frey Waxman, From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist
Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature (New York: Greenwood Press,
1990); Lars Tornstam, Gerotranscendence: A Developmental Theory of
Positive Aging (New York: Springer, 2005).
39. Chase, The Victorians and Old Age, 213–14.
42. Killeen, The Faiths of Oscar Wilde, 79–108.
45. Wilde, Dorian Gray, 12–13.
46. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 283–87.
47. George Bornstein, ‘W. B. Yeats’s Poetry of Aging’, Sewanee Review 120
(1) (2012): 46–61 (46–47).
48. Late Style and Its Discontents: Essays in Art, Literature, and Music, ed. Gordon
McMullen and Sam Smiles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
49. Cole, The Journey of Life, 173.
50. Margaret Gullette, ‘Creativity, Aging, Gender: A Study of their
Intersections, 1910–1935’, in Aging and Gender in Literature:
Studies in Creativity, ed. Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen
(Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 19–48.
51. Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan,
2001), 298.
52. Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats, 345.
53. Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats, 349–50.
54. Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney
(London: Faber and Faber, 2008), 465.
55. Finneran, Richard J. ed., The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, second edi-
tion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 193.
56. See Chase, The Victorians and Old Age, 276–80.
57. Quoted in Norman A. Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of
W. B. Yeats (London and Melbourne: Macmillan, 1968), 253.
58. Robert N. Butler, ‘The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence
in the Aged’, Psychiatry 26 (1963): 65–76 (66).
60. Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats, 176–77.
61. Finneran, ed., The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, 216.
64. Daniel Albright, The Myth Against Myth: A Study of Yeats’s Imagination
in Old Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 11.
Aging (New York: Springer, 2005).
70. Quoted in Ann Saddlemyer, Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 475.
72. Wellesley, Dorothy, ed., Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy
Wellesley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 164.
74. O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones, 465.
54 H. INGMAN
75. In several passages in her Diaries Woolf records her fear of the calcify-
ing effects of old age, see Heather Ingman, ‘Virginia Woolf and Ageing:
The Years and Between the Acts’, Virginia Woolf Bulletin, 49 (2015):
17–24. In this context Woolf’s praise of Yeats after their meeting on 8
November 1930 as ‘vital’ and ‘supple’ is significant in suggesting she
believed he had, despite his physical frailty at this time, avoided the
rigidities of old age, see Woolf, Selected Diaries, ed. Anne Olivier Bell
(London: Vintage, 2008), 288–89.
76. W. B. Yeats, Mythologies (London and New York: Macmillan, 1959), 342.
78. Albright, The Myth Against Myth, 174.
80. Albright, The Myth Against Myth, 174.
81. Wellesley, ed., Letters on Poetry, 179. May 6, 1938.
82. Betty Friedan, The Fountain of Age (New York: Vintage, 1994), 538.
83. Edward Said, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain
(New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 6. Said includes discus-
sion of Beethoven, Thomas Mann, Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, C. D.
Cavafy, among others.
84. See, for example, Zoe Brennan, The Older Woman in Recent Fiction
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 2005); Jeannette King, Discourses
of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: The Invisible Woman (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
85. Ageing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Feminisms: Harleys and
Hormones, ed. Imelda Whelehan and Joel Gwynne (New York and
Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2014), 2.
86. Elizabeth Bowen, The Little Girls (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 56.
87. Hermione Lee, ed., The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen
(London: Vintage, 1999), 279–80.
88. Glendinning, with Robertson, Love’s Civil War, 405.
96. Bowen, The Little Girls, 10.
98. Bowen, The Little Girls, 12–13.

106. Wilde, ‘The Critic as Artist’, 24.
111. See Anne M. Wyatt-Brown, ‘The Liberation of Mourning in Elizabeth
Bowen’s The Little Girls and Eva Trout’, in Aging and Gender in
Literature, ed. Wyatt-Brown and Rossen, 164–86; Maud Ellmann,
Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2003), 199.
114. Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen (London: Vintage, 1999), 194.
115. Wellesley, ed., Letters on Poetry, 66.
Bibliography
Albright, Daniel. 1972. The Myth Against Myth: A Study of Yeats’s Imagination
in Old Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bornstein, George. 2012. W. B. Yeats’s Poetry of Aging. Sewanee Review 120
(1): 46–61.
Bourke, Angela. 1998. Hunting Out the Fairies: E. F. Benson, Oscar Wilde
and the Burning of Bridget Cleary. In Wilde the Irishman, ed. Jerusha
McCormack, 36–46. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Bowen, Elizabeth. 1982. The Little Girls. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Bowen, Elizabeth. 1999. The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed.
Hermione Lee. London: Vintage.
McFarland and Co.
Brown, Terence. 2001. The Life of W. B. Yeats. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.
Chase, Karen. 2009. The Victorians and Old Age. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Clifton, Glenn. 2016. Aging and Periodicity in The Picture of Dorian Gray and
The Ambassadors: An Aesthetic Adulthood. English Literature in Transition,
1880–1920 (January): 283–302.
56 H. INGMAN
Coakley, Davis. 1994. Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Irish. Dublin: Town
House.
Cole, Thomas R. 1992. The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in
Ellmann, Maud. 2003. Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page. Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Ellmann, Richard. 1988. Oscar Wilde. London and New York: Penguin Books.
Glendinning, Victoria, ed., with Judith Robertson. 2009. Love’s Civil War:
Elizabeth Bowen and Charles Ritchie, Letters and Diaries from a Lifetime.
London: Simon and Schuster.
Holland, Merlin, and Rupert Hart-Davis, eds. 2000. The Complete Letters of
Oscar Wilde. London: Fourth Estate.
Ingman, Heather. 2015. Virginia Woolf and Ageing: The Years and Between the
Acts. Virginia Woolf Bulletin 49: 17–24.
Jeffares, Norman A. 1968. A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats.
London and Melbourne: Macmillan.
Killeen, Jarlath. 2005. The Faiths of Oscar Wilde: Catholicism, Folklore and
Ireland. Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Lee, Hermione. 1999. Elizabeth Bowen. London: Vintage.
McMullen, Gordon, and Sam Smiles, eds. 2016. Late Style and Its Discontents:
Essays in Art, Literature, and Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
O’Driscoll, Dennis. 2008. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney.
London: Faber and Faber.
Pine, Richard. 1995. The Thief of Reason: Oscar Wilde and Modern Ireland.
Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.
Saddlemeyer, Ann. 2002. Becoming George: The Life of Mrs W. B. Yeats. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Said, Edward. 2006. On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain.
New York and London: Bloomsbury.
Sinfield, Alan. 1994. The Wilde Century. London: Cassell.
Upchurch, David A. 1992. Wilde’s Use of Irish Celtic Elements in the Picture of
Dorian Gray. New York and Bern: Peter Lang.
Wellesley, Dorothy, ed. 1964. Letters on Poetry from W. B. Yeats to Dorothy
Wellesley. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Whelehan, Imelda, and Joel Gwynne. 2014. Ageing, Popular Culture and
Contemporary Feminisms: Harleys and Hormones. New York and Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Wilde, Oscar. 2006. The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Joseph Bristow. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Woolf, Virginia. 2008. Selected Diaries, ed. Anne Olivier Bell. London: Vintage.
Yeats, W. B. 1959. Mythologies. London and New York: Macmillan.
Yeats, W. B. 1996. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats, ed. Richard J. Finneran.
New York: Simon and Schuster.
CHAPTER 3
Resisting the Narrative of Decline: Molly

Keane, Time After Time, Deirdre Madden,
Authenticity and Anne Enright,
The Green Road
The narrative of ageing as decline has been hard to resist in the west for
reasons outlined in chapter one of this study, namely a capitalist culture
that values success, strength and power, the influence of Freudian theory
in shaping gerontophobia, and a social media obsessed with images of
youth. In Ireland, the emphasis on positive ageing was slow to develop
and even now, despite governmental and voluntary efforts to encour-
age positive attitudes, examples of ageism continue to be highlighted in
the Irish media.1 In The Fountain of Age (1993), Betty Friedan points
out that, despite the dominant western narrative of negativity around
ageing, some gerontologists, notably Erik Erikson, Lars Tornstam, and
Raymond Tallis, have challenged the equation of old age with stagnation
and decline, stressing instead the capacity for growth and change in older
people. She suggests that: ‘It is time to look at age on its own terms, and
put names on its values and strengths as they are actually experienced,
breaking through the definition of age solely as deterioration or decline
from youth.’2
Discussing ageing in the fiction of Molly Keane, Deirdre Madden and
Anne Enright, this chapter aims to examine the way in which these nov-
elists, while not denying the realities of old age, succeed in challenging
the cultural narrative of ageing as decline by highlighting new skills and
strengths that may be gained during the ageing process. The chapter
will argue that their novels fall into the category of Reifungsromane, a
term coined by Barbara Frey Waxman in From the Hearth to the Open
Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature (1990)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96430-0_3
60 H. INGMAN
to denote fiction that portrays later years as a time of change and even
growth. Since it is part of Waxman’s argument that women display
more resilience than men as they age, because they have less invested in
power structures and the patriarchy, her study concentrates on descrip-
tions of ageing by and about women. In this chapter, though the authors
selected are female, the presentation of ageing in their work lends itself
to a discussion that is more evenly balanced across the genders.
Molly Keane, Time After Time (1983)

Molly Keane (1904–96)’s final three novels, Good Behaviour (1981),
Time After Time (1983) and Loving and Giving (1988) published when
the author herself was in her late seventies and early eighties, and after a
career hiatus of thirty years, use age and incapacity as a symbol of Anglo-
Irish decline. Her portraits of elderly Anglo-Irish are, however, suf-
ficiently detailed to move beyond symbols of cultural ageing into vivid
pictures of old age. In Good Behaviour, Aroon St Charles’s father, hav-
ing lost a leg in the First World War, is further incapacitated by a stroke
and becomes bed-ridden, provided with meals and sexual relief by the
Catholic servant, Rosie, who assumes a position of power and influence
in the Big House, underlining its decay from within. In this novel the
Anglo-Irish landlord depicted, in Vera Kreilkamp’s words, as ‘a para-
lyzed, one-legged old man, able to control neither his wife’s cruelty
toward their daughter nor his own philandering’, embodies the collapse
of Big House patriarchy but is also carefully individualized through pre-
cise details of his gradual physical and mental decline.3
In Loving and Giving, Nicandra’s aged Aunt Tossie lives to see
her fortune dissipated by the Big House, Deer Forest, but survives by
moving into a secondhand caravan where she happily resides with her
stuffed parrot. All too pleased to be free of anxiety about the fate of
Deer Forest, she maintains her independence at the price of an abrupt
decline in social status, spending her days in ‘contented selfishness’,4 as
she dwindles into gentle senility with meals and nursing care provided
by simple-minded William who understands her ways. Nicandra, horri-
fied by conditions in the caravan, makes plans to move her out but Aunt
Tossie is determined to resist:
No loving coercion would succeed in keeping her caged and closeted for
her own good. Her own good, or her own bad, were her own concern,
3 RESISTING THE NARRATIVE OF DECLINE … 61
her own sacred cows and causes. Even though Nicandra, this child she so
loved, was to be her warden, she could never yield up her independence.5
When the doctor and Nicandra collude to insist that Aunt Tossie
spend a night in the Big House the vulnerability of the frail elderly to
having their wishes overruled by others is clear. As Joan Erikson has
commented:
When you are feisty and stubborn about arrangements made for or about
you, all the more powerful elements – doctors, lawyers, and your own
grown children – get into the act. They may well be right, but it can make
you feel rebellious. Shame and doubt challenge cherished autonomy.6
Only Nicandra’s death prevents Aunt Tossie from having to leave her
caravan.
Aroon St Charles’s mother is less fortunate than Aunt Tossie in that,
as the opening scene of Good Behaviour reveals, frail old age obliges her
to lie bedbound in a room decorated by her daughter in a way that she
dislikes and eat food that she loathes. Aroon, the unreliable narrator,
remarks:
One knows sick people and old people can be difficult and unrewarding,
however much one does for them: not exactly ungrateful, just absolutely
maddening. But I enjoy the room whenever I go in. It’s all my own doing
and Mummie lying back in her nest of pretty pillows, is my doing too – I
insist on her being scrupulously clean and washed and scented.7
Good Behaviour is largely about the power play between mother and
daughter, and Aroon’s obtuse and self-deceiving treatment of her
mother in old age is an important element in the novel’s black comedy,
this opening scene, where Aroon ends by killing her mother through the
wrong sort of care, setting the tone for the rest of the novel.
Whereas Good Behaviour and Loving and Giving are centred on
stories of the coming of age of daughters of the house, Aroon and
Nicandra respectively, and the older characters are marginal, in Time
After Time, the portrait of age and disability is central. The novel
opens with the four Swift siblings, three of them in their seventies like
the author herself, struggling with their various disabilities. Not all of
these disabilities are the result of ageing: May was born with missing
62 H. INGMAN
fingers on her right hand and from an early age developed coping strate-
gies to overcome her disability, disciplining her hand to obey her. May’s
elder brother, Jasper, has been blind in one eye since a teenage acci-
dent, April’s deafness developed when she was still a young woman, and
the youngest of the siblings, Baby June, has had trouble all her life with
language, but compensates for her lack of literacy with an outstanding
memory.
Under their Anglo-Irish mother’s chilling regime, all four Swift
siblings learned early on to suppress or compensate for signs of their dif-
ference, May in particular training her hand to behave in socially accept-
able ways. The price has been a diversion of her emotional life into a
persistent and needy kleptomania illustrative of Elizabeth Grosz’s theo-
rization of the body as both ‘inscriptive’, whereby the body is conceived
as a surface on which social law, morality and values are inscribed, in con-
trast with the phenomenological body as experienced from the inside.
Grosz explains: ‘The body can be regarded as a kind of hinge or thresh-
old between a psychic or lived interiority and a more sociopolitical exteri-
ority that produces interiority through the inscription of the body’s outer
surface.’8 In the novel it becomes clear that despite May’s mostly suc-
cessful efforts to compensate socially for her disability, emotionally it has
shaped her whole life: ‘She looked a composed, decisive person stand-
ing there in her dark-brown stockinette slacks and white Connemara car-
digan … Nothing vulnerable about May. Only May could guess at the
cringing second self she must defend so long as they both should live.’9
Her small, but skillful and risky thefts are a way of proving to herself
her own worth in the face of a callous and prejudiced world: ‘it was her
secret vagrancies that lent her a power outside herself, a power that she
accepted questionless. It was her ultimate protest and defence against her
infirmity’.10
Having struggled courageously with disability for most of their lives,
these Swift siblings are in a strong position to face the indignities of old
age. In this respect, as Jamesie suggests in relation to Bill Evans in John
McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun, old age is a great leve-
ler. Jasper, now in his seventies, in addition to the loss of one eye suf-
fers from arthritis and memory loss, but he is as accepting of his own
frailties as he is tolerant of the unpredictable behaviour of their Aga:
‘Today he had forgotten his shopping list – something that could hap-
pen to the most efficiently equipped person, even to his sister May. He
was not going to taunt his own memory, or his age, on the matter.’11
Even his emotional cauterizing by Mummie does not much trouble him
nowadays: ‘He was tolerant of his own limitations; he quite liked skating
about on them.’12
Until the arrival of Leda, the Swift siblings manage to rub along
together, fractious, poverty-stricken, in thrall to the past while repressing
many disturbing elements in it, but surviving each with their own preoc-
cupations. Self-protectively, they ignore the unpleasant realities of their
decaying Big House, Durraghglass, emblematic of a dying Anglo-Ireland
and described with unsparing detail by Keane, from the filthy kitchen to
the inefficient sewage system. Vera Kreilkamp comments:
In piling up such physical details to evoke the decline of the Big House,
the septuagenarian writer is relentlessly unsentimental about the process of
aging, willing to face the meaning of rot and decay with powerful literal-
ness. Thus the neglected house, traditionally the symbol of a dying society,
converges here with images of human decay and old age.13
Durraghglass confers, however, certain advantages: already outside the

dominant discourse of the Irish state by virtue of their Anglo-Irish back-
ground, the Swift siblings live in a home which, while conferring on
them, if not money, at least a certain class confidence, is sufficiently iso-
lated so that their various eccentricities by and large pass unnoticed and
can in any case be accommodated under the general rubric of expected
Anglo-Irish Big House behaviour.
The catalyst for turmoil in the Big House is, as in Elizabeth Bowen’s
Big House novel, The Last September (1929), the arrival of a visitor, in
this case cousin Leda. Leda who, as far as Jasper is concerned is an old
woman, is prevented by her blindness from having to face up to the
passing years. Her disability thus allows her to retain a youthful confi-
dence: ‘Her ageless assurance was almost shocking compared with the
heavy undisciplined body, the swollen ankles that made her shoes strain
and tighten at the insteps.’14 Leda’s blindness frees her from her cul-
ture’s anti-ageing discourses regulating the body and her blithe una-
wareness of her obesity contrasts with April who goes to considerable
expense and self-discipline in her efforts to preserve her complexion and
her figure. Rather than deriving from social pressure to ‘pass’ as younger,
April’s attention to her body arises from her previous experience of mar-
ital abuse and she gets much pleasure from tending to her own physical
health and well-being.
64 H. INGMAN
For Leda in her blindness Durraghglass and her cousins remain

unchanged, out of time, so that her return allows each of them to revert
to their earlier selves:
Since she could not see Durraghglass in its cold decay; or her cousins in
their proper ages, timeless grace was given to them in her assumption
that they looked as though all the years between them were empty myths.
Because they knew themselves so imagined, their youth was present to
them, a mirage trembling in her flattery as air trembles close on the surface
of summer roads. What more might she recall? What else might she show
them of their lost selves?15
As with the meeting between Dinah, Clare and Sheila in Bowen’s The
Little Girls, reunion with the friend of their youth produces a Dorian
Gray effect on the Swift siblings. But, since they have each in their dif-
ferent ways battled to overcome the disadvantages of their childhood
under the emotional tyranny of their manipulative Mummie, return to
their youth is not entirely welcome. Conscious of her power over them,
Leda divides to rule and in a final explosive scene over breakfast cruelly
exposes their weaknesses to one another. May’s self-confidence in par-
ticular is damaged by Leda’s revelations to the others of her kleptomania:
May, very white now, sat entirely disestablished and betrayed. Every pic-
ture she had seen and shown to others, every comfort and satisfaction built
on her desperate efforts deserted her. She was back where the efforts had
started, in the time when they fed her with a spoon until she was six; when
Jasper, so much younger, had his own fork and silver knife.
That he should sympathise now brought that lost time into close per-
spective. If he could be kind, she must be finished. She stared forwards
into nothing.16
Despite this setback, the Swift siblings, with courage derived from years
of managing with disability and ageing, slowly reassert their coping strat-
egies. Leda’s wounding behaviour acts as a sort of exorcism releasing
them from the paralyzing hold of the past and Mummie’s false glamour,
and setting them on the road to a life more in keeping with post-In-
dependence Ireland. Andries Wessels comments: ‘Released from their
obsolete aristocratic inheritance, the four siblings regain their vital-
ity, embarking on new enterprises, “grace gone, age apparent in all its
inadequacies”’.17 If the Big House lifestyle has aged beyond hope of
recuperation, they themselves have not: out of a series of darkly comic

disasters the Swift siblings emerge with a fresh sense of their individual
identities, while Leda is sent back to the convent residential home pow-
erless now to resist April’s domination.
In their late sixties and seventies, the Swift siblings are still young
enough to pursue such activities as keeping hens and pigs, landscape gar-
dening, and restoring antiques, thereby prolonging the life of the Big
House for another decade or so along more practical lines better suited
to their lost social and political status. There is even a sense of life now
becoming richer for them all: April gets the comforts she desires, Jasper
is able to express ‘the stored love of half a life-time’18 by creating the
garden of his dreams, May achieves her real love—restoring antiques
and even getting paid for it—while June acquires a new stable lad to
train up and ride her unpredictable horse. The positive angle on ageing
that Maria O’Neill struggles to find in her reading of Good Behaviour,
‘a bleak scenario of revenge and tyranny’,19 is sufficiently present in
this later Keane novel for Zoe Brennan, in The Older Woman in Recent
Fiction (2005), to contrast Kingsley Amis’s nihilism about old age in
Ending Up (1974) with the more hopeful portrait in Time After Time.20
The occupations of the Swift siblings may be unvalued in a capital-
ist economy but they themselves find their pastimes sufficiently absorb-
ing and meaningful, and Brennan glosses Simone de Beauvoir’s inability
in The Coming of Age (1972) to find worth in old age in a capitalist
consumerist society with Michel Certeau’s prizing of the everyday in
The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) as a means of resisting the domi-
nant capitalist discourse.21 Certeau’s valuing of the heroism of daily life
is particularly applicable to Keane’s portrait of the Swift siblings’ active
creation of meaning in the face of the limited opportunities available to
them, and in this sense the novel may be said to fall into Barbara Frey
Waxman’s category of Reifungsroman, or novel of ripening, portraying
the latter part of life as a period of personal growth and fulfilment.
Deirdre Madden, Authenticity (2002)

Throughout her work, Deirdre Madden has been preoccupied with
ethical problems of identity and authenticity. Authenticity may have

many different meanings in psychology, philosophy and aesthetics and
we will return to this question in the following chapter, when discuss-
ing John Banville’s novels. Central to Madden’s fiction is the existential
66 H. INGMAN
definition of the authentic life as lived according to one’s own inner

morality, personality, and beliefs, as opposed to living according to socie-
ty’s expectations, a mode of life that is characterised in existentialist writ-
ing as bad faith. The understanding of authenticity evident in Madden’s
novels chimes in with the following definition by Charles Taylor:
There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called up to

live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives
a new importance to being true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of
my life, I miss what is being human for me.22
Taylor notes that this onus on the individual to shape his or her own life
may be liberating but also burdensome in its responsibility.
This is the case with many of Madden’s characters who inhabit a
postmodern world where universal frameworks for life have broken
down. Her characters may or may not believe in Catholicism but their
mental world remains shaped by it and often it is to art or nature that
they turn in their personal search for a depth of meaning lost to them
through inhabiting what has become in Ireland a predominantly secu-
lar society. In Hidden Symptoms (1987), in contrast to Robert’s dilettan-
tish approach, Theresa looks on art as a calling akin in seriousness and
commitment to the religious life and having as goals truth and authen-
ticity. In Remembering Light and Stone (1992), Aisling’s contemplation
of the paintings and frescoes she encounters in Italy plays a central part
in her healing process and in the same novel Ted explains his unexpected
preference for medieval and Renaissance art by saying that it represents a
harmony lost in contemporary society.
Madden has always been interested in exploring the life of the art-
ist and the difficulty of remaining true to one’s vocation, and in
Authenticity (2002) she examines the artistic vocation from a variety
of perspectives. Roderic has achieved a certain amount of success as
a painter and remained committed to his vocation. Julia has a similar
commitment but is only at the start of her career as an artist. Roderic’s
older brother, Dennis, who abandoned his ambition to become a pia-
nist because of stage fright, has come to terms with this and is living
the kind of life that is right for him. Ray, a marginal character, has the
commitment but lacks the vision necessary to be a great artist. Finally
there is William whose dreams of being an artist return in middle age to
haunt him. All of these characters are living lives of varying authenticity.
None of the characters in the novel would be classed as old in today’s

terms. William and Roderic are both in their late forties and even Julia’s
father, Dan, is described as no more than middle aged. However all are
having to come to terms with the ageing process in a way that poses
problems of authenticity and identity. In discussing Authenticity through
the lens of gerontology this section will focus particularly on three char-
acters, Dan, William and Roderic, who in different ways illustrate the
complexity of the ageing process.
Authenticity lends itself to being read in the light of both earlier
humanistic gerontology and the recent turn to cultural gerontology dis-
cussed in chapter one. In humanistic gerontology, ageing is seen as a
time of getting back to essentials, a journey towards a more authentic
self, and in chapter one, the influence in this respect of Erik Erikson’s
eighth stage of ageing in The Life Cycle Completed (1982) was noted.
Erikson’s eighth stage, which he labelled maturity, spans the years from
sixty-five till death, a time in Erikson’s theory, either of ego integ-
rity or of despair, of reflection on one’s life leading to, if all goes well,
self-acceptance and a sense of fulfilment. Drawing on Erikson’s work in
Gerotranscendence: A Developmental Theory of Positive Aging (2005),
Lars Tornstam employs the term gerotranscendence to suggest the
desire for solitude, meditation and increased attentiveness to the world
around us that may come with age, together with a wish to reflect on,
or even redefine, one’s life. Acceptance of ageing, Tornstam argues,
may lead people to live in a more generous way, being less concerned
with prestige and possessions, though he also notes that western society,
with its emphasis on competition and consumerism, often impedes this
stage. Gerotranscendence, as described by Tornstam, involves returning
to memories of childhood and exploring connections to earlier genera-
tions but, unlike Erikson’s ego-integrity stressing life review and the inte-
gration of one’s past life, gerotranscendence is a movement towards the
future and open-ended in its aims. A similar open-endedness is explored
by Henri Nouwen and William Gaffney in Aging: The Fulfillment of Life
(1976): ‘Aging does not need to be hidden or denied, but can be under-
stood, affirmed and experienced as a process of growth by which the
mystery of life is slowly revealed to us.’23
Barbara Frey Waxman’s concept of the Reifungsroman, referred to
earlier, reflects this process of regarding ageing as a journey towards a
more realized self.24 Less concerned with others’ approval, no longer
constrained by society’s expectations around gender or professional
68 H. INGMAN
roles and relinquishing the power and competition inherent in a

capitalist society, people during the ageing process, Waxman argues, may
focus on different priorities—friendships, community, nature, creativ-
ity—in order to reclaim buried aspects of the self, as we saw in the case
of the Swift siblings. Time may even operate differently, with less empha-
sis on the constraints of clock time, more on an intensification of the
moment. An awareness of the transience of life may deepen our appreci-
ation of it, as we will see in chapter four is the case for Elizabeth Reegan
in John McGahern’s The Barracks (1963) who, with the approach of
death, experiences a more profound awareness of the beauty of nature
and the mystery of life. Life may even become richer, as memoirs of old
age by writers such as May Sarton and Florida Scott-Maxwell bear out,
suggesting that ageing takes place as much in the psyche as in the body.25
In Authenticity Dan, with his freedom from social convention, his
serenity and his solid sense of self, is the character who comes closest
to this gerotranscendent ideal. He strikes Roderic as someone who is
‘simply and utterly and completely himself’, the only person capable of
making Roderic, for all his bohemian artistic lifestyle, feel utterly con-
ventional.26 For Julia, Dan’s letters with ‘their pure-hearted simplicity’
are like blows ‘from the stick of a Zen master, waking her back into real-
ity’.27 As she matures, she comes to understand that ‘at the centre of
him was something quite free of time and society’.28 Significantly, the
novel ends with Dan’s words of recognition of the transience of human
life: ‘“Oh there’ll be apples, Julia,” Dan said, “when we’re all of us
gone.”’29
Dan’s acceptance of death as a natural part of the human cycle goes
against western emphasis on the autonomy of the individual and the
importance of personal identity. For this reason the process of Dan fac-
ing up to death as a natural part of life is presented as fraught since the
society in which he lives is one where the reality of death has to be kept
at bay. When Roderic’s father dies, his mother forbids any open display
of grief. Similarly, when his wife dies, Dan initially tries to suppress his
feelings in alcohol. As gerontologists have argued, contemporary western
society lacks any helpful philosophy around death.30 Despite its tradition
of wakes and the prolonged influence of Catholicism, a rapidly seculariz-
ing Ireland is no different in this respect, as Bridget English points out.31
Hence Dan’s acceptance of the transience of life, like Elizabeth’s in The
Barracks, is hard-earned personal knowledge, honed in his case in soli-
tude and lifelong mourning for his wife.
Dan’s acceptance of his own mortality is part of what makes him such
an attractive character and, paradoxically, more human rather than less.
It links him, undereducated though he may be, with writers like Henry
Thoreau who, in Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), expresses a deep
sense of being part of the natural cycle of the world and argues that a
person grows in integrity and authenticity in solitude. Awareness of the
transience of human life is an insight shared by many of the characters in
John McGahern’s final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002),
discussed in chapter four, and indeed Dan would not be out of place in
that rural community whose inhabitants know better than most how to
handle ageing and death. Like them Dan prizes the small communal ritu-
als of life (celebration of birthdays, Christmas, Easter) that give shape to
life and act as a stay against inevitable sorrows. ‘Life will give you plenty
of kicks in the teeth and there’ll be nothing you can do about it,’ he
insists, ‘so why turn your back on the good times?’32
Dan is someone in whom age develops a stronger capacity to handle
negative emotions. His present serenity chimes in with gerontologists’
observations that, despite experiences of ill-health and bereavement,
older people often display surprisingly high levels of well-being because
they have developed better emotional defences.33 Dan may be compared
with the portrait of the cheerful and resilient Granny Kate in Madden’s
One by One in the Darkness (1996) or the feisty and assertive Joan in
Time Present and Time Past (2013). Her days of childrearing over, Joan
considers being a widow in her seventies the best time of her life. She
takes pride in her appearance, exercises choice over where to live, enjoys
her own company and is well informed about the economy. With such
portraits of successful ageing Madden’s fiction resists the predominant
western cultural narrative of ageing as inevitable decline while also mak-
ing clear that aging is not a homogeneous process: Joan’s gentle sister,
Beth, is a portrait of frail, though accepting, old age.
In stark contrast to Dan, William has all the traits of ageing badly: he
is trembling and hesitant in the park with Julia, and he is prey to feelings
of despair, loss of self-worth, anxiety and depression. Indeed his depres-
sion verges on the clinical. He feels numb, weary, separated from others
by a sheet of plate glass, moving around in a ‘depressed fog’.34 Raymond
Tallis has argued that ageing provides the opportunity for chosen nar-
ratives as compared with ‘the traditional, largely unchosen narratives of
ambition, development and personal advancement; and the biological
imperatives of survival, reproduction and child-rearing’.35 In his forties,
70 H. INGMAN
William is coming to realise that the life he drifted into to please his
father and those around him, is inauthentic. What he really wanted to
do, and perhaps should have done, was paint.
When we first meet William he has just resisted the desire to kill him-
self. In the past he has tried to alleviate his inauthentic life by casual sex,
with Hannah and other unnamed women. Now he latches on to Julia
for help. William is consumed by an anger and bitterness that the much
younger Julia only dimly comprehends and Roderic, who has a better
understanding of William’s state of mind, warns her that William will
draw off energy from her, as in the past he himself almost destroyed his
brother Dennis by leaning on him in crises.
Even as he warns her against getting sucked into William’s prob-
lems, Roderic understands the grief of the middle-aged William for his
unlived life and his failure to have the courage of his gift. In The Life
Cycle Completed Erik Erikson points out that the ageing process can
reveal hidden traumas and, while this may lead to wisdom and ego-in-
tegrity (self-possession), it may also result in bitterness and despair if a
review of one’s past life results in the feeling that possibilities have been
wasted. This is the case with William. He tells Julia: ‘It’s been a strange
time. Thinking about my life. Realising that I haven’t become the person
I was supposed to become. Realising that it won’t ever happen now, and
trying to come to terms with it’.36
William’s despair is partly socially induced and, through portraying
him, Madden shows how cultural factors may hinder successful ageing.
He was raised to exercise self-control and will-power, qualities that have
enabled him to succeed as a lawyer in a competitive, consumerist society.
However in the course of this he has constructed a false self. The theory
of the false self, developed by Donald Winnicott and elaborated on by
subsequent psychoanalysts, describes a situation where the expectations
of others, particularly parental expectations, can become of such over-
riding importance that they overlie or contradict the deeper self.37 The
false self evolves to protect and conceal the true self. In such cases, the
danger is that a false set of relationships is erected and a façade main-
tained that conceals an inner emptiness. This false self blocks creativity
and is utterly lacking in spontaneity. William’s public persona has some
of the characteristics of this kind of false self. At their first meeting in
Stephen’s Green, his appearance strikes Julia as almost painfully cor-
rect and indeed he succeeds in living this inauthentic life only by tight
self-control. He later admits to Julia that his father was overbearing and
coerced his two sons to get on in life and achieve. This is symptomatic
of masculine behaviour in a capitalist society where paid employment is
a central source of masculine identity, status and power and a life course
is equated with career development. Another Irishman, Anthony Clare,
observed: ‘I learned very early on that what a man does, his work, is as
important as, even more important than, who he is; that a man is defined
in modern capitalistic society in terms not of being but doing’.38
The kind of society in which William lives equates masculinity with
sexual and physical assertiveness, with competitiveness, aggression,
self-reliance and emotional control. In turn this repression of the emo-
tions is what renders masculinity such a fragile construct, as Lynne Segal
has pointed out: ‘Since all the linguistic codes, cultural imagery and
social relations for representing the ideals of “manliness”, or what is
termed “normative masculinity”, symbolize power, rationality, assertive-
ness, invulnerability, it is hardly surprising that men, individually, should
exist in perpetual fear of being unmanned’.39 Men may become trapped
in the role of breadwinner and the novel is very clear on the damage
done, for example to Frank, the father of Roderic and Dennis, a man
temperamentally unsuited to family life and whose only outlets are lis-
tening to opera and solitary hill walking. Frank’s example is a lesson to
Dennis who recognizes in himself a similar temperament and as a result
avoids marriage and family life.
At the beginning of the novel William is in tears; by the end he has
refused, rather brutally, to empathise with Julia’s grief over her dead
mother and buttoned himself once again into his lawyer persona. This
false self lasts only a few weeks before it eventually destroys him. In terms
of Winnicott’s theory this is inevitable when the false self is unable to
organize conditions that would allow the true self to flourish:
Suicide in this context is the destruction of the total self in avoidance of

annihilation of the True Self. When suicide is the only defence left against
betrayal of the True Self, then it becomes the lot of the False Self to organ-
ize the suicide. This, of course, involves its own destruction, but at the
same time eliminates the need for its continued existence, since its function
is the protection of the True Self from insult.40
William has been shaped by a masculinist culture and is unable to break

out of it. To that extent Roderic is right when he observes that, despite
possessing genuine talent, painting is a parallel fantasy life for William
72 H. INGMAN
and that in the last resort he will do nothing to endanger his money and
position in society. The final image we have of William is through Julia’s
eyes. He is on his way to work in a grey suit, carrying a briefcase and the
expression on his face strikes Julia as ‘tense and forlorn’.41 Clinging to
culturally stereotyped views of the lifestyle he should be leading has pre-
vented William from growing and changing. In this sense he illustrates
Freud’s view that adult development is fixed in middle age with no pos-
sibility of further progress.42 Roderic’s sister, Maeve, is another example
of someone who has hardened in middle age and remains consumed by
bitterness at what life has offered her. In both cases, the ripening that
Waxman suggests can be part of the ageing process, is blocked.
Freud’s negative view of ageing was countered by Carl Jung who
believed more attention should be paid to the second half of life and to
the development of an inner life. For Jung, ageing should be a source
of discovery and growth, a time when one gains a new sense of freedom
from society’s constraints and becomes less conformist.43 ‘The afternoon
of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and
purpose are different,’ he argued.44 William’s tragedy is that, trapped by
his family and by his social position, he is unable to grow and develop
such inner resources. He has been unable to achieve the balance between
pursuit of his personal identity (authenticity) and care for others that,
Joseph Dohmen has argued, is a sign of successful ageing.45
The novel presents William as partly responsible for his own despair.
He does have pockets of hope: he has always appreciated his solitary
early mornings observing the light breaking in his garden; moreover his
collapse leads to time off work which allows him to return to art. He sets
up a studio in his house and spends months painting. As Julia tells him
there is no secret to success: ‘You just get on with it. You just do the
work.’46 However William fears he has left things too late and does not
seem to take in her observation that perhaps he does have enough time
remaining to develop his art: ‘art has its own laws concerning time.
It’s not like other things. The years you have left may well be all you
ever needed.’47 Again Jung is illuminating. Jung’s seven tasks of ageing
include reviewing one’s life, letting go of the ego (something William
signally fails to do, remaining preoccupied with money and social sta-
tus) and honouring the self, another failure for William who stays con-
sumed by self-hatred. The seventh task of ageing, according to Jung,
is to engage unused potential to foster late-life creativity. As we saw in
chapter two, there have been several studies of the late life creativity
of writers and artists such as Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Matisse, and

Goethe48 and in an Irish context, W.B. Yeats is the obvious example of
a writer who continued to explore his creative powers into old age and
gained a new sense of freedom as he aged. The possibility of a late-flow-
ering artistic career is there for William but he seems unable to attend to
Julia’s words.
William is not without talent. There is some suggestion that his pic-
tures in middle age, though they lack the vigour of those of his youth,
are technically more accomplished and not without passion. Even
Roderic admires his technique as a painter. But William is unable to
shake off the values instilled in him by his upbringing, his education and
society and find a different way of living. Having once glamourized Julia
as an independent artist living an intriguingly bohemian life, he comes
to see her as a shabby young woman with no proper job and no money.
His inability to shake off his professional values prevents him from devel-
oping. As Roderic observes, William has not fully counted the cost of
commitment to art. In this respect he contrasts with Dennis who is
extremely aware of the challenges and discomfort of living as his brother
does. William lacks confidence in his abilities but is also too easily dis-
couraged by comparisons with other artists, such as Roderic. That he is
unable to prevent himself from drawing such comparisons illustrates how
difficult it is for him to step away from the values of the competitive,
goal-orientated society around him. Julia advises him simply to get on
with his painting but, lacking the solid sense of self-worth possessed by
someone like Dan, in the end William abandons the struggle too easily.
The portrayal of William fits in with the recurring anti-consumer theme
in Deirdre Madden’s work. In Remembering Light and Stone Aisling’s
status as a foreigner and outsider leads her to observe and marvel at the
materialism of Italian society. Nothing is Black (1994), a precursor to
Authenticity in terms of examining the costs and rewards of commitment
to an artistic vocation, explores the tension between the pressures of
materialism in contemporary Ireland and the integrity necessary for the
artistic life. The uncertain rewards of living out an artistic vocation are
portrayed in the asceticism of Claire’s life as a painter in Donegal while
Claire’s more materialistic cousin, Nuala, finds consumerism empty com-
pensation for the loss of her mother.
Roderic has also experienced what it is like to be trapped in an
inauthentic life. He married Marta partly out of gratitude that life
with her allowed him the opportunity to stay in Italy and develop his
74 H. INGMAN
painting. Marta gives him everything he could ostensibly desire—three

daughters, an elegant home, a studio, access to Italian galleries—yet
he gradually comes to acknowledge, what Dennis recognised immedi-
ately, that he and Marta are terribly mismatched in terms of what they
want from life. Like William, and unlike Julia, Roderic knows what it
is to choose comfort and an inauthentic life. However, as Julia points
out, it was easier for him to escape his inauthentic life than it is for
William. Roderic had no interest in money or status; his father, unlike
William’s father, put no particular pressure on him to choose a pres-
tigious career and he had Dennis’s unfailing help and understanding.
Moreover, early on in his time in Italy, Roderic recognized his need
for periods of solitude. During his fraught and unsatisfactory marriage,
snatched days in the Albergo Perfetto became ‘sacred spaces’ for him
during which he could connect, Thoreau-like, with the deepest springs
of his being.49 Unlike William he had already taken time to practise a
more authentic life.
Yet ageing has also caught up with Roderic. His years of drinking and
his failed marriage have combined to wreck his confidence. Conscious of
so many failures in his life, he is susceptible to anxiety and depression.
He particularly lacks sexual confidence, something he was never short of
in his younger days. ‘Made hesitant by self-doubt’, he has lost his nerve
with women generally.50 With Julia, the fact that he is twenty years older
preys on his mind: ‘it would be embarrassing for her to be seen with
him’.51 Roderic lives in a society where the emphasis on youth and phys-
ical beauty that previously worked in his favour now renders him fearful,
underlining how unhelpful these values are for the ageing process. In the
end it is Julia who has to make the first move.
Unlike Dan Roderic has yet to negotiate that part of the ageing
process that consists of integrating the past into his present, as he dis-
covers during a trip to Paris when he remains haunted by dreams and
waking nightmares of past failures, with Marta, with Jeannie, and with
his daughters. At the same time he has renewed appreciation of the
significant moments of his life: his memory of standing in the chapel
with Marta before they are about to make love for the first time, or
his feelings of joy after making love with Julia. His consciousness of
such moments as moments out of linear time (‘It was as though they
had moved into a condition where the ordinary rules of time did not
apply’)52 corresponds to gerontologists’ recognition of the intensification
of the moment in later life and the lessening significance of linear time.53
The theme of time has always been central in Madden’s work.

In One by One in the Darkness (1996), time stands still for Emily and her
daughters after Charlie’s death as they remain consumed by memories
and flashbacks of their shared past. In her mourning Emily rejects chron-
ological time, preferring to regard time as circular: as a way of dismiss-
ing linear time she ties her life into the seasons, becoming obsessed with
growing flowers, especially roses around Charlie’s grave:
Her daughters teased her about her mania, but she only smiled. She knew
they understood. It made her able to bear time, because it hooked her into
the circle of the seasons, and time would otherwise have been a horrible
straight line, a straight, merciless journey at speed towards death. Instead
of which, she had pulled Charlie back into the circle and back into her life,
in a way which she wordlessly comprehended, and which offered to her the
nearest approximation she would ever have to comfort or consolation. 54
It is a theme Madden shares with John McGahern whose story ‘The

Wine Breath’, discussed in chapter five of this study, moves away from
time presented as repetitive and entrapping in his earlier story, ‘Wheels’,
to a sustained effort on the part of the priest to transcend linear time
through an imaginative recreation of his life. In McGahern’s work, as in
Madden’s, memory provides an escape from linear time.
In Time Present and Time Past (2013) the speed of life during the
Celtic Tiger years alarms the middle-aged Fintan who wishes for time to
slow down or even stop for a moment: ‘Time racing on, racing like a
palpitating heart, so that he feels his life will be over before he has had
a chance to live it, certainly before he has had a chance to understand it.
Sometimes he feels he can almost hear time rushing past him …’.55 He
tries to freeze time by making his family pause for a moment over the
dinner table:
Now he thinks that maybe it had had something to do with the idea of
stopping time, of working against just this rush of life that he finds so dis-
turbing. He had wanted to keep the moment, to preserve it, and even by
the strangeness of his request to make of it something that they might all
remember.56
Like Roderic, Fintan experiences strange, hallucinatory states when the

boundaries between past, present and future dissolve and he seems to slip
76 H. INGMAN
through time to the past or into the future. These states become very
precious to him since they allow him to pause and feel grateful for his life:
The hallucinations and strange shifts of perception are still occurring, but
they are becoming less frequent, and he is getting rather used to them. He
is sensible these days to an immense pathos in life, and finds himself fer-
vently hoping this awareness will never again leave him.57
Part of the ageing process for Roderic involves coming to terms with
his memories in a way that does not gloss over his past failures but that
will allow him to integrate them into his present life and move on. This
connects with gerontologists’ recognition of ageing as a process of con-
tinuous growth whereby we acknowledge buried aspects of the self and
slowly to come to see what we are.58 In Memories, Dreams, Reflections
(1961) Jung argued that looking back on one’s life is a crucial aspect
of the ageing process but emphasized that it is a mistake to remain
imprisoned by past memories. He advocated the ‘reculer pour mieux sau-
ter’ approach, that is, using memory to move forward.59 This is what
Roderic struggles to do as he fights against his alcoholism, makes efforts
to reconcile with his ex-wife and daughters, and forges a new future with
Julia.
Again comparisons may be drawn with Fintan in Time Present and
Time Past. In his late forties, Fintan suffers from deep-seated anxiety and
a generalised sense of guilt: ‘he feels a kind of free-floating guilt about
everything and nothing.’60 This mid-life crisis draws him back into the
past, to the world of early photography and to retrieving elements of his
family history. Lars Tornstam has highlighted this renewed awareness of
connection to previous generations as characteristic of the ageing pro-
cess.61 By the end of the novel, however, Fintan comes to realize the
value of the present moment. He arranges a meeting with his cousin in
order to recapture something of his past. They end up, though, speaking
mostly about the present: ‘If you think about it, we spent far more time
talking about our lives as they are now,’ he tells his sister, ‘rather than
talking about Granny Buckley and when we were children’.62 He finds
this therapeutic. As in Jungian theory Fintan resists being trapped in the
past but uses memory to move forward in his life.
Much of this discussion of Authenticity has drawn on earlier, human-
istic gerontology to which the novel seems most closely aligned.
However the turn to cultural gerontology, discussed in chapter one of
this study, emphasising that age is as much socially and culturally con-
structed as biological,63 is also relevant to a reading of Madden’s novel,
particularly in the case of William who is trapped by the values of his
culture. Nevertheless, though our ageing experience may be shaped by
our culture, ageing is a heterogeneous process. Julia, we feel, will suc-
ceed in ageing well because she has been raised by Dan to look atten-
tively at things. In her childhood Dan taught her a memory game based
on recalling visual images and it is partly this, she believes, that led to
her becoming an artist. Here the themes of art, ageing and memory
draw together. Slowing down and paying careful attention to the world
around is not only part of the ageing process, it is also an integral part
of being an artist, as Julia recognizes. This is the reason, she believes,
why in the busy modern world people prize still life paintings, for their
element of repose. And it is the reason why, in Time Present and Time
Past, in the midst of hectic Celtic Tiger Ireland, Fintan turns to old pho-
tographs as a means of making time stand still for a moment.
Yet compared to the understanding of Fintan, Roderic and Dan about
the way time works, Julia’s youth is a disadvantage for appreciating the
richness of a life lived in time. She spends the summer months listen-
ing to a particular jazz cassette believing that when she listens to it again
some time in the future ‘the music would give those months back to her,
immutable and perfect.’ Such efforts to freeze time through art, as we
saw in chapter two, are ultimately doomed and Madden’s omniscient
narrator points out that Julia’s memory of these summer months will be
altered by the onward movement of time:
What Julia did not understand was that between the joy of an experience
such as she was then living and the recollection of it years later, might fall
the shadow of the intervening time …Roderic could have told her this, so
too could her father and even William.
But Julia, at this time, did not know.64
As is the case with many of Madden’s novels, Authenticity sounds a

warning note about life in twenty-first Ireland. No longer supported
by a religious belief in life as a spiritual journey and ageing as progress
towards wisdom, contemporary Irish society as portrayed in Authenticity
requires people to draw on their own resources to make the ageing expe-
rience meaningful: art, in Roderic’s case, music (Dennis and Frank),
78 H. INGMAN
expanding one’s knowledge (Dan). When society’s values of money, sta-

tus, power are deeply engrained, as in William’s case, consumerist secular
Ireland proves to be extremely unhelpful for the ageing process, provid-
ing few resources and impeding William’s ability to grow and develop
other talents. Above all, Authenticity highlights the fact that identity is
never static but a continual process of renegotiation between society and
the individual. The fact that so many of the characters fail in this pro-
cess—William, Frank, Roderic’s sister Maeve, his mother Sinéad—is not
simply a result of personality flaws but an indictment of the society in
which they live.
Anne Enright, The Green Road (2015)

Ageing as a central topic is a fairly recent introduction into Anne
Enright’s work with the moving description of the elderly father suffer-
ing from memory loss in her 2015 short story, ‘Three Loves’, discussed
in chapter five, and the portrayal of Rosaleen Madigan in her novel, The
Green Road, published in the same year. As writers on ageing point out,
older women suffer from a double marginality, obliged often to counter
their invisibility and disguise their age by means of make up, hair dye and
cosmetic surgery.65 This invisibility is certainly true for the vague and
forgetful seventy-year-old mother of twelve in Enright’s earlier novel,
The Gathering (2007), the doped-up Mrs Hegarty, who is barely artic-
ulate and whose story comes to us through the voice of her daughter,
Veronica. Veronica finds it hard to bring her mother into focus: ‘Some
days I don’t remember my mother. I look at her photograph and she
escapes me. Or I see her on a Sunday, after lunch, and we spend a pleas-
ant afternoon, and when I leave I find she has run through me like
water.’66 As we saw in chapter one, even feminism was slow to engage
with the ageing woman: ‘feminism itself has been profoundly ageist’,
Kathleen Woodward has remarked.67 In The Green Road, Enright coun-
ters this marginalization of older women by putting Rosaleen Madigan’s
story alongside those of her grown up children, as of equal interest, and
provides a vivid portrayal of what ageing looks like from the inside.
Rosaleen’s name suggests another marginalization—that of women in
Irish nationalism. As far back as eighteenth-century Gaelic poetry, fixed
constructs of gender were central to Irish nationalism with Ireland con-
structed as a woman victimized by the colonizing English male. Ireland
was Hibernia, Mother Ireland, the Poor Woman, Cathleen Ni Houlihan
and, in James Clarence Mangan’s poetry, Dark Rosaleen.68 By choosing

such an iconic name for her mother figure, Enright deliberately invokes
questions of the way in which Irish nationalism has been gendered. The
Devotional Revolution of the mid-nineteenth century added the cult of
the Virgin Mary and established constructs of masculinity and femininity
that reflected Catholic doctrine. Women were to be passive embodiments
of Irish virtue; men were Mother Ireland’s sons who were to sacrifice
their lives for her. These stereotypes of male and female behaviour held
sway in Irish literature well into the middle of the twentieth century, as
Eavan Boland has pointed out: ‘Long after it was necessary, Irish poetry
had continued to trade in the exhausted fictions of the nation, had
allowed these fictions to edit ideas of womanhood.’69 Since the estab-
lishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, political and Catholic ideolo-
gies combined to restrict women’s lives to the home. For the sake of the
new Irish nation, woman’s role was to be confined to the home where
she was to ensure the stability of the state, the preservation of the family
and the upholding of Catholic values. In 1937 these efforts to restrict
Irish women to the domestic sphere culminated in Eamon de Valera’s
Constitution founded, as Article 41 makes clear, on the family unit.
Article 41.2 states:
In particular the State recognizes that by her life within the home, woman
gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be
achieved.
The State shall therefore endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be
obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their
duties in the home.
The Constitution suggests that the natural place of all women is in the
home and, secondarily, in the slippage between ‘woman’ and ‘mothers’,
that they will be mothers.
The Green Road opens in 1980, precisely dating therefore the period
of Rosaleen’s mothering of her four children from the 1960s to the
mid 1980s, since Hanna her youngest, is twelve, Emmet is fourteen,
Dan is studying in Galway and Constance, the eldest, is working up in
Dublin. Although second-wave feminism began to take off in Ireland in
the early 1970s there is little evidence in the novel that what started as
a movement among young, middle class, media savvy women in Dublin
80 H. INGMAN
has reached as far as this rural county Clare family in time to make a
difference to Rosaleen’s life. She may have inherited Ardeevin from her
father but it is her husband, Pat, who rules the roost, spending his days
out with his mother working his family farm at Boolavaun whereas in
Ardeevin nothing gets repaired without Rosaleen nagging and pleading
‘like a housewife’.70 She is disempowered in her own home.71
If Rosaleen can exercise power in this family it is only through indirect
means, by manipulation and emotional blackmail. In the opening chap-
ter, in protest against the announcement of her elder son, Dan, that he
has decided to become a priest, she takes to her bed for a fortnight, ‘the
horizontal solution, as Dan liked to call it’.72 The fact that Rosaleen is
the central presence, binding home and family together, becomes appar-
ent to the younger children, Hanna and Emmet. With their mother lying
in bed upstairs, the house seems ‘so large and silent without her. It all
looked strange and unconnected’.73 In the mother’s absence, it falls to
their elder sister, Constance, to delay her return to Dublin and take over
the running of the house, further emphasizing the home as women’s
business. Neither Dan nor their father, Pat, is expected to help. The first
section thus establishes the context of Rosaleen’s mothering in a typical
Irish rural family where even Sunday dinner is iconically Irish: ‘bacon and
cabbage with white sauce and carrots—green, white and orange, like the
Irish flag’.74
The story moves on to portray the lives of Rosaleen’s adult children
at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty first:
Dan, gradually coming out as gay in New York during the Aids crisis,
Constance back in rural Ireland, repeating her own mother’s life as a stay
at home mother to three children, and responsible for keeping an eye
on Rosaleen, Emmet, an aid worker in Mali, and Hanna, an unsuccessful
actress and new mother, alcohol dependent, in a relationship with Hugh,
her baby’s father, that teeters on the edge of violence. As adults they
barely give their mother a thought, apart from Constance who recog-
nizes that Rosaleen, widowed in 1995, is still in mourning two years later
and probably suffering from depression.
By 2005 Rosaleen, an increasingly fragile and slightly confused seven-
ty-six-year-old, dwells alone in the big empty family home at Ardeevin,
living largely on her memories as a way of conquering linear time; indeed
the house itself seems to resist linear time since the kitchen clock stopped
shortly after Pat’s death. Rosaleen is a woman who has never become rec-
onciled to her age. In her youth she defied class and convention to marry
Pat and has memories of a passionate sex life in her marriage. She retains
a flirtatious eye for any handsome young man who crosses her path. She
prides herself on going out for a walk each day and on the fact that, unlike
her middle-aged daughter, Constance, she has kept her figure and her
looks. As we enter into Rosaleen’s memories of her children when small,
herself as a little girl, herself after her father’s death, her sex life with Pat,
we see the vital role of reminiscence in maintaining a sense of continuity,
personal identity and self-worth in old age. Lynne Segal has commented
on the psychic layers of memory that become part of the ageing process:
‘as we age we retain a certain access, consciously or not, to all the selves
we have been’.75 Yet, as we will see in the discussion of ageing protag-
onists in the fiction of Iris Murdoch and John Banville in chapter four,
memory may confirm but also destabilize identity and, to some extent,
this happens with Rosaleen whose rebellious acts of escape from linear
time do not only involve the past: she also travels in her mind to wher-
ever her children are, particularly her favourite, forty-three-year-old Dan
in Toronto, whose postcards over the years have opened up her life to
different places and nurtured her undeveloped love of art. It is from his
mother that Dan has inherited his passion for colour, clothes, art and
design; imagining his life enriches Rosaleen’s present lonely life.
What power Rosaleen still has over her children resides in her own-
ership of Ardeevin and of the Madigan family farm out in Boolavaun,
both valuable in the context of house prices in Celtic Tiger Ireland. In
this sense the novel mirrors a current social problem in Ireland, namely,
the resentment of a younger generation unable to afford homes of their
own against an older generation of property-owners.76 Rosaleen’s son-
in-law, Dessie, is particularly keen to get his hands on part of her land
for development. But Ardeevin no longer seems familiar to Rosaleen.
The first floor is never used, the house is too large and cold and uncom-
fortable—‘falling around her ears’ is how Constance thinks of it.77 Even
Rosaleen feels Ardeevin is getting beyond her:
The gutters falling into the flowerbeds, the dripping taps, the shut-up
rooms that she had abandoned, over the years; the pity of it; an old woman
chased into a corner by her own house. The pity of it – an old woman.78
By the end of Part One she has decided to exercise her power and put
Ardeevin on the market, knowing that this will call her children home for
one last Christmas.
82 H. INGMAN
Deprived of access to any other sort of power, Rosaleen continues, in

old age, to exercise power through manipulation and emotional black-
mail, to have the last word in any argument, such as the one about the
broken Belleek, by adeptly shifting ground. At Christmas dinner she
upsets each one of her children in different minor ways to prove that
she still can, but succeeds in gaining the whole of their attention by dis-
appearing, the culmination of those passive aggressive techniques she
has employed against her family all her life. Rosaleen’s grown up chil-
dren continue, child-like, to air their grievances against their mother
and to feel like children again back in Ardeevin the only house in which
Dan permits others to wait on him, where Constance loves feeling like
‘a grown-up child in her parents’ house’,79 and where Emmet, in a
moment of emotional honesty, recognizes that he will never be free from
his Irish Catholic idealization of the mother: ‘Emmet was still trapped,
always would be trapped, in some endlessly unavailable, restless ideal.
O clement, O loving,/O sweet Virgin Mary.’80 Rosaleen’s disappearance
forces her children to acknowledge that the tables are turned, no longer
children they will have to become her carers: ‘She was an elderly woman
in desperate need of their assistance and even as her absence grew to
fill the cold mountainside, she shrank into a human being—any human
being—frail, mortal, old.’81
Out on the road, Rosaleen is once again testing her children, wanting
them to prove their love to her, to prove that she is not ‘irrelevant’ in
their lives. She has always resented their ability to lead their own lives
apart from her: ‘Such selfish children she had reared’.82 By wandering
away she is underlining Constance’s refusal to take her into her own
home after Ardeevin is sold: ‘“You’re not going to put me out on the
roads,” said Rosaleen and Constance lowered her head.’83 At the same
time Rosaleen’s escape from Ardeevin allows her to recover her voice,
and what comes out are the words expected from an Irish Catholic
mother: ‘“Oh, don’t mind me!” she said. She roared it. She stuck her
fists down straight by her sides. “Don’t mind me!”’ The difference is
that Rosaleen is not murmuring but shouting these words:
Old women were not given to shouting. Rosaleen did not know if she still
could, or if your voice went slack like the rest of you, when you got old. …
There was no problem with her voice, that is what she discovered. Old women
do not shout because they are not allowed to shout. Because if they shout and
roar then there will be no dinner.84
The rural Catholic martyr mother finally recovers her voice.

Constance recognizes her mother in a memory of her standing at
the back door, ‘looking out at it all, waiting to leave’85 and this is what
Rosaleen does finally. All her life her children have been leaving, now she
in turn will leave them: ‘Rosaleen could also walk out that door and not
come back. And how did that feel? How did it feel when your mother
left you?’86 Out on this road, ‘the road of her youth’,87 Rosaleen recalls
her courting days with Pat where it all began, and she faces the fact that
she is now an old woman growing increasingly confused: ‘It was old age,
of course—the fear. Passing cars, children on bicycles, plugs and sock-
ets, escalators: she was afraid of things that beeped, or hummed, she was
afraid of looking like a fool, of wearing the wrong stockings, wearing the
wrong clothes.’88
The Green Road demonstrates that it is never too late to make a
change in one’s life as Rosaleen succeeds in renegotiating her iden-
tity. She will no longer be the woman of the house, the homemaker,
the mother; instead she will spend her life as a visitor in her children’s
homes, beginning with Emmet. After Ardeevin is sold, Rosaleen has no
further interest in it: ‘The front windows were boarded up and the gate
hanging open, but Rosaleen did not seem to notice the house, it was as
though the place had never been.’89 She has finally succeeded in escaping
the home that has defined her identity for so long. Like her son, Dan, to
a limited degree, she will become a traveller.
Enright’s portrayal of the ageing matriarch, Rosaleen, interrogates
Irish cultural stereotypes around motherhood and gender, depicting
Rosaleen, whose name associates her with Irish nationalist idealisations
around femininity, recovering her voice after years of being trapped in
the home. In this sense, The Green Road may be seen as falling into the
category of Waxman’s Reifungsromane, novels that portray old age as a
time of change and even growth. The mother figure is by no means ide-
alized, however, Rosaleen remains as exasperating and self-absorbed as
ever, running away again when Constance is diagnosed with cancer and
then blaming her daughter for throwing her out.
Rosaleen is very far from the archetypal wise old woman. She has
always favoured her sons over her daughters. Constance, who has invested
her identity in motherhood, tries to get her to establish a female line
of continuity by talking of their maternal grandmother but Rosaleen
is unable to describe her properly, though she has vivid memories of
their grandfather. For Constance the mother-daughter connection, so
84 H. INGMAN
important for a strong female identity, must come from her relationship
with her daughter rather than with her mother. When at the end Rosaleen
confesses that she has paid too little attention to things it is a belated
admission of her inability to see a world beyond her own small concerns,
to value the world as it is and not as she would like it to be. In this sense
she provides a striking contrast with Dan in Madden’s novel, Authenticity.
Nonetheless, in their depictions of characters like Dan and Rosaleen, both
Authenticity and The Green Road resist the decline narrative of ageing and
suggest the possibility of enrichment and adventure in later life. The hard-
ships, grief and losses of old age are not glossed over but, as in Time After
Time, ageing is presented both as a series of problems to be overcome and
as holding out the possibility of interesting challenges.
Notes
1. See, for example, the series of articles by Jackie Jones published in The
Irish Times between September 2015 and June 2016, highlighting persis-
tent ageism in Irish society.
2. Betty Friedan, The Fountain of Age (New York: Vintage, 1994), 33.
3. Vera Kreilkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House (Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 1998), 186.
4. Molly Keane, Loving and Giving [1988] (London: Virago, 2001), 170.
5. Keane, Loving and Giving, 214.
6. Erik Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed (1982; New York: W. W. Norton,
1998), 108.
7. Molly Keane, Good Behaviour [1981] (London: Abacus, 1982), 5.
8. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis
of Reason,’ in Feminist Epistemologies (Thinking Gender), ed. Linda
Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (New York and London: Routledge, 1993),
(187–216), 196.
9. Molly Keane, Time After Time (London: Abacus, 1984), 68.
10. Keane, Time After Time, 130.
13. Kreilkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House, 189.
15. Keane, Time After Time, 100–101.
17. Andries Wessels, ‘Resolving History: Negotiating the Past in Molly
Keane’s Big House novels’, Molly Keane: Essays in Contemporary
Criticism, ed. Eibhear Walshe and Gwenda Young (Dublin: Four Courts
Press, 2006), (27–35), 34–35.
19. Maria O’Neill, ‘The Ageing of the Anglo-Irish Gentry as Portrayed in
the “Big House” Novel’, in The Aesthetics of Ageing: Critical Approaches
to Literary Representations of the Ageing Process, ed. Maria O’Neill and
Carmen Zamorano Llena (Lleida: Universitat de Lleida, 2002), (97–
110), 109.
20. Zoe Brennan, The Older Woman in Recent Fiction (Jefferson, NC:
McFarland and Co., 2005), 119.
21. Brennan, The Older Woman in Recent Fiction, 115–20.
22. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Cambridge
23. Henri, J. M. Nouwen and William J. Gaffney, Aging: The Fulfillment of
Life (New York: Doubleday, 1976), 14.
24. In From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in
Contemporary Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990), Barbara
Frey Waxman discusses fiction by, among others, Doris Lessing, Elizabeth
Taylor, Barbara Pym, and Margaret Laurence. See also by Barbara Frey
Waxman, To Live in the Center of the Moment: Literary Autobiographies of
Aging (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1997).
25. May Sarton, At Seventy: A Journal (New York and London: W. W.
Norton, 1984); Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days [1968]
(New York and London: Penguin, 1979).
26. Deirdre Madden, Authenticity (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), 340.
27. Madden, Authenticity, 217.
30. Harry R. Moody, ‘The Meaning of Life and the Meaning of Old Age’
in What Does It Mean to Grow Old? Reflections from the Humanities,
ed. Thomas R. Cole and Sally Gadow (Durham: Duke University Press,
1986), 3–40.
31. Bridget English, Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern
Irish Novel (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017).
32. Madden, Authenticity, 221–22.
33. Ageing in Society, ed. John Bond, Sheila M. Peace, Freya Dittmann-Kohli,
and Gerben Westerhof (London: Sage, 2007), 55.
35. Quoted in Mike Hepworth, Stories of Ageing. (Buckingham: Open
86 H. INGMAN
37. Donald W. Winnicott, ‘Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self’,

in The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in
the Theory of Emotional Development (New York: International UP Inc.,
1965), 140–152.
38. Anthony Clare, On Men (London: Chatto and Windus, 2000), 1.
39. Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, 3rd
edition. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), xxiv.
40. Winnicott, ‘Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self’, 142.
42. See Kathleen Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other
Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 26–52 for an
extended discussion of Freud’s negative view of the ageing process.
43. Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections recorded and edited by Aniela
Jaffé (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961).
44. Carl Jung, Collected Works, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), vol. 7, 61.
45. Joseph Dohmen, ‘My Own Life: Ethics, Ageing and Lifestyle’ in Ageing,
Meaning and Social Structure: Connecting Critical and Humanistic
Gerontology, ed. Jan Baars, Joseph Dohmen, Amanda Grenier, and Chris
Phillipson (Bristol: Policy Press, 2014), 31–54.
(London: Bloomsbury, 2006); Kathleen Woodward, At Last, The Real
Distinguished Thing: The Late Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens and Williams
(Columbus, OH: Ohio State University, 1980).
50. Madden, Authenticity, 237–38.
Aging (New York: Springer, 2005), 50–51.
54. Deirdre Madden, One by One in the Darkness (London: Faber and Faber,
1996), 106.
55. Deirdre Madden, Time Present and Time Past (London: Faber and Faber,
2013), 66–67.
56. Madden, Time Present and Time Past, 67.
58. Nouwen and Gaffney, Aging: The Fulfillment of Life, 14.
59. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 51.
61. Tornstam, Gerotranscendence, 51, 188.

63. See, for example, Gail Wilson’s cross-cultural approach to the study of
ageing in Understanding Old Age: Critical and Global Perspectives (New
York: Sage, 2000).
65. See Jeannette King, Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism: The
Invisible Woman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), xi–xvii. Also
Brennan, The Older Woman in Recent Fiction and Kathleen Woodward,
‘Tribute to the Older Woman: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Ageism’ in
Images of Aging: Cultural References of Later Life, ed. Mike Featherstone
and Andrew Wernick (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 79–96.
66. Anne Enright, The Gathering (London: Jonathan Cape, 2007), 3.
67. Woodward, ‘Tribute to the Older Woman’, 88.
68. For the symbolic representation of Ireland as female see, among others, C.
L. Innes, Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society 1880–1935
(London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), Part One; David
Cairns and Shaun Richards, ‘Tropes and Traps: Aspects of “Woman”
and Nationality in Twentieth-Century Irish Drama’, in Gender in Irish
Writing, ed. Toni O’Brien Johnson and David Cairns (Buckingham:
Open University Press, 1991), 128–37; and Ann Owens Weekes, Irish
Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1990), 14–15.
69. Eavan Boland, Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our
Time (London: Vintage, 1996), 137.
70. Anne Enright, The Green Road (London: Jonathan Cape, 2015), 153.
71. For more on the theme of home in The Green Road, see Dearbhaile
Houston’s excellent MPhil dissertation, ‘Gender and Nation in Irish
Writing’, 2016, in the library of Trinity College, the University of
Dublin.
72. Enright, The Green Road, 13.
75. Lynne Segal, Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (London and
New York: Verso, 2013), 177.
76. See, for example, Jackie Jones, ‘Empty nesters, bed blockers, old farts or
biddies—Ageist terms are not the right fit’ The Irish Times 22 March,
2016, 16.
88 H. INGMAN

Bibliography
Boland, Eavan. 1996. Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our
Time. London: Vintage.
Bond, John, Sheila M. Peace, Freya Dittmann-Kohli, and Gerben Westerhof, eds.
2007. Ageing in Society. London: Sage.
McFarland and Co.
Cairns, David, and Shaun Richards. 1991. Tropes and Traps: Aspects of ‘Woman’
and Nationality in Twentieth-Century Irish Drama. In Gender in Irish
Writing ed. Toni O’Brien Johnson and David Cairns, 128–37. Buckingham:
Open University Press.
Clare, Anthony. 2000. On Men. London: Chatto and Windus.
Dohmen, Joseph. 2014. My Own Life: Ethics, Ageing and Lifestyle. In
Gerontology, ed. Jan Baars, Joseph Dohmen, Amanda Grenier, and Chris
Phillipson, 31–54. Bristol: Policy Press.
Enright, Anne. 2007. The Gathering. London: Jonathan Cape.
Enright, Anne. 2015. The Green Road. London: Jonathan Cape.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1993. Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of
Reason. In Feminist Epistemologies (Thinking Gender), ed. Linda Alcoff and
Elizabeth Potter, 187–216. New York and London: Routledge.
Innes, C. L. 1991. Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society 1880–
1935. London and New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Jung, Carl. 1961. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela
Jaffé. New York: Pantheon Books.
Jung, Carl. 1966. Collected Works, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, vol. 7.
Keane, Molly. 1982. Good Behaviour. London: Abacus.

Keane, Molly. 1984. Time After Time. London: Abacus.
Keane, Molly. 2001. Loving and Giving. London: Virago.
Kreilkamp, Vera. 1998. The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House. Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press.
Madden, Deirdre. 1996. One by One in the Darkness. London: Faber and Faber.
Madden, Deirdre. 2002. Authenticity. London: Faber and Faber.
Madden, Deirdre. 2013. Time Present and Time Past. London: Faber and Faber.
Moody, Harry R. 1986. The Meaning of Life and the Meaning of Old Age.
In What Does It Mean to Grow Old? Reflections from the Humanities, ed.
Thomas R. Cole and Sally Gadow, 3–40. Durham: Duke University Press.
Nouwen, Henri, and W. J. Gaffney. 1976. Aging: The Fulfillment of Life. New
York: Doubleday.
O’Neill, Maria. 2002. The Ageing of the Anglo-Irish Gentry as Portrayed in
the ‘Big House’ Novel. In The Aesthetics of Ageing: Critical Approaches to
Literary Representations of the Ageing Process, ed. Maria O’Neill and Carmen
Zamorano Llena, 97–110. Lleida: Universitat de Lleida.
Sarton, May. 1984. At Seventy: A Journal. New York and London: W. W.
Norton.
Scott-Maxwell, Florida. 1979. The Measure of My Days. New York and London:
Penguin.
Segal, Lynne. 2007. Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, 3rd
edition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Segal, Lynne. 2013. Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing. London and
New York: Verso.
Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Waxman, Barbara Frey. 1997. To Live in the Center of the Moment: Literary
Autobiographies of Aging. Charlottesville and London: University Press of
Virginia.
Wessels, Andries. 2006. Resolving History: Negotiating the Past in Molly
Keane’s Big House Novels. In Molly Keane: Essays in Contemporary Criticism,
ed. Eibhear Walshe and Gwenda Young, 27–35. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
90 H. INGMAN
Weekes, Ann Owens. 1990. Irish Women Writers: An Uncharted Tradition.

Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
Wilson, Gail. 2000. Understanding Old Age: Critical and Global Perspectives.
New York: Sage.
Winnicott, Donald W. 1965. Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self. In
The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory
of Emotional Development, 140–52. New York: International University Press.
Woodward, Kathleeen. 1980. At Last, The Real Distinguished Thing: The Late
Poems of Eliot, Pound, Stevens and Williams. Columbus, OH: Ohio State
University.
Woodward, Kathleen. 1995. Tribute to the Older Woman: Psychoanalysis,
Feminism, and Ageism. In Images of Aging: Cultural References of Later Life,
ed. Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick, 79–96. London and New York:
Routledge.
CHAPTER 4
Ageing, the Individual and the Community

in the Fiction of Iris Murdoch, John
Banville and John McGahern
This chapter analyses fiction by three authors—Iris Murdoch, John

Banville and John McGahern—whose treatment of the topic of ageing
invites discussion of issues involving the individual and the community.
Though, as will be discussed, ageing is a subject that extends throughout
Murdoch’s oeuvre, The Sea, the Sea (1978) especially lends itself to com-
parison with Banville’s fiction with its emphasis on the ageing individ-
ual, invariably male, who attempts to fashion a coherent identity through
narration. By contrast, McGahern’s The Barracks (1963) is focused
through the eyes of a female protagonist, propelled into the psychic age-
ing of the critically ill, whose dying months are shaped by her interaction
with the society around her, while in That They May Face the Rising Sun
(2002) ageing is experienced through an entire community. Loneliness
in people aged 65 and over remains a problem in Ireland, with one in
ten older people suffering chronic loneliness and the myriad mental and
physical illnesses arising from that.1 Gerontologists argue that ageing in
a community of older people can be a mutually beneficial and enriching
experience, facilitating a move outwards from focus on the ageing self
to participation in a network of relationships between peers.2 It will be
one of the aims of this chapter to juxtapose the experience of the solitary
ageing individual in the novels of Murdoch and Banville with the more
socially connected experiences of McGahern’s protagonists.

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96430-0_4
92 H. INGMAN
Iris Murdoch
From the start, Murdoch’s fiction displays realism about the physical
effects of ageing. In An Unofficial Rose (1962), sixty-seven-year-old
Hugh Peronett reflects:
Old age, which when he had been younger had seemed a coloured pros-
pect of broken wisdom, a condition like that of a late Titian, full of great
melancholy shattered forms, now presented itself, when he was on the
brink of it as a state, at best, of distraction, irritation and diminished dig-
nity: his rheumatism, his indigestion, his weak legs, his deafness, the per-
petual buzzing in his head.3
There are similarly vividly rendered physical descriptions of ill and age-
ing minor characters in Murdoch’s earlier fiction (Emma in An Unofficial
Rose or Tallis’s father, Leonard, in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970),
for instance) and of the final, bedridden, months of octogenarian Bruno
in Bruno’s Dream (1969) discussed in the epilogue to this study, but it is
only in The Sea, the Sea that the ageing process itself, experienced through
the eyes of the narrator, Charles, becomes the central focus of a novel.
The use of a male narrator illustrates Murdoch’s preference, despite
her own prominent public status as a philosopher and novelist, for por-
traying male professionals and employing male narrators.4 Women do
age in her fiction but unlike, for example, John Robert Rozanov in The
Philosopher’s Pupil (1983) who fears that his brain is ageing, the emphasis
is not on the waning of women’s intellectual powers so much as on their
changing physical appearance. When they are in good spirits, Murdoch’s
middle-aged women, like Lily in The Book and the Brotherhood (1987),
look young; when things go badly for them or, as with the case of Lizzie
in The Sea, the Sea, when the narrator is out of love with them, they look
old, ugly and unwanted. In The Book and the Brotherhood Lily appears, in
the words of the omniscient narrator:
… remarkably old or remarkably young. When old, a pinched mask of anx-

iety descended on her face, stained wrinkled skin obscured her light brown
eyes, her long neck looked starved and stringy, and her skin sallow and pit-
ted, as if drawn towards her mouth in a querulous pout.5
Amidst her complex reflections on her past life in The Book and the
Brotherhood, Rose’s thoughts on ageing are similarly gender specific—she
4 AGEING, THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE COMMUNITY IN THE FICTION … 93
regrets that she is too old to bear Gerard children. In her feminist study
of Iris Murdoch, Deborah Johnston poses the question as to what extent
Murdoch’s use of male narration is a form of evasion or a means of sub-
verting the patriarchal assumptions of her narrators. Similarly, Murdoch’s
emphasis on female characters’ gender-specific anxieties around ageing,
fertility and physical attractiveness may be read either as an evasion or
as reflective of cultural stereotypes around femininity. These female char-
acters are not central, however, and, given Murdoch’s concentration on
the psychological, moral and social dilemmas of her male characters, the
analysis in this section inevitably focuses on male characters and the age-
ing process.
In The Sea, the Sea, the narrator, Charles Arrowby, now in his sixties,
gives up his career as theatre director and retires to the coast possibly, he
suggests, though the question mark is significant, ‘to repent of a life of
egoism?’ and ‘learn to be good’.6 In his solitary meditations and atten-
tiveness to nature, he seems to be journeying towards the more realized
self, described by Erik Erikson, Lars Tornstam and Barbara Waxman and
referenced in chapter one of this study where we saw that these writ-
ers envisage old age as a time of reflection on one’s life leading to, if
all goes well, self-acceptance and a sense of fulfilment in Erikson, gero-
transcendence in Tornstam and ripening in Waxman.7 Abjuring theatri-
cal magic, no longer experiencing the distorting pressures of professional
ambition and rivalries, Charles feels alive to the connections between
past and present, ready to explore deeper parts of his consciousness and
attend to hidden or neglected aspects of his self: ‘I feel completely sane
and free and happy for the first time in my life!’8 He seems about to
embark on what Robert Butler termed a ‘life review’, a Janus-like process
involving ‘facing death as well as looking back’, surveying and integrat-
ing past experiences, making amends, seeking forgiveness and potentially
proceeding ‘towards personality reorganisation’.9
Such ‘personality reorganisation’ seems a distant prospect for Charles,
however, since in retirement he resembles Lear rather than Prospero,
remaining jealous, self-absorbed and lacking in self-knowledge. If the sea
in some way mirrors the unconscious that he wishes to explore in tran-
quillity, then the emergence of a sea monster indicates horrors lurking in
its depths: ‘I could feel all sorts of dark debris from the far past shifting
and beginning to move up towards the surface’.10 He is unsuited to a
life of contemplation, veering between professions of delight in this, his
‘first genuine solitude’,11 and wondering why he has received no letters.
94 H. INGMAN
He admits: ‘I do not really like silence except in the theatre’.12 His

reluctance to embark on a life review is evident: ‘I seem to be con-
stantly putting off the moment when I begin to give a formal account of
myself’.13 His dark, puzzling house with its odd spaces and empty inner
rooms, acts as a suitable metaphor for Charles’s evasive frame of mind.
Moreover, his essential values remain the same as becomes clear when
the obsessions that drove Charles as a director are transferred to Hartley,
his first love, whom he re-encounters by the sea: ‘one surrenders power
in one form, and grasps it in another’, he admits.14 Like a theatre direc-
tor, he endeavours ruthlessly to manipulate and allot roles to his visitors,
turning Gilbert into his butler and Titus into his son. He retains a pre-
occupation with his physical appearance to the extent of enlisting the aid
of science to mask his receding hair. He has so successfully suppressed
signs of ageing that Perry accuses him of being a Dorian Gray: ‘You still
have the joie de vivre of a young man. In your case it is nothing to do
with goodness. You are ungood. It is just a natural endowment, a gift
of nature, like your figure and your girlish complexion’.15 Intuiting his
obsession with age, Rosina tries to wound him by using age as a weapon
against him (‘Charles dear, you’re old’).16 It is this physical vanity that
prevents him from warning Titus of the dangerous rocks edging the sea
where they both swim: ‘It was rather too early to start losing face and
seeming old. I wanted him to accept me as a comrade’.17 Belatedly, he
acknowledges that this vanity led directly to Titus’s death:
I ought to have warned him, I ought never to have dived in with him on
that first day; I had destroyed him because I so rejoiced in his youth and
because I had to pretend to be young too. He died because he trusted me.
My vanity destroyed him.18
Charles comes close to Freud’s view of old age as castration as he laments

the loss of control over his body, envies Titus’s physical agility, dreams
of being young again and fearfully recalls the physical and mental dete-
rioration of his former lover, Clement: ‘That is a dreadful land, old age.
I shall soon be entering it myself’.19 He confesses to a ‘fear of loneliness
and death’, wondering who will care for him when he is ‘old and fright-
ened’.20 He is constantly noting when people appear older or younger
than their chronological age: Lizzie, Gilbert and especially Hartley
whom he imagines will be rejuvenated by life with him. Charles’s obses-
sion with Hartley is partly an effort to freeze time, to ward off painful
memories of the demented, dying Clement and to recapture youth, inno-

cence and an authenticity lost in the intervening years: ‘Perhaps I would
indeed, through her and through our old childish love, now irremediably
chaste, be enabled to become what I had hoped to become when I came
away to the sea, pure in heart’.21 Yet his pursuit of her, like his earlier
pursuit of Lizzie, is revealed to be self-centred, obtuse and utterly blind
to Hartley’s own happiness. Charles is conspicuously lacking in the kind
of ‘loving attention’ Murdoch outlines in The Sovereignty of Good (1970),
a concept she borrowed from Simone Weil to express ‘the idea of a just
and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality’, which she defines as
‘the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent’.22 Charles’s
‘meditation’, as he terms his account of his life, is unreliable and evasive,
as his cousin James has warned him is likely to be the case in any life
review: ‘People lie so, even we old men do’.23
James, a Buddhist, who has lived in India and other parts of the
east, is less reluctant than Charles to face the facts of old age and death.
Gerontologists argue that eastern societies have different symbolic and
sociocultural discourses around ageing and dying in which there is
greater realism in accepting the transience of life, the ageing body and
the place of the elderly. Free from the Cartesian notion of the body as
machine, these societies see death not as annihilation but as an integral
process of life itself, and contemplation of one’s mortality is taken to be
an important aspect of spiritual evolution.24 James, who comes closest
in the novel to Murdoch’s concept of the ‘just and loving gaze’, under-
stands most clearly the situation between Charles and Hartley, telling
him: ‘You’ve built a cage of your needs and installed her in an empty
space in the middle’ and warning that his obsession with Hartley is
prompted by narcissistic ‘love for your youth’.25 Through the exercise of
his powers, James saves Charles from drowning both literally in the sea
and metaphorically from being engulfed by his subconscious.
Critical opinion has been divided in assessment of James. Lindsey
Tucker regards James as one of Murdoch’s saintly figures whose surren-
der of magic as a preparation for death makes him a second Prospero,
while Elizabeth Dipple takes a more ambivalent view of James, regard-
ing him as unwilling to cede his magic powers, abusing them to save
Charles and failing tragically in his goal of Enlightenment.26 Suguna
Ramanathan, who provides a detailed analysis of the blend of Buddhism,
Hinduism and Christianity in Murdoch’s fiction, sees Charles’s journal
as evidence, in Buddhist terms, of the falsifications of the unawakened
96 H. INGMAN
mind, being preoccupied with Charles’s own needs and compulsions

and deluded in the belief that Hartley is a source of good for him.27
Ramanathan argues persuasively that James is an example of a realized
soul, one who sees accurately, disentangles himself from earthly attach-
ments, displays compassion and finally dies serenely, having achieved
Enlightenment. This is underlined in the novel by the letter from James’s
Indian doctor who writes to Charles: ‘In northern India I have known
such deaths, and I tell it to you so that you need not be sorry too much,
Mr. Arrowby died in happiness achieving all … Believe me, Sir, he was an
enlightened one’.28 James is not without his failures—with the sherpa,
with Titus—but these failures are presented as essential to his growth as a
moral being. For Murdoch, moral growth was always incremental, invisi-
ble and interior, a much humbler and more ordinary business than gran-
diose gestures at times of crisis:
But if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously

it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round
about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most
of the business of choosing is already over … The moral life, on this view,
is something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off
in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices.29
By contrast, Charles returns to his former life apparently unchanged;

a new relationship with the very much younger Angie is hinted at and
he has offers of theatre work. Nevertheless, there has been some alter-
ation in Charles; he achieves, as Deborah Johnson has argued, ‘a partial
truth, an incomplete illumination’.30 He has had moments with Hartley
when he tried to put her first, he has acknowledged his responsibility
over Titus’s death, and he finally gets around to writing, however briefly,
about Clement’s protracted dying. Moreover, he has experienced pass-
ing moments of transcendence, most significantly when the alarming sea
monster is counterbalanced at the end of his retreat by the blessing of
seals. However, The Sea, the Sea cannot be read as a Reifungsroman in
Waxman’s sense for, if Charles has undergone transformation, his diary
after his return to London reveals a gradual loss of insight after the
intense experiences of the summer: ‘Can one change oneself? I doubt it.
Or if there is any change it must be measured as the millionth part of a
millimeter’.31 The insights James has shared with him and his vision of
James standing on water to save him gradually fade from his memory.
It would be a mistake, however, to interpret The Sea, the Sea as

intending to portray Charles’s failure to achieve Jungian self-realization.
In a 1989 radio interview, Murdoch made clear her rejection of Jungian
transcendence in favour of seeing humans as continually balanced
between good and evil:
Jung is a magician; […] he wants people to come to terms with the dark
side of their soul and to recognize the great archetypal images and to har-
monise themselves into some sort of serene unification of the soul. That’s
the opposite of what I think. If one’s looking for philosophical pictures, I
would follow one which makes it very clear that human beings live on a line
between good and evil, and every moment of one’s life is involved in move-
ment upon this line, in one’s thoughts, as well as in the things one does.32
At the outset of his narration, Charles announces that the main events
of his life are over and that all he has to look forward to is ‘recollec-
tion in tranquillity’.33 In the ‘Postscript’, he acknowledges that he was
mistaken: ‘life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limp-
ing on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally
illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after’.34
Murdoch’s presentation of Charles’s life review leads not to the ultimate
integration or transcendence promised in humanistic gerontology but
more closely resembles critiques of the term by Betty Friedan and Jan
Baars as cutting off the possibility of future change and development.35
The struggle between Charles’s good and bad impulses will continue,
as his final words acknowledge: ‘Upon the demon-ridden pilgrimage of
human life, what next I wonder?’36 For Charles, there will be no ulti-
mate integration; the work of transformation is unending, as he recog-
nizes: ‘Judgments on people are never final, they emerge from summings
up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration’.37 In John
McGahern’s The Barracks, the dying Elizabeth Reegan comes to a sim-
ilar recognition: ‘Sometimes meaning and peace come but I lose them
again, nothing in life is ever resolved once and for all but changes with
the changing life’.38
A later novel by Murdoch, The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), picks
up some of the themes of The Sea, the Sea. Like Charles, John Robert
Rozanov is ambivalent about retirement: in his seventies and arthritic,
he returns to his childhood home of Ennistone having come to the end
of analytical philosophy, yet still seeking to complete his great book
98 H. INGMAN
which, bad though it may be, is still better than anything produced by
his contemporaries, he believes. At the same time, horribly prescient of
Murdoch’s own decline into Alzheimer’s, he is aware of his mind ageing:
And now, when there might perhaps burst forth some great symphonic
finale, the crown of his laborious trial, at the crucial point demanding the
purest most refined thinking of all, he was old, losing the clarity of his
mind, losing his words and mislaying his thoughts. Could he stop thinking?
What could he do but think?39
The spa waters of Ennistone may alleviate his arthritis but poignantly for
‘the weary diminishing cells of the mind’ there is no cure.40
Like Charles, the charismatic John Robert is a manipulator and a sol-
ipsist, attempting to rule the lives of those around him by means of curt
little notes. Like Charles, he blunders in personal relationships, divert-
ing his disappointments into a secret sexual obsession with a woman, in
this case his own granddaughter Hattie, who for him represents a fresh
start in terms of the human love that he has so often in the past rejected:
‘he felt world-weary, as if the journey was done, his era was over, John
Robert Rozanov was finished. There only and so terribly remained alive
the future, which was Hattie’.41 Through a mammoth exertion of will-
power, he finally succeeds in resisting Hattie, thrusting her into the arms
of a more suitable young man before committing suicide, his career as
an analytical philosopher having led him, in the words of John Sturrock,
‘nowhere but into a macabre and self-regarding old age’.42
For all the intricacy of his philosophy, John Robert has, as Father
Bernard discerns, ‘a massive lack of connection with the world’,43 and
indeed, it becomes apparent through the novel that his concentration on
the intellect has severely retarded his emotional and spiritual development.
In contrast, the Quaker, William Eastcote, a minor but essential presence
in the novel, enunciates, as his death approaches, his faith in the goodness
of ordinary life, ‘the close clear good things’.44 John Robert’s chaotic and
confused death, his suicide compounded by George’s efforts to drown
him, contrasts sharply with Eastcote’s silent waiting on death and peace-
ful end. As examples of people who age badly, parallels may be drawn
between John Robert and Jesse Baltram in Murdoch’s next novel, The
Good Apprentice (1985). Formerly a gifted, ruthless and charismatic artist,
Jesse has dwindled to a senile, sick, angry old man, a monster of egoism
whose death is similarly chaotic, his corpse left floating for days in a river.
The Philosopher’s Pupil is one of a trio of later Murdoch novels fea-

turing an older man who is supposed by his friends and followers to be
engaged on a great work. In The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), one
crucial scene of which is set in a tower in Ireland, the Crimondgesellschaft
eagerly awaits David Crimond’s radical left-wing study, while in The
Message to the Planet (1989) Alfred Ludens persists in believing that
Marcus is at work on a book that will represent a paradigm shift in
human thought. If in The Philosopher’s Pupil John Robert’s struggle with
his great work on philosophy is hampered by his consciousness that his
brain is ageing, in The Book and the Brotherhood ageing is not so much of
an issue for the energetic and fanatical Crimond who in his fifties dances
vigorously in the opening scene, steals Duncan’s wife and finally pub-
lishes his Marxist book. As far as Crimond’s book is concerned, The Book
and the Brotherhood ends on a note of ambiguity: we have only Gerard’s
word for it that it is brilliant, while in The Message to the Planet it turns
out that, despite Ludens’s faith in him, Marcus, a former mathematical
genius and painter, has no book to write. It remains unclear whether
Marcus is, as Ludens believes, a wise philosopher probing the secrets
of the human consciousness in order to uncover an important message
for the world. Or whether he is, as Patrick and the Seekers believe, a
mystic capable, like James in The Sea, the Sea, of performing supernat-
ural acts. Is Marcus a raving megalomaniac thriving on the adoration
of his followers, as Gildas Herne initially believes? Or, accepting that
love must go beyond power does he, like some sort of demythologized
Christ, renounce his charismatic power in order to take on the suffer-
ing of his people? Does he, as his psychiatrist Dr. Marzillian suggests,
empathetically re-enact the experience of the Holocaust, thereby will-
ing his own death? Does Marcus perhaps have Asperger syndrome as the
nurse, Suzanne Moxon, hints, or is he, in the words of his daughter Irina
who resents having to act as his carer, ‘just an ordinary confused elderly
man’?45 Marcus suffers from asthma, arthritis, high blood pressure and
constipation; he is often rambling, confused and forgetful. His periods
of blankness may be, as his followers believe, signs of a higher mystical
state, or they may betoken a man in the early throes of dementia. He
dies beside a gas oven: has he taken on the sufferings of the Holocaust,
or forgotten to switch off the gas? The portrait is deliberately ambigu-
ous; there can be no single interpretation of Marcus’s life.
Unlike The Sea, the Sea narrated by and centred on Charles, in these
three later novels the demonic anti-heroes, though pivotal, are part of a
100 H. INGMAN
large cast of characters and they are more often than not perceived from
the outside, through the eyes of other characters or an omniscient narra-
tor. It is considerations of form, therefore, as well as theme, which invite
comparison between The Sea, the Sea and the fiction of John Banville.
Before leaving our discussion of Murdoch, though, it is worth noting
that her last two novels, The Green Knight (1993) and Jackson’s Dilemma
(1995), display a determined effort to populate her work with young
people in their early twenties on the cusp of life, representatives of the
older generation being, at most, in early middle age. It is as if the older
and frailer she herself became, the more Murdoch felt drawn to portray-
ing the hopes and dreams of youth.
John Banville
John Banville’s unreliable, solipsistic, dissembling narrators are often
highly conscious of signs of ageing in themselves. ‘Everybody seems to
be younger than I am, even the dead’, says Max Morden at the start
of his narration in The Sea (2005).46 Now in his sixties, he finds mir-
rors give back only ‘a parody’ of himself: ‘a sadly dishevelled figure in
a Hallowe’en mask made of sagging, pinkish-grey rubber that bears no
more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that
I stubbornly retain in my head’.47 Kathleen Woodward regards the mir-
ror stage of old age as an inversion of Lacan’s mirror image in which
the infant (mis)recognizes his/herself as whole. In old age, the mirror
stage, Woodward argues, reveals a disintegrating self, and therefore, the
narcissistic impulse is driven to reject rather than embrace it.48 As Pierre
Bonnard, on whom Max is supposedly writing a monograph, painted
the septuagenarian Marthe as a teenager, so Max attempts to deny the
ageing process yet cannot help seeing its signs everywhere on his body
(greying hair, liver spots on his hands, rosacea on his face, bloodshot
eyes). He observes, as a portent of his own future, signs of ageing in his
older fellow resident, Colonel Blunden (bladder problems, leathery skin,
hand tremor). Max’s acute consciousness and anxiety over his ageing
body, like that of Charles in The Sea, the Sea, suggest that, notwithstand-
ing the recent valuable work on the ageing female, discussed in chap-
ter one of this study, men as well as women are constrained by society’s
emphasis on physical perfection.
Max is aware of living in a society that is bad at facing up to death:
when his wife Anna is given her cancer diagnosis, they feel as if a nasty
secret has been imparted to them: ‘From this day forward all would be
dissembling. There would be no other way to live with death’.49 For
much of the twelve months of Anna’s dying, until she is taken into a
nursing home, they hide themselves away from friends and family. Anna’s
death prompts Max, always drawn, as he admits, to shelter and comfort,
to retreat to the nostalgic protection of Ballyless, where he spent child-
hood holidays by the sea, much as Clement’s death prompts Charles in
The Sea, the Sea to retire to the coast where he attempts to recapture his
lost youth through his obsession with Hartley. Similarly, Max’s narrative
of boyhood days by the sea, seen through the eyes of his eleven-year-old
self, has been read as an attempt ‘to ward off the mortifications of grow-
ing old’.50
Max’s sojourn, rather than being consolatory, draws him down, like
Charles, into the sea of his subconscious and reawakens memories of the
earlier tragedy of the twins’ drowning, so that The Sea may more accu-
rately be classed as trauma narrative than life review.51 Exhausted by
grief, Max ‘must take the world in small and carefully measured doses’,52
numbing himself with alcohol and living through the tedious routine
of Miss Vavasour’s boarding house in the company of the aged Colonel
Blunden until he is ready to face the world again. On occasion, mem-
ories of his past are insufficient to contain the grief which breaks out
with a violence all the more shocking for the restraint of his previous
narrative: ‘You cunt, you fucking cunt, how could you go and leave me
like this, floundering in my own foulness, with no one to save me from
myself. How could you’.53
Nevertheless, Max does appear to be fumbling after some sort of a
reassessment of his life: ‘Nothing like disaster for showing up the cheap-
ness and fraudulence of one’s world, one’s former world’, he com-
ments.54 There seems no likelihood, however, either of Reifungs or of
transcendence. Max recognizes that marriage to Anna enabled him to
leave behind his lower-class origins and fashion for himself a new iden-
tity, that of wealthy dilettante: ‘what I found in Anna from the first was
a way of fulfilling the fantasy of myself’.55 But he also acknowledges that
if he tries to cast aside that identity, he may find there is no authentic
self beneath: ‘I grant that even the notion of an essential, singular self
is problematic’,56 an insight underlined by a dream in which he finds
himself trying to write his will ‘on a machine that was lacking the word
I’.57 In the previous chapter, we touched on the notion of authen-
ticity in the context of Deirdre Madden’s novel, Authenticity, where
102 H. INGMAN
William had allowed a false self to hide his true desires. Authenticity is
even more fraught for Banville’s troubled male narrators. If, as Mark
O’Connell argues, Banville’s protagonists ‘create their narratives to see
themselves’,58 they often end in doubt as to the reality of that self. The
particular brand of narcissism O’Connell discusses in connection with
Banville’s narrators might seem to link in with the notion of the inte-
grating life review, regarded by Robert Butler as characteristic of older
people,59 but in Banville such life reviews lead his protagonists further
away from the notion of a coherent identity. Gerontologists argue that
this difficulty in achieving a secure sense of self is particularly problem-
atic for older people in a postmodern society that, as in Banville’s fiction,
lacks any binding religious or philosophic framework into which people
can set their experience of ageing.60
Despite the fact that through the course of his narrative Max comes
to recognize his misreadings of the past (Rose, for example, was in love
with Mrs., not Mr., Grace), The Sea, unlike Murdoch’s novel, is uncon-
cerned with the possibility of integration or ultimate self-awakening on
the protagonist’s part. Indeed, as Eoghan Smith suggests, the indiffer-
ence of the world presented in the novel (the strange tide that drowns
the twins on an earlier occasion carries Max safely back to shore) renders
these kind of human struggles useless:
Ultimately, as with other Banville texts of this period, and perhaps inev-
itably, the book seems to suggest that the struggles of human life in the
face of an indifferent, mute world render meaningful confrontation with
the conditions of existence futile.61
Rather, rejecting the linear narrative progression of the Reifungsroman,

the story turns back on itself, ending at the point of Anna’s death and
the start of Max’s wading through the sea of memory that has formed
his narrative.62
More obviously categorizable in terms of life review are Banville’s
earlier works, Eclipse (2000) and Shroud (2002), initially one novel,63 in
which the protagonists as Derek Hand has noted, ‘perform their quest
for the self through writing’.64 Much critical work has been done on
these two novels around the themes of identity and authenticity, notably
by Eoghan Smith and Mark O’Connell. Smith’s definition of authentic-
ity, like that of Charles Taylor quoted in the previous chapter, stresses the
individual’s responsibility for shaping a meaningful life:
Broadly, however, for many existentialist thinkers, to live authentically

involves decisively taking free possession of one’s existence in the absence
of any pre-given or externally governed meaning … In an existentialist
context, individual self-determination is an unavoidable freedom.65
For this definition, Smith draws on key figures in literary and philosoph-
ical existentialism, such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus,
adding in Heidegger’s insistence that authenticity does not necessar-
ily involve the ethically correct action or any predetermined goal, but
simply an intensification of Being. The opposite of this is, of course,
Sartre’s ‘bad faith’, the inauthentic life, which many of Banville’s pro-
tagonists find themselves living while at the same time being haunted
by, in Smith’s words, ‘an original wholeness that is forever fading out of
reach’.66 Though there has been extensive critical discussion of the top-
ics of identity and authenticity in Banville’s fiction, there has been lit-
tle attempt to connect these themes to ageing despite the fact that, as
we saw in chapter one and in the previous chapter, writers like Erikson,
Tornstam and Waxman have linked the ageing process to a desire for
greater authenticity in later life and a wish to reassess our values in order
to uncover an identity that may have been defined and deformed by the
demands of our profession, a theme central to both Eclipse and Shroud.
For Alex Cleave in Eclipse, his career as an actor, embarked upon in
order to aggrandize and at the same time ‘achieve my authentic self’,67
has led him to adopt such a multiplicity of identities that he no longer
knows who he is. The memory of the sense of self that he experienced
so vividly as a boy out on the November streets is immediately followed
by a description of his life as an actor during which ‘I would be anyone
but myself’.68 His acting career has involved the loss of that ‘precious
ichor’, the mystery of the self, leaving ‘only a vacancy’, a ‘vacuum where
the self should be’.69 The dream in which he tortures himself, the actor,
for ‘not acknowledging me’ is a measure of his acute psychological dis-
tress.70 Alex’s estrangement from ordinary life is so complete that, like
Elizabeth Bowen’s Eva Trout, he regularly spies on others (his mother’s
lodgers, a naked girl in the flat next door, tramps in the street) in order
to understand what constitutes a human being. His wife Lydia accuses
him of wanting to study human beings in the manner of a vivisectionist,
taking them apart ‘to see how they work’.71 A crisis occurs when his pro-
fessional mask slips, poignantly, on the line from Amphitryon: ‘Who if not
I, then, is Amphitryon?’,72 cleaving his life in two and ending his career in
104 H. INGMAN
the theatre. From now on, he will have to live differently and, like Max,
he retreats to the scenes of his childhood in order to discover how: ‘I
have lived amid surfaces too long, skated too well upon them; I require
the shock of the icy water now, the icy deeps’.73
Withdrawal from his professional life suggests that Alex, in his fifties,
recognizes that, to recall Jung, the second half of life cannot be governed
by the same principles as the first. However, since, in Hedda Friberg’s
phrase, ‘the real has gone missing through imitation’, he finds himself
floundering.74 Indeed, like Charles in The Sea, the Sea, he at first tries
to evade any projected life review: ‘See how I parry and duck, like an
outclassed boxer? I begin to speak of the ancestral home and within a
sentence or two I have moved next door. That is me all over’.75 He has
no intention of spending too long in introspection, planning that his stay
in his childhood home will be: ‘no more than a brief respite from life, an
interval between acts’.76
Though Alex’s aim in his retreat is ‘To be watchful and attentive of
everything’,77 he admits that he gazes out ‘in ever intensifying perplex-
ity upon a world in which nothing is exactly plausible, nothing is exactly
what it is’.78 Figures and scenes from his past return to haunt him in
his childhood home and he uncovers more and more traces of his past
selves, illustrating the complex layering of identity which, Lynne Segal
has argued, is a feature of the ageing process.79 He recognizes that he
has lived too much on the surface, not properly attending to life, so that
now memories he tried to suppress in his bid to leave his home behind
return to haunt him. Unlike Rosaleen in Anne Enright’s The Green Road
for whom, as we saw in the previous chapter, memory largely confirms
identity, these complex psychic layers erupting in a previously unexam-
ined life prevent Alex’s life review from leading to the sort of integration
and harmony that Erikson and Tornstam anticipate. Instead, he confesses:
I thought that by coming here I would find a perspective on things, a

standpoint from which to survey my life, but when I look back now to
what I have left behind me I am afflicted by a disabling wonderment … I
cannot begin to locate that singular essential self, the one I came here to
find, that must be in hiding, somewhere, under the jumble of discarded
masks.80
Under Lydia’s accusing eye, Alex sees himself as ‘a farrago of delusions,

false desires, fantastical misconceptions’.81 ‘I really am a stranger to
myself’, he admits, suggesting that, for him at least, the continuity of the
self over the course of a life is an impossible fiction.82
In his confusion, under the impact of his daughter Cass’s absence,
then death, Alex constructs himself another false identity, as Lily’s father.
Hedwig Schwall argues that Alex is constructing Lily here as Cass’s
double, and she cites Otto Rank’s view, discussed by Freud in ‘The
Uncanny’ (1919), that the double is ‘an insurance against the destruc-
tion of the ego, an “energetic denial of the power of death”’.83 As a
way of warding off thoughts of mortality and surrounding himself with
youth, this new identity thus illustrates Alex’s unwillingness to face up
to death. Earlier he has confessed that a vision bringing home to him
the fact that Lydia would one day die and leave him caused ‘a significant
shift’ in his attitude towards her, and he pinpoints this inability to accept
Lydia’s mortality as the source of his irrational fits of rage against her.84
Nevertheless, as with Charles in The Sea, the Sea, there are signs that
Alex’s life narrative, unreliable though it is, prompts some change and
his hauntings may be read as the sign of the development of a more
authentic self. The other within him is most obviously a spectral image
of Cass and her future but gains another layer of meaning if old age is
viewed as the uncanny stranger within. The uncanny otherness of ageing
is discussed at length by Kathleen Woodward who, drawing on Freud’s
famous description in ‘The Uncanny’ of the moment on a train when he
was suddenly confronted by his ageing appearance in a mirror, observes
that: ‘to see one’s own aged body with a shock of recognition is to expe-
rience the uncanny’.85 Freud’s memory of his elderly double, rather
than a haunting from the past, may be interpreted, as Stephen Frosh has
argued, as an unsettling portent of what his future holds as an old man
awaiting death:
What sends shivers down his spine, it seems, is not the return of the infan-
tile repressed, but the beckoning from the future; that is, it is the future
that haunts the present, and not the past. This future is one in which
Freud is an old man, in which he will regret what he comes to be; in which
death calls him, and daily reminds him of its threat.86
Similarly, Woodward says of the image on the train: ‘It uncannily prefig-
ured the coming years of suffering which Freud was destined to live out’.87
In this context, it is possible to read Alex as haunted, not only by
ghosts of past selves, but also by his future ageing self that he has yet to
106 H. INGMAN
come to terms with, despite knowing that he must: ‘See me there, the
haunted one, in my fiftieth year, assailed suddenly, in the midst of the
world. I was frightened, as well I might be’.88 ‘I am as a house walked
up and down in by an irresistibly proprietorial stranger’.89 Lydia tells
him: ‘You are your own ghost’.90 Alex himself recognizes that this inter-
nal ghost is trying to teach him something for his benefit: ‘Something is
expected of me here, something is being asked of me’.91 He has a vision
of a shrouded figure ‘waiting, it might be, for some desired response
from me’.92 Like Freud’s elderly gentleman, this shrouded figure, ‘vague,
patient, biding’, in contrast to the ghosts from the past summoned up
by his return to his childhood home, seems to point Alex towards his
future: ‘Is that the future, trying to speak to me here, among these shad-
ows of the past?’ he wonders.93 Though in the novel he never finds a way
of satisfying the ghosts that haunt him, the reader understands that even
posing the question constitutes an advance for Alex.
In Shroud, Axel Vander’s performative identity is more deliberate since
he has purposely stolen another person’s identity and compounded that
fakery by his fraudulent approach to scholarship. The lifting of his mask
is involuntary and unwelcome, the result of Cass’s scholarly research into
Axel Vander’s life. Far from choosing withdrawal and contemplation,
Axel decides that he may yet be able to retain enough of a mask to bra-
zen out Cass’s discoveries: ‘All my life I have lied. I lied to escape, I lied
to be loved, I lied for placement and power; I lied to lie. It was a way of
living’.94
Axel has all the symptoms of ageing badly: shame, self-disgust, fear of
dependence. The ageing body, forcing itself on his attention, troubles his
sense of self: like Max he inverts Lacan’s mirror stage, refusing to identify
with his decaying body in the mirror, ‘goggling in horror at the dribbled
on shirt-front, the piss-stained flies’.95 He enumerates with dry precision
the physical effects of old age as he experiences them: constipation, dry
joints, hardening toenails. He is acutely aware of his ageing peers, and
his descriptions are always pejorative, as in the ‘bald old body’ at recep-
tion, the ‘ageing dandy’ of a hotel manager,96 the hennaed housewives of
Turin ageing ‘from the top down’,97 the ‘spry cadaver’ of a waiter,98 the
‘painted hag’ who is guest in his hotel.99 Before he meets Cass, he ima-
gines his nemesis as ‘a dried-up old virgin with blue-veined talons and
spectacles on a string, and a mouth with a fan of fine wrinkles etched
into the whiskered upper lip’.100 Recalling Anna’s arresting and dis-
turbing photographs of cancer patients in The Sea, Axel documents the
successive stages of cancer in the gradual physical decline of his ex-lover,

Kristina Kovacs. The ageing body seen through Axel’s eyes is a particu-
lar object of loathing illustrating the way in which ageist stereotypes can
be internalized by those who are most affected by them. Flaunting his
elderly naked body in front of Cass, he expects to disgust her, though he
does not.
As well as physical frailty, Axel fears that age is bringing with it a
diminishment of his mental powers: his increasing clumsiness and ten-
dency to misplace things may be ‘the outward manifestation of lapses
and final closures occurring deep in the brain’.101 Axel’s faith in a
Nietzschian will to power gives him a Freudian view of old age as akin
to castration: ‘Time and age have brought not wisdom, as they are sup-
posed to do, but confusion and a broadening incomprehension, each
year laying down another ring of nescience’.102 He murders his wife
Magda by feeding her pills when he can no longer face coping with her
senility.
When Axel does experience what gerontologists explain as an inten-
sification of the moment in later life, rather than leading to a positive
appreciation of life’s richness, the suspension of linear time provokes a
negative awareness of his own mortality:
For a second, strangely, and for no reason that I knew, everything seemed
to stop, as if the world missed a heartbeat. Is this how death will be, a
chink in the flow of time through which I shall slip as lightly as a letter
dropping with a rustle into the mysterious dark interior of a mailbox?103
Holding Cass’s hand for the first time brings ‘a sudden, shocking
reminder of how much of my life was gone. I was wearing out, I, and
my world as well. A wave of bitterness and anger washed over me, tak-
ing my breath away. So many of the things were blunted now that in
my youth would have pierced me …’104 His urgent desire, not just to
possess Cass, but to ‘open up her flesh itself like a coat, unzip her from
instep to sternum and climb bodily into her’, arises not only from lust
but from an old man’s rage that he has lost the intensity of youth.105
Later he admits:
The object of my true regard was not her, the so-called loved one, but
myself, the one who loved, so-called. Is it not always thus? Is not love the
mirror of burnished gold in which we contemplate our shining selves?106
108 H. INGMAN
Rejecting his elderly self seen in the mirror, he substitutes twenty-seven-

year-old Cass: ‘on the lip of the grave I was happy and grateful to get my
hands on a girl’.107
Cass’s suicide jolts Axel out of his solipsism and he becomes so
haunted by her voice in his head, ‘telling me things I do not want to
hear’, that he is compelled to compose this life review, giving him ‘one
last chance to redeem something of myself’.108 Having built his career,
like Paul De Man, one of the historical figures behind this novel, on
deconstructing the notion of an essential, singular self Axel, showing the
sort of bad faith that Charles Arrowby displays with Hartley and John
Robert Rozanov with Hattie, makes Cass the guarantor of his authentic-
ity: ‘I seized on her to be my authenticity itself … she was my last chance
to be me’.109
Patricia Coughlan has criticized, with justification, the recurring ten-
dency of Banville’s male narrators to inscribe their desires and pain onto
the tabulae rasae of young women’s bodies:
The form of possible dissent perhaps not allowed for is the reader’s from
the apparent inescapability of projecting masculine self-realization, and the
attainment by male protagonists of some degree of moral coherence, upon
inconscient female characters.110
If, as Mark O’Connell has argued,111 we are to read the third-person

narrative sections as Axel’s attempt to think himself into Cass’s frame of
mind, this may suggest a belated effort on his part to move beyond sol-
ipsism into empathy and the kind of attention to the other advocated by
Iris Murdoch. It may also, however, be indicative of Axel’s continuing
desire to expropriate Cass, as in the past he expropriated the identity of
his friend: ‘Deep down it is all I have ever wanted, really, to step out
of myself and clamber bodily into someone else’, he confesses.112 In the
context of ageing, Axel’s projection of the search for meaning in his life
onto Cass may be read as another example of the difficulty of ageing in a
late modern society where traditional frameworks and narratives around
ageing have broken down.
Though Axel ultimately admits to failure in his attempt to know
Cass, it is possible to interpret his life review as resulting in some pro-
gress towards self-knowledge. In contrast to his previous endlessly
masquerading self, he now yearns, however futilely, for ‘an enduring core
of selfhood’113 and wonders whether that was Cass’s intention all along,
‘to offer me the possibility of redemption. If so, you have already had an
effect: redemption is not a word that up to now has figured prominently
in my vocabulary’.114 He is aware of his irresponsibility in starting the
affair with the much younger and mentally disturbed Cass and of his fail-
ure to save her, and he steps outside himself sufficiently to consider the
effect of Cass’s suicide on her father. He imagines their unborn child as
heralding redemption for his people, the Jews: ‘For once, perhaps really
for the first time, it was others I was thinking of’.115 As Hedda Friberg
suggests, Axel demonstrates a form of atonement by taking the dying
Kristina into his own home.116
Nevertheless, Banville’s ageing narrators put into question the
notion that a life review leads to the integration and transcendence
described by Erikson and Tornstam. Faced with the difficulty of mov-
ing towards greater self-realization in a postmodern world of frac-
tured and unstable identities, while retaining a romantic yearning for
authenticity they are unable, in Erikson’s terms, to make a successful
synthesis between integrity and despair, ending, in Eoghan Smith’s
phrase, in ‘existential drift’.117 In an interview in 1978, Iris Murdoch
commented on the attempt to impose a pattern on what is ultimately
without form:
When we tell stories or when we write letters, we are making a form out
of something which might be formless, and this is one of the deep motives
for literature, or for art of any sort: that one is defeating the formlessness
of the world … one is cheering oneself up and consoling oneself, and also
instructing oneself, by giving form to something which is perhaps alarm-
ingly formless in its original condition – a sort of rubble. It is as if we live
in a kind of rubble world, and we are always making forms.118
The narratives of Banville’s ageing protagonists, like Charles Arrowby’s

in The Sea, the Sea, suggest that the wish to make one’s life cohere into
a pattern is an integral, but inevitably self-defeating, part of the ageing
process in a postmodern, secular society where the fragmented self is
constantly in the process of evolution; in this sense, Banville’s fictional
world poses a challenge to gerontologists’ notions of gerotranscendence
and Reifungs.
110 H. INGMAN
John McGahern
Max, Alex and Axel scarcely move beyond their personal preoccupations,
and one of the criticisms that has been brought against Banville’s fiction
is that it ‘overlooks the bonds of social existence’.119 His protagonists’
ageing, like Charles’s in The Sea, the Sea, becomes a solitary, solipsistic
process. By contrast, John McGahern’s fiction is very often rooted in the
kind of communities that are beneficial for older people. Admittedly in
The Barracks Elizabeth Reegan, for whom the ageing process is acceler-
ated by cancer, working her way through despair in the face of an indif-
ferent world to something like serenity, finds herself frequently at odds
with her community’s values. She knows she must avoid on the one
hand the existential despair that led her former lover, Michael Halliday,
to commit suicide, and on the other the dull, life-sapping rituals of the
Catholic Church adhered to unthinkingly by her husband and neigh-
bours. In the opening scenes of the novel, Elizabeth finds herself unable
‘to get any ordered vision on her life’.120 Sick and drained of energy, she
experiences her routine of caring for her stepchildren who never confide
in her, in a marriage that has lost all intimacy, as increasingly purpose-
less. In despair, she feels that her life is ‘losing the last vestiges of its pur-
poses and meaning’.121 Her daily routine no longer suffices and, unlike
her husband, she cannot share the rote Catholic faith of her community
that suppresses all individual expression: ‘She could see no purpose, no
anything, and she could not go on blindly now and without needing
answers and reasons as she could once’.122 Pain and approaching death
force her to formulate, at least for herself, a personal vision of life.
Elizabeth’s life review takes the form of modernist-inspired flashbacks
as in her final year memory frees her from the constraints of linear time
and intense moments of joy enrich her daily life: ‘She was not really
going in a common taxi to a common death. She had a rich life, and she
could remember … She reached over and took Reegan’s hand, her face
alive with joy’.123 This echoes memoirs on ageing by writers such as May
Sarton and Florida Scott-Maxwell who portray life becoming richer and
deeper with age, suggesting that ageing takes place as much in the psy-
che as in the body.124
Elizabeth’s deepening sense of the mystery of life, commented upon
by several scholars,125 together with her heightened appreciation of the
natural world as she is dying, corresponds more closely than the fic-
tion of Murdoch and Banville both to gerontologists’ emphasis on
gerotranscendence126 and to Waxman’s Reifungsroman. Elizabeth finds

her inner sense of self fortified by memories of the past as she moves
away from despair at the apparent randomness and futility of life to
acceptance that she will find no answers and even to appreciation of life’s
strangeness: ‘It was so fantastic, and so miraculous that it could go on in
spite of having no known purpose’.127 Elizabeth accepts that ‘nothing in
life is ever resolved once and for all’,128 and in this sense, her ‘life review’
does not lead to any easy answers: ‘She had come to life out of mys-
tery and would return, it surrounded her life’.129 Her difficulty, which
is never overcome in the novel, is how to reconcile her personal vision
of life’s mystery with a society and a church that insist on conformity to
formula and ritual at the expense of individual expression.
Although her search for meaning in the midst of her dying is an indi-
vidual quest, Elizabeth is not cut off from people, like the narcissistic
narrators in Murdoch and Banville. Her dying takes place in the heart
of her community and for as long as she is able she carries on the quo-
tidian tasks of running a house and tending to her stepchildren. Her
attention to the natural world around her and to the children, allowing
her to avoid the sort of self-absorption that afflicts Banville’s narrators,
keeps her grounded and free from her mind’s ‘futile wanderings’: ‘She
was growing too engrossed in herself and no matter what she’d think
or where her mind might wander she was still a woman on an earthen
road with a boy and a bucket’.130 Her involvement with her neighbours’
problems helps her overcome egocentricity and put her own situation in
perspective: ‘This petty world of hers wasn’t the whole world’.131 Even
at her sickest, she maintains connection with others’ lives by insisting her
bedroom door remains open.
It is possible, as Grace Tighe Ledwidge has argued, to judge
Elizabeth’s behaviour as masochistically self-sacrificing, shaped by the
post-colonial world of mid-twentieth-century Ireland in which church
and state colluded to ensure that women’s role was within the home
serving others.132 However, though it is important to bear this fem-
inist reading in mind, if looked at from the point of view of ageing,
Elizabeth’s attention to the needs of others allows her to avoid what ger-
ontologists have seen as one of the greatest hazards of the ageing pro-
cess, namely the tendency to narcissism.133
After Elizabeth’s death, The Barracks refocuses on her family and
neighbours, portraying a community that knows how to deal with death,
in practical terms at least:
112 H. INGMAN
After the first shock, the incredulity of the death, the women, as at a wed-
ding, took over: the priest and doctor were sent for, the news broken to
Reegan on the bog, the room tidied of its sick litter, a brown habit and
whiskey and stout and tobacco and foodstuffs got from the shops at the
chapel, the body washed and laid out.134
There is a suggestion, though, that this practical and custom-bound

approach too easily masks the emotional side of death, a suggestion
underlined by the ending where the children return to their daily rou-
tine their lives scarcely altered by Elizabeth’s passing. Since her values,
shaped in part by her encounter with Halliday in London, have been so
much at odds with those of her husband and neighbours, Elizabeth’s
unique insights as she faces death have no impact on the wider commu-
nity, which afterwards sinks back into its mechanical rituals and routines.
Elizabeth’s struggle to find meaning in the face of death is a solitary
one. In ‘The Meaning of Life and the Meaning of Old Age’, the philos-
opher Harry R. Moody stresses the difficulty for the individual, in the
absence of shared cultural values, to engage with the ageing process: suc-
cessful ageing, he argues, ‘depends on a cultural framework wider than
the individual’.135 In their study of the social networks of older Dutch
people, ‘Social Ability or Social Frailty? The balance between auton-
omy and connectedness in the lives of older people’, Anja Machielse and
Roelof Hortulanus argue that achieving a balance between independence
and meaningful social connectedness has a positive effect on personal
well-being and quality of life and is crucial to successful ageing.136 In the
Irish context, Carmel Gallagher’s study, The Community Life of Older
People in Ireland (2008), a sociological account of the daily lives of peo-
ple aged 65 and over living in Rathmore, an urban area of Dublin, and
Rathbeg, a rural area in the North West of Ireland, found that engage-
ment in communal life through formal and informal activities greatly
enhanced the quality of life for older people. An appropriate test case in
fiction is McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun which portrays
a rural community, dying in sociological terms since families with chil-
dren can no longer afford to live there, undergoing the ageing process
together.
Gerontologists argue that western liberal capitalism encourages age-
ism by valuing only those who are productive in terms of power, money
and success: if people are not contributing to the workplace they are
liable to be culturally disenfranchised and relegated to the margins.137
The members of the ageing community in That They May Face the Rising
Sun have no sense, however, that they inhabit society’s margins. They are
‘confidently themselves’,138 centred firmly in their world, living in sea-
sonal, communal time tied to the rhythms of nature, rather than to the
linear, individual, pressurized time of urban capitalism. The lake com-
munity fulfils several types of the social support deemed by sociologists
to be necessary for successful ageing, namely companionship, emotional
support and practical help.139 In the opening scene, Jamesie calls in on
the Ruttledges to return the loan of shears and bring them the latest
news. The Shah comes to lunch every Sunday. Neighbours keep an eye
on one another, extending their care to the disabled Bill Evans who is
given food and drink and tactful help to secure a home of his own. Bill is
an interesting example of how the power balance may shift for the disa-
bled in an ageing society where they may be better placed to help others
frailer than themselves, as Jamesie observes to Ruttledge:
With people living longer there’s a whole new class who are neither in
the world or the graveyard. Once they were miles above poor Bill in life
… Now they are in wheelchairs and hardly able to cope … Compared to
some of the souls in that bus, Bill Evans is a millionaire.140
This community possesses a realism about ageing: the Shah, the most
successful among them in material terms, has enough insight to choose
his moment of retirement in a careful and considered fashion, relin-
quishing control of his business but retaining sufficient work to keep
himself occupied. ‘There are some old cunts going around who think
they’ll never disappear’, he tells Ruttledge. ‘I wouldn’t want to be one
of those’.141 The exception is John Quinn who continues to seek dis-
traction in womanizing, asserting that age is ‘all in the mind. You’re
as young as you feel. I myself intend to be a permanent twenty-two or
twenty-three till night falls’.142 Sixty-five-year-old Patrick Ryan, too, dis-
tracts himself from awareness of the transience of life with endless escap-
ist activity and play acting, refusing to contemplate work on Ruttledge’s
shed except at moments when he is confronted directly by mortality (the
deaths of his brother and of Johnny). The references to Ruttledge’s shed
as a ‘cathedral’ reinforce, as Denis Sampson suggests, its connection with
‘death and the passage of time’,143 and Ryan’s procrastination gains in
significance in the light of this.
114 H. INGMAN
Quinn and Ryan stand out as exceptions in this lake community

which has the cultural resources to sustain and enrich the ageing pro-
cess; when Johnny dies, the funeral ceremonies are performed in a dig-
nified and restrained manner by a community that knows how to handle
death: ‘With the watchers on the chairs around the walls and the white-
ness of the linen and the flowers and the candles, the small room looked
beautiful in the stillness of the ceremony’.144 As Bridget English notes,
there is a less critical attitude towards Catholic ritual in That They May
Face the Rising Sun than in The Barracks where funeral rites are used
to suppress emotion around death.145 In McGahern’s final novel, even
the agnostic Ruttledge finds personal meaning in the act of laying out
Johnny, feeling that it ‘made death and the fear of death more natural,
more ordinary’.146
The acceptance of death as a natural part of the human cycle goes
against western emphasis on the autonomy of the individual and
the importance of personal identity, and provides a counterpoint to
McGahern’s portraits of father figures who remain trapped in resent-
ful rage at the ageing process, in stories such as ‘The Gold Watch’ and
‘Wheels’, or in his novel, Amongst Women (1990). Commenting on a
study of the interconnected, and thereby mutually sustaining, lives of
older people in Sarasota, Florida, Sally Gadow notes that: ‘The creation
of meaning need not be a solitary work; it can be the expression of per-
sons together’.147 This is the achievement of the community by the lake
in That They May Face the Rising Sun with its shared ritual activities, its
almost daily visits to one another’s houses and its good-humoured tol-
erance of even the most eccentric among them. Jung’s influence on
McGahern, discussed by James Whyte and attested to in a 1992 inter-
view with the author,148 may lie behind the recognition in the novel that
the latter part of life contains its own value and purposes and deserves
special attention.
McGahern’s novel is also a late work in Edward Said’s sense in that,
written towards the end of his life, it shows a change of theme and style,
focusing on community rather than individual life, shaped to reflect the
rhythm of the seasons and employing a narratorial voice that seems to
arise organically out of the community by the lake almost as if it were
the product of an oral culture. Eamonn Hughes has examined the
break That They May Face the Rising Sun makes with McGahern’s pre-
vious work in terms of form and style, turning away from the interior-
ity and linearity of his previous novels to create, through recurrence and
repetition, a timelessness reminiscent of Tomás Ó Criomhthain’s An

tOileánach.149 In this way That They May Face the Rising Sun corrobo-
rates Said’s observation that with certain artists their work acquires a new
idiom towards the end of their lives, ‘a late style’.150 Many readers have
found in McGahern’s novel the crowning achievement of his writing
life: ‘In the novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun (2002), all of his
concerns—thematic as well as formal—find their most full and, perhaps,
complete expression’.151 There is a serenity in McGahern’s last novel that
we did not find either in Yeats’s late poetry or in Elizabeth Bowen’s The
Little Girls, and in this sense, McGahern’s rich, lyrical novel does not
fit Said’s description of late works that are fragmented, angry and unre-
solved. Instead, That They May Face the Rising Sun looking both ways,
towards life and towards death, attempts to maintain Erikson’s balance
between integrity and despair.
McGahern’s work may seem to provide a solution to the problem of
ageing, but in twenty-first century, youth-obsessed, rapidly secularizing
Ireland close-knit rural communities of ageing peers like the one por-
trayed in That They May Face the Rising Sun are increasingly hard to
find.152 Moreover, there are elements of late modern society even in this
community. Ruttledge and his wife, Kate, reflect the individualism of
postmodern societies in that they have freely made a choice to live in this
community and do not share all of its traditional values, such as church
going. Indeed, for a while Kate is conflicted as to whether she wants
to give up her social network in London entirely. Due to their beloved
son Jim’s move to the city and Johnny’s earlier emigration to England,
Jamesie and Mary have to rely on friendship networks rather than family
ties in their later years, a characteristic feature of modern life.153 Johnny
himself highlights the situation of the ageing emigrant who, having
spent his working life in England, is unable to make a home for himself
in Ireland at the end of his life. Here, the notion of community breaks
down since, given his relatives’ thinly veiled reluctance to take him in,
Johnny has to solve the problem of his retirement for himself in London.
Even in this traditional community, then, some of the problems associ-
ated with ageing in late modern societies are present, namely given the
decline of traditional frameworks and customs, the onus on individuals
actively to shape a meaningful later life.
Nor is ageing in the community always the answer: though Banville’s
narcissistic protagonists age badly, there is a suggestion in Murdoch’s
novels that proper attention to the good is a key to successful ageing
116 H. INGMAN
and, in a culture that lacks a common belief system, this can only be
achieved on an individual level, by moving beyond the concerns of the
ego and attending to what is other than self. The novels of Murdoch,
Banville and McGahern, presenting ageing as a complex interac-
tion between body, self and culture, pose challenges to gerontologists’
assumptions around life reviews and transcendence suggesting that life
reviews are never complete but subject to the onward movement of time
and throwing doubt on the possibility of sustained transcendence and
shared meaning in a secular, postmodern age.
Notes
1. h ttp://www.thejournal.ie/older-people-living-alone-3708722-
Nov2017/. See also https://www.publichealth.ie/document/
iph-report/loneliness-and-ageing-ireland-north-and-south
2. See, for example, Natalie Rosel’s study, ‘Growing Old Together:
Communality in a Sarasota Neighbourhood’ in What Does It Mean
to Grow Old? Reflections from the Humanities, ed. Thomas R. Cole
and Sally Gadow (Durham: Duke University Press, 1986), 199–233.
The US is possibly ahead of Ireland in terms of establishing com-
munities for older people, see http://www.asaging.org/blog/
aging-community-communitarian-alternative-aging-place-alone.
3. Iris Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose [1962] (St Albans: Triad/Panther,
1977), 12.
4. Margaret Moan Rowe, ‘Iris Murdoch and the Case of “Too Many
Men”’, Studies in the Novel 36 (1) (2004): 79–94; Deborah Johnson,
Iris Murdoch (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987).
5. Iris Murdoch, The Book and the Brotherhood (London: Chatto and
Windus, 1987), 143.
6. Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea (London: Chatto and Windus, 1978),
1–2.
7. Erik Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed (1982; New York: W. W. Norton
and Co., 1998); Lars Tornstam, Gerotranscendence: A Developmental
Theory of Positive Aging (New York: Springer, 2005); and Barbara Frey
Waxman From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging
in Contemporary Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).
8. Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea, 4.
9. Robert N. Butler, ‘The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence
in the Aged’, Psychiatry 26 (1963): (65–76), 67.

20. Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea, 49, 54.
21. Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea, 121–22.
22. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good [1970] (London and New York:
Routledge, 2001), 33.
24. See Discourses on Aging and Dying, ed. Suhita Chatterjee, Priyadarshi
Patnaik, and Vijayaraghavan Chariar (London: Sage, 2008).
26. See Lindsey Tucker, ‘Released from Bands: Iris Murdoch’s Two
Prosperos in The Sea, the Sea’, Contemporary Literature 27 (3) (1986):
378–95; Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (London:
Methuen, 1982), 274–305.
27. Suguna Ramanathan, Iris Murdoch: Figures of Good (New York:
Macmillan, 1990), 67–96.
29. Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 36.
30. Johnson, Iris Murdoch, 91.
32. From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with Iris
Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 2003), 236.
35. Betty Friedan, The Fountain of Age (New York: Vintage, 1994), 569–638;
Jan Baars, Aging and the Art of Living (Baltimore: The John Hopkins
38. John McGahern, The Barracks (London: Penguin, 1963), 204.
39. Iris Murdoch, The Philosopher’s Pupil [1983] (London: Vintage, 2000),
136. Murdoch’s Alzheimer’s was officially diagnosed in 1997 see Peter
J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (London: HarperCollins, 2001), 588.
40. Murdoch, The Philosopher’s Pupil, 174.
118 H. INGMAN
42. John Sturrock, ‘Reading Iris Murdoch’, Salmagundi 80 (1988):

(144–60), 155.
45. Iris Murdoch, The Message to the Planet (London: Chatto and Windus,
1989), 394.
46. John Banville, The Sea (London: Picador, 2005), 35.
47. Banville, The Sea, 128.
48. Kathleen Woodward, Aging and its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 66–67.
49. Banville, The Sea, 22–23.
50. Rüdiger Imhof, ‘The Sea: “Was’t Well Done?”’ Irish University Review
36 (1) (2006): (165–81), 176.
51. On The Sea as trauma novel, see Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, ‘“My
Memory Gropes in Search of Details”: Memory, Narrative, and
“Founding Traumas” in John Banville’s The Sea’, Irish University
Review 46 (2) (2016): 340–58.
55. Banville, The Sea, 215–16.
58. Mark O’Connell, John Banville’s Narcissistic Fictions (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2.
59. Butler, ‘The Life Review’: 65–76.
60. See the extended discussion of the difficulties of growing old in a post-
modern society in Chris Phillipson, Reconstructing Old Age: New
Agendas in Social Theory and Practice (London: Sage, 1998), 43–54.
61. Eoghan Smith, John Banville: Art and Authenticity (Bern: Peter Lang,
2014), 151.
62. A similar circular movement is evident in The Blue Guitar (2015),
another trauma novel, where the narrator, Oliver Orme, recognizes
at the end of his narrative that he must go back to the beginning ‘and
begin to learn over again all I had thought I knew but didn’t’. John
Banville, The Blue Guitar (London: Penguin, 2015), 249.
63. Hedda Friberg, ‘“[P]assing Through Ourselves and Finding Ourselves
in the Beyond”: The Rites of Passage of Cass Cleave in John Banville’s
Eclipse and Shroud’, Irish University Review 36 (1) (2006): (151–64),
163, note 2.
64. Derek Hand, John Banville: Exploring Fictions (Dublin: The Liffey Press,
2002), 116.
65. Smith, John Banville: Art and Authenticity, 15.

67. John Banville, Eclipse (London: Picador, 2000), 36.
68. Banville, Eclipse, 33.
74. Friberg ‘[P]assing Through Ourselves’, 152.
79. Lynne Segal, Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing (London
and New York: Verso, 2013), 4.
83. Hedwig Schwall, ‘“Mirror on Mirror Mirrored is all the show”: Aspects
of the Uncanny in Banville’s Work with a Focus on Eclipse’, Irish
University Review 36 (1) (2006): (116–33), 125.
85. Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents, 63.
86. Stephen Frosh, Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions
(New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Chapter 2. This
passage is quoted in Segal, Out of Time, 21–22.
87. Woodward, Aging and its Discontents, 66.
94. John Banville, Shroud (London: Picador, 2002), 12.
95. Banville, Shroud, 20.
100. Banville, Shroud, 36–37.
120 H. INGMAN

103. Banville, Shroud, 46. For discussion of the theory of appreciation of the
intensification of the moment in later life, see Raymond Tallis, ‘Old
Faces, New Lives’, The Times Higher, 9 July (1999): 230, quoted in
Mike Hepworth, Stories of Ageing (Buckingham: Open University Press,
2000), 125–26.
104. Banville, Shroud, 104–5.
108. Banville, Shroud, 3, 6.
110. Patricia Coughlan, ‘Banville, The Feminine, and The Scenes of Eros’,
Irish University Review 36 (1) (2006): (81–101), 96.
111. O’Connell, John Banville’s Narcissistic Fictions, 193–99.
114. Banville, Shroud, 6. For further discussion of the internal tension in
Axel’s account between his intellectual disbelief in a unified self and
his yearning for some kind of fixity of meaning, see Elmer Kennedy-
Andrews, ‘Representations of the Jew in the Modern Irish Novel since
Joyce’, Irish University Review 43 (2) (2013): 307–26.
116. Friberg ‘[P]assing Through Ourselves’, 161.
117. Smith, John Banville, 54.
118. Quoted in Dipple, Iris Murdoch, 277.
120. John McGahern, The Barracks (London: Penguin, 1963), 50.
121. McGahern, The Barracks, 49.
124. May Sarton, At Seventy: A Journal (New York and London: W. W.
Norton, 1984); Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days (1968;
New York and London: Penguin, 1979).
125. Denis Sampson, Outstaring Nature’s Eye: The Fiction of John McGahern
(Dublin: Lilliput Press, 1993); Eamon Maher, John McGahern: From
the Local to the Universal (Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2003); Dermot
McCarthy, John McGahern and the Art of Memory (New York: Peter
Lang, 2010); and James Whyte, History, Myth and Ritual in the Fiction
of John McGahern: Strategies of Transcendence (Lampeter: Edwin Mellon
Press, 2002).
126. See particularly Tornstam, Gerotranscendence, 188.

132. Grace Tighe Ledwidge, ‘Death in Marriage: The Tragedy of Elizabeth
Reegan in “The Barracks”’, Irish University Review 35 (1) (2005):
90–103.
133. See What Does It Mean to Grow Old? ed. Cole and Gadow, 13, 20.
135. Harry R. Moody, ‘The Meaning of Life and the Meaning of Old Age’ in
What Does It Mean to Grow Old? ed. Cole and Gadow, 12.
136. Anja Machielse and Roelof Hortulanus, ‘Social Ability or Social Frailty?
The Balance Between Autonomy and Connectedness in the Lives of Older
People’ in Ageing, Meaning and Social Structure: Connecting Critical and
Humanistic Gerontology, ed. Jan Baars, Joseph Dohmen, Amanda Grenier,
and Chris Phillipson (Bristol: Policy Press, 2014), 119–38.
137. See, for example, Phillipson, Reconstructing Old Age, 7; Thomas R.
Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 231.
138. Denis Sampson, ‘“Open to the World”: A Reading of John McGahern’s
That They May Face the Rising Sun’, Irish University Review 35 (1)
(2005): 139.
139. Machielse and Hortulanus, 121.
140. John McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun (London: Faber and
Faber, 2002), 155–56.
141. McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun, 123.
143. Sampson, ‘Open to the World’, 143.
144. McGahern, That They May Face the Rising Sun, 292–93.
145. Bridget English, Laying Out the Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern
Irish Novel (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017), 149.
147. What Does It Mean to Grow Old? ed. Cole and Gadow, 199.
148. See Whyte, History, Myth and Ritual, 227–35.
149. Eamonn Hughes, ‘“All That Surrounds Our Life”: Time, Sex, and
Death in That They May Face the Rising Sun’, Irish University Review 35
(1) (2005): 147–63.
(New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2006), 6.
151. Derek Hand, A History of the Irish Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge
122 H. INGMAN
152. See Carmel Gallagher, The Community Life of Older People in Ireland

(New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 43.
153. Machielse and Hortulanus, 123.
Bibliography
University Press.
Baars, Jan, Joseph Dohmen, Amanda Grenier, and Chris Phillipson. 2014.
Banville, John. 2000. Eclipse. London: Picador.
Banville, John. 2002. Shroud. London: Picador.
Banville, John. 2005. The Sea. London: Picador.
Banville, John. 2015. The Blue Guitar. London: Penguin.
Chatterjee, Suhita, Priyadarshi Patnaik, and Vijayaraghavan Chariar, eds. 2008.
Discourses on Aging and Dying. London: Sage.
Cole, Thomas R. 1992. The Journey of Life. A Cultural History of Aging in
Conradi, Peter J. 2001. Iris Murdoch: A Life. London: HarperCollins.
Costello-Sullivan, Kathleen. 2016. ‘My Memory Gropes in Search of Details’:
Memory, Narrative, and ‘Founding Traumas’ in John Banville’s The Sea. Irish
University Review 46 (2): 340–58.
Coughlan, Patricia. 2006. Banville, the Feminine, and the Scenes of Eros. Irish
University Review 36 (1): 81–101.
Dipple, Elizabeth. 1982. Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit. London: Methuen.
Dooley, Gillian, ed. 2003. From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction:
Conversations with Iris Murdoch. Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press.
Erikson, Erik. 1998. The Life Cycle Completed. New York: W. W. Norton and Co.
Friberg, Hedda. 2006. ‘[P]assing Through Ourselves and Finding Ourselves in
the Beyond’: The Rites of Passage of Cass Cleave in John Banville’s Eclipse
and Shroud. Irish University Review 36 (1): 151–64.
Frosh, Stephen. 2013. Hauntings: Psychoanalysis and Ghostly Transmissions.
New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gallagher, Carmel. 2008. The Community Life of Older People in Ireland.
New York: Peter Lang.
Hand, Derek. 2002. John Banville: Exploring Fictions. Dublin: The Liffey Press.
Hand, Derek. 2011. A History of the Irish Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Hughes, Eamonn. 2005. ‘All That Surrounds Our Life’: Time, Sex, and Death
in That They May Face the Rising Sun. Irish University Review 35 (1): 147–63.
Imhof, Rüdiger. 2006. The Sea: ‘Was’t well done?’ Irish University Review 36
(1): 165–81.
Johnson, Deborah. 1987. Iris Murdoch. Brighton: Harvester Press.
Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer. 2013. Representations of the Jew in the Modern Irish
Novel Since Joyce. Irish University Review 43 (2): 307–26.
Ledwidge, Grace Tighe. 2005. Death in Marriage: The Tragedy of Elizabeth
Reegan in ‘The Barracks’. Irish University Review 35 (1): 90–103.
Machielse, Anja, and Roelof Hortulanus. 2014. Social Ability or Social Frailty?
The Balance Between Autonomy and Connectedness in the Lives of Older
People. In Ageing, Meaning and Social Structure: Connecting Critical and
Humanistic Gerontology, ed. Jan Baars, Joseph Dohmen, Amanda Grenier,
and Chris Phillipson, 119–38. Bristol: Policy Press.
Maher, Eamon. 2003. John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal. Dublin:
The Liffey Press.
McCarthy, Dermot. 2010. John McGahern and the Art of Memory. New York:
Peter Lang.
McGahern, John. 1963. The Barracks. London: Penguin.
McGahern, John. 2002. That They May Face the Rising Sun. London: Faber and
Faber.
Moody, Harry R. 1986. The Meaning of Life and the Meaning of Old Age. In
What Does It Mean to Grow Old? Reflections from the Humanities, ed. Thomas
R. Cole and Sally Gadow, 9–40. Durham: Duke University Press.
Murdoch, Iris. 1977. An Unofficial Rose. St Albans: Triad/Panther.
Murdoch, Iris. 1978. The Sea, the Sea. London: Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, Iris. 1987. The Book and the Brotherhood. London: Chatto and
Windus.
Murdoch, Iris. 1989. The Message to the Planet. London: Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, Iris. 2000. The Philosopher’s Pupil. London: Vintage.
Murdoch, Iris. 2001. The Sovereignty of Good. London and New York: Routledge.
O’Connell, Mark. 2013. John Banville’s Narcissistic Fictions. Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan.
Phillipson, Chris. 1998. Reconstructing Old Age: New Agendas in Social Theory
and Practice. London: Sage.
Ramanathan, Suguna. 1990. Iris Murdoch: Figures of Good. New York:
Macmillan.
124 H. INGMAN
Rosel, Natalie. 1986. Growing Old Together: Communality in a Sarasota

Neighbourhood. In What Does It Mean to Grow Old? Reflections from the
Humanities, ed. Thomas R. Cole and Sally Gadow, 199–233. Durham: Duke
University Press.
Rowe, Margaret Moan. 2004. Iris Murdoch and the Case of ‘Too Many Men’.
Studies in the Novel 36 (1): 79–94.
Sampson, Denis. 1993. Outstaring Nature’s Eye: The Fiction of John McGahern.
Dublin: Lilliput Press.
Sampson, Denis. 2005. ‘Open to the World’: A Reading of John McGahern’s
That They May Face the Rising Sun. Irish University Review 35 (1): 136–46.
Sarton, May. 1984. At Seventy: A Journal. New York and London: W. W.
Norton.
Schwall, Hedwig. 2006. ‘Mirror on Mirror Mirrored Is All the Show’: Aspects
of the Uncanny in Banville’s Work with a Focus on Eclipse. Irish University
Review 36 (1): 116–33.
Scott-Maxwell, Florida. 1979. The Measure of My Days. New York and London:
Penguin.
Segal, Lynne. 2013. Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing. London and
New York: Verso.
Smith, Eoghan. 2014. John Banville: Art and Authenticity. Bern: Peter Lang.
Sturrock, John. 1988. Reading Iris Murdoch. Salmagundi 80: 144–60.
Tucker, Lindsey. 1986. Released from Bands: Iris Murdoch’s Two Prosperos in
The Sea, the Sea. Contemporary Literature 27 (3): 378–95.
Whyte, James. 2002. History, Myth and Ritual in the Fiction of John McGahern:
Strategies of Transcendence. Lampeter: Edwin Mellon Press.
http://www.asaging.org/blog/aging-community-communitarian-alternative-ag-
ing-place-alone.
http://www.thejournal.ie/older-people-living-alone-3708722-Nov2017/.
https://www.publichealth.ie/document/iph-repor t/loneliness-and-
ageing-ireland-north-and-south.
CHAPTER 5
A Voice of Their Own: Portraits of Old Age

in the Irish Short Story
The short story form lends itself particularly well to the subject of
ageing, its brevity facilitating attention to moments when middle-aged
characters, such as Gabriel in James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ (1914), Manny
in Mary Lavin’s ‘At Sally Gap’ (1947) and Jerry in Sean O’Faolain’s
‘A Shadow, Silent as a Cloud’ (1961), become aware of time passing
and cast a questioning or nostalgic glance back on their youth. Given
the potential vastness of the subject, this chapter narrows the focus
to those already past middle age in order to demonstrate the richness
and complexity of the portrayal of older people in the Irish short story,
from Liam O’Flaherty’s depiction of old age as part of the natural cycle,
through William Trevor’s portraits of social change through the eyes
of the elderly, to contemporary writers’ accounts of dementia from the
inside. The definition of old age varies widely from epoch to epoch and,
to some extent, depends on the physical and mental health of the indi-
vidual; consequently, gerontologists warn against too rigid insistence on
chronometric time.1 For the purposes of this chapter, the elderly will be
defined as any character who is clearly presented by the author as nearing
the end of his or her life.
The influence of both the Aran islands, where Liam O’Flaherty
(1896–1984) grew up in an Irish-speaking community, and the oral sto-
rytelling tradition, still very much alive in his childhood, is evident in his
three major collections of the 1920s: Spring Sowing (1924), The Tent
(1926) and The Mountain Tavern and Other Stories (1929). The lat-
ter volume contains two of O’Flaherty’s earliest stories about old age,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96430-0_5
126 H. INGMAN
‘The Stone’ and ‘The Stream’. Though ‘The Stone’ belongs to

O’Flaherty’s earlier allegorical mode, it portrays the physical effects of
ageing with realism and precision: the old fisherman’s shrunken body, his
withered face and toothless mouth, his laboured breathing and unsteady
gait. As the old man comes within sight of the sea, memories from the
past flood back to him, ‘so vivid that he thought himself waking from
a long sleep and entering the land of youth’.2 Caught up in this Tír na
nÓg and forgetting his aged body, he tries to lift the granite stone that
had made him celebrated in his youth for his physical strength. He dies
in the attempt and again there are precise physical descriptions of his
body in death: ‘His lower jaw dropped. A little yellow wisp of moisture
oozed out over his lower lip. For a few moments his body shuddered
and then he became terribly still, with his eyes wide open and his lower
jaw hanging’.3 Although the villagers who come to find him comment
on the sin of pride involved in trials of strength, the story ends with the
young men of the village stripping off in readiness to test their strength
against the stone. ‘The Stone’ is characteristic of O’Flaherty’s short sto-
ries in this period, seemingly timeless evocations of nature, the animals
and the peasants among whom he spent his childhood, and presenting
life in these peasant communities as tied to the seasons and part of the
natural cycle in an often harsh environment. The old fisherman is not
even distinguished by a name; however, the vividness of the descriptions
of the physical characteristics of his ageing body goes some way towards
mitigating the allegory and enlisting the reader’s sympathy for the old
man as an individual.
If time is cyclical in ‘The Stone’, in ‘The Stream’ time for the aged,
crazed woman is painfully linear, bearing her further away from the
memory of her brief joyful marriage to a man long dead. Though its
overvaluing of physical strength is unhelpful for the ageing process, the
community in ‘The Stone’ shows their care for the old man in going out
to search for him and genuine sorrow at his death. By contrast, in ‘The
Stream’, the aged woman, whose grief has caused her to lose her mind,
is an object of terror for the village which, like the very different soci-
ety in Dorian Gray, equates old age and ugliness with evil: ‘Her body
withered until it was like her soul. She became a thing of horror to the
village’.4
Disillusionment with Irish politics caused O’Flaherty to move away
from allegory into social critique in his following collection, Two Lovely
Beasts and Other Stories (1948), and his criticism of rural communities’
5 A VOICE OF THEIR OWN … 127
casual treatment of the elderly became more marked as in, for example,
Girleen’s contempt for her mother and for Nuala in ‘The Wedding’,
Martin Joyce shouldering his father aside in ‘The Parting’ and the
family’s neglect of the incapacitated grandfather in ‘Life’ in favour of
an equally dependent but more selfish and demanding baby. The fam-
ily resents having to wash, dress and feed the old man, though they
delight in performing such services for the baby. These stories suggest
that youth is at a premium in the Irish countryside, which so many of
the younger generation were deserting at this time for life in the towns
and cities. In ‘The Wedding’ Nuala laments: ‘All the lovely young people
go away from the black, lonely places. They go marching east and west
looking for the big towns where there is everlasting light and dancing
and fine music. It was for the lovely young people that God made the
world’.5 The rural communities portrayed in O’Flaherty’s stories lack the
mutual support and consideration for older people exemplified by the
lake community in John McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun,
discussed in the previous chapter.
The older person as representative of a dying way of life is powerfully
presented in a story from the same collection, ‘Galway Bay’, in the por-
trait of the angry old man, eighty-year-old Tom, whose wife is dead and
whose children have mostly emigrated to America. One daughter and
her husband are left behind and Tom, whose only remaining strength
resides in his eyes, likened to ‘the eyes of a captured hawk’, disputes with
them the management of the family farm.6 However much Tom tries
to assert his independence in the face of old age by keeping hold of his
stock, the ending reveals him walking into town to sell his aged cow.
There is little authorial comment, the poignant portrayal of an old man
who knows his time has passed being conveyed through the final striking
visual image of Tom and his cow: ‘He walked beside her with downcast
head, one hand on her high hip-bone, the other leaning heavily on his
stick’.7 Though tourists marvel at Tom’s eccentricity, he displays pride,
courage and independence, all characteristics O’Flaherty admired in his
father’s generation and which he feared were dying out as the peasants’
way of life entered the modern world.
Death is a prominent theme in O’Flaherty’s stories—deaths of ani-
mals, deaths of peasants, violent deaths of young men in war—however
since his stories share the fatalistic attitude of the Aran communities
to violence and death as part of the natural cycle of life, the defeat of
the spirit in life comes to seem more terrible than physical death.
128 H. INGMAN
O’Flaherty’s stories contain several portraits of older people courageous

in the face of worldly defeat. These portraits cross social boundaries:
Tom in ‘Galway Bay’ is a peasant farmer whereas in ‘The Eviction’, con-
fronted with the loss of her family seat, Barra Castle, Anglo-Irish Miss
Newell summons up the confidence of her class in the face of her family’s
coming social downfall. In ‘The Old Woman’, the dialogue between the
aged Maggie and the younger Julia refutes the villagers’ association of
old age and ugliness with evil in ‘The Stream’ by juxtaposing Maggie’s
unkempt outward appearance with her dignity and trust in God’s world
as revealed through her spoken words: ‘“It’s only now when my hour
approaches,” the old woman said as she put the pipe into the pocket of
her skirt, “that I understand the loveliness of God’s world”’.8 Observing
Maggie’s kind face, Julia’s little daughter, Nellie, loses her fear of the
old woman that has been instilled into her by the villagers. As in ‘The
Stream’, the community’s attitudes towards ageing are unhelpful and the
story suggests that Julia is an exception among her neighbours in show-
ing kindness to the old woman.
In all these stories, O’Flaherty’s portraits of older people are largely
conveyed through external description and dialogue. In ‘Lovers’ (first
published in 1931, later collected in Short Stories: The Pedlar’s Revenge,
1976), the physical and emotional dehumanizing effects of old age on
Michael Doyle are recounted through the device of a single encounter
between Michael and Mary Kane and the dialogue that follows. Michael
has not only lost all physical strength, a crucial virtue in O’Flaherty’s
world, but charity as well, with the result that he fails to respond to
Mary’s touching account of their youthful love affair. There is very little
narrative, all we know of Michael we learn through his conversation with
Mary, his crotchety gestures and visual appearance: ‘His withered coun-
tenance seemed to have lost all traces of human consciousness. It was
apelike. His rheumy eyes, wrinkled like those of a gorilla, had no light in
them’.9 Here, O’Flaherty comes perilously close to the sort of equation
of physical decrepitude with moral failing that is condemned in his other
stories.
A lack of introspection continued to feature in portraits of older peo-
ple in the Irish short story: the two aged men in ‘The Weaver’s Grave:
A Story of Old Men’ (1919) by Seumas O’Kelly (1878/80–1918),
the nail maker, Meehaul Lynskey, and Cahir Bowes, a former stone-
breaker, are presented through description, dialogue and gesture.
Lynskey and Bowes are, as in O’Flaherty’s stories, peasants moulded by
their occupations and environment and, like Tom in ‘Galway Bay’, they
represent a way of life that is dying out: ‘After all they had been a long
time pensioned off, forgotten, neglected by the world. The renewed
sensation of usefulness was precious to them. They knew that when this
business was over they were not likely to be in request for anything in
this world again’.10 Aware that this is their last chance for the limelight,
Lynskey and Bowes are none too eager to resolve their dispute as to the
whereabouts of Mortimer Hehir’s grave and, in a community that has
long discounted them, the two old seanchaí spin out the time by telling
each other romanticized stories of the past: ‘… all their talk was of the
dead, of the people who lay in the ground about them. They warmed to
it, airing their knowledge, calling up names and complications of family
relationships, telling stories, reviving all virtues, whispering at past vices’.11
O’Kelly’s lengthy story contains extraordinarily vivid portraits of the
physical effects of old age, not only in Lynskey and Bowes, but also in
Malachi Roohan, the bedridden cooper whom Hehir’s young widow vis-
its in an effort to locate the whereabouts of her husband’s plot in the
graveyard. ‘The Weaver’s Grave: A Story of Old Men’ portrays the sac-
rificial patience and self-suppression of the young widow and Roohan’s
daughter, Nan, in dealing with angry and dying men frustrated at their
waning powers and determined to use every last ounce of their failing
energies to maintain their hold on life even at the expense of the next
generation. When Hehir’s widow steps into Roohan’s bedroom with
its familiar ‘smell of old age. Of decay’, she is overcome by the thought
that ‘God had made her move in the ways of old men – passionate, can-
tankerous, egoistic old men, old men for whom she was always doing
something, always remembering things, from missing buttons to lost
graves’.12
Despite echoes of the oral tradition, ‘The Weaver’s Grave’ is a transi-
tional story between the nineteenth-century tale inherited from William
Carleton and modernism. Lynskey and Bowes quarrel in the presence of
Hehir’s widow and two youthful gravediggers. At the end of the story,
the focus shifts from the old men’s tale telling and use of repetitions
characteristic of the oral tradition to modernist stream of consciousness
with the widow’s gradual realization that after a loveless marriage she is
falling in love with one of the young gravediggers. ‘The Weaver’s Grave’
simultaneously insists on the value of the past, represented by Lynskey,
Bowes and Roohan, while showing that that past is about to be trans-
formed and it does this by juxtaposing not only the generations, but also
130 H. INGMAN
different styles, realism and Gothic for representing the older generation
and modernism for the younger, the oral tradition of the three old men
and the lyrical, literary portrayal of the young widow’s emotions.
Stories by Daniel Corkery (1878–1964) notably in his collection, The
Stormy Hills (1929), continue to use older characters in order to make
points about social change, recording through the elderly person’s con-
fusions about the modern world, the stresses and strains of an emergent
Irish nation unsure of the way forward and of how much of the past
to jettison. In ‘The Emptied Sack’ from this collection, the disappear-
ance of the old ways when a modern furnace puts Old Tadhg Kinnane,
a furze-gatherer in his eighties, out of business is summed up in Tadhg’s
cry of ‘“Vo! Vo! Vo! Vo!” – the traditional Irish cry of sorrow’.13
Anonymous voices in the community are divided between concern for
Tadhg, whose work has been the centre of his life since his daughter ran
away, and indifference amounting to callousness: ‘“Still, what’ll he do
with himself?” “Lie down and die; and indeed they’re a long time wait-
ing for him, his people in Ardmore”’.14 More sensitively, in ‘Carrig-an-
Afrinn’, the younger generation keeps from their elderly father, Michael,
the fact that the old mass rock of Carrig-an-Afrinn, around which
Catholics secretly worshipped during times of persecution, has been
destroyed in the name of progress in order to widen the road, knowing
that such knowledge would kill him. As the old man becomes energized
by his memories of the arduous move from Carrig-an-Afrinn to greater
prosperity in Dunerling East, the younger generation gradually acknowl-
edges the scale of his efforts to raise his family in the world. At the same
time, the magnitude of his losses along the way—the deaths of his wife
and four of his children—makes understandable his fear that, despite
their current prosperity, selling the land on which the sacred mass rock
stood has brought bad luck on the family. Through Michael’s words, the
story registers the gains and the losses of the struggle to bring the Irish
state into being; and both ‘The Emptied Sack’ and ‘Carrig-an-Afrinn’
reveal the unhelpfulness for the ageing process of a masculine identity
equated with hard work, physical strength and self-reliance.
Corkery’s ‘A Looter of the Hills’ portrays eighty-year-old Mrs.
Donaghy living out her days in an urban slum. Her childhood memories
of her family farm, conveyed through dialogue with her son, register the
psychological cost of the general shift in this period from the country-
side to the towns. In all these stories, older people are depicted, often
with compassion, but from the outside, through dialogue and action.
In a later Corkery story, ‘Refuge’ (Earth out of Earth, 1939), the

ancient, tenement-dwelling writer who plots out stories in his mind as
a mental refuge from the noisy chaos of his surroundings, is portrayed
through the eyes of a visiting doctor with fitting precision of physical
detail: ‘I can recall the bent-down figure, the scraping feet, the uncertain
stick poking in his right hand, the left, extended, balancing him – I see
the stretched fingers of it, long and frail, white as chalk’.15 At this point,
the Irish short story excelled in physical descriptions of elderly individ-
uals but their emotional state of mind is deduced only from external
actions, gestures and dialogue.
With few exceptions, the mid twentieth-century Irish short story
remained allied to realism: in the stories of Frank O’Connor (1903–
1966), portraits of older people continue to be drawn from the exterior.
They may be stubbornly wedded to traditional attitudes and customs,
like Dan in ‘The Majesty of the Law’ (Bones of Contention, 1936) and
the bigoted old priest, Father Whelan, in ‘The Shepherds’ (Crab Apple
Jelly, 1944), or they may, like the old woman in ‘Guests of the Nation’
(Guests of the Nation, 1931), provide the moral centre of the story. The
tone O’Connor uses to portray these characters as they defend their
integrity is partly comic, but it is comedy that preserves their dignity and
the idiomatic language they speak precisely reflects their circumstances.
In one of O’Connor’s finest stories, ‘The Long Road to Ummera’
(Crab Apple Jelly, 1944), a narrator from within the community recounts
the story of Abby, uprooted from the countryside by her son and
brought to live in the town. The physical portrait of the exiled, ageing,
snuff-taking countrywoman is vividly rendered:
Always in the evenings you saw her shuffle up the road to Miss O.’s for
her little jug of porter, a shapeless lump of an old woman in a plaid shawl,
faded to the colour of snuff, that dragged her head down on to her bosom
where she clutched its folds in one hand; a canvas apron and a pair of
men’s boots without laces. Her eyes were puffy and screwed up in tight
little buds of flesh and her rosy old face that might have been carved out of
a turnip was all crumpled with blindness. The old heart was failing her, and
several times she would have to rest …16
Abby’s fierce independence aids her in resisting her son’s attempts to

draw her into his upwardly mobile town life. She retains her country cus-
toms, ‘talking about old times in the country and long-dead neighbours,
132 H. INGMAN
ghosts, fairies, spells, and charms’,17 and insists on being buried back
home, rather than ‘among foreigners in the town’.18 Her reversion to
the Irish language on her deathbed is a reminder of another loss she has
suffered in moving from the countryside to the town. Once again an
older character is used sympathetically to portray the difficulty of retain-
ing agency over one’s decisions in later life and the psychological cost of
the general movement of the population during this period.
Different sorts of loss are registered through older characters in the
stories of Sean O’Faolain (1900–1991). In ‘The Silence of the Valley’
(Teresa and Other Stories, 1947), O’Faolain’s tribute to Tim Buckley the
Tailor, the death of the cobbler marks the end of the oral storytelling tra-
dition in that community, while in ‘The End of the Record’ (The Stories
of Sean O’Faolain, 1958), the collector records the last traces of that tra-
dition among the older inmates of the poorhouses. In the same collec-
tion, ‘Lord and Master’ portrays the declining power of the Anglo-Irish
through the figure of the elderly Lord Carew but also the waning of the
old schoolmaster’s brand of republicanism, out of kilter with the materi-
alism of modern Ireland.
In the title story of Midsummer Night Madness and Other Stories
(1932), Old Henn is the last representative of the local Anglo-Irish fam-
ily that the narrator, a gunman, has been brought up to despise and hate
as exploiters of his people. His hatred turns to pity when he arrives at
Henn Hall to find the old man being bullied by Stevey, another repub-
lican gunman, into marrying the young tinker woman, Gipsy, whom
Stevey has almost certainly made pregnant. Henn’s wrecked physique is
matched by his ruined house, but O’Faolain avoids what by now was the
clichéd presentation of the Anglo-Irish as lacking in energy and vitality
by portraying Henn as a man whose ideas for improving the Irish econ-
omy have gone unheeded. Henn’s effort to greet the Blakes with civil-
ity contrasts with the coarseness of Stevey and his marriage to Gypsy,
however incongruous, gains some measure of sympathy in the light of
Stevey’s boorishness. Henn sparks in the reader a complex mixture of
disapproval, pity and unwilling admiration; however, the focus of the
story is not on Henn but on the exploration of the narrator’s chang-
ing attitudes to Stevey, the war and the Anglo-Irish. Though in general
O’Faolain shifted the short story towards modernist techniques of irony,
indirection and suggestion to probe the consciousness of his characters,
in this story the elderly Henn, a vivid and memorable character, is por-
trayed entirely from the outside.
The same might be said of the portrait of Daniel Cashen in

O’Faolain’s ‘A Touch of Autumn in the Air’ (I Remember! I Remember!,
1961):
… a powerful horse of a man, always dressed in well-pressed Irish tweeds,

heavy countryman’s boots, and a fawn, flat-topped bowler hat set squat
above a big, red, square face, heavy handle-bar moustaches and pale,
blue staring eyes of which one always saw the complete circle of the iris,
challenging, concentrated, slightly mad.19
However, in this story the narrator, an acquaintance of Cashen’s, probes

more deeply into why the memory of a certain October morning over
sixty years ago troubles the old man. The narrator concludes that it is
the very randomness of the memory that perplexes his friend: why has
this memory been preserved rather than another? Randomness has never
played a big part in the life of this self-made businessman accustomed
to controlling everything around him. Nor has he been until now intro-
spective: ‘Cashen was playing archaeology with his boyhood, trying to
deduce a whole self out of a few dusty shards. It was, of course, far too
late’.20 Cashen’s anxious groping after some pattern or meaning to his
life, his belated attempt at a life review, unsettles him with the sudden
revelation of his insignificance in the wider world and betokens, the nar-
rator rightly guesses, that death is not far off.
Though the story form is too brief to be able to incorporate lengthy
life reviews, the use of modernist-inspired flashbacks is able to high-
light, as here, the search for a coherent identity in later life similar to
that which troubles the narrators in the novels of Iris Murdoch and
John Banville. Cashen is another portrait of a masculinity built around
assertiveness, competition and personal advancement, qualities that
have helped the new Irish state to prosper but which may become dis-
advantageous to an individual in the later, more reflective, stages of life.
Unaccustomed to introspection, Cashen is confounded by the seemingly
uncontrollable nature of his memories and by his sudden recognition of
his own insignificance in the vast universe, until the narrator saves him by
diverting his attention back to the present and to his work.
The stories of the Ulster writer, Michael McLaverty (1904–1992),
mark a shift in the portrayal of older people in that, though still working
in the realist mode, McLaverty’s stories enter further into the conscious-
ness and frame of mind of his ageing protagonists. In a general comment
134 H. INGMAN
on McLaverty’s stories, one critic has described the ‘curious quality of

soliloquy’ in McLaverty’s work ‘that goes beyond what we would nor-
mally expect in the short story form’.21 This trait of allowing the reader
to overhear a character’s thoughts deepens the portrayal of older people
in McLaverty’s work.
Like O’Connor’s ‘The Long Road to Ummera’, McLaverty’s
‘Uprooted’ (1956) describes the exodus from the countryside, this time
through the eyes of an elderly farmer, Tom O’Brien. In McLaverty, the
theme is given a specifically Northern Irish twist since it is the British
Army’s wartime requisitioning of their land to build an aerodrome that
precipitates the O’Briens’ move to the town. ‘Uprooted’ opens in idyl-
lic countryside evoking, through Tom’s eyes, a way of life that has gone
on for centuries. The life may be hard but Tom delights in his farm, his
son, daughter-in-law and his grandchildren. The story enters into the
old man’s state of mind as he gradually realizes that the requisitioning of
their land means the end of a way of life that has sustained himself and
his ancestors for centuries. Though the younger generation adapts easily
to life in the town where his son, Jim, opens a shop, Tom, like Abby in
‘The Long Road to Ummera’, yearns to return to the countryside. He
embarks on the long walk back only to discover that the old farmhouse
has been flattened. The story moves from exploring Tom’s interior con-
sciousness to an external picture of the old man gazing into the cemetery
where his ancestors lie buried, anticipating his own death.
McLaverty’s ‘Stone’ (1939), the title echoing O’Flaherty’s earlier
story about the old fisherman, similarly ends with premonitions of death.
Jamesy, the last Heaney left on the island, seeks to overcome his lack
of heirs through erecting a headstone to outdo in size all others in the
graveyard since stone, he believes, is the only lasting thing in life and in
that way his name will live on. He is punished for his pride when a storm
blows down the largest headstone in the cemetery and the story ends
on an almost Beckettian note with Jamesy staring into the void. Again
McLaverty’s story of this dying community keeps the focus firmly on
the state of mind of the elderly Jamesy, so avoiding the elements of car-
icature that often crept into earlier portraits of older people in the Irish
short story. ‘The White Mare’ (1939), first published like ‘Stone’ in
the Capuchin Annual, portrays with precision and compassion seven-
ty-year-old Paddy’s fierce determination to hang on to his mare and his
work of ploughing his fields in the face of his sisters’ protests that he is
killing both himself and the mare. The rural setting of many mid-century
Irish short stories accentuates the equation of masculinity with

physical strength making old age seem like a disaster that robs these
elderly farmers of both their work and their manhood. In the end,
Paddy’s efforts to ward off old age are defeated by his physical collapse.
Despite McLaverty’s continued use of an omniscient narrator, his older
characters are no longer depicted solely by gesture and dialogue but
through a sympathetic exploration of their states of mind. In his work,
older people are beginning to have a voice of their own.
The stories of John McGahern (1934–2006) develop the growing
interiority of the Irish short story under the belated influence of mod-
ernism. In particular, McGahern’s stories give space to the flashback,
allowing for the depiction of social change through the eyes of the older
generation, as in ‘A Slip-Up’ (Getting Through, 1978), which treats the
emotional cost of emigration through the consciousness of the ageing
Michael, disorientated and confused by the move to London but able
in his imagination to walk every inch of the farm he has left behind in
Ireland. ‘A Slip-Up’ illustrates the tenuous hold of English city life on
the first generation of emigrants from rural Ireland. Allowing the reader
directly into Michael’s consciousness, the story emphasizes the power of
the imagination to defeat reality: the old man’s farm is more real to him
than what is going on around him in London. Though Michael remains
an object of exasperation to his wife, the story explores the psychic layers
of his inner life with insight and compassion and moves the Irish short
story further along the road of giving older people a voice of their own.
In the same volume, ‘The Wine Breath’ takes up the theme of time in
greater depth exploring, through the consciousness of the ageing priest,
the capacity of memory and the imagination to defeat the hegemonic
flow of linear time. McGahern himself drew attention to this key theme
in his work: ‘One of my favourite definitions of art is that it abolishes
time and establishes memory’.22 Sunlight falling on white chips of beech
wood prompts the old priest’s memory of Michael Bruen’s funeral, a day
when he gained a fleeting glimpse of the sacred, and this memory leads
him to reflect on his life in the light of his impending death. He is some-
one who has tried to make his life matter from the perspective of what is
timeless. There have been elements of failure: he turned to the church
out of a fear of death and a concomitant fear of sex; he allowed his life
to be subsumed by his mother’s wish that he become a priest and in
that sense it has been ‘a lost life’, inauthentic in that it has been dictated
by someone else’s wishes, a fate McGahern himself narrowly escaped.
136 H. INGMAN
His mother’s demise has now thrown him back on his own resources,
and he realizes he can no longer escape thoughts of his own death. The
priest endeavours to overcome his fear of linear time by imagining a new
identity for himself in the form of a young man embarking on a love
affair and feeling he has all the time in the world. With its lyrical med-
itation on time and death, ‘The Wine Breath’ achieves new depths and
sophistication in the Irish short story’s exploration of an older person’s
consciousness. The priest echoes John Banville’s troubled narrators, dis-
cussed in the previous chapter, in his late life concern with authenticity
and with reviewing his life in the light of the postmodern necessity to
shape one’s own meaning.
The theme of rage against the passage of time is vividly presented in
McGahern’s portrayal of father figures in ‘Wheels’, ‘The Key’, ‘Korea’
(Nightlines, 1970), ‘The Stoat’ (1978), ‘Sierra Leone’ (1978) and ‘Gold
Watch’ (1980). These stories describe a man determined to hang on to
power, lamenting the social changes he sees around him and consumed
with ‘bitterness at growing old’.23 The father in these stories is, how-
ever, largely evoked from the outside, through the eyes of his resentful
son, and, though ageing, he is not yet frail elderly. If Freud’s model of
the oedipal struggle overshadows the conflict between fathers and sons
in McGahern’s stories with fathers remaining trapped in resentful rage
at the ageing process, by contrast, generational continuity features in
the fraught, though not necessarily unloving, mother–daughter relation-
ships portrayed in stories by Mary Lavin (1912–1996), Mary Beckett
(1926–2013) and Edna O’Brien (1930–). Such generational linkage has
been seen as crucial for a strong sense of female identity in the work of,
among others, Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (1977), Luce Irigaray
(‘Women-Mothers, the Silent Substratum of the Social Order’) and Julia
Kristeva (‘Motherhood according to Giovanni Bellini’).24 These writ-
ers argue that in a patriarchal society strong intergenerational bonds
between women are essential and in Irigaray’s lyrical monologue, ‘And
the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other’ (1981), the daughter pleads
with her mother to provide her with a strong identity: ‘What I wanted
for you, Mother, was this: that in giving me life, you still remain alive’.25
Links between generations of mothers and daughters is a central
theme in Lavin’s ‘A Family Likeness’ (A Family Likeness and Other
Stories, 1985), which presents Laura, a young mother, and her elderly
mother, Ada, both exhausted by the demands of daily domestic life and
hampered by cultural pressures to conform to self-sacrificing femininity.
They make well-intentioned efforts to understand one another but

have to battle against mutual suspicion and insecurities that have built
up between them over the years. An earlier mother–daughter relation-
ship overshadows the present as Laura berates Ada for having treated
her grandmother unkindly; Ada, hurt by this criticism, responds that
her mother was too demanding. The misunderstandings between Ada
and her mother are replicated in the misunderstandings between Ada
and Laura who almost willfully misread each other, their sensitivity to
one another’s remarks heightened by their mutual fatigue. Ann Owens
Weekes comments: ‘Not only do the women read and misread each
other, they also fall into inherited patterns of behaviour … Having
once caused conflict, these patterns are likely to do so again’.26 If, fol-
lowing the theories of Irigaray and Kristeva, female gender identity is
at stake here, this would at least partly account for the intensity of the
emotions aroused in both women. Within the bounds of a short story,
Lavin skillfully evokes mother–daughter relationships going back over
the generations, to Ada’s own grandmother and, through Ada’s resent-
ful eyes, portrays the changing relationship between an ageing mother
and her grown-up daughter: now it is Ada who lacks energy and has
to be helped over stiles, and Ada who is grateful for her daughter’s
cast-offs.
‘Senility’ (The Shrine and Other Stories, 1977) portrays a later stage
in Ada’s ageing as she reluctantly gives up her independence to move
in with Laura and her husband, John. Again the mother–daughter story
is spread over the generations: now that she has experienced the humil-
iations of growing old, Ada feels guilty at having consigned her own
mother to a nursing home. Initially interpreting Laura’s tactlessness
over her night-time incontinence as an attempt to undermine her dig-
nity, Ada comes to recognize that locking the linen cupboard is in fact
a clumsy expression of love and anxiety on Laura’s part. Lavin movingly
conveys Ada’s loss of self-confidence, which Laura sensitively attempts to
bolster by deferring to her gardening expertise. In this later, more diffi-
cult stage of ageing, the anger between mother and daughter has largely
dissipated and Ada’s need for physical contact and intimacy is shown in
the pleasure she experiences when Laura strokes her hand and kisses her.
The story ends with Ada hoping that her old age will not be too hard
on her daughter. The efforts made in these stories on the part of Laura
and Ada to arrive at a mutual understanding, if not always successful,
contrast sharply with the hostile father–son relationships in McGahern’s
138 H. INGMAN
work, and the reference to Ada’s incontinence is characteristic of Lavin’s

honesty about the body in her stories.
In ‘Failing Years’ (A Belfast Woman, 1980) by the Northern Irish
writer, Mary Beckett, Nora manages to live independently as a widow
in Dublin but when she suffers a stroke she loses all control over her life
as her middle-aged widowed daughter Una insists on moving into her
mother’s house and taking care of her. Una’s well-meaning attentions
and constant presence in the house irritate Nora who resents her loss of
independence. Since the story is told entirely from Nora’s point of view
the reader sympathizes with her, feeling that her life has been taken over
to the extent that she no longer has a voice or agency of her own, a fate
that Joan Erikson has warned is common among the frail elderly.27 When
Nora’s sons come to pick apples in her garden, they divide up the boxes
without consulting her, as though she no longer has authority in her
own home.
As the story progresses, however, there are suggestions that Nora’s
confusions are greater than she admits. She mixes up words, she is una-
ble to cope with the range in her kitchen, and she spends a lot of time
dwelling on memories of her childhood in Belfast in the three-storied
house now boarded up after being bombed. A sudden whim to visit her
sisters in Belfast reveals the extent of Nora’s confusion. She succeeds in
getting a taxi to the station, though without remembering to pack a suit-
case, but when she learns that part of the line has been blown up and
that she will have to take a bus some of the way, the journey becomes
impossible for her. The thwarting of her plans is another of the disrup-
tions to daily life caused by the Troubles. When she eventually returns
home, cold, tired and hungry, Nora becomes irritated by Una’s anxi-
ety but now her daughter’s worries no longer seem out of proportion.
Nora’s angry and hurtful replies directed at Una, arising out of exasper-
ation at her own frailties, reveal how difficult and uncooperative she can
be. The story ends by being finely balanced in its sympathies between
mother and daughter.
The conflicted relationship between Irish country mothers and their
more cosmopolitan and sophisticated daughters features prominently
in the fiction of Edna O’Brien though very often the mother is middle
aged rather than elderly.28 In ‘A Rose in the Heart of New York’ (Mrs
Reinhardt, 1978), however, the thirty-eight-year-old daughter, now liv-
ing in London, endeavours to achieve a reconciliation with her seven-
ty-eight-year-old mother before it is too late by paying for them both
to go away on holiday. The mother has become too accustomed to her

sacrificial way of life to take pleasure in the comfortable hotel. Since the
story is recounted by the daughter, the mother’s character is revealed
only through her daughter’s memories and their dialogue as her daugh-
ter tries to bridge ‘the chasm’ between them by encouraging her mother
to talk about the days before she married and learned to suppress her
desires. Here and there, the reader catches a glimpse of the mother’s
former independence, when she speaks of her first lover or of the time
she climbed a ladder into chapel in order to jump the queue for confes-
sion or the period she spent as a young single woman earning her liv-
ing in New York. This episode of independence in her mother’s life is
the moment the narrator yearns to return to in order to create a bond
between them, hence the significance of the title. The mother rejects,
however, any similarity between her life in the States and her daughter’s
London life, filled as it is with lovers, and asserts that the only worth-
while love is that of a mother for her child. The narrator finally realizes
that it will be impossible for her mother and herself to meet as adult
women: ‘The reconciliation that she had hoped for, and indeed intended
to instigate, never came’.29 ‘A Rose in the Heart of New York’ is an
elegy for a failed mother–daughter relationship: the daughter’s effort to
heal the breach with her mother through an act of sympathetic imagina-
tion is unsuccessful and the self-sacrificing Catholic mother dies without
having discovered her voice.
In O’Brien’s later story, ‘My Two Mothers’ (Saints and Sinners,
2011), the mother finds her voice to some extent through the almost
daily letters she writes to her daughter revealing a desire to nurture the
connection between them but, since the letters reach us through the
daughter’s paraphrases and summary, the reader catches only glimpses of
what Elke D’hoker calls, ‘a warm, generous, energetic woman who wants
to enjoy life in spite of the hardships and who expresses her love for
her daughter through food, confidences and small luxuries’.30 D’hoker
is perceptive in seeing this story as marking a shift in O’Brien’s work
towards presenting the mother as a subject in her own right; however,
as she also points out, the relationship between mother and daughter
remains unhealed.
Male writers, too, presented the effort of ageing mothers and
their daughters to come to an understanding, though in Michael
McLaverty’s ‘Mother and Daughter’ (1965), the effort is rather one-
sided. McLaverty’s story explores the mother’s querulous, selfish and
140 H. INGMAN
self-absorbed state of mind as she lies in bed in the nursing home.

Despite her mother’s constant nagging and complaints, her daughter
Lizzie understands that it is old age and sickness that have made her like
this. A touching final scene between Lizzie and her own small daughter,
Mary, suggests that, unlike in some of Lavin’s stories, bitterness and mis-
understandings will not be repeated down the generations.
The oedipal conflict between fathers and sons, treated at length
in John McGahern’s work, is picked up in several stories by Desmond
Hogan (1951–), notably in ‘The Mourning Thief’ (The Children of Lir,
1981) where the pacifist son, Liam, seeks reconciliation with his dying
father. Hogan places their conflict in the wider context of Irish politics
since Liam’s father fought in the GPO in 1916 and subsequently on the
republican side during the civil war, whereas his son has demonstrated
against the Vietnam war and has no sympathy for the current fighting in
Northern Ireland, seeing it as a direct result of 1916. His eighty-three-
year-old father at first refutes this connection: ‘The men who fought in
1916 were heroes. Those who lay bombs in cafés are scum’.31 Then, as
he lies on his deathbed, he comes to wonder whether in fact his son is
right, whether his generation of police officers, teachers and clergy were
responsible for nurturing a cult of violence that has led directly to the
bombs in Belfast and London. Liam regrets having sown the seeds of
doubt and guilt in his dying father’s mind and, searching for a way to
unite them, alights on the figure of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, a pacifist
shot by the British in 1916 while he was trying to stop the looting in
Dublin. For Liam, Sheehy-Skeffington represents:
‘… the sort of man we need now, one who comes from a revolution but
understands it in a different way, a creative way, who understands that
change isn’t born from violence but intense and self-sacrificing acts.’ His
father understood what he was saying, that there was a remnant of 1916
that was relevant and urgent now, that there had been at least one man
among the men of 1916 who could speak to the present generation.32
In contrast to McGahern’s stories, an understanding of sorts is arrived at

between father and son suggesting, as we shall see in the epilogue to this
study, that even the bedbound and dying have the potential to grow and
change.
If ‘The Mourning Thief’ depicts the elderly father through the eyes
of his son, Hogan, generally associated with describing the entangled
love lives of cosmopolitan sophisticates, also has several insightful sto-

ries on the loneliness of old age. ‘Poltergeists’ (The Diamonds at the
Bottom of the Sea, 1979) depicts the thoughts of a reclusive, incontinent
old man facing a lonely future as his last bond with life, glimpses of a
neighbouring young woman, Maeve, snaps when Maeve moves away
to Dublin. Having nothing left to live for he commits suicide becom-
ing, the narrator comments, another of ‘the victims of loneliness and
the Irish sky’.33 In the same volume, the elderly Miss Duffy in ‘Foils’
envies a young boy’s youth, equating youth with happiness, though iron-
ically he is as lonely as she is and later attempts suicide. The story por-
trays Miss Duffy’s slow decline into senility, emblematic of the dwindling
Protestant community that once dominated the town.
Both in his novels and in his short stories, William Trevor (1928–
2016) is noted for writing about the later stages of life, though strictly
speaking many of his older characters are active sixty-year-olds rather
than frail elderly. ‘Broken Homes’ (1978), however, portrays with
compassion eighty-seven-year-old Mrs. Malby bullied by a patroniz-
ing teacher from the local London comprehensive into participating in
a community scheme for promoting cooperation between the gener-
ations. Intergenerational cooperation is generally regarded in a favour-
able light by gerontologists34 but Trevor’s story, entirely told through
Mrs. Malby’s eyes, illustrates the powerlessness of older people in the
face of bureaucratic authorities. Content with her independent life
among neighbours who know her, Mrs. Malby’s biggest fear is being
labelled senile and forced to enter a nursing home: ‘She was well aware
that it wasn’t going to be up to her to state that she was senile, or to
argue that she wasn’t, when the moment came’.35 Even when teenage
children from broken homes wreck her house, reawakening the earlier
trauma of losing both her sons in the war, she dares not protest too
much. ‘Broken Homes’ shows Mrs. Malby being deprived of a voice
and a point of view because of her fear that her neighbours and the
authorities might collude in deciding that it is her age that is the prob-
lem, rather than the delinquency of the teenagers. The story, a powerful
portrayal of the vulnerability of older people, succeeds in giving a voice
to someone who, in this society, is afraid of using hers in case her life
ends up being managed by ‘professionals’. It demonstrates, as gerontol-
ogists such as Amanda Grenier and Chris Phillipson have pointed out,
how difficult it is for older people to retain agency over their lives as they
age.36 If Mrs. Malby is acutely conscious that her age permits others
142 H. INGMAN
to judge her and carefully monitors her behaviour as a result, seventy-

eight-year-old General Suffolk in Trevor’s ‘The General’s Day’ (1967)
comes to grief through trying to deny his age. His refusal to modify his
predatory, drunken behaviour now that he is older becomes unhelpful
for him to the extent that he alienates everyone around him, exacerbat-
ing his loneliness.
These two stories are set in England but other stories by Trevor link
the portrayal of older people with events in Ireland, exploring the impact
of the renewed outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland from the late
1960s onwards on the Protestant minority in the Republic, already mar-
ginalized in mainstream Catholic life. In ‘The Distant Past’ (Angels at the
Ritz, 1975), the ageing Middletons, remnant of a once wealthy Anglo-
Irish family inhabiting a decaying Big House, have been tolerated in the
neighbourhood for years, despite their obstinate loyalty to pre-independ-
ence Ireland. The Troubles shatter their peaceful coexistence with their
neighbours by aligning them, at least in others’ eyes, with the British
army. The memories of the elderly Middletons, and of their Catholic
neighbours, reveal the impact of the politics of the past on the present
and permit connections to be made between the war of independence
and the contemporary Northern Irish Troubles. The quiet precision of
Trevor’s prose underlines the way in which abstract ideologies return to
rupture the Middletons’ connection with the local community as a result
of which they will die friendless and alone.
As the sectarian violence in the North continued, Trevor increas-
ingly used the short story to urge tolerance, forgiveness and acts of
imaginative sympathy. ‘Autumn Sunshine’ (Beyond the Pale, 1981) is a
characteristic Trevor story in juxtaposing present and the past. For frail
elderly Canon Moran, a lonely widower living in County Wexford, his-
tory is a motive for understanding and forgiveness, whereas his daugh-
ter’s English socialist boyfriend, Harold, latches onto Irish republicanism
out of class hatred for the establishment in his own country, dredging
up past acts of violence by the British as a way of justifying the current
Troubles in Northern Ireland. The elderly Canon embodies a plea for
tolerance in contrast to the dehumanizing strategies employed by Harold
to feed the cycle of violence. But, as always in Trevor, nothing is clear
cut: the end of the story portrays the Canon reflecting that he also has to
learn tolerance and that Harold, who has taken away his favourite daugh-
ter, is possibly not as dark and dangerous character as the Canon, missing
his wife’s mediating influence, has painted him in his mind.
In later stories, Trevor continued to employ older characters as a

means to convey social change in Ireland. ‘Of the Cloth’ (The Hill
Bachelors, 2000) is constructed to reveal layers of Irish history, open-
ing with an elderly church of Ireland rector, the significantly named
Reverend Grattan Fitzmaurice, feeling out of touch with modern
Ireland, recalling the successive stages in which the Protestant com-
munity became increasingly marginalized in independent Ireland. The
theme of the Protestant remnant is given a new twist, however, when
the rector is visited by the local Catholic curate, Father Leahy. The rector
believes Father Leahy has come on an errand of mercy, to cheer up an
ageing clergyman whose flock is dwindling, but he slowly realizes that,
far from pitying Grattan Father Leahy, shocked by recent newspaper rev-
elations concerning the paedophile Catholic priest, Brendan Smyth, has
turned to his church of Ireland counterpart for a clue as to how to sur-
vive as a minority in Irish life. Through the old rector’s compassionate
eyes, the story underlines the shifts and reversals of Irish history marking
the Catholic Church’s decline from triumphant inheritor of an independ-
ent Ireland to fast-decreasing remnant endeavouring to keep the faith
alive in contemporary Ireland.
‘Men of Ireland’ (Cheating at Canasta, 2007) marks the further
decline of the Catholic Church as the elderly Father Meade pays off
Prunty, his accuser, not because he admits to being guilty of the sex-
ual abuse Prunty alleges, but because he feels the church to which he
belongs is so deeply steeped in sin and shame that he fears to do oth-
erwise than buy Prunty’s silence in order to avoid gossip. However,
the elliptical turns of phrase and evasions in the story reinforce, as Paul
Delaney has pointed out, the reader’s uncertainty about the extent of
Father Meade’s guilt: does he feel guilty because he failed to help Prunty
in his youth, because as a priest he belongs to an institution manifestly
guilty of covering up horrific actions, or because Prunty’s accusation,
however unlikely it might seem, is actually true?37 The reader is left at
the end with a sickening sense of uncertainty.
In the same volume, ‘At Olivehill’ registers the materialism of Celtic
Tiger Ireland through the eyes of elderly Mollie as the farmland that
has been in her husband’s Catholic family for generations and preserved
through times of persecution is sold off to create a golf course. The story
does not apportion blame: Mollie’s two sons are being realistic, as Mollie
herself acknowledges, when they argue that the land can no longer turn
a profit. They love the land and they try to deal with their mother as
144 H. INGMAN
sensitively as possible, even delaying their plans until after their father’s
death, in accordance with her wishes. Mollie’s retreat into the safety
of her darkened drawing room may be a silent gesture of defiance akin
to the subterfuges practised by Irish Catholics in the past, but it is also
indicative of a deeper malaise, namely an obstinate siding with the dead
against the living and a willful refusal to engage with the modern world.
Trevor’s older characters might seem like convenient pegs on which to
hang observations about changing social circumstances in Ireland but his
detailed attention to their states of mind, spoken and unspoken, avoids
the didactic and succeeds in giving a wide range of different voices to the
older people in his stories. A similar wish to allow the older generation
to speak through their own voices is evident in Edna O’Brien’s poign-
ant story of the ageing Irish labourer in London, Rafferty, who recounts
the story of his life to the narrator in ‘Shovel Kings’ (Saints and Sinners,
2011). Rafferty represents the forgotten 1950s generation of Irish
who emigrated to find work in England and is now stranded in limbo
between countries: unlike Johnny in That They Face the Rising Sun and
Michael in ‘A Slip-Up’, Rafferty has the opportunity to spend his last
years in Ireland but no longer feels at home there.38
A number of contemporary Irish writers have published individ-
ual stories centred on the frail elderly, or what has been termed the
‘fourth age’, a time when ageing brings fresh challenges as the body
weakens and independence diminishes. In ‘The Colour of Shadows’
(The Empty Family, 2010) by Colm Tóibín (1955–) the narrator, Paul,
precisely describes the stages in his aunt Josie’s decline, from the ini-
tial fall and being taken into a nursing home, her resentment and then
eventual accommodation to being in care, to her increasing confusion
and the narrowing of her world. Though written with Tóibín’s charac-
teristic restraint, the emotional cost to Paul of the successive changes
in his aunt’s condition is apparent to the reader, as is also the kindness
of neighbours and the nursing home staff in guiding him through the
stages in Josie’s condition. Yet as a result of Josie’s obstinate refusal to
countenance him seeing his mother, her death is also a liberation for
Paul, almost like a new birth bringing with it the possibility of renewing
the connection with his mother: ‘a space had been freed for them, the
shadows cleared … He found himself inhaling and releasing breath as a
way of nourishing that space’.39
‘Three Stories About Love’ (2015) by Anne Enright (1962–) opens,
predictably enough from this writer, with a story about romantic love
and one about impending motherhood; the third, however, describes

an elderly dementia patient in a care home through the eyes of Lara,
his middle-aged daughter, who comes to visit. Lara, half resentful that
she can no longer have a meaningful conversation with her father and
that his time in the home is eating into her inheritance, is amazed that
dementia has turned her father into someone who instead of calling her
stupid, now calls her darling. The relationship between them has obvi-
ously been conflicted in the past but the story ends on a breathtaking
note of tenderness as her racist, bigoted old father beams with happiness:
‘“Look at your wings,” he said’.40 Enright’s brief sketch conveys the dif-
ficulties but also the unexpected moments of grace involved in caring for
dementia patients.
These two stories by Tóibín and Enright present older people
through the sympathetic eyes of their relatives, and as the number of
frail elderly in Ireland increases, they might be expected to feature
more prominently in the Irish short story of the future. Lara’s father in
Enright’s story is racist while in ‘The Colour of Shadows’ Josie has dif-
ficulty accepting that Paul is gay, but what is noticeable in the contem-
porary short story is a growing tendency not to use older characters as
a peg on which to hang observations about social change in Ireland, as
in earlier periods, but to focus on older people for their own sake. A
story by Mary Dorcey (1950–) is a forerunner. ‘Miss Callaghan’s Day
Out’ (A Noise from the Woodshed, 1989) is entirely recounted through
the thoughts of the elderly Miss Callaghan, resident of a nursing home
where the nurses routinely patronize their patients: ‘“We are not quite
ourself, this morning, are we Miss Callaghan?” Sister Josephine said,
taking my tray’. The story explores Miss Callaghan’s efforts to pre-
serve her sense of identity through constantly subverting and chal-
lenging authority in her thoughts: ‘But today we are more ourselves
than ever’.41 Though her carers whisper that she has lost all sense of
time, Miss Callaghan is able to mark the seasons by the appearance
of the hawthorn blossom outside her window. They say she has for-
gotten everything, but her thoughts, with their own kind of jumbled
logic, reveal the extent and precision of her memories from the past,
despite the fact that her stroke has left her unable to articulate them
out loud. She is able to recall, for example, the songs her charming but
unreliable father sang to her about his dark Rosaleen and now comes
to recognize his damaging idealizations around femininity. Dorcey’s
story is remarkable for using stream of consciousness to convey the
146 H. INGMAN
confusions, yet dignity and remaining individuality of Miss Callaghan

in an environment that may be well meaning but is depersonalizing
because her carers are constantly imposing a false identity on her or
stripping her of her identity by taking away her personal possessions
‘for safekeeping’.42
Since no one around her has the time or the understanding to unravel
her thoughts, it is left to Miss Callaghan herself to work her way through
to an accommodation with her past: ‘each day I remember something
more, drawn up from the well, hand over hand as my father taught
me’.43 Euphemisms around death confuse her but eventually she real-
izes that her cruel and oppressive mother, whom she was left at home
to care for after her sisters’ marriages, has not gone to Paris in her place
but is in fact dead probably killed by herself, though it is impossible for
the reader to know that for certain. The knowledge that her mother is
dead allows Miss Callaghan’s own personality finally to blossom, free
from the dominating influence of both her parents, so that, to paraphrase
Sister Josephine’s patronizing words, she is quite herself at last. ‘Miss
Callaghan’s Day Out’ underlines the importance of not discounting the
possibility for change and development even in those who seem most
frail and confused. Dorcey’s story shares characteristics of Constance
Rooke’s Vollendungsroman, the novel of completion or winding up, in
which a character looks back over his/her life with a special intensity
because of the nearness of death.44
In The House on Parkgate Street and Other Dublin Stories (2013) by
Christine Dwyer Hickey, ‘Teatro La Fenice’ is told through the voice of
an elderly unnamed patient with severe memory loss: ‘I only see things
in a block, one picture at a time. What becomes before or what happens
after – well, I’m not always in charge of the sequence’.45 She has a partial
memory of holding hands with a very much loved man who took her
to a theatre abroad (hence the title of the story). Since she sometimes
receives calls from a man whom she does not recognize, we take it that
the man is still alive and is her husband or partner. The twist in the story
is that at first the reader believes that Claire, who guides the narrator
down steps and generally tends to her, is a visitor but later it becomes
clear that Claire also is a resident of the nursing home. While the nar-
rator lives mostly in the present, unsure of who she is and what her life
has been like in the past, Claire deludes herself with the notion that her
son and daughter-in-law have invited her to their house for the weekend.
In fact, it becomes clear to the reader that they have taken her money
and unable, or unwilling, to cope with her, have consigned her to this
home. Unlike the narrator, Claire never receives a phone call. Hickey’s
story, although less complex than ‘Miss Callaghan’s Day Out’, being
narrated by someone who is losing language, skillfully gives a voice to
a dementia patient, the opening paragraph subtly underlining the nar-
rator’s confusion over words: ‘We pass Mr Fleming, who keeps the
grass laundered, ironing green stripes, light and dark, with the big yel-
low machine that goes before him’.46 Like William Trevor’s ‘Broken
Homes’, ‘Teatro La Fenice’ highlights the vulnerability of older people
to the judgement of those in authority: the narrator carefully monitors
her speech in order to avoid being sent to the ward that houses seriously
disturbed patients.
‘The Assessment’ (2006) by Bernard MacLaverty (1942–) also accu-
rately reflects a dementia patient’s repetitions, confusions and paranoia
as Mrs. Quinn waits in hospital for the doctors’ assessment as to whether
she can continue living independently. Like Mrs. Malby in Trevor’s story
and the unnamed narrator in Hickey’s ‘Teatro La Fenice’, Cassie Quinn
knows that her behaviour is being scrutinized: ‘They’re watching me.
I’m not sure how – but they’re watching me. Making a note of any mis-
takes. Even first thing in the morning sitting on the bed half dressed,
one leg out of my tights. Or buttoning things up badly’.47 Like the nar-
rator in Hickey’s story, Cassie knows there is a worse place (‘the special
unit’) that she could end up in. As the story progresses, Cassie’s confu-
sion becomes gradually more apparent to the reader so that we too are
implicated in the final medical assessment that she can no longer man-
age on her own. The fact that the reader believes the right decision has
been taken makes the ending no less heartrending as Cassie protests: ‘I
want to be in my own house. With my own things around me. My china
cabinet, my bone-handled knives and forks’.48 The story underlines the
loss of identity that institutionalized old age can bring. Not only has
Cassie had to give up her treasured possessions, she feels doubly exiled
since she is originally from Northern Ireland and feels out of place in this
Dublin hospital.
Stories such as these, which enter directly into the consciousness of
the elderly confused, are an important way of validating the inner con-
sciousness of the demented and counter society’s tendency to write off
their inner world as of no importance. The next chapter will explore in
more detail the world of frail older people and the demented as pre-
sented in the work of Irish novelists.
148 H. INGMAN
Notes
1. See, for example, Jan Baars, Aging and the Art of Living (Baltimore: The
John Hopkins University Press, 2011), 12–57.
2. Liam O’Flaherty, The Short Stories of Liam O’Flaherty (London: Jonathan
Cape, 1937), 397.
3. O’Flaherty, The Short Stories, 400.
5. Liam O’Flaherty, Two Lovely Beasts and Other Stories (New York: Devin-
Adair, 1950), 92.
6. O’Flaherty, Two Lovely Beasts and Other Stories, 260.
10. Seumas O’Kelly, The Weaver’s Grave (Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1922), 19.
11. O’Kelly, The Weaver’s Grave, 19–20.
12. O’Kelly, The Weaver’s Grave, 54.
13. Daniel Corkery, The Stones and Other Stories, ed. Paul Delaney (Cork:
Mercier Press, 2003), 124.
14. Corkery, The Stones and Other Stories, ed. Delaney, 117.
15. Corkery, The Stones and Other Stories, ed. Delaney, 188.
16. Frank O’Connor, Collected Stories, introduction by Richard Ellmann
(New York: Vintage, 1982), 48.
17. O’Connor, Collected Stories, 49.
18. O’Connor, Collected Stories, 55.
19. Sean O’Faolain, The Heat of the Sun: Collected Short Stories, Volume 2
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 138.
20. O’Faolain, The Heat of the Sun, 145.
21. John W. Foster, ‘Private Worlds: The Stories of Michael McLaverty’, in
The Irish Short Story, ed. Patrick Rafroidi and Terence Brown (Gerrards
Cross: Colin Smythe, 1979), 249–61.
22. Eamon Maher, John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal (Dublin:
The Liffey Press, 2003), 146.
23. John McGahern, Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories
(London: Faber and Faber, 2007), 8.
24. For a more detailed discussion of the mother–daughter relationship in the
context of work by Irigaray and Kristeva, see Heather Ingman, Women’s
Fiction Between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters and Writing (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 32–41. For discussion of Kristeva’s
theories and the ageing woman in Freudian psychoanalysis, see Kathleen
Woodward, ‘Tribute to the Older Woman: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and
Ageism’, in Images of Aging: Cultural References of Later Life, ed. Mike
Featherstone and Andrew Wernick (New York: Routledge, 1995), 79–96.
25. Luce Irigaray, ‘And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other’, Signs 7 (1),
1981: 60–67.
26. Ann Owens Weekes, ‘Figuring the Mother in Contemporary Irish Fiction’,
in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories, ed. Liam Harte
and Michael Parker (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000) (100–24), 113.
27. See Joan Erikson’s discussion of the frail elderly, which she labels the
ninth stage of ageing, in Erik Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed (1982;
New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 105–14.
28. For discussion of the mother–daughter relationship in Edna O’Brien’s
work, see, among others, Ann Owens Weekes, ‘Figuring the Mother in
Contemporary Irish Fiction’, in Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes,
Tropes, Theories, ed. Liam Harte and Michael Parker (London:
Macmillan, 2000), 100–24; Anne Fogarty, ‘Mother-Daughter
Relationships in Contemporary Irish Women’s Fiction’, in Writing
Mothers and Daughters: Renegotiating the Mother in Western European
Narratives by Women, ed. Adalgisa Giorgio (Oxford: Berghahn Books,
2002), 85–118; and Amanda Graham, ‘“The Lovely Substance of the
Mother”: Food, Gender and Nation in the Work of Edna O’Brien’, Irish
Studies Review 4 (15), 1996: 16–20.
29. Edna O’Brien, A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories (London: Phoenix,
2003), 400.
30. Elke D’hoker, Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story (New York
and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 156.
31. Desmond Hogan, Stories (London: Picador, 1982), 157.
32. Hogan, Stories, 160–61.
33. Hogan, Stories, 48.
34. See, for example, Ageing, Meaning and Social Structure: Connecting Critical
and Humanistic Gerontology, ed. Jan Baars, Joseph Dohmen, Amanda
Grenier, and Chris Phillipson (Bristol: Policy Press, 2014), 18, 111.
35. William Trevor, The Collected Stories (New York and London: Penguin,
1992), 525.
36. See the discussion on agency in later life in Ageing, Meaning and Social
Structure, ed. Baars et al., 55–79.
37. Paul Delaney, ‘“The Art of the Glimpse”: Cheating at Canasta’, in
William Trevor: Revaluations, ed. Paul Delaney and Michael Parker
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) (180–97), 183–84.
38. The experience of the ageing Irish female emigrant in 1950s London is
central to Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light (2010), discussed at length
by Margaret O’Neill in ‘“This Is How Time Unfolds When You Are
Old”: Ageing, Subjectivity and Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light’, in
Reimaginings, ed. Cathy McGlynn, Margaret O’Neill, and Michaela
Schrage-Früh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 289–303.
150 H. INGMAN
39. Colm Tóibín, The Empty Family (London and New York: Viking, 2010), 144.
40. Anne Enright, ‘Three Stories About Love’, in The Long Gaze Back: An
Anthology of Irish Women Writers, ed. Sinéad Gleeson (Dublin: New
Island Books, 2015), 176.
41. Mary Dorcey, A Noise from the Woodshed (London: OnlyWomen Press,
1989), 81.
42. Dorcey, A Noise from the Woodshed, 90.
43. Dorcey, A Noise from the Woodshed, 83.
Song’, in Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, ed.
Anne M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen (Charlottesville and London:
University Press of Virginia, 1993), 204–25.
45. Christine Dwyer Hickey, The House on Parkgate and Other Stories
(Dublin: New Island, 2013), 113.
46. Hickey, The House on Parkgate, 111.
47. Bernard MacLaverty, Matters of Life and Death (London: Jonathan Cape,
2006), 123.
48. MacLaverty, Matters of Life and Death, 140.
Bibliography
University Press.
Baars, Jan, Joseph Dohmen, Amanda Grenier, and Chris Phillipson, eds. 2014.
Beckett, Mary. 1980. A Belfast Woman. New York: William Morrow and Co.
Corkery, Daniel. 2003. The Stones and Other Stories, ed. Paul Delaney. Cork:
Mercier Press.
Delaney, Paul. 2013. ‘The Art of the Glimpse’: Cheating at Canasta. In
William Trevor: Revaluations, ed. Paul Delaney and Michael Parker, 180–97.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
D’hoker, Elke. 2016. Irish Women Writers and the Modern Short Story. New York
and London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Dorcey, Mary. 1989. A Noise from the Woodshed. London: OnlyWomen Press.
Enright, Anne. 2015. Three Stories About Love. In The Long Gaze Back: An
Anthology of Irish Women Writers, ed. Sinéad Gleeson, 167–78. Dublin: New
Island Books.
Fogarty, Anne. 2002. Mother-Daughter Relationships in Contemporary Irish
Women’s Fiction. In Writing Mothers and Daughters: Renegotiating the
Mother in Western European Narratives by Women, ed. Adalgisa Giorgio,
85–118. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Foster, John W. 1979. Private Worlds: The Stories of Michael McLaverty. In The
Irish Short Story, ed. Patrick Rafroidi and Terence Brown, 249–61. Gerrards
Cross: Colin Smythe.
Graham, Amanda. 1996. ‘The Lovely Substance of the Mother’: Food, Gender
and Nation in the Work of Edna O’Brien. Irish Studies Review 4 (15): 16–20.
Hickey, Christine Dwyer. 2013. The House on Parkgate and Other Stories. Dublin:
New Island.
Hogan, Desmond. 1982. Stories. London: Picador.
Ingman, Heather. 1998. Women’s Fiction Between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters
and Writing. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Irigaray, Luce. 1981. And the One Doesn’t Stir Without the Other. Signs 7 (1):
60–67.
Lavin, Mary. 1977. The Shrine and Other Stories. London: Constable.
Lavin, Mary. 1985. A Family Likeness and Other Stories. London: Constable.
MacLaverty, Bernard. 2006. Matters of Life and Death. London: Jonathan Cape.
Maher, Eamon. 2003. John McGahern: From the Local to the Universal. Dublin:
The Liffey Press.
McGahern, John. 2007. Creatures of the Earth: New and Selected Stories.
London: Faber and Faber.
McLaverty, Michael. 2002. Collected Short Stories. Belfast: The Blackstaff Press.
O’Brien, Edna. 2003. A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories. London: Phoenix.
O’Connor, Frank. 1982. Collected Stories. Introduction by Richard Ellmann.
New York: Vintage.
O’Faolain, Sean. 1983. The Heat of the Sun: Collected Short Stories, Volume 2.
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
O’Flaherty, Liam. 1937. The Short Stories of Liam O’Flaherty. London: Jonathan
Cape.
O’Flaherty, Liam. 1950. Two Lovely Beasts and Other Stories. New York:
Devin-Adair.
O’Kelly, Seumas. 1922. The Weaver’s Grave. Dublin: The Talbot Press.
O’Neill, Margaret. 2017. ‘This Is How Time Unfolds When You Are Old’:
Ageing, Subjectivity and Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light. In Ageing Women
in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings, ed.
Cathy McGlynn, Margaret O’Neill, and Michaela Schrage-Früh, 289–303.
New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rooke, Constance. 1993. Oh What a Paradise It Seems: John Cheever’s Swan
Song. In Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, ed. Anne
M. Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rossen, 204–25. Charlottesville and London:
University Press of Virginia.
Tóibín, Colm. 2010. The Empty Family. London and New York: Viking.
Trevor, William. 1992. The Collected Stories. New York and London: Penguin.
152 H. INGMAN
Weekes, Ann Owens. 2000. Figuring the Mother in Contemporary Irish Fiction.
In Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories, ed. Liam Harte and
Michael Parker, 100–24. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Woodward, Kathleen. 1995. Tribute to the Older Woman: Psychoanalysis,
Feminism and Ageism. In Images of Aging: Cultural References of Later Life,
ed. Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick, 79–96. New York: Routledge.
CHAPTER 6
Frail Old Age
In Iris Murdoch’s An Unofficial Rose (1962), on the day of his wife’s

funeral, sixty-seven-year-old Hugh Peronett reflects on the ageing pro-
cess. Despite his rheumatism, indigestion, weak limbs, deafness and tin-
nitus, he feels himself to be not yet embarked on old age: ‘On the brink
of it was indeed how he now from day to day imagined himself. To pic-
ture himself passing that limit would be to admit into his imagination
the reality of death; and this even now he could not do’.1 Hugh wards
off thoughts of death by contemplating a love affair, first with Emma,
and then with Mildred, both old friends of his wife. Unlike Hugh, the
protagonists of the novels discussed in this chapter have no choice but
to confront their own demise. The chapter considers fictional portrayals
of old age as depicted in Norah Hoult’s There Were No Windows (1944),
Julia O’Faolain’s No Country for Young Men (1980), Edna O’Brien’s
House of Splendid Isolation (1994) and Jennifer Johnston’s Foolish
Mortals (2007), novels that provide vivid portraits of frail older people as
seen through their own eyes and those of society around them.
Consideration of frail old age brings us to what Joan Erikson des-
ignated as the ninth stage of the life cycle that, partly as a result of
observing her husband in his nineties, she added to the eight develop-
mental stages put forward in Erik Erikson’s The Life Cycle. In The Life
Cycle Completed (1982), Joan Erikson links this ninth stage in the life
cycle to people in their eighties and nineties, decades which, she argues,
bring new difficulties and challenges as the body weakens, independence
diminishes and the older person has less control over his or her daily

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96430-0_6
154 H. INGMAN
life, leading often to a loss of confidence and self-esteem. In Erikson’s

account, people in their eighties and nineties become increasingly uncer-
tain about their role and identity, lose trust and hope in the future and
experience shame and doubt as the body becomes more fragile:
Despair, which haunts the eighth stage, is a close companion in the ninth
because it is almost impossible to know what emergencies and losses of
physical ability are imminent. As independence and control are challenged,
self-esteem and confidence weaken.2
People in this age group, also known as the ‘fourth age’, may become
prey to feelings of uselessness and stagnation as the whole of daily life is
taken up with coping with physical frailty. They may no longer have the
time, energy or peace of mind for the kind of life reviews that are the
prerogative of the older but more active characters discussed in previous
chapters of this study. Memory may be reduced to momentary flashbacks
rather than sustained narrative. As Erikson explains it:
Life in the eighth stage includes a retrospective accounting of one’s life to

date; how much one embraces life as having been lived well, as opposed to
regretting missed opportunities, will contribute to the degree of disgust
and despair one experiences. In one’s eighties and nineties one may no
longer have the luxury of such retrospective despair. Loss of capacities and
disintegration may demand almost all of one’s attention. One’s focus may
become thoroughly circumscribed by concerns of daily functioning so that
it is enough just to get through a day intact.3
In such circumstances, one may begin to lose control of one’s life story
and become forced to rely on others to reinforce identity, as is the case
with Claire assailed by dementia in There Were No Windows or even
the doughty Tash in Foolish Mortals. As we saw in the previous chap-
ter, particularly in stories by William Trevor (‘Broken Homes’), Mary
Dorcey (‘Miss Callaghan’s Day Out’) and Bernard MacLaverty (‘The
Assessment’), there may develop a gap between how these frail older
people feel inside and how they are perceived on account of their frag-
ile physical state, between, in Elizabeth Grosz’s terms, the private, inter-
nal lived body and the public body ‘constructed by the various regimes
of institutional, discursive, and non-discursive power as a particular kind
of body’.4 In her discussion of dementia, Margreet Bruens, noting how
6 FRAIL OLD AGE 155
few sociological and psychological studies include the voices of dementia

sufferers themselves, argues that in order to change the ‘persistent struc-
tures of social exclusion’ that people of the ‘fourth age’, and in particular
dementia patients suffer from, it is necessary for their personal stories to
be heard in public debate.5 The following novels have been selected for
discussion precisely because, rather than relying on the ‘Othering’ voices
of carers, friends and relatives, they attempt to convey, through imagi-
native reconstruction, what the experience of frail old age feels like from
the inside.
Norah Hoult, There Were No Windows (1944)

The early publication date of Norah Hoult’s remarkable portrayal of
dementia through the voice of Claire Temple in There Were No Windows
challenges Heike Hartung’s assertion that dementia narratives ‘emerged
as a new form of narrating age from the 1980s onwards’.6 Hoult’s novel
has been slowly gaining recognition in recent years as a major work of
World War II fiction, much helped by its reissue in 2005 by Persephone
Books, with an excellent afterword by Julia Briggs that sets Claire’s
mental confusion in the context of the disorientations of the wartime
blackout in London. Gerardine Meaney places There Were No Windows
alongside Kate O’Brien’s historical allegory, That Lady (1946), and
Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day (1949) as ‘part of an extraordi-
nary trio of novels by Irish and Anglo-Irish women responding to the
experience of women living through the Blitz’.7
Hoult (1898–1984) was born in Dublin to an Irish Catholic mother
and an English Protestant father. After her parents’ deaths, she attended
English boarding schools and then worked as a journalist for the Sheffield
Daily Telegraph. Upon the success of her short story collection Poor
Women! (1928), she became a full-time writer. In 1931, she returned to
live in Ireland but left again to live in New York and then in England
(1939–1957), before finally settling in Ireland. Hoult is known for
employing the middlebrow novel for feminist protest, notably in Holy
Ireland (1935), banned in Ireland as indeed was the case with much of
her fiction. In There Were No Windows, gender stereotypes, along with
those of age and class, combine to deny Claire a voice and a sense of
identity, and the novel gives an insight into the power mechanisms that
weigh against the ageing woman.
156 H. INGMAN
There Were No Windows is set in 1941 and based on the final years
of Violet Hunt (1862–1942), daughter of a watercolour painter Alfred
Hunt and Scottish novelist Margaret Raine. Raised in Pre-Raphaelite
circles in London, Hunt became an active feminist, writing novels in
the New Woman genre, founding the Woman Writers’ Suffrage League
(1908) and participating in establishing International PEN (1921).
Despite her feminist activities, the facts of Hunt’s life highlight the sec-
ondary position of women in modernist literary circles, as muses, help-
mates and facilitators of male writers. Though Hunt published seventeen
novels, short stories in the supernatural vein, memoir and a biography,
her literary achievements have been overshadowed by her reputation as
a hostess of literary salons at her home, South Lodge, in Campden Hill
Road, London, attended by, among others, Rebecca West, Ezra Pound,
Joseph Conrad, Wyndham Lewis, D.H. Lawrence and Henry James.
Some of these names recur in Hoult’s novel along with that of Oscar
Wilde who was rumoured to have proposed to Hunt, as it is suggested
he has to Claire in There Were No Windows.
Hunt had a number of male married lovers, including Somerset
Maugham, H.G. Wells and Ford Madox Ford (Wallace Temple in the
novel). Ford worked with Hunt on the English Review and lived with her at
South Lodge from 1910 to 1918. He subsequently fictionalized her as the
manipulative Florence Dowdall in The Good Soldier (1915) and in the strik-
ing portrait of Sonja Tietjens in his tetralogy, Parade’s End (1924–1928).
Julia Briggs emphasizes how much Hoult’s portrait of Claire owes to South
Lodge, Douglas Goldring’s memoir of Hunt, Ford and the English Review
circle, published the year before Hoult’s novel, in 1943, though Briggs
also suggests, based on Hoult’s correspondence, that Hoult may have vis-
ited Hunt in her final years.8 Goldring’s description of the ageing Hunt
in South Lodge is of a woman who repeated herself constantly, misquoted
from other writers and often failed to recognize to whom she was speaking.
Tellingly, he adds: ‘after 1935 few busy people could be bothered to spend
a whole evening with her’.9 Goldring describes Hunt in her prime, how-
ever, as ‘emotional, impetuous, passionate, witty, wise, fascinating, and, at
times, very foolish’, a description that resonates with Hoult’s fictional por-
trait.10 Given the source material, There Were No Windows is set in London,
though there is a nod to Hoult’s Irish roots in the character of Kathleen,
Claire’s Irish cook, transformed from Hunt’s Welsh parlourmaid.
In There Were No Windows, Claire is suffering from short-term mem-
ory loss and displays all the confusion, anxiety and paranoia that go with
6 FRAIL OLD AGE 157
this. Occasional flashes of wit and astute observations on her visitors

make her present decline all the more poignant as she struggles to hold
onto a sense of who she is, or has been. Claire’s loss of short-term mem-
ory renders communication difficult as her constant repetitions and con-
fusions over time become an increasing social burden on others, risking
what has been described in sociology as ‘social death’.11 Identity loss is
at the centre of the experience of memory loss and when the sufferer is
surrounded, as Claire is, by people who do not sufficiently reinforce that
identity, the self becomes vulnerable. John Swinton’s study, Dementia
(2012), underlines the importance of safeguarding a sense of identity
among dementia patients:
One of the problems for people with dementia is that they gradually begin
to lose the ability to tell their own stories. Over time it is the stories of
others that shape their experiences and place the parameters on their iden-
tity, personhood and experiences. Particularly those people with advanced
dementia simply do not have the ability to articulate counter-stories in
ways that provide them with enough social power to sustain their identities
as valuable and capable human beings. The various stories told by the pow-
erful others that surround them – doctors, neurologists, nurses, society,
media, family, friends – eventually overwhelm their own stories …12
Claire gains strength and confirmation from her identity as ‘a woman of

letters’: ‘the sense of being surrounded by books, some of them fash-
ioned of the stuff of literature, renewed within her the sense of her posi-
tion as a literary woman’.13 The trouble is her immediate carers, such
as Kathleen, have no experience of the literary world and those visitors
who do, like Francis, are not prepared to bear with Claire’s dementia.
Her dilemma illustrates the split Elizabeth Grosz identified between
the internal lived body and the public body vulnerable to various forms
of powerful institutional discourses. In moments of lucidity, Claire
is very aware of her exposure to other people’s interpretations of her
behaviour:
Yes, how could she have forgotten? Because she was losing her memory.
They were always telling her that. And behind the reminder, uttered by
falsely smiling or bored or impatient faces, there was always the sense of
threat. For what did they do to those who had entirely lost their mem-
ories? They shut them into asylums. That was why she had to be so very
careful. All the time.14
158 H. INGMAN
In Foucauldian terms, Claire’s weakened mental state means that she is

unable to provide a coherent counter-discourse to the stories about her-
self put around by her carers, friends and visitors who all, as Jeannette
King observes in her account of Hoult’s novel, look at her through the
darkened windows of their own prejudices.15
There Were No Windows combines middlebrow novel with modernist
techniques, entering not only into Claire’s consciousness but also that of
her multiple unreliable carers and visitors in order to unpick their various
reactions to her illness. Swinton argues in chapter three of his study that
dementia is not only a question of impaired brain cells but may be exac-
erbated by the way society treats sufferers and by value-laden negative
reactions to them:
What people like this need is someone to take the time to listen carefully
to them and to learn how best to interpret their ‘linguistic confusion’ and
‘impaired thinking’. They need someone who has a map that’s open to the
type of terrain that they actually inhabit rather than a map that points out
where they should be.16
This is certainly the case with Claire. The people interacting with Claire
on a daily basis—Kathleen, Mrs. White, Miss Jones—have no real com-
prehension of her former life and, apart from the humane and compas-
sionate Dr. Fairfax, no interest in taking the time to understand her state
of mind. Instead, they judge her according to a range of sexist and ageist
stereotypes. Class prejudice operates in her interaction with Kathleen, the
cook. King points out that Kathleen’s attitude to sex, formed by work-
ing-class ideas of respectability, draws on stereotypes linking madness and
female promiscuity in a way that fails to take account of the very different
mores of the upper-class bohemian world in which Claire has lived.17 To
this might be added the puritanical strain of the Irish Catholicism in which
Kathleen would have been raised, reinforcing her punitive attitude towards
her employer. Kathleen holds to the Victorian idea of old age as a punish-
ment for sin and exercises her power to label her mistress ‘mad’ on sev-
eral occasions. Kathleen does not bother to enter Claire’s world; instead,
she takes advantage of her employer’s confusion to manipulate her. She is
unsympathetic to the side effects of Claire’s illness, such as incontinence,
puts her apparent lack of generosity with money down to meanness rather
than to an inability to understand how money values have altered, and
attributes the narrowing of her mistress’s interests (at times Claire forgets
there is a war on) to self-absorption rather than to her illness.
6 FRAIL OLD AGE 159
Claire’s companion, Miss Jones, acts in the opposite way, employing

the professional discourse of a carer in order to infantilize Claire as a
child to be pitied and humoured, ‘giving those evasive answers which she
believed were suitable fare for mental cases, drunkards and children’.18
Treating an adult dementia patient as a child is one of the examples given
by Swinton to illustrate malignant social interaction that depersonalizes
the sufferer.19 As Claire’s anger and violence increase, Miss Jones down-
plays this unacceptably unfeminine behaviour as a side effect of her men-
tal illness rather than considering whether it is a rational response to the
frustrations of Claire’s daily life, her sense of powerlessness to determine
her own fate and her constant fear of being labelled insane and shut up
in asylum: ‘She had to watch them all the time, so the shadow warned
her. And that watching imposed the most continuous strain she had ever
known’.20 Swinton explores this problem of referring all behaviour of a
dementia sufferer to the original diagnosis. In particular, he notes:
Agitation is translated into a problem manifesting an underlying neurologi-

cal pathology rather than a normal response to a frightening experience, or
even an understandable response to the ways in which people have begun
to treat the person since they ‘discovered’ that she has dementia. The per-
son is assumed to have ‘deterioration in emotional control, social behavior,
or motivation.’ The fact that such experiences might well be reasonable
responses to a frightening life experience – a profound loss of memory – is
lost in translation.21
Claire’s anger and violence may be an aspect of her illness, but they are
also part of her wish to hold on to agency over her life and her determi-
nation to ‘fight for her own individuality to the end’.22
Kathleen and Miss Jones illustrate many of the examples Tom
Kitwood, writing on the importance of person-centred dementia care,
enumerates as evidence of ‘malignant social psychology’, namely infanti-
lization, manipulation, blaming the patient, intimidation, stigmatization
through verbal labels and invalidation of their emotions, such as feel-
ings of distress or rage.23 Edith Barlow, older by two years than Claire
and a writer herself, might be expected to reinforce Claire’s desired
identity as a literary woman, but Edith is out of sympathy with Claire’s
romanticism and impatient with the symptoms of her illness, liken-
ing Claire’s repetitive questions to ‘a Chinese form of torture … they
relied on the cumulative effect of a continual drip of water …’.24 Edith,
an independent spinster who prides herself on her rational, masculine
160 H. INGMAN
mind, congratulates herself on having weathered the years rather better

than Claire whose Victorian notions of feminine dependence on male
approval have dated. In passing this judgement, Edith reveals not only
her own sexism in failing to measure the social conventions weighing
on her friend, but also a lack of understanding of dementia as an illness.
Francis Maitland too, a publisher reluctantly coming to terms with his
own ageing, finds it difficult to restrain his irritation with Claire’s con-
fusions and self-pity. He is far too self-centred and misogynistic to be of
any help in sustaining her identity as a writer believing as he does that
‘even if men possessed, to use the trite phrase, the artistic temperament,
they always kept a better balance than did women, a greater sense of pro-
portion, of objectivity’.25
On Claire’s side, there are a number of factors that make her expe-
rience of ageing particularly traumatic, as Dr. Fairfax recognizes.
Clinging to outmoded class prejudice and social mannerisms means her
behaviour is always likely to give offence in the changing world ush-
ered in by the Second World War. Claire continually makes disparaging
generalizations about ‘the lower classes’, being particularly cruel and
snobbish towards her lower-middle-class companion, Miss Jones. In
her encounter with Sara, she displays the sort of anti-Semitic attitudes
common in pre-war upper-class literary circles. Gender stereotypes are
also a hindrance to successful ageing. If Claire is unable any longer to
rethink her class attitudes in order to keep up with the changing times
(and this must be a common problem among dementia patients), she is
capable of recognizing that the way in which society encouraged her to
think of herself when young, as a sex object whose purpose was to flatter
and charm men, is useless now that old age has rendered her unattrac-
tive and indeed invisible. Her role as literary hostess, facilitating a space
where other writers, generally men, had the opportunity to further their
careers, has left her with an inability to be alone. As she tells Dr. Fairfax:
‘People have been my furniture, with all the heartbreaks they bring’.26
Loneliness is generally recognized to be a central experience for people
with dementia,27 but the particular circumstances of Claire’s life have
exacerbated her solitude.28
As Claire’s world narrows to the familiar objects around her and to
her own concerns, the terrifying darkness outside on the London streets
during the Blitz, with all the windows blacked out, mirrors Claire’s inner
darkness and her feeling of being left alone and shut in on herself: ‘she
drifted into a dreamy state, in which she was one with the insubstantiality
6 FRAIL OLD AGE 161
of the world about her’.29 This merging into the world around her is
perhaps the kindest moment in Hoult’s portrayal of Claire’s final strug-
gle with her disease: as Dr. Fairfax observes, Claire’s belief in Victorian
individualism is of no help with an illness that seemingly attacks individ-
ual personality at its core.
The dissolution of private, personal life was, according to Elizabeth
Bowen, one of the common side effects of living through the Blitz when
at any moment one’s home and entire way of life were liable to be blown
to pieces. In her preface to her wartime collection of stories, The Demon
Lover (1945), she explains:
I felt one with, and just like, everyone else. Sometimes I hardly knew
where I stopped and somebody else began. The violent destruction of
solid things, the explosion of the illusion that prestige, power and per-
manence attach to bulk and weight, left all of us, equally, heady and
disembodied.30
It is part of Hoult’s astuteness in this novel to link the disasters of war-

time bombing with an illness that is seen as wreaking catastrophe on the
human personality. In her preface, Bowen describes how people made
considerable efforts to preserve personal life in the face of its threat-
ened annihilation, retrieving bits and pieces of their former lives from
bombed-out ruins:
People whose homes had been blown up went to infinite lengths to assem-
ble bits of themselves – broken ornaments, odd shoes, torn scraps of the
curtains that had hung in a room – from the wreckage … we accepted that
at this time individual destiny became an obsession in every heart. You
cannot depersonalize persons. Every writer during this time was aware
of the personal cry of the individual. And he was aware of the passionate
attachment of men and women to every object or image or place or love or
fragment of memory with which his or her destiny seemed to be identified,
and by which the destiny seemed to be assured.31
It is one of the sadnesses of Claire’s illness that it eventually erodes her

capacity to hold on to her identity, ‘the uncertain “I”’, as Bowen terms it.
In choosing to personalize the story of a dementia sufferer Hoult’s
novel may be labelled, as Bowen classed all wartime writing, resistance liter-
ature: ‘You may say that these resistance-fantasies are in themselves fright-
ening. I can only say that one counteracts fear by fear, stress by stress’.32
162 H. INGMAN
The accuracy of Hoult’s portrayal of Claire’s sufferings has led to There

Were No Windows being recommended for those involved in the care of
dementia patients, confirmation of the vital role of fiction and imaginative
reconstruction in aiding understanding of the ageing process.33
Julia O’Faolain, No Country for Young Men (1980)

The work of Julia O’Faolain (1932–), daughter of writers Sean
O’Faolain and Eileen Gould, has long been associated with explo-
ration of women’s lives, both historical and contemporary, around
themes of marriage, motherhood, Catholicism and sexuality. Her first
novel, Godded and Codded (1970), recounts the sexual adventures of
convent-educated Irish girl, Sally Tyndal, in Paris while Women in the
Wall (1975) is a fictional account of Queen Radegund who founded a
monastery in Gaul in the sixth century. At the heart of her novel, No
Country for Young Men (1980), short listed for the Booker prize, lies
the irony that sexist and ageist stereotypes prevent the relatives of the
frail and demented Judith Clancy, all desperate to get to the bottom of
a violent incident during Ireland’s civil war that has repercussions for the
contemporary Troubles in Northern Ireland, from accepting that what
she is telling them about Sparky Driscoll’s murder is the truth. Judith
has been raised in the twin ideologies of republicanism and Catholicism,
both presented in the novel as controlling and suppressing women, rele-
gating them to the domestic sphere and to the service of men. As Sister
Judith, she has been enclosed in a convent since the time of Driscoll’s
death in 1922, periodically undergoing electric shock treatment that has
left her with holes in her memory and a sense of being haunted by some
traumatic event in her past. Judith’s condition mirrors that of Ireland
generally still, in the 1970s, recovering from the wounds of the War of
Independence and the Civil War, kept fresh in old men’s memories and
reignited by the contemporary outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland.
Inverting Yeats’s poem, from which she derives her title, O’Faolain pre-
sents Ireland as a country in bondage to the past, the present generation
overshadowed by the memory of the previous generation who fought for
its independence, prominent among whom was Judith’s brother-in-law,
Owen O’Malley.
In his study, Trauma and History in the Irish Novel (2011), Robert
Garratt reads No Country for Young Men as the ‘prototypical example of
an Irish trauma novel’ and positions Judith as a trauma victim plagued by
6 FRAIL OLD AGE 163
nightmares and flashbacks.34 While this is undoubtedly true—O’Faolain

frequently makes use of bog imagery to suggest the ‘unfathomable
layers’35 of Judith’s buried memories—it is also worth taking into
account Judith’s age and the fact that many of her symptoms are charac-
teristic of the elderly demented. Judith’s condition worsens when, aged
seventy-five, she is forced out of the familiar surroundings of her convent
as a result of a newly imposed rule that the nuns should live among the
people. Institutionalized for most of her life, Judith finds it hard to adapt
to life in the house of her great-nephew and niece, Michael and Grainne:
In the convent, clocks, bells and timetables had been reliable. Holy
Offices, the sounds from the school – breaks for prayer or hockey, eleven-
ses or singing – had been as cosy as the functions of her own body. More
predictable. Reassuring.
It was extraordinary being without them. Like a loss of gravity or the
proper alteration of night and day.36
With a predictable schedule and a helper to rely on, Judith can regulate
her toilet needs; without these she flounders: ‘When your body was not
predictable, other things had to be’.37 As in the case of Claire Temple,
Judith’s body has become the abject, an object of disgust both to herself
and to those around her. Michael’s sardonic comment on the Catholic
Church’s abandonment of his great aunt is that: ‘This country hasn’t
advanced beyond the social welfare system of ancient Greece’.38
Like Claire in There Were No Windows, Judith is often confused about
time, living as much in 1922 as in 1979 when the novel is set and mixing
up visitors in the present with people from her youth, asking Michael,
for example, whether he knew Sparky Driscoll. Like Claire, she has inter-
ludes of paranoia when she suspects everyone around her of scheming
against her. At the same time, like Claire, she has flashes of self-aware-
ness, commenting to Grainne how much she must have disrupted their
lives and picturing her memory as ‘a library put to the sack …Volumes
were smoke-blackened. A shelf of books gave way and, in spite of her
efforts, crumbled’.39 Judith’s memories of the traumatic event in her past
threaten to surface on several occasions but even she is unsure whether
remembering will be advantageous, observing to Grainne: ‘Memories? It
might be as well not to dig them up? One can get nasty surprises. Not
everything buried is treasure’.40 Like Rosaleen in Enright’s The Green
Road, Judith experiences uncanny ghosts of her past life and selves
164 H. INGMAN
intruding into her present, bearing out Lynne Segal’s observation that:
‘The older we are the more we encounter the world through complex
layerings of identity, attempting to negotiate the shifting present while
grappling with the disconcerting images of the old thrust so intrusively
upon us’.41
Like Claire’s visitors, each person interprets Judith through the lens of
their own prejudices and their varied judgements on her give a disturb-
ing snapshot of the attitudes towards the frail elderly in 1970s Ireland:
‘gentle madwoman’ (Sister Gilchrist), ‘bonkers’ (Michael), ‘a looney’
(Cormac), ‘the unwanted past’ (Grainne), ‘mad as a brush’ (the chap-
lain) and ‘disgrace’ (Owen Roe). Grainne is the person who takes the
most time to listen to Judith’s story, but her feminism and abhorrence
of violent republicanism lead her to regard Judith simply as a victim of
patriarchal control, incarcerated in the convent by her brother-in-law,
Owen O’Mally, and forced to undergo electric shock treatment to make
her forget some secret that would endanger Owen’s political ambitions:
‘From seeing the poor thing as an inconvenient relative, she had come
to see her as a victim deserving special concern’.42 Owen Roe, Owen
O’Malley’s son, obsessed with his own republican ambitions and con-
temptuous of women, believes it quite possible Judith knows some secret
that would damage his father’s memory and wishes to silence her. In
fact, it turns out that Owen O’Malley, though this was undoubtedly also
convenient for himself, placed Judith in the convent for her own protec-
tion, lest she be convicted of Sparky’s murder to which she was driven
by a mixture of diehard republicanism, uncontrollable rage, loyalty to
Owen’s anti-treaty position and fear of her own sexuality. Judith’s mem-
ory of the murder hovers at the edge of her mind throughout the novel
to the extent that at one point she even re-enacts the murder scene with
Michael, using a hockey stick rather than a bayonet, though her family
fails to comprehend the meaning of this episode.
The one person who does not underestimate Judith is the old IRA
man, Patsy Flynn, himself treated as simple-minded and therefore innoc-
uous by those around him though, like Judith, he is far from harmless
since it is he who is responsible for James’s death at the end. Again,
Judith is the only one to know the truth about this event and again she
is disbelieved. As Christine St. Peters comments: ‘The choice of the
Cassandra-like Sister Judith as history’s witness is a brilliant metafictional
device. She tells truths no one believes and forgets facts that would chal-
lenge received political orthodoxies’.43 Judith’s presence underlines the
6 FRAIL OLD AGE 165
way in which Irish history was constructed after independence to present

a particular account of republicanism and to suppress stories that failed
to fit into the official histories. As Larry O’Toole, the Irish-American
millionaire intent on making a film that can be used as a front for IRA
fund-raising in America, tells James:
Even if your nutty nun’s got the truth, we don’t want it. We’re making a
film. We don’t want appendices and footnotes. Above all, we don’t want
material that doesn’t fit … We’re constructing a myth … We don’t give
a goddam about the truth. It does not set you free. It dissipates energies.
Myths unify.44
The truth, particularly when embodied in a seventy-five-year-old woman,

is revealed to be unnecessary, and thus, O’Faolain suggests that the Irish
will remain chained to the past and doomed to repeat it, a suggestion
reflected in the circular structure of her novel and the numerous parallels
between events in 1922 and 1979 (political killings, adultery, patriarchal
bullying), reinforced by the marginal presence in the novel of IRA veter-
ans and diehard Republican women such as Miss Lefanu-Lynch whose
political attitudes have failed to evolve from the 1920s, and indeed by
the recurrence of violence in the 1970s in Northern Ireland, which
Owen Roe hopes to exploit for his own political ends. O’Faolain’s por-
trait of Judith Clancy becomes emblematic of the way in which Irish
women have been constructed outside the official narrative of the Irish
nation and revealing of the way in which power mechanisms operate so
that the story of a frail, elderly woman can be held to be of no account.45
Edna O’Brien, House of Splendid Isolation (1994)

House of Splendid Isolation belongs to a trio of novels Edna O’Brien
(1930–) published in the 1990s exploring national issues. Previously
known, indeed notorious, for novels that challenged Irish Catholic and
nationalist pieties with their unflinching depictions of the harsh reali-
ties of women’s lives and in particular of punitive Irish attitudes towards
female sexual desire, in her 1990s novels O’Brien turned to exploring the
wider life of the Irish nation dealing with violent nationalism in House of
Splendid Isolation, the ‘X’ case in Down by the River (1996) and the hun-
ger for land in Wild Decembers (1999). A persistent theme in O’Brien’s
work has been a protest against the way in which rigid religious and
166 H. INGMAN
state ideologies silence other voices in the Irish nation. House of Splendid
Isolation, written just before the 1994 ceasefire, is partly recounted
through the voice of the frail octogenarian Josie O’Meara whose story
struggles to be told amidst the competing ideologies weighing on her
life, namely nationalism, Catholicism and a concept of masculinity that
involves exercising control over Irish women and their bodies.
Josie shares a certain cultural marginality with Molly Keane’s Swift
siblings in that she is the owner, albeit from Catholic peasant stock, of a
decaying Big House. Like O’Faolain’s Sister Judith, she possesses secrets
which, if told, would challenge the orthodoxies of the Irish family and
state and, like Judith, she finds herself embroiled in violent events when
a republican gunman, Frank McGreevy, said to be modelled on Dominic
McGlinchey, leader of the INLA, takes refuge in her house.46
When we first meet Josie, she is recovering at home after a bout of
pneumonia. The brisk but kind nurse who fixes up her bedroom so that
she can make tea in it possesses sufficient empathy to acknowledge that
Josie is better off in her own home than in residential care. At the same
time, Nurse Morrissey begrudges the class difference between them,
knowing that in the past Josie would have looked down on her: ‘this
woman once wouldn’t wipe the floor with her or her kind’.47 Like the
Swift siblings, Josie’s ageing body is matched by her ‘decrepit house’48
marking the end of the Big House way of life. On Josie’s wanderings
through the house, she observes that:
A warped and pitiless decrepitude has invaded every corner so that there
are flaking walls, missing stair-rods, stacks of damp and mildewed newspa-
pers and over a light switch, like some rustic fetish, a tranche of toadstools
ripening in the sun.49
Immediately after this description of her house, in an inversion of

Lacan’s mirror stage in which the infant (mis)recognizes his/herself as
whole, she is horrified by the sight of her own aged face in a mirror:
‘“Good God,” she says seeing the hoar face, her own, in the gilt mir-
ror, a reflection more pitiless than from the clouded handglass in her
bedroom’.50
Recounted in postmodernist style, through many different voic-
es—a Guard, the republican gunman, simple-minded Paud—and dif-
ferent styles—diary entries, poetry, myth, fable, an IRA volunteer’s
journal from 1921—House of Splendid Isolation is interleaved with
6 FRAIL OLD AGE 167
Josie’s memories of the past, a story at variance with the traditional

positioning of Irish Catholic women as chaste wives and mothers, sym-
bols of the purity of the Irish nation. Josie’s story includes an alco-
holic, physically abusive husband, the abortion of her husband’s child as
revenge for his treatment of her as a brood mare and a failed love affair
with a priest. Unlike Sister Judith, Josie is no diehard republican: her
story also includes her act of treachery to the republican cause in the
form of an anonymous tip-off to the Guards about the cache of arms
Paud was minding on their land, a betrayal that led directly to her hus-
band’s death. Despite Paud’s idealization of her, Josie is very far from
the Virgin Mary/Mother Ireland figure beloved of Irish nationalism.
A casual remark from Creena to the effect that old people know noth-
ing about young love sparks off Josie’s lengthy reminiscence about her
youthful passion for Father John. Nor is sex entirely confined to the past:
unusually in Irish writing, which generally presents the ageing female as
asexual, O’Brien is brave enough to describe moments when Josie feels
sexually attracted to McGreevy.
In the section ‘Captivity’, we enter directly into octogenarian Josie’s
consciousness as she lies alone in the Big House reviewing, in a frag-
mented and piecemeal way, the events of her life, a review shattered by
the gunman, Frank McGreevy, and his invasion of her home. From then
on, her story, partly recounted through her diary, is about her attempt
to preserve ownership of her house, and by extension herself, from
McGreevy’s depredations: ‘Her house seems so precious to her even in
its decay, her house should not have to suffer this … One single order
from his lot and walls, staircases, gongs and panelling will be no more’.51
In the same way that McGreevy believes he is fighting for ‘Personal iden-
tity. Racial identity’,52 under threat of death by his mere presence in her
house Josie feels an urgency to recover the deeper part of her identity
that has been lost through the long, unhappy years of her marriage: ‘in
spite of it all there used to be inside me this river, an expectation for
something marvelous. When did I lose it? When did it go? I want before
I die to be myself again’.53 As we saw in chapter three, this wish to
recover an essential self lost in the process of living is characteristic of the
ageing process with humanistic gerontologists like Erik Erikson (The Life
Cycle Completed, 1982), Lars Tornstam (Gerotranscendence, 2005) and
Henri Nouwen and W. J. Gaffney (Aging: The Fulfillment of Life, 1976),
emphasizing ageing as a time of growth towards a more realized self.
In her memoir, The Measure of My Days (1968), Florida Scott-Maxwell
168 H. INGMAN
talks of feeling a growing intensity as she ages, stating that ‘near the end
of my life … I am myself as never before’.54 House of Splendid Isolation,
portraying Josie’s life as containing the potential for deepening and
enriching even at this late stage, contains elements of Constance Rooke’s
Vollendungsroman, that is a novel of completion or winding up which
may have a special intensity due to the felt proximity of death.55
The story of the next five days becomes a power struggle between the
gunman and the woman of the house (‘Bean an Tighe’) during which
Josie, though still abhorring violence, finds herself coming closer to
understanding McGreevy’s point of view, particularly after the Guards
have ransacked her home. Influenced by his commitment to Ireland and
rejuvenated by his presence in the house, she considers making over her
house to young people, as a hostel for travellers, suggesting an opening
out of her life. McGreevy departs but, yearning for ordinary domestic
warmth and protection, returns to Josie’s house, knowing that even if
he wanted to he would be unable to escape the series of violent reprisals
and counter reprisals in which he is caught up: ‘If he quit and ran now,
what would he do, what was there – nothing else, nothing else. His life
was graphed by others and his deeds punished or rewarded by others’.56
As in No Country for Young Men, Irish history is presented as cyclical and
doomed to repeat itself. Josie feels trapped in a contemporary recurrence
of the cycle of violence that killed her Volunteer uncle in the 1920s at
the hands of the Black and Tans: ‘the dark threads of history looping
back and forth and catching her and people like her in their grip, like
snares’.57
In an act of resistance, Josie ritualistically cuts her hair, casting off her
role as an aging and frail female victim to the extent that in her long
raincoat she is mistaken for a second gunman. Notwithstanding her mas-
culine appearance, at this point Josie comes close to performing the tra-
ditional roles of woman of the house and Mother Ireland, being shot
while attempting to prevent McGreevy from being killed by the Guards
who raid her home a second time. Her death and the ruin of the Big
House converge: despite rejecting the role of passive female victim, Josie
ends by becoming entangled as much as McGreevy in the straitjacket of
republican narrative. As Diane Farquharson and Bernice Schrank have
argued: ‘although the components of progressive change may be pres-
ent in House of Splendid Isolation, they have not yet combined so as to
enable the emergence of a future significantly different from the past’.58
The Irish political context prevents House of Splendid Isolation from
6 FRAIL OLD AGE 169
becoming a satisfyingly complete Vollendungsroman yet, by placing Josie

at the heart of her narrative about the link between violent republicanism
in the 1920s and the resurgence of violence in Northern Ireland in the
1970s O’Brien, like O’Faolain in No Country for Young Men, insists on
the central importance of the life of an ageing woman to the public life
of the Irish nation.
Jennifer Johnston, Foolish Mortals

The early novels of Jennifer Johnston (1930–) depict older men haunted
by their wartime experiences and handing on to the younger gener-
ation tales of militarism. In her first novel, The Captain and the Kings
(1972), Charles Prendergast re-enacts with the village boy, Diarmid, his
time fighting in the trenches with the British army during the First World
War. In an interview, Johnston explained how, though not strictly from
a Big House family herself, there were elements of this in her Protestant
family and her childhood was spent in ‘rather crumbly country houses
that one’s friends lived in, where people had time to sit down and talk
to you – old men would talk to you about the First World War, for
example’.59 With his conversations about the Napoleonic wars and bat-
tles in the Crimea, Charles takes a more romanticized view of war than
Minnie’s uncle Frank in Johnston’s following novel, The Gates (1973).
Frank, traumatized by his time in the First World War and overbur-
dened by the upkeep of his estate, self-medicates with alcohol. Charles
and Frank, both Anglo-Irish, live in decaying Big Houses that like the
houses in Time After Time and House of Splendid Isolation reflect the
bodily decrepitude of their owners. In The Old Jest (1979), the memories
of Nancy Gulliver’s grandfather, General Dwyer, rapidly descending into
senility, stretch back to the Boer War, and the Dwyer family home too is
reaching the end of its life.
Johnston is now acknowledged as one of the first Irish writers to write
about Irishmen in the British army—indeed the figure crops up again in
her later novels, Truth or Fiction (2009), in the thinly veiled portrait of
her father, Denis Johnston, and in Shadowstory (2011)—but from our
point of view these early novels are significant for their vivid portraits of
elderly men feeling abandoned by the changing times. In all her descrip-
tions of ageing ex soldiers, Johnston carefully presents the physical and
mental signs of old age—Charles’ stiffness, cramps, insomnia and grow-
ing mental confusion; Frank, prematurely aged through alcoholism,
170 H. INGMAN
with chilblains, watery eyes, insomnia and failing appetite; and General
Dwyer’s random hymn singing, petulance and refusal to feed him-
self when confined to bed. The old men are not all Anglo-Irish: in The
Gates Big Jim Breslin, over eighty and ‘now shriveled and almost weight-
less’,60 lives on memories of his time fighting for Ireland during the War
of Independence and the Civil War and laments the propensity of the
younger generation of Irish to leave the country.
Johnston’s novels of the following two decades, such as The Christmas
Tree (1981), The Railway Station Man (1984) and The Illusionist
(1995), look at the lives of young- and middle-aged Irish women finding
their voice, particularly their artistic voice, in a country where women
writers and artists were becoming more visible, while novels like Fool’s
Sanctuary (1987) and The Invisible Worm (1991) explore the lives of
women whose voices have been silenced by the forces of Irish history.
Two Moons (1998), a story of three generations of Irish women, traces,
through the consciousness of the eighty-year-old grandmother, Mimi,
the social forces that narrowed and shaped the lives of an earlier genera-
tion of women. Mimi’s daughter, Grace, is a successful actress so preoc-
cupied throughout the novel in rehearsals for playing Hamlet’s mother
that she decides to shelve the problem of what to do with the increas-
ingly fragile and confused Mimi until after the play is under way. Grace
illustrates the tensions between women’s caretaking role and their pro-
fessional lives, sandwiched as she is between the demands of her some-
times hostile daughter Polly in London and the needs of her mother
with whom she shares the old family home in Dublin. Torn between
wanting to keep Mimi safe and her desire to continue pursuing act-
ing opportunities outside the country but refusing to contemplate the
idea of a nursing home for her mother, by the end of the novel Grace
has turned down the offer of a role in New York and planned to stay
at home to care for Mimi. Like the grown-up children in Enright’s The
Green Road, Grace takes some time to come to the realization that the
caring role is now reversed: ‘My mother looks so small, thought Grace.
How is it that I have kept my eyes shut for so long? Small, frail, a bit
crazy. She is under my protection now. I am becoming the mother, she
the child’.61
Mimi’s life, unlike that of her daughter, has been confined to the
domestic roles of wife and mother. She comments:
6 FRAIL OLD AGE 171
My expectations, like most of the women of my generation, were negligi-

ble; a family, a reasonable life, safety, with luck, for ever. In return we ran
good homes, were loyal wives, loving mothers, smiled at the right people;
we saw our men right. It sounds pretty despicable now, but then it was the
natural scheme of things.62
Two Moons explores Mimi’s regrets over her long unhappy marriage
to the suppressed homosexual Benjamin and her end of life renewal
through her encounter with a friendly messenger angel, Bonifacio.
‘I have a lot of things in my head that need seeing to’, Mimi tells her
daughter.63 Grace fears that her mother is going crazy with her talk
about Bonifacio, but the novel thwarts the reader’s acceptance of this
judgement by drawing parallels between Mimi’s inner life and Grace
living inside her head as she prepares to act Gertrude. Bonifacio, who
sometimes merges with her memory of Benjamin, facilitates Mimi’s life
review, enabling her to face the past, unlock the secret of her unhappy
marriage and forgive Benjamin for his withheld secrets, ‘good house-
keeping’, as he calls it.64 Bonifacio also sustains her through a minor
stroke and gently prepares her for death. Though Mimi is only one of
the voices in the novel, her conversations with Bonifacio vividly evoke
the undimmed interiority of a woman so physically frail that she seems
like ‘a shadow’, who moves with difficulty and whose age makes her
socially invisible: ‘People looked through her now’.65 By conveying
the intense inner life of a woman believed by others to be fading fast,
Johnston forces her readers to reconsider their attitudes towards socially
marginalized older people.
Unlike Mimi, Tash in Foolish Mortals (2007) has been able to pur-
sue her artistic vocation even if this has come at the expense of her rela-
tionship with her two sons whom she has always put second to her work
and from whose emotional demands she has been careful to insulate her-
self: ‘You never minded me, Tash’, one of these sons, Henry, tells her.66
Although Foolish Mortals is told through many different voices and is pri-
marily focused on Henry’s coming out as gay, one of the most power-
ful voices in the novel is that of Tash, the family matriarch still, in her
eighties, passionate about her painting. She is increasingly confused, eats
very little and, like Johnston’s earlier old soldiers, self-medicates with
alcohol. Johnston presents a vivid portrait of a temperamental, outspo-
ken and forceful woman battling increasing physical and mental frailty
but determined to continue living an independent life, as she explains to
172 H. INGMAN
her former daughter-in-law, Stephanie: ‘God, oh God how I hate being

old. One day, I know, you’ll lock me up, put me away in some sort of
home. But, and I say but now to you, if I get wind of your intentions I
will kill myself first’.67 When Stephanie suggests she should see a doctor,
Tash expresses her determination to die ‘unhelped by doctors’.68 Like
Claire in No More Windows, Tash has to battle against some powerful
counter-discourses in order to retain her autonomy and, like Claire, her
occasional flashes of anger may be interpreted as a reasonable response to
her situation.
Tash is more fortunate than Claire in being surrounded by people
who have known her for a long time and recognize that what she needs
above all is her independence and scope to preserve her identity as an
artist to the end. She has also been prescient enough to understand the
help she will need and to arrange it before she becomes entirely inca-
pacitated. Both Mr. Cook who drives her places and Mrs. Cook who
makes her meals ‘know her ways’, as Mr. Cook explains to Stephanie,
and are able to preserve the familiar routines of her daily life as nearly
as possible.69 Tash’s neighbour, Mavis, and her husband also check
on her daily. Being able to stay in her own home, with carers who are
familiar to her, enables Tash to feel safe even during her worst bouts of
paranoia.
All this does not, however, prevent Tash’s decline to the stage where
she is unable to paint because of arthritis in her hands:
‘Look,’ she screamed. ‘How can you paint with hands like that.’ Not only
were her arms shaking, but her hands were gnarled with arthritis, her fin-
gers like little stumps of branches, brown and withered. ‘How can I work?
How can I live, if I don’t work?’70
Nor does it prevent Stephanie from suggesting that Henry stage an

intervention to put the increasingly confused, angry and paranoid Tash
into a nursing home. Mavis warns him against this:
‘You wouldn’t be thinking of putting her into a home, would you?’

‘I haven’t really thought …’
‘Because I think that would kill her. So if you want to kill her do
that. Otherwise, I think we can all manage with things as they are. It
can’t be for too long. Poor old Tash.’71
6 FRAIL OLD AGE 173
The novel is very clear that family members are not always best equipped
to decide on the needs of their elderly relatives. Early in the novel, when
Tash embarks on a life review that is a rambling but at this stage essential
means of reinforcing to herself her personal identity, Stephanie cuts her
short, saying ‘We know, really we do, all about you’.72 If Foolish Mortals
is partly about Stephanie coming to terms with the knowledge that both
her former husband, Henry, and her son, Donough, are gay, it also tracks
her progress, firstly in coming to recognize that Tash really is ill and then
to understand the kind of help she needs. Preoccupied by their own var-
ious crises and misled by Tash’s preference for solitude, it takes family
members a while to see that her eccentricities and tendency to repeat her-
self have developed into full-blown dementia, as in Two Moons it takes
Grace nearly the length of the novel to recognize how much her mother
has deteriorated. In both novels, Johnston underlines the extent to which
frail, ageing family relatives may be neglected by a busy, preoccupied
younger generation, a theme which, in Foolish Mortals, gains in resonance
by being set in the context of a rapidly changing Celtic Tiger Ireland.
Eventually, Stephanie acknowledges that it is people like the Cooks,
involved in Tash’s daily life, who are best placed to understand how to
keep her safe and cared for while preserving her independence, much as
in Molly Keane’s novel, Loving and Giving, discussed in chapter three,
Aunt Tossie’s needs are more clearly met by the simple-minded servant,
William, who tends to her on a daily basis than by her niece and doctor
who try to overrule her wish to remain alone in her caravan. In Foolish
Mortals, in a development from the earlier scene where she abruptly
halted Tash’s reminiscences, Stephanie recognizes that Tash cannot be
separated from her home and her work since being surrounded by famil-
iar objects plays an important role in shoring up Tash’s increasingly shaky
hold on her personal identity:
She could not be taken away from her house, that was for sure, or her par-
aphernalia, her brushes, tubes, boards and canvases; and her memorabilia,
bits and pieces from her long life, who knew when she might want to sum-
mon up some tiny fraction of the past.73
The problem the family face is, in Henry’s words, how to protect Tash
and keep her safe without going against her wishes and putting her in a
nursing home, which might well kill her.
174 H. INGMAN
As Tash becomes increasingly demented and unable to recognize even

her family, Stephanie reflects on the burden elderly relations pose to
other family members: ‘She thought about all the people she had known
who had lingered on for years trampling on the love that people had had
for them, turning it into bitterness and tears’.74 Similarly Nancy in The
Old Jest, angrily observing the toll caring for her grandfather is taking
on her aunt Mary, wishes he would die ‘before we become damaged by
his decay’.75 Viewed in this light, Tash’s death on Christmas Day in the
midst of family celebrations is part of the novel’s happy ending, releasing
her sons, daughter-in-law and grandchildren to their own futures. It is
also a happy release for Tash whose future care was due to be decided by
her family on St Stephen’s Day, underlining her loss of autonomy over
her own life. As George, her other son, says she died ‘in the nick of time.
If you believed in God you could say that he rescued her, but if, like me,
you don’t, she just dropped off the tree. Wasn’t she lucky?’76
In her portrayal of Tash, Johnston accurately captures a swift descent
into dementia, with all its confusion, paranoia and even hostility towards
family members. The final interior monologue, to which only we as read-
ers are privy, finely conveys Tash’s almost Beckettian confusions over lan-
guage and identity:
Do I know who I was?

What did I do with my life?
What is life?
Another word.
Why am I sitting here in my best clothes?
Why am I?77
In the circumstances, Tash is fortunate to have had understanding carers

like the Cooks and her neighbour, Mavis, and to have avoided the slow,
lingering decline suffered by Claire in No More Windows that is all too
often the fate of dementia sufferers.
All four novelists discussed in this chapter underline the fact that,
however, confused and fragile their elderly characters may be, and how-
ever despised and ignored by the society around them, they all yet retain
a powerful sense of their own individuality. The novels effectively fore-
close, however, any notion of end of life serenity or sense of comple-
tion: dementia in the case of Claire and Tash, the Irish political situation
in the case of Josie, and a combination of both mental frailty and Irish
6 FRAIL OLD AGE 175
politics in the case of Judith, combine to prevent this. It is noteworthy

that in this chapter the uncomfortable topic of frail older people is, with
the exception of Johnston’s early novels, presented through the eyes of
female protagonists.78 Is this apparent gender bias a reflection of the
slightly longer life expectancy for Irish women than for Irish men, is it
due to a wish, particularly in the novels of O’Faolain and O’Brien, to
interrogate the figure of Mother Ireland, or does it indicate that anxieties
about extreme old age are still often projected onto women?79 Whatever
the case, the gender balance will be redressed in the epilogue discuss-
ing the portrayal of bedbound and dying patriarchs in Samuel Beckett’s
Malone Dies (1951), Iris Murdoch’s Bruno’s Dream (1969) and John
Banville’s Infinities (2009).
Notes
1. Iris Murdoch, An Unofficial Rose (London: Vintage, 2000), 12.
2. Erik Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998),
105–6.
3. Erikson, The Life Cycle Completed, 113.
4. Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of
Reason’, in Feminist Epistemologies, ed. Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter
(New York and London: Routledge, 1993): 187–216 (196).
5. Margreet Bruens, ‘Dementia: Beyond Structures of Medicalization and
Cultural Neglect’, in Ageing, Meaning and Social Structure: Connecting
Critical and Humanistic Gerontology, ed. Jan Baars, Joseph Dohmen,
Amanda Grenier, Chris Phillipson (Bristol: Policy Press, 2014), 81–96 (91).
6. Heike Hartung, Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature:
Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman (New York and London:
7. Gerardine Meaney, ‘Women and the Novel, 1922–1960’, forthcoming in
A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature, ed. Heather Ingman and
Cliona O’Gallchoir (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
8. Norah Hoult, There Were No Windows [1944] (London: Persephone
Books, 2005), 338.
9. Douglas Goldring, South Lodge: Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox
Ford and the English Review Circle (London: Constable, 1943), xiii.
10. Goldring, South Lodge, 201.
11. Hartung, Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature, 179.
12. John Swinton, Dementia: Living in the Memories of God (Michigan and
Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans, 2012), 23.
13. Hoult, There Were No Windows, 13.
176 H. INGMAN
14. Hoult, There Were No Windows, 11–12.

15. Jeannette King, Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism (New York
and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 43–53.
16. Swinton, Dementia, 59.
17. King, Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism, 45–6.
19. Swinton, Dementia, 82–3.
21. Swinton, Dementia, 53.
22. Hoult, There Were No Windows, 277. There are interesting points of com-
parison with Scar Tissue (1993), a novel by the Canadian writer, Michael
Ignatieff, in which the narrator seeks to uncover the self he believes his
Alzheimer’s stricken mother still possesses, notably in those passages
where he insists on respecting his mother’s personal identity in the face of
the obfuscating and depersonalized jargon of the medical profession.
23. Tom Kitwood, ‘Frames of Reference for an Understanding of Dementia’,
in Ageing and Later Life, ed. Julia Johnson and Robert Slater (London:
Sage, 1993), 100–6.
30. Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Preface to The Demon Lover (1945)’, in The Mulberry
Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed. Hermione Lee (London: Vintage,
1999), 95.
31. Bowen, Preface to The Demon Lover (1945), 97.
32. Bowen, Preface to The Demon Lover (1945), 97.
33. Hannah Zeilig, ‘The critical use of narrative and literature in gerontol-
ogy’, International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 6 (2), 2012: 7–37. I
am grateful to Gerardine Meaney’s signposting of this article.
34. Robert F. Garratt, Trauma and Irish History: The Return of the Dead
(New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 37.
35. Julia O’Faolain, No Country for Young Men (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1980), 12.
36. O’Faolain, No Country for Young Men, 55. The vulnerability of the insti-
tutionalized elderly to being moved against their will is a central theme in
Sebastian Barry’s novel, The Secret Scripture (2008).
37. O’Faolain, No Country for Young Men, 55.
6 FRAIL OLD AGE 177

41. Lynne Segal, Out of Time: The Perils and Pleasures of Ageing (London:
Verso, 2013), 4.
43. Christine St. Peter, Changing Ireland: Strategies in Contemporary
Women’s Fiction (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 84.
45. In Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture (2008), the narrative the aged
Roseanne McNulty constructs of her life is, like Judith’s, a story that
has been suppressed in the official narratives of Irish history. Unlike
O’Faolain’s No Country for Young Men, the ending of Barry’s novel
stressing the therapeutic value of Roseanne’s life review suggests a too
easy resolution of the suffering such marginalization entailed. On this
point, see Tara Harney-Mahajan, ‘Provoking Forgiveness in Sebastian
Barry’s The Secret Scripture,’ New Hibernia Review 16 (2), 2012: 54–71.
46. Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since
1969: (De-)Constructing the North (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003),
248. Details of O’Brien’s research for this novel are given in her memoir,
Country Girl (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 236–49.
47. Edna O’Brien, House of Splendid Isolation (London: Orion, 1995), 23.
48. O’Brien, House of Splendid Isolation, 60.
54. Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days [1968] (New York:
Penguin, 1979), 19.
University Press of Virginia, 1993), 204–25.
58. Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on Edna O’Brien, ed. Lisa Colletta and Maureen
O’Connor (Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 112.
59. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl, ed. John Quinn (London:
Methuen, 1986), 59.
60. Jennifer Johnston, The Gates [1973] (London: Headline, 1998), 55.
61. Jennifer Johnston, Two Moons (London: Headline, 1998), 196.
62. Johnston, Two Moons, 192.
178 H. INGMAN

66. Jennifer Johnston, Foolish Mortals (London: Headline, 2007), 82.
67. Johnston, Foolish Mortals, 61.
73. Johnston, Foolish Mortals, 218–19.
75. Jennifer Johnston, The Old Jest [1979] (London: Fontana, 1984), 33.
78. In two recent novels by Irish male writers, Joseph O’Connor and
Sebastian Barry, the experience of frail old age is again portrayed
through the eyes of female protagonists, the hundred-year-old Roseanne
McNulty in Barry’s The Secret Scripture and O’Connor’s fictionalization
of the last days of Molly Allgood in Ghost Light (2010), discussed at
length by Margaret O’Neill in ‘“This Is How Time Unfolds When You
Are Old”: Ageing, Subjectivity and Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light’, in
Reimaginings, ed. Cathy McGlynn, Margaret O’Neill, and Michaela
Schrage-Früh (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 289–303.
79. See King, Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism, 53.
Bibliography
Barry, Sebastian. 2008. The Secret Scripture. London: Faber and Faber.
Bowen, Elizabeth. 1999. The Mulberry Tree: Writings of Elizabeth Bowen, ed.
Hermione Lee. London: Vintage.
Bruens, Margreet. 2014. Dementia: Beyond Structures of Medicalization and
Cultural Neglect. In Ageing, Meaning and Social Structure: Connecting
Critical and Humanistic Gerontology, ed. Jan Baars, Joseph Dohmen,
Amanda Grenier, Chris Phillipson, 81–96. Bristol: Policy Press.
Colletta, Lisa, and Maureen O’Connor, eds. 2006. Wild Colonial Girl: Essays on
Edna O’Brien. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Garratt, Robert F. 2011. Trauma and Irish History: The Return of the Dead.
New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Goldring, Douglas. 1943. South Lodge: Reminiscences of Violet Hunt, Ford Madox
Ford and the English Review Circle. London: Constable.
6 FRAIL OLD AGE 179
Grosz, Elizabeth. 1993. Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of
Reason. In Feminist Epistemologies (Thinking Gender), ed. Linda Alcoff and
Elizabeth Potter, 187–216. New York and London: Routledge.
Hartung, Heike. 2016. Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature:
Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman. New York and London: Routledge.
Hoult, Norah. 2000. There Were No Windows. London: Persephone Books.
Johnston, Jennifer. 1984. The Old Jest. London: Fontana.
Johnston, Jennifer. 1998. The Gates. London: Headline.
Johnston, Jennifer. 1998. Two Moons. London: Headline.
Johnston, Jennifer. 2007. Foolish Mortals. London: Headline.
Kennedy-Andrews, Elmer. 2003. Fiction and the Northern Ireland Troubles since
1969: (De-)Constructing the North. Dublin: Four Courts Press.
Kitwood, Tom. 1993. Frames of Reference for an Understanding of Dementia.
In Ageing and Later Life, ed. Julia Johnson and Robert Slater, 100–6.
London: Sage.
Murdoch, Iris. 2000. An Unofficial Rose. London: Vintage.
O’Brien, Edna. 1995. House of Splendid Isolation. London: Orion.
O’Brien, Edna. 2012. Country Girl: A Memoir. London: Faber and Faber.
O’Connor, Joseph. 2010. Ghost Light. London: Harvill Secker.
O’Faolain, Julia. 1980. No Country for Young Men. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
O’Neill, Margaret. 2017. ‘This Is How Time Unfolds When You Are Old’:
Ageing, Subjectivity and Joseph O’Connor’s Ghost Light. In Ageing Women
in Literature and Visual Culture: Reflections, Refractions, Reimaginings, ed.
Cathy McGlynn, Margaret O’Neill, and Michaela Schrage-Früh, 289–303.
New York: PalgraveMacmillan.
Quinn, John, ed. 1986. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl. London:
Methuen.
Scott-Maxwell, Florida. 1979. The Measure of My Days. New York: Penguin.
Segal, Lynne. 2013. Out of Time: The Perils and Pleasures of Ageing. London:
Verso.
St. Peter, Christine. 2000. Changing Ireland: Strategies in Contemporary
Women’s Fiction. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Swinton, John. 2012. Dementia: Living in the Memories of God. Michigan and
Cambridge, UK: William B. Eerdmans.
Zeilig, Hannah. 2012. The critical use of narrative and literature in gerontology.
International Journal of Ageing and Later Life 6 (2): 7–37.
CHAPTER 7
Epilogue: The Bedbound and Dying
After frail old age, the logical next step is the bedbound and dying.
Though not strictly speaking a study of dying, this account of ageing
in Irish writing would be incomplete without some reference to thana-
tology and accordingly the book concludes with discussion of the bed-
bound in Iris Murdoch’s Bruno’s Dream (1969), and John Banville’s
Infinities (2009), prefaced by a brief discussion, for purposes of com-
parison, of Samuel Beckett’s seminal thanatological novel, Malone Dies
(1951). This period of life is radically different from the experience of
the protagonists in the novels discussed in the previous chapter. Frail and
confused though they may be, characters like Claire, Judith, Josie and
Tash continue to have some interaction and communication with the
outside world. This later stage is, in Malone’s words, ‘that kind of epi-
logue when it is not very clear what is happening and which does not
seem to add very much to what has already been acquired or to shed any
light on its confusion, but which no doubt has its usefulness, as hay is left
out to dry before being garnered’.1 The aim of this epilogue is to deter-
mine whether, if this stage of life does have its ‘usefulness’, what that
usefulness, or meaning, might be.
Thanatology is a rather newer discipline than gerontology. The enor-
mous death tolls of the First and Second World wars returned the issue of
death to philosophy in the writings of Martin Heidegger (Being and Time,
1927), Emanuel Levinas (Time and the Other, 1947) and Jean-Paul Sartre
(Being and Nothingness, 1943). The Meaning of Death (1959), edited by
Herman Feifel, was crucial in developing a methodology of thanatology

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96430-0_7
182 H. INGMAN
and in challenging academicians and clinicians to explore the way in which

humans cope with dying and loss. Feifel was a pioneer in the death aware-
ness movement that developed from the 1950s onwards focusing on car-
egiving practices and the importance of acknowledging grief. Another
important intervention in the field was Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s widely
cited work, On Death and Dying (1969), outlining six stages of com-
ing to terms with death (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, accept-
ance, hope), but it was not until the 1970s, with the rise of the Death
with Dignity movement in the USA that thanatology, or the science of
death, really began to develop as a subject for study. In The Inner Life of
the Dying Person (2014), Allan Kellehear argues that: ‘We are at the begin-
ning of our serious exploration of the human encounter with death’.2
Kellehear’s book is devoted to describing the experience of dying from
the point of view of the participant rather than of onlookers such as family,
friends, carers and medical professionals. He argues that because of medical
advances people may now know about their imminent death for a consid-
erable period before their actual demise and it is this period that interests
him: ‘Dying – the final and normal period of living – is underinvestigated’.3
As a result of interviewing patients about to die, Kellehear argues that for
people who know they are going to die shortly: ‘This knowledge changes
the way they experience the world—emotionally, socially, spiritually, and
more often than not, totally’.4 Often it provokes a desire to reorientate
one’s life, a wish to understand the purpose and meaning of one’s life and
to make sense of the ending, as we saw in chapter four is the case with
Elizabeth Reegan in John McGahern’s The Barracks. Kellehear discovered
that, while sadness and horror may be common reactions among family
and carers, the person dying may not feel like that:
Instead, dying people commonly report a diversity of positive themes and

meanings. In fact, existing studies of the human dying experience suggest
that the road to death tends to erode habit, pretense, preconception, and
even fear in one’s usual character to reveal deeper and novel experiences in
personal direction, positive purpose, and social intimacy.5
Even more urgently than the ageing process the prospect of imminent
death, Kellehear’s study suggests, may prompt fresh inspirations, new
experiences and renewed outlooks and commitments, and provide an
opportunity to add deeper or different meaning to our lives, findings
borne out by Philip Gould’s memoir, When I Die: Lessons from the Death
7 EPILOGUE: THE BEDBOUND AND DYING 183
Zone (2012), where Gould testifies to life becoming more intense as he

approached death, leading to renewed closeness to loved ones, reassess-
ment of his life and even new hopes and aspirations:
Death is usually depicted as a time of decline, of growing irrelevance, as

the ending of growth, the cessation of contribution. To some extent those
things may be true. But for the dying themselves, like me, there is another
dynamic at work: the sheer intensity of death leads us to assess our world
in ways we have never done before …6
Gould adds: ‘And so my death became my life. And my life gained a kind
of intensity that it had never had before’.7 One only has to recall how
much emotional havoc Mme Fisher wreaks in young Leopold’s life in
Elizabeth Bowen’s novel, The House in Paris (1935), to recognize that
being bedbound does not necessarily equate with passivity.
In an Irish context, Kellehear’s optimism about the final stages of
life is somewhat modified by a recent TILDA survey of people dying
between 2009 and 2014 which found that about half experienced reg-
ular pain in the final year of their life, while 45% experienced prolonged
bouts of depression.8 Only 27% died at home, 11% in a hospice and one
in ten in a nursing home. Almost 46% died in hospital, a number higher
than the European average suggesting both that Irish people are not get-
ting the health care they need in the final stages of life and that death has
become removed and hidden away from daily life, a taboo subject.
The science of thanatology may be relatively new but of course writers
down the ages have sought to convey the dying experience and, given
the importance of the wake and other Irish rituals around death, it is not
surprising that literature on death and dying has played a central part in
the Irish canon though, as Bridget English points out in Laying Out the
Bones: Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel (2017), there is a pau-
city of major critical works on the topic. This epilogue focuses on three
Irish novels that attempt to describe what the experience of dying feels
like from the inside.
Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies (1951)

Representing a further point of decrepitude from the ageing figures of
Molloy and Moran in Beckett’s previous novel, Molloy (1950), Malone
Dies derives its power from the unwavering focus on the interior
184 H. INGMAN
consciousness of the dying Malone and his rapidly diminishing world.

Doing away with the linear narrative and the omniscient narrator that are
still present to some extent in Molloy, Beckett draws on modernist tech-
niques to underline the fact that, immobile, losing his capacity to hear
and later to speak, there is nowhere for Malone to go but inwards: ‘All
my senses are trained full on me, me’.9 The intensity of Malone’s inner
consciousness separates his active mind from his outwardly decaying
body in a Cartesian split that is a warning not to equate physical decline
with a vegetative state: ‘Words and images run riot in my head, pursu-
ing, flying, clashing, merging, endlessly’.10 Malone insists: ‘I do not want
to sleep. There is no time for that in my timetable … Coma is for the
living’.11
In his study of the dying, Kellehear observes that: ‘people waiting to
die can creatively make new emotional and spiritual spaces inside them-
selves’.12 This is what happens with Malone: confronted by his imminent
demise, he plans to distract himself by means of a carefully worked out
timetable consisting of relating four stories, later reduced in number, and
by making an inventory of his few remaining possessions. This, he trusts,
will see him out to the point of death (‘it is important not to finish’)13
and perhaps even delay the moment of death: ‘All is pretext … pretext
for not coming to the point, the abandoning, the raising of the arms and
going down, without further splash, even though it may annoy the bath-
ers. Yes, there is no good pretending, it is hard to leave everything’.14
The narrative deliberately runs counter to traditional Christian death-
bed scenes of love and reconciliation on the part of the dying person.15
Malone refuses to forgive anyone, indeed curses future generations, and
neither does he wish to review his life: ‘All my life long I have put off
this reckoning, saying, Too soon, too soon. Well it is still too soon’.16
Instead, endeavouring to maintain some sort of control over his life, he
intends to use storytelling to keep death at bay.
Moving seamlessly between the pain-filled present and Malone’s
blackly comic stories of Saposcat, Macmann and Lemuel that provide
intriguing echoes of his own situation, Malone Dies evokes the last weeks
of a dying man with powerful precision. The reader is spared no detail
of Malone’s physical state. Though his arms are capable of some move-
ment, he lies immobile on his back: ‘My body is what is called, unadvis-
edly perhaps, impotent. There is virtually nothing it can do’.17 His sight
and hearing are both ‘very bad’.18 His physical pain is evoked with strik-
ing lyrical intensity: ‘I feel, deep down in my trunk, I cannot be more
explicit, pains that seem new to me. I think they are chiefly in my back.
They have a kind of rhythm, they even have a kind of little tune. They
are bluish’.19 By the end, he cannot even turn his head: ‘My head. On
fire, full of boiling oil … Incandescent migraine’. His emotions fluctuate
between anger at others (‘I forgive nobody. I wish them all an atrocious
life’)20 and rage at his situation (‘If I had the use of my body I would
throw it out of the window’).21 His mental confusion is such that he
does not understand where he is, what time it is or recognize any of his
carers. He does not even know his exact age.
Though by this stage Malone is barely aware of his surroundings,
he does possess a residual attachment to certain, random objects still in
his possession, some of which have featured in Molloy: among others, a
hooked stick to draw objects towards his bed, a boot, the bowl of a pipe,
a needle stuck into two corks, a bloodstained club, a brimless hat, a scrap
of newspaper, a photograph of an ass, two pencils, an exercise book.
He gradually reduces these to the pencils and the exercise book. The
attachment of the very old to a few cherished possessions, as if denoting
identity, has often been observed by gerontologists.22 In There Were No
Windows, Claire prizes her books as reminders of her former identity as
a writer even though she can no longer write and barely has the atten-
tion to read any more. Douglas Goldring describes in his memoir, South
Lodge, on which Hoult drew for her novel, Violet Hunt’s obsessional
attachment to ancestral documents, and books and pictures of long dead
celebrities she had known.
Objects function rather differently in Malone Dies since at this stage of
his life Malone has forgotten which, if any, memories adhere to them. In
her reading of Beckett’s novel Kathleen Woodward, noting the recurring
imagery in Malone’s monologue likening death to childbirth (‘the world
that parts at last its labia and lets me go’23) interprets Malone’s attitude
to objects in the light of Donald Winnicott’s theory of the ‘transitional
object’ in infancy whereby the young child clings to an object, such as
a blanket or a teddy bear, to help him transition away from the mother
and into the objective world. In Woodward’s reading, Malone stages this
transference in reverse, as disintegration rather than individuation, since
he abandons all his possessions and remains attached only to his exer-
cise book containing a record of his present sufferings, his reminiscences
and stories, ‘fictions that yield a measure of illusion and control’.24 His
gradual detachment from the world of things (it is a catastrophe when
he drops his hooked stick but he is soon reconciled to it) reflects, in
186 H. INGMAN
Woodward’s account, the withdrawal of the I into an intermediate space

prior to death, in the same way as Malone’s stories are filled with char-
acters substituting for himself: ‘What we see represented in the fictional
world of Malone Dies is that the indeterminate state of being at the end
of the character’s life mirrors the intermediate area of infancy as the-
orized by Winnicott’.25 All that Malone has left is his exercise book, a
metonym for language that provides the bridge between life and death.
The story of Saposcat (or Sapo), ‘the eldest child of poor and sickly
parents’,26 may or may not be Malone’s alter ego (‘I wonder if I am
not talking yet again about myself. Shall I be incapable, to the end, of
lying on any other subject?’).27 In any case, it is difficult for the suffer-
ing Malone to focus consistently on his story: ‘Already I forget what
I have said … Soon I shall not know where Sapo comes from, nor what
he hopes’. The solution to this increasing forgetfulness is to be on his
guard, ‘reflecting on what I have said before I go on and stopping, each
time disaster threatens, to look at myself as I am’.28 However, contem-
plating his present situation is exactly what he wants to avoid. Between
distracting himself with storytelling and getting confused by his stories
(for example, over the question of Sapo’s non-expulsion from school),
there seems no easy solution. Malone oscillates between telling stories
and telling his own story as Beckett’s modernist techniques dovetail with
his subject matter to render an already unreliable narrative even more
unreliable due to the confusions of old age.
At times, storytelling seems almost beyond Malone’s capacities: ‘In
his country the problem – no, I can’t do it. The peasants. His visits to.
I can’t’.29 A few pages later, after anchoring himself with a detour into
his present and a list of some of the objects in his possession, he solves
his problem by introducing the Lamberts without explanation. He also
decides, illustrating the resourcefulness of old age, to overcome the con-
fusions of memory by writing down his stories: ‘I did not want to write,
but I had to resign myself to it in the end. It is in order to know where
I have got to, where he has got to. At first I did not write, I just said the
thing. Then I forgot what I had said. A minimum of memory is indis-
pensable, if one is to live really’.30
Modernist emphasis on the fluidity of human identity plays into
the transformation of Sapo into the adult, Macmann (‘son of man’),
a vagrant eventually confined to St. John of God’s asylum where he is
initially bedbound, like Malone, and tended to by an elderly woman,
Moll, and after her death by Lemuel. Running out of energy as he suffers
what appears to be a stroke and death approaches, Malone tires of his

characters and has Lemuel arbitrarily kill off most of them. Lemuel,
Macmann and the rest of the survivors drift out to sea in a boat while
Malone himself, speaking in shorter, broken sentences, lapses into
unconsciousness. As the stories of Molloy and Moran coalesced in Molloy
so, by the end of Malone Dies, the story of Malone and of his creation,
Sapo/Macmann, converge. Failing to ward off death, Malone’s stories
ultimately return him to himself and to his dying. His language breaks
down at the end into fragments representing the final dissolution of
identity in a way that, as Julie Campbell has noted, involves the reader in
the act of dying:
Death is a traditional ending for many narratives, but the metaleptic play of
Malone Dies achieves something far more involving for the reader. We are
not placed outside the death as detached observers, but become as if a part
of it on both the narrative and the diegetic levels … What Beckett could be
said to have achieved here is something that is simultaneously frightening
and magical: he has brought us face to face with death.31
This is not dying seen from the point of view of the onlooker but dying
as felt by a dying person and, as Kellehear has pointed out, the expe-
rience is very different. However, while Kellehear and Gould speak
of dying as bringing new challenges and a deeper appreciation of life,
in Malone’s case death defeats his efforts to find meaning in human
existence.
Malone Dies represents a turning point in Beckett’s stylistic develop-
ment, one that, as Sinéad Mooney has argued, is inextricably connected
with his presentation of the dying Malone: ‘It is … the final decay of the
body that strands Malone, and the Beckett narrators to come, in a universe
of pure language’.32 His next novel, The Unnameable (1952), presents
simply a disembodied voice in a post-mortem limbo, condemned to go on
telling stories while longing for silence: in this sense, it might be said that
Beckett’s thanatological novel has prompted aesthetic innovation.
Iris Murdoch, Bruno’s Dream (1969)

Beckett’s influence on Iris Murdoch’s early novels is well documented.
David Gordon sees both writers as ‘seeming to take up a position beyond
the end of civilization and to write about and for survivors of some
188 H. INGMAN
sort of catastrophe that has already taken place and broken the thread
of historical continuity’.33 Many of Murdoch’s novels are anchored by
reference to the Holocaust but Bruno’s Dream seems especially timeless,
opening in Beckett-like fashion with several pages of interior monologue
from the more or less bedbound octogenarian Bruno. There are precise
physical details of Bruno’s disintegration: he can still shuffle to the lava-
tory next door but his progress is painfully slow; his physical appearance
horrifies visitors; internalizing ageist stereotypes, he likens himself to a
smelly, emaciated monster with an outsize head and he can no longer
bear to look in the mirror. Like Malone, Bruno is surrounded by cer-
tain objects to which he still feels attached: the valuable stamp collec-
tion inherited from his father in which he feels little personal interest, his
books on spiders which represent his thwarted ambition to study zool-
ogy, the old red dressing gown that hangs on the door reminding him
that, except for his final journey, his travelling days are over.
Bruno is more aware of his surroundings than Malone and still able
to exert some control over his life to the extent that his wish for his
estranged son Miles to be summoned is granted. Amanda Grenier and
Chris Phillipson have underlined the importance of rethinking defini-
tions of agency in the ‘fourth age’ in the light of the complex realities
of illness and chronic physical and cognitive impairment at this stage of
life, in contrast to the more active agency of the ‘third age’ years: ‘We
wish to suggest that agency may be possible in the “fourth age”, but that
the forms or expressions of this agency likely differ from that currently
understood’.34 His son-in-law, Danby, acknowledges that his bedbound
state has misled him into writing off Bruno too soon:
Danby had come to feel that Bruno had settled down peacefully into the
last phase of his life, wanting simply to be left alone with his routine of
stamps and telephone and evening papers, with his eyes fixed, if not
upon eternity and the day of judgement, at least upon some great calm
and imminent negation which would preclude surprises, demarches, and
the unpredictable. He had underestimated Bruno, and when he suddenly
perceived the strength of will that still remained inside that big head and
shriveled body he had experienced a shock.35
Bruno himself, looking forward to the meeting with his son with a
mixture of fear and annoyance, is surprised at his capacity still to feel
emotion:
He also felt an excited touched surprise that such a complex of emotions

could still exist in such an old man. ‘Such an old man,’ he thought to him-
self until the tears came. He was pleased at these moments when he felt
that he had not been simplified by age and illness. He was the complicated
spread-out thing that he had always been, in fact more so, much more
so. He had drawn the web of his emotions back inside himself with not a
thread lost.36
Anticipating the arguments of Grenier and Phillipson on acknowl-
edging agency even in the bedbound, Murdoch is at pains to underline
that physical deterioration need not imply emotional stagnation or men-
tal decline. Danby insists that, despite occasional confusion due to his
medication, Bruno is ‘still a rational being’.37 He is at least as rational
as everyone else in a novel that portrays its main characters as living fan-
tasy-ridden lives, preferring to live on solipsistic illusions that feed their
egos, a process described by Murdoch as ‘the intrusion of fantasy, the
assertion of self, the dimming of any reflection of the real world’.38 A
crucial exchange on this topic takes place between Bruno and Lisa with
the former confessing:
‘At my age you live in your mind, in a sort of dream.’

‘I think we all do that.’
‘At the end there’s nothing left to do. It’s all just thought.’
‘Thinking is doing something.’39
Bruno’s Dream gains by being read in the light of Murdoch’s philo-

sophical work, The Sovereignty of Good, published a year after this novel,
in which she agrees with Freud’s assessment that human beings are fan-
tasy-ridden beings who prefer to preserve their illusions rather than to
look at the world as it really is and themselves as they really are. As Scott
Dunbar, the dedicatee of Bruno’s Dream observes in an article expound-
ing Murdoch’s philosophy: ‘Realism and truth are what we most avoid
because they are the enemies of fantasy and illusion’.40
In The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch describes fantasy as ‘the prolif-
eration of blinding self-centred aims and images’41 and introspection as
revealing ‘only the deep tissue of ambivalent motive’ in which ‘fantasy
is a stronger force than reason’.42 Endless focus on the self may lead,
as in Bruno’s case, to self-indulgent masochism. Murdoch explains the
process:
190 H. INGMAN
Even suffering can play a demonic role here, and the ideas of guilt and
punishment can be the most subtle tool of the ingenious self. The idea of
suffering confuses the mind and in certain contexts (the context of ‘sincere
self-examination’ for instance) can masquerade as a purification.43
Torturing himself with guilt over his past cruelty towards his wife, Janie,
his mistress, Maureen, and Parvati, his son’s Indian wife, Bruno suf-
fers from what Murdoch calls the ‘imagined inflation of the self’44 and
Dunbar describes as ‘the hazy cosmos of the ego’ which is ‘magnetic
and fascinating, and within its pliable domain the human consciousness
drifts unimpeded around the great grand central me’.45 A lot of the
motives Bruno imputes to his son Miles, for example, are simply false:
Miles never knew about Bruno’s mistress, Maureen, and therefore bore
his father no resentment on her account, yet Bruno, trapped in illusion
and self-absorption, continues to rehearse his guilty feelings: ‘These mil-
lion-times thought thoughts could still blind him, make him gasp with
emotion and absorb him into an utter oblivion of everything else. …
Was there no right way to think about those dreadful things, no way of
thinking about them which would bring resignation and peace?’46 A life
review that emphasizes suffering and guilt represents a form of fantasy
for Murdoch, since it nourishes the ego and increases self-absorption.
Feeling he has passed through life in a dream, Bruno yearns to awaken
from it: though lacking religious belief, he wonders whether there is any
point ‘in starting to think about it all now, in setting up the idea of being
good now?’47 Yet he remains ego-bound, unable to envision the future
‘unimaginable time when he would no longer be’.48
In The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch argues that love and com-
passion for something outside ourselves are ways of freeing our lives
from the endless cycle of illusion and fantasy; in this sense, the dying
Bruno becomes a touchstone for other characters’ encounter with
the real. Danby exercises a responsibility and kindness towards Bruno
that Bruno’s self-protective son, Miles, absorbed in tortured efforts to
recover his poetic vocation, is incapable of. However Danby, with his
easy enjoyment of life, only gets so far. Miles’s wife, Diana, is shocked
and repulsed by Bruno’s appearance and it is her sister Lisa’s compas-
sion and ability to focus her attention on Bruno the human being that
helps release Bruno from his futile cycle of regret and self-reproach.
Understanding the importance of physical contact for the dying, Lisa
touches and kisses him, advising: ‘Leave yourself. It’s just an agitating
puppet. Think about other things, think about anything that’s good’.49
It is this same quality of attention to the other outside herself that ena-
bles Lisa, who once was a nun and is now a teacher in a tough East End
school, to act rightly by going away when Miles falls in love with her.
‘It is in the capacity to love, that is to see, that the liberation of the soul
from fantasy consists’, Murdoch argues.50
The flood, which brings so many beneficent transformations in the
characters’ lives, changes Bruno both physically and mentally, making
him frailer but less self-obsessed and less tortured. From this point on,
he lives in the present moment and can talk only about inconsequential,
everyday matters: ‘the background of his mind seemed to have come
adrift’.51 He recognizes with renewed intensity that he has lived his
life in a dream, pursuing egotistic fantasies, whereas approaching death
brings with it the realization that only goodness matters: ‘It looks as if
it would have been easy to be kind and good since it’s so obvious now
that nothing else matters at all. But of course then one was inside the
dream’.52 Like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich who on his deathbed suddenly feels
compassion for his wife and son, Bruno wishes he could live life over
again with this new knowledge:
He had loved only a few people and loved them so badly, so selfishly. He
had made a muddle of everything. Was it only in the presence of death that
one could see so clearly what love ought to be like? If only the knowledge
which he had now, this absolute nothing-else-matters, could somehow go
backwards and purify the little selfish loves and straighten out the muddles.
But it could not.53
The novel is clear on the absence of an omniscient redeemer God, yet

there remains one demythologized moment of redemption for Bruno as
he realizes that his wife must have experienced similar feelings at the end
of her life and wanted to forgive him, though he had not given her the
chance. ‘“Janie, I am so sorry,” murmured Bruno. His tears flowed. But
he was glad that he knew, at last’.54 In the light of Plato’s view of life as a
pilgrimage from appearance to reality in his cave myth, which Murdoch
endorses in The Sovereignty of Good, for Bruno this epilogue to his life
(to borrow Malone’s description) has served some purpose with this final
recognition of his wife’s forgiveness.
This moment of transcendence allows us to put Bruno’s Dream
into Constance Rooke’s category of Vollendungsroman, the novel
192 H. INGMAN
of affirmation and serenity, featuring a protagonist poised between

this world and the next. As Rooke explains: ‘the act of completion
or winding up is always incomplete without some gesture of tran-
scendence’.55 In Bruno’s Dream, the flood provides a form of cleans-
ing for nearly all the characters and this, according to Rooke, is a
feature of Vollendungsromane: ‘Perhaps the most common image in the
Vollendungsroman is water, which generally signifies the flux and open
form of nature and is associated with the fear of death and the hope of
spiritual renewal’.56 Another characteristic of the Vollendungsroman,
according to Rooke, is an ‘elderly protagonist tormented by the memory
of characters who have died before some vital message could be delivered
or received’.57 After his understanding of Janie’s final message to him,
Bruno’s transitional object, his dressing gown, moves forward marking
his bridge between life and death.
In her study of Iris Murdoch’s fiction, Elizabeth Dipple calls
Murdoch’s portrayal of the successive stages of the dying Bruno’s last
few months ‘one of the most accurately observed pieces of thanatol-
ogy in our literature’.58 From the outset, death is a central theme in
Murdoch’s fiction, often acting as a catalyst for change: in The Italian
Girl (1965), Elsa’s death inspires positive changes in all the characters’
lives; in The Nice and the Good (1968), the death of his Indian teacher
compels Theo to reorientate his life towards a different conception of
the good; in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1970), the discovery that his
beloved father has cancer drives Tallis to concentrate his attention on
what has perhaps been, even more than his love for his wife, Morgan, the
central relationship of his life.
For some of Murdoch’s characters, only death is strong enough
to shake the complacent ego: in Henry and Cato (1976), the weak
but strangely touching failed poet, Lucius Lamb, grows in stature and
self-knowledge as his death becomes imminent while in The Unicorn
(1963), Effingham experiences a moment of selflessness when he fears he
is going to die in the bog: ‘with the death of the self the world becomes
quite automatically the object of a perfect love’.59 In an interview in
1985, Murdoch commented that: ‘In the case of Effingham, he has a
truthful vision of the world without the self, but of course he cannot sus-
tain it, it disappears from him’.60 She added that she believed people do
have such visions occasionally and that if they are fortunate the residue
may remain with them. As Lisa comments to Diana in Bruno’s Dream:
‘Death contradicts ownership and the self. If only one knew that all
along’.61 In Murdoch’s philosophy, attention to the real involves forget-

fulness of self and the moment when death is confronted is the supreme
moment of unselfing.
In his introduction to Bruno’s Dream, Robert Irwin suggests that the
entire action of the novel takes place in the dying Bruno’s conscious-
ness, an interpretation that aligns Murdoch’s novel more closely with
Beckett’s presentation of Malone.62 However, whereas in Malone Dies
Malone kills off most of the characters before the end and the rest drift
out to sea as Malone loses consciousness, in Bruno’s Dream such a read-
ing downplays the independence of other characters who experience
their own significant journeys from ego-based fantasies to a focus on
the real and an exercise of loving compassion. This is notably the case
with Bruno’s daughter-in-law, Diana. Diana’s sister, Lisa, who in the
past coped with their father’s death on her own, decides, after the trans-
formative flood, for ordinary human warmth and even worldly self-in-
dulgence, leaving Diana to exercise self-forgetfulness and take on the
painful reality of Bruno’s dying: ‘And it seemed to her as the days went
by and Bruno became weaker and less rational, that she had come to
participate in his death, that she was experiencing it too’.63 The sisters
have swopped places, underlining Murdoch’s belief that human beings
are incapable of attending to the real for any length of time and that it
will always be more natural for human beings to seek distraction. Lisa
chooses ordinary secular happiness with Danby while Diana at Bruno’s
bedside, experiencing death vicariously, takes on the disciplined fea-
tures that were formerly Lisa’s: ‘The helplessness of human stuff in the
grip of death was something which Diana felt now in her own body.
She lived the reality of death and felt herself made nothing by it and
denuded of desire. Yet love still existed and it was the only thing that
existed’.64 On this realization, the novel ends. Bruno has had his wish
granted to be loved one last time and in turn he has shown Diana, that
formerly complacent middle-aged woman absorbed in her fantasy life of
domestic perfection with Miles, a deeper view of life and death. This,
together with Bruno’s recognition of his wife’s forgiveness, is quite a lot
to achieve during months of what appears to onlookers to be prolonged
stagnation and is consonant with Kellehear’s findings that the period
immediately before death may give rise to a process of renewal and dis-
covery, and an opportunity to add deeper or different meaning to our
lives. To paraphrase Malone, the hay ‘left out to dry’ has indeed served
some purpose.
194 H. INGMAN
John Banville, the Infinities (2009)

The Infinities bears similarities with Malone Dies and Bruno’s Dream in
portraying the central character’s withdrawal into an intermediate space
prior to death. Dying Adam Godley’s doctors are quick to write him off
following his stroke: ‘the doctors blandly insist that nothing any longer
passes beyond the portals of Pa’s hearing’. His son, also called Adam,
is not so certain: ‘His father is in another kingdom now, far-off to be
sure, but may it not be that news from the old realm reaches him still?’65
Old Adam’s second wife, Ursula, also resists the doctors’ assessment:
‘For who can know but that Adam in some part of his mind might not
be awake in a way and experiencing wonders?… She is sure he is think-
ing, thinking away, she is sure of it’.66 Those closest to Adam defend
his personhood by refusing to collude in the medical diagnosis that his
consciousness has shut down. Hermes describes Adam as ‘in a state of
conscious but incommunicate ataraxia’, suggesting that Ursula and
Adam are correct in their judgement of continuing activity in the dying
man’s brain. This is confirmed when Adam opens his eyes briefly to look
at his wife, a moment of consciousness disbelieved by the doctors who
persist in describing him as in a vegetative state.67 A vegetative state is
the extreme point of the ageing process discussed in this study and yet
even here fiction has scope to underline the importance of continuing
to value personal identity; moreover, though ‘poised upon the point of
oblivion’,68 Adam still possesses some possibility of change and develop-
ment, as the novel bears out.
Befitting a theoretical mathematician who has solved the infinity prob-
lem of quantum physics (that is, certain types of calculation give infinite
results) in a way that has proved the existence of parallel universes, old
Adam in his aptly named Sky Room, inhabits a liminal place between this
world and the next: ‘There is a world of the living and a world of the
dead and he is suspended in a place between the two’.69 Adam, whose
fame has eclipsed that of Einstein, has been responsible for ‘a handful of
exquisite and unimpeachable paradoxes’ that ‘unlocked the sealed cham-
ber of time’,70 leading to, among other things, cars that run on brine,
the discrediting of theories of relativity and evolution, and the discovery
of ‘the infinite number of infinities’ and ‘a multitude of universes’. These
parallel universes intersect in the novel as Greek gods, notably Hermes
and Zeus, get involved in the action in Arden House (names, always
playful in Banville, are more than usually so in this novel) with Zeus
ravishing old Adam’s daughter-in-law, Helen, in the opening chapter and

Hermes, who facilitates this act, performing his usual role of go-between
between mortals and the gods.
Though most contemporary reviewers of the novel understood
the principal narrative voice, ‘this voice speaking out of the void’,71 to
be that of Hermes occasionally fused with old Adam and other voices
such as Ursula, his daughter Petra, and young Adam, in his reading of
The Infinities Mark O’Connell argues that the slippage of pronouns in
Hermes’s narrative hints at the action all taking place in old Adam’s
mind as he lies dying over the course of one midsummer day, in much
the same way as Robert Irwin has suggested that Bruno’s Dream takes
place in Bruno’s imaginings.72 At the beginning of the novel, Hermes
underlines Adam’s ego-bound reluctance to depart this world (in con-
trast to the gods who yearn to die):
Dying, yet he cannot conceive of a world from which he will have departed.
No, that is not right. He could conceive of it. He can conceive of anything.
Conception of impossible things is what he does best. He was ever pregna-
ble by the world. I note the shifting of tenses. What I should have said is
that he does not wish to conceive of a world from which, et cetera.73
If O’Connell’s reading is correct it suggests that Adam, like Malone, is

distracting himself from thoughts of his own demise by inventing stories.
However, Adam’s stories, unlike those of Malone, do not feature alter
egos but members of his own family and in that sense he moves beyond
Malone’s self-obsession into concern for those around him. In this inter-
pretation, the Banville protagonist finally overcomes self-absorption suffi-
ciently to imagine the lives of others.
Adam has not always been selfless: in the past family relationships
have always taken second place to his work. Neglect led his first wife,
Dorothy, to commit suicide, for which he remains, like Bruno, racked
with guilt. His emotional coldness and philandering have driven Ursula
to drink; his overbearing temperament has produced in young Adam a
son who is ineffectual, and in Petra, a daughter who self-harms to calm
the tumult in her head. He confesses to an inability to love, to get over
‘the gap of otherness’74 and asks ‘how can people go on being fully real
when they are elsewhere, out of his ken?’75 In a sense his narrative is an
answer to this question and by the end of it he begins to express love for
his family and even for his colleague, Benny: ‘I must be softening, here
196 H. INGMAN
at the end’.76 He moves from dread of his own absence from the world
to picturing life going on happily, if slightly fantastically, without him. It
seems that, as in Murdoch’s fiction, only the thought of imminent death
is strong enough to shake the complacent ego into imagining a world
without it. In his study of the dying, Kellehear observes:
An important way many dying people have coped with waiting is to take
a renewed, and sometimes new, interest in the welfare and care of others
around them. Some dying people realize that dying is not all about them
but rather about others. The centrality of others and their welfare becomes
an important insight in transcending the suffering of waiting. It transforms
the experience by linking passive acknowledgement of one’s own short life
to an active concern for the longer life and love of others. This rejoining
and recommitment to others is life affirming and transcending, and its
renewal is a surprising source of consolation and strength to the self.77
In O’Connell’s reading, Banville’s novel confirms Kellehear’s observa-

tions since the previously patriarchal and self-absorbed Adam takes a
renewed interest in the people around him. However, this interpretation
of the novel’s events as taking place entirely inside Adam’s mind lessens
the impact of Banville’s presentation of the liminal world of the dying
and the strongly individualized portraits of the gods, as well as those of
Adam’s family and friends. It also effaces the connection between Adam’s
mathematical discoveries, his ‘notorious Brahma equations’78 and the
opening up of interpenetrant worlds: ‘Since there are infinities, indeed,
an infinity of infinities, as he has shown there to be, there must be eternal
entities to inhabit them’.79 Both Ursula and Young Adam separately sense
invisible presences in Adam’s room, the Sky Room, which represents a
transitional space between the earthly family life going on beneath him
and the presences of the gods above, in much the same way as Kathryn
White sees Malone’s room, with people above and below him, as resem-
bling an in-between state of life and death.80 It might be more accu-
rate to read the two worlds of Adam and Hermes converging at points
throughout The Infinities as Adam moves from life into death, in the
same way as Malone’s stories converge with his present circumstances in
Beckett’s novel, so that by the end, it becomes impossible to disentan-
gle the voice of Adam from that of Hermes. This does not, however,
negate the fact that the passages which clearly express the thoughts of the
dying Adam move in the course of the narrative from an egotistic inabil-
ity to imagine the world without himself in it to acknowledgement of his
mistreatment of others (‘I have done many wrongs, to many people’),81

culminating in imaginative empathy with the lives of those around him.
The worlds of frail old age and of the bedbound and dying are in
many ways the most alien to the busy consumerist world of western
democracies like Ireland, yet the fiction discussed in this epilogue shows
the ability of even the bedbound to change and develop in rich and com-
plex ways. Identities are never static and we need in Ireland to shape a
fresh concept of the declining body in a way that rejects stigmatization,
acknowledges agency and permits the frailty of extreme later life to be
fully integrated into mainstream society.
Notes
1. Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies in The Beckett Trilogy (London: Picador,
1979), 213.
2. Allan Kellehear, The Inner Life of the Dying Person (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014), xi.
3. Kellehear, The Inner Life, xii.
4. Kellehear, The Inner Life, x.
5. Kellehear, The Inner Life, 13.
6. Philip Gould, When I Die: Lessons from the Death Zone [2012] (London:
Abacus, 2013), 111.
7. Gould, When I Die, 125.
8. Ronan McGreevy, ‘How Irish People Die: Many Suffer Unnecessarily in
the Final Year’, The Irish Times, 12 December 2017.
9. Beckett, Malone Dies, 171.
11. Beckett, Malone Dies, 178. A comparison may be drawn with the active
remembering of the Irish actress, Molly Allgood, as she lies bedbound
and dying in an English hospital in the penultimate chapter of Joseph
O’Connor’s, Ghost Light (2011).
15. For discussion of the use of Christian ars moriendi in Malone Dies, see
Erik Tonning, ‘Beckett’s Unholy Dying: From Malone Dies to The
Unnameable’, in Beckett and Death, ed. Steven Barfield, Matthew
Feldman, and Phillip Tew (New York: Continuum, 2009), 106–27 and
the subsequent discussion in Bridget English, Laying Out the Bones:
Death and Dying in the Modern Irish Novel (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 2017), 87–118.
198 H. INGMAN

22. Kathleen Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991), 137–8.
23. Beckett, Malone Dies, 174. Compare Adam Godley in John Banville’s The
Infinities feeling that he has ‘re-entered the embryonic state. Yes, that is
how it seems to him, that he is being born in reverse’ (London: Picador,
2009, 35–6).
31. Julie Campbell, ‘Playing With Death in Malone Dies’, Samuel Beckett
Today/Aujourd’hui 19, 2008: 431–39 (438–39).
32. Sinéad Mooney, Samuel Beckett (London: Northcote House, 2006), 34.
33. David J. Gordon, ‘Iris Murdoch’s Comedies of Unselfing’, Twentieth
Century Literature 36 (2), 1990: 115–36 (116).
34. See Amanda Grenier and Chris Phillipson, ‘Rethinking Agency in Late
Life: Structural and Interpretive Approaches’, in Ageing, Meaning and
Social Structure: Connecting Critical and Humanistic Gerontology, ed. Jan
Baars, Joseph Dohmen, Amanda Grenier and Chris Phillipson (Bristol:
Policy Press, 2014), 55–80.
35. Iris Murdoch, Bruno’s Dream [1969] (London: Chatto and Windus,
1970), 68–9.
36. Murdoch, Bruno’s Dream, 75.
38. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good [1970] (London and New York:
40. Scott Dunbar, ‘On Art, Morals and Religion: Some Reflections on the
Work of Iris Murdoch’, Religious Studies 14 (4), 1978: 515–24 (517).
45. Dunbar, ‘On Art, Morals and Religion’, 517.

University Press of Virginia, 1993): 204–25 (211).
56. Rooke, ‘Oh What a Paradise It Seems’, 222.
57. Constance Rooke, ‘Hagar’s Old Age: The Stone Angel as
Vollendungsroman’, in Crossing the River: Essays in Honour of Margaret
Laurence, ed. Kristjana Gunners (Winnipeg: Turnstone Press, 1998):
25–42 (33).
58. Elizabeth Dipple, Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit (London: Methuen,
1982), 175.
59. Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn [1963] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 167.
60. Jo Brans, ‘Virtuous Dogs and a Unicorn: An Interview with Iris
Murdoch’ (1985), in From A Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction:
Conversations with Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley (Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 2003): 155–66 (164).
65. John Banville, The Infinities (London: Picador, 2009), 12.
66. Banville, The Infinities, 19.
72. Mark O’Connell, John Banville’s Narcissistic Fictions (New York and
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 199–206.
200 H. INGMAN

80. Kathryn White, Beckett and Decay (New York: Continuum, 2009), 46.
Bibliography
Banville, John. 2009. The Infinities. London: Picador.
Beckett, Samuel. 1979. The Beckett Trilogy. London: Picador.
Brans, Jo. 2003. Virtuous Dogs and a Unicorn: An Interview with Iris
Murdoch. In From A Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction: Conversations with
Iris Murdoch, ed. Gillian Dooley, 155–66. Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press.
Campbell, Julie. 2008. Playing with Death in Malone Dies. Samuel Beckett Today/
Aujourd’hui 19: 431–39.
Dipple, Elizabeth. 1982. Iris Murdoch: Work for the Spirit. London: Methuen.
Dunbar, Scott. 1978. On Art, Morals and Religion: Some Reflections on the
Work of Iris Murdoch. Religious Studies 14 (4): 515–24.
Gordon, David J. 1990. Iris Murdoch’s Comedies of Unselfing. Twentieth
Century Literature 36 (2): 115–36.
Gould, Philip. 2013. When I Die: Lessons from the Death Zone. London: Abacus.
Grenier, Amanda, and Chris Phillipson. 2014. Rethinking Agency in Late Life:
Structural and Interpretive Approaches. In Ageing, Meaning and Social
Structure: Connecting Critical and Humanistic Gerontology, ed. Jan Baars,
Joseph Dohmen, Amanda Grenier, and Chris Phillipson, 55–80. Bristol:
Policy Press.
Kellehear, Allan. 2014. The Inner Life of the Dying Person. New York: Columbia
University Press.
Mooney, Sinéad. 2006. Samuel Beckett. London: Northcote House.
Murdoch, Iris. 1966. The Unicorn. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Murdoch, Iris. 1970. Bruno’s Dream. London: Chatto and Windus.
Murdoch, Iris. 2001. The Sovereignty of Good. London and New York: Routledge.
O’Connell, Mark. 2013. John Banville’s Narcissistic Fictions. New York and
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rooke, Constance. 1998. Hagar’s Old Age: The Stone Angel as

Vollendungsroman. In Crossing the River: Essays in Honour of Margaret
Laurence, ed. Kristjana Gunners, 25–42. Winnipeg: Turnstone Press.
Tonning, Erik. 2009. Beckett’s Unholy Dying: From Malone Dies to The
Unnameable. In Beckett and Death, ed. Steven Barfield, Matthew Feldman,
and Phillip Tew, 106–27. New York: Continuum.
White, Kathryn. 2009. Beckett and Decay. New York: Continuum.
Index
A and the short story, 21, 78, 125,

AE (George Russell), 41 128
Ageing and time, 3, 4, 6, 8, 19, 23, 29,
and ageism, 2, 5, 8, 17, 26, 59, 84, 31, 36, 39, 49, 51, 59, 67, 93,
87, 112, 148 107, 126, 135, 144, 158, 167
and age studies, 1, 23 Age studies, 1, 23
authenticity, 39, 67, 77, 84 Albright, Daniel, 40, 43, 53, 54
and the body, 11, 17, 22, 41, 42, Alzheimer, 2, 14, 18, 98, 117, 176
68, 110, 144 Amis, Kingsley, 11, 65
and capitalism, 2, 112 Anglo-Irish, 19, 60, 62, 63, 85, 128,
and the community, 9, 21, 68, 69, 132, 142, 155, 169, 170
91, 113–115, 126, 128, 131
and disability, 61–64
and emigration, 16, 115, 135 B
and feminism, 5, 8, 43, 78, 87, 148 Baars, Jan, 2, 4, 7, 23, 24, 26, 86, 97,
and gender, 1, 6, 8, 9, 11–13, 93, 117, 121, 148, 149, 175, 198
155 Banville, John, 19, 21, 23, 65, 81, 91,
and Ireland, 1, 11, 13, 15–18, 21, 100, 102, 103, 108–111, 116,
39, 59, 77 118, 133, 136, 175, 181, 196,
and Irish folklore, 34 198
and loneliness, 5, 11, 18, 91, 141 Eclipse, 21
and masculinity, 6, 19, 135 Infinities, 23, 181, 194, 198
and postmodernism, 51 Sea, The, 21, 102
and sex, 6, 38, 160, 167 Shroud, 21, 102, 103, 106
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license 203
to Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2018
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96430-0
204 Index
Barry, Sebastian, Secret Scripture, The, Certeau, Michel, 65

176–178 Chase, Karen, 30, 32, 34, 35, 51–53
Beauvoir, Simone de, 4, 5, 43, 65 Cicero
Coming of Age, The, 4, 5, 44, 65 De Senectute, 30
Beckett, Mary, 136 Cixous, Hélène, 9
‘Failing Years’, 138 Clare, Anthony, 71, 86
Beckett, Samuel, 19, 54, 175, 197 Coakley, Davis, 34, 52
Malone Dies, 9, 23, 181, 183–185, Cole, Thomas, 2, 23, 30, 51, 53, 85,
187, 193, 194, 197, 198 116, 121
Big House, the, 45, 60, 61, 63, 64, Corkery, Daniel, 21, 130, 131
166–168 ‘Carrig-an-Afrinn’, 130
Boland, Eavan, 79, 87 ‘Emptied Sack, The’, 130
Booth, Charles, 30, 32 ‘Looter of the Hills, A’, 130
Bornstein, George, 37, 52 ‘Refuge’, 131
Bourke, Angela, 34, 52 Coughlan, Patricia, 108, 120
Bowen, Elizabeth, 9, 20, 29, 43–47, Critical gerontology, 7, 13
49, 50, 55, 63, 103, 115, 155, Cultural gerontology, 7, 10–13, 19,
161, 183 67, 76
Eva Trout, 51, 55, 103
Heat of the Day, The, 44, 155
House in Paris, The, 183 D
Little Girls, The, 20, 29, 44–47, 50, Death, 3, 9, 10, 19, 22, 23, 29, 30,
55, 64, 115 34, 35, 38, 40, 41, 43, 44,
Boylan, Clare, 19 47–50, 61, 67–69, 75, 80, 81,
Beloved Stranger, 12, 25 85, 88, 93–96, 98–102, 105,
Brennan, Zoe, 11, 19, 54, 65, 85, 87 107, 110–115, 121, 126, 127,
Briggs, Julia, 155, 156 130, 132–136, 144, 146, 150,
Bruens, Margreet, 154, 175 153, 155, 157, 162, 164, 167,
Butler, Judith, 12 168, 171, 174, 181–187,
Butler, Robert, 4, 24, 39, 53, 93, 102, 191–194, 196–198. See also
116 Dying
Delaney, Paul, 143, 148, 149
Dementia, 2, 3, 16, 18, 26, 99, 125,
C 145, 147, 154, 155, 157–162,
Campbell, Julie, 187, 198 173–176
Carter, Angela, 11, 12 D’hoker, Elke, 139, 149
Catholic, 36, 41, 60, 79, 82, 110, Dipple, Elizabeth, 95, 117, 120, 192,
114, 130, 139, 142, 143, 155, 199
165–167 Dohmen, Joseph, 72, 86, 121, 149,
Catholic Church, 14, 110, 143, 163 175, 198
Catholicism, 36, 66, 68, 158, 162, 166 Dorcey, Mary, 22, 150
Celtic Tiger, 75, 77, 81, 143, 173
Index 205
‘Miss Callaghan’s Day Out’, G

145–147, 154 Gadow, Sally, 24, 85, 114, 116, 121
Dunbar, Scott, 189, 190, 198, 199 Gaffney, W.J., 3, 24, 85, 86, 167
Dying, 19, 20, 23, 29, 39, 43, 51, 63, Gallagher, Carmel, 112, 122
91, 95–97, 101, 109–112, 127, Garratt, Robert, 162, 176
129, 134, 140, 175, 181–184, Geriatrics, 30, 37
187, 190, 192–197. See also Gerontology, 1, 4, 7, 13, 19, 22, 24,
Death 30, 37, 67, 176, 181. See also
Critical gerontology; Cultural
gerontology; Humanistic geron-
E tology; Irish literary gerontology;
Ellmann, Richard, 30, 51, 148 Literary gerontology
English, Bridget, 19, 68, 85, 114, Gerontophobia, 2, 9, 59
121, 183, 197 Gerotranscendence, 3, 40, 67, 93,
Enright, Anne, 20, 22, 59, 78, 104, 109, 111
144, 170 Goldring, Douglas, 156, 175, 185
Gathering, The, 78 Gordon, David, 187
Green Road, The, 20, 78, 79, 83, Gould, Philip, 182, 197
84, 87, 104, 163, 170 Greer, Germaine, 5, 6, 43
‘Three Loves’, 78 Change, The, 5, 43
Erikson, Erik, 3, 24, 59, 67, 70, 84, Grenier, Amanda, 24, 86, 121, 141,
93, 116, 149, 153, 167, 175 149, 175, 188, 189, 198
Erikson, Joan, 2, 3, 61, 138, 149, Grosz, Elizabeth, 12, 62, 84, 154,
153 157, 175
Gullette, Margaret, 8, 19, 53
Gwynne, Joel, 12, 44, 54
F
Farquharson, Diane, 168. See also
Schrank, Bernice H
Fathers and Sons, 136, 140 Hand, Derek, 102, 118, 121
Feifel, Harman, 181 Harper, Sarah, 12, 25
Ford, Ford Madox, 156, 175 Hartung, Heike, 19, 155, 175
Fourth Age, the, 18, 22, 144, 154, Heaney, Seamus, 38, 42, 53, 134
155, 188 Hepworth, Mike, 10, 19, 24, 26, 85,
Freud, Sigmund, 4, 9, 72, 86, 94, 120
105, 136, 189 Hickey, Christine Dwyer, 22, 150
Friberg, Hedda, 104, 109, 118–120 ‘Teatro La Fenice’, 146, 147
Friedan, Betty, 4, 6, 43, 97 Hogan, Desmond, 22, 140
Fountain of Age, The, 6, 24, 43, 54, ‘Foils’, 141
59, 84, 117 ‘Mourning Thief, The’, 140
Frosh, Stephen, 105, 119 ‘Poltergeists’, 141
206 Index
Hortulanus, Roelof, 26, 112, 121, 122 King, Jeannette, 11, 12, 19, 54, 87,
Hoult, Norah, 161, 175, 176 158, 176
There Were No Windows, 22, Kitwood, Tom, 159, 176
153–156, 158, 162, 185 Kreilkamp, Vera, 60, 63, 84
Hughes, Eamonn, 114, 121 Kristeva, Julia, 136, 137, 148
Humanistic gerontology, 3, 7, 13, 67, Kübler-Ross, Elizabeth, 182
76, 97
Hunt, Violet, 156, 175, 185
L
Lacan, Jacques, 35, 100
I mirror stage, 9, 106, 166
Ignatieff, Michael, 176 ‘Late style’, 10, 37, 50
Scar Tissue, 176 Lavin, Mary, 125, 136–138, 140
Intergenerational understanding, 2 ‘Family Likeness, A’, 136
Irigaray, Luce, 136, 137, 148, 149 ‘Senility’, 137
Irish literary gerontology, 1 Ledwidge, Grace Tighe, 111, 121
Irish nationalism, 78, 79, 167 Lee, Hermione, 50, 54, 55, 176
Irwin, Robert, 193, 195 Life review, 4, 21, 39, 40, 42, 67, 93–
95, 97, 101, 102, 104, 108–111,
116, 118, 133, 154, 171, 173,
J 177, 190
Johnston, Deborah, 93 Literary gerontology, 1, 7, 9, 12,
Johnston, Jennifer, 22, 153, 169–175 13, 19, 20. See also Irish literary
Captain and the Kings, The, 169 gerontology
Foolish Mortals, 22, 153, 154, Llena, Carmen Zamorano, 11, 25, 85
169–175
Gates, The, 169, 170
Old Jest, The, 169, 174 M
Two Moons, 22, 170, 171, 173 Macdonald, Barbara, 5, 24. See also
Joyce, James, 125 Rich, Cynthia
Jung, Carl, 24, 72, 86 Machielse, Anja, 26, 112, 121, 122.
See also Hortulanus, Roelof
MacLaverty, Bernard, 22, 150
K ‘Assessment, The’, 147, 154
Keane, Molly, 20, 59, 60, 63, 65, 166, Madden, Deirdre, 19, 20, 59, 65, 66,
173 69, 70, 73, 75, 77, 84, 101
Good Behaviour, 60, 61, 65 Authenticity, 20, 65–78
Loving and Giving, 60, 61, 173 Hidden Symptoms, 66
Time After Time, 20, 60–65 Nothing is Black, 73
Kellehear, Allan, 23, 182, 184, 187, One by One in the Darkness, 69, 75
193, 196, 197, 200 Remembering Light and Stone, 66, 73
Killeen, Jarlath, 34, 36, 52 Time Present and Time Past, 69
Index 207
McGahern, John, 19, 21, 22, 62, Nice and the Good, The, 192
68, 69, 75, 91, 97, 110–116, Philosopher’s Pupil, The, 92, 97, 99
135–137, 140 Sea, The Sea, The, 21, 91–93, 96,
Barracks, The, 21, 68, 91, 97, 110, 97, 99–101, 104, 105, 109,
111, 114, 182 110
That They May Face the Rising Sun, Sovereignty of Good, The, 95,
21, 62, 69, 91, 112–115, 127 189–191
‘Slip-Up, A’, 135, 144 Unicorn, The, 192
‘Wine Breath, The’, 75, 135, 136 Unofficial Rose, An, 92, 153
McGlynn, Cathy, 12, 25, 149, 178. See
also O’Neill, Margaret; Schrage-
Früh, Michaela N
McLaverty, Michael, 22, 133–135, Nascher, Ignatz Leo, 30
139 Newman, Henry, 35
‘Mother and Daughter’, 139 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 103
‘Stone’, 134 Nouwen, Henri, 3, 24, 67, 85, 86,
‘Uprooted’, 134 167. See also Gaffney, W.J.
‘White Mare, The’, 134
McMullan, Gordon, 10, 37. See also
Smiles, Sam O
Meaney, Gerardine, 155, 175, 176 O’Brien, Edna, 22, 136, 138, 144,
Menopause, 5 153, 165, 167, 169, 175
Modernism, 22, 37, 50, 129, 135 House of Splendid Isolation, 22, 153,
Moody, Harry R., 24, 85, 112, 121 165–169
Mooney, Sinéad, 187, 198 ‘My Two Mothers’, 139
Mothers and Daughters, 136 ‘Rose in the Heart of New York, A’,
Murdoch, Iris, 19, 21, 23, 81, 91, 138, 139
92–100, 102, 108–111, 115, ‘Shovel Kings’, 144
116, 133, 153, 175, 181, O’Brien, Kate, 155
187–193, 196 O’Connell, Mark, 102, 108, 118, 195,
Book and the Brotherhood, The, 92, 199
99 O’Connor, Frank, 21, 131, 148
Bruno’s Dream, 23, 92, 175, 181, ‘Long Road to Ummera, The’, 131,
187–193 134
Fairly Honourable Defeat, A, 92, O’Connor, Joseph, 12, 19, 25, 149,
192 178, 197
Good Apprentice, The, 98 Ghost Light, 12, 25, 149, 178, 197
Green Knight, The, 100 O’Faolain, Julia, 22, 153, 162, 165
Henry and Cato, 192 No Country for Young Men, 22,
Italian Girl, The, 192 153, 162–165, 168, 169, 176,
Jackson’s Dilemma, 100 177
Message to the Planet, The, 99 O’Faolain, Sean, 21, 125, 132
208 Index
‘Midsummer Night Madness’, 132 Sarton, May, 8, 11, 68, 85, 110, 120
‘Touch of Autumn in the Air, A’, 133 Schrage-Früh, Michaela, 12, 19, 25,
O’Flaherty, Liam, 21, 125–128, 134 149, 178
‘Eviction, The’, 128 Schrank, Bernice, 168
‘Galway Bay’, 127–129 Schwall, Hedwig, 105, 119
‘Lovers’, 128 Scott-Maxwell, Florida, 68, 85, 110,
‘Old Woman, The’, 128 120, 167, 177
‘Stone, The’, 126 Segal, Lynne, 6, 12, 71, 81, 86, 87,
‘Stream, The’, 126, 128 104, 119, 164, 177
O’Kelly, Seumas, 128, 129 Senile, 98, 141
‘Weaver’s Grave, The’, 128, 129 Sidhe, the, 34, 47
O’Neill, Margaret, 12, 19, 25, 149, Sinfield, Alan, 32, 51
178 Smiles, Sam, 10, 37, 53
O’Neill, Maria, 11, 19, 25, 65, 85. See Smith, Eoghan, 102, 103, 109, 118
also Llena, Carmen Zamorano Sokoloff, Janice, 8, 25
Sontag, Susan, 5
Steinach operation, 39, 41
P St. Peters, Christine, 164
Phillipson, Chris, 2, 24, 86, 118, 121, Sturrock, John, 98, 118
141, 149, 175, 188, 189, 198. Swinton, John, 2, 24, 26, 157–159,
See also Grenier, Amanda 175, 176
Pine, Richard, 34, 52
Protestant, 141–143, 155, 169
Proust, Marcel, 9 T
Tallis, Raymond, 3, 24, 59, 69, 120,
192
R Taylor, Charles, 66, 85, 102
Ramanathan, Suguna, 95, 117 Thanatology, 19, 20, 22, 181, 183,
Reifungsroman, 8, 10, 12, 25, 65, 67, 192
96, 102, 111 Third Age, the, 17, 188
Rich, Adrienne, 136 Thoreau, Henry, 69
Rich, Cynthia, 5, 24 TILDA (The Irish Longitudinal Study
Rooke, Constance, 10, 25, 146, 150, on Ageing), 15, 16, 18, 23, 183
168, 177, 191, 199 Tír na nÓg, 34, 46, 126
Rossen, Janice, 9, 25, 53, 55, 150, Tóibín, Colm, 22, 144, 150
177, 199 ‘Colour of Shadows, The’, 144, 145
Tolstoy, Leo, 191
Tornstam, Lars, 3, 24, 35, 40, 52, 53,
S 59, 67, 76, 86, 93, 103, 104,
Said, Edward, 10, 36, 37, 54, 86, 114, 109, 116, 167
121 Trevor, William, 19, 22, 125,
Sampson, Denis, 113, 120, 121 141–144, 147, 154
Index 209
‘At Olivehill’, 143 Woodward, Kathleen, 9, 19, 24, 26,

‘Autumn Sunshine’, 142 78, 86, 87, 100, 105, 118, 119,
‘Broken Homes’, 141, 147, 154 148, 185, 198
‘Distant Past, The’, 142 Woolf, Virginia, 9, 30, 42, 50, 54
‘General’s Day, The’, 142 Wordsworth, William, 42
‘Men of Ireland’, 143 Wyatt-Brown, Anne, 8, 9, 25, 53, 55,
‘Of the Cloth’, 143 150, 177, 199. See also Rossen,
Tucker, Lindsey, 95, 117 Janice
U Y
Uncanny, the, 105, 119 Yeats, William Butler, 9, 19, 20, 29,
Upchurch, David, 34, 52 36–43, 48, 50, 51, 54, 73, 115,
162
‘Acre of Grass, An’, 42
V ‘Among School Children’, 39
Vollendungsroman, 10, 146, 168, 169, ‘Are You Content?’, 42
191, 192, 199 ‘Blood and the Moon’, 40
‘Byzantium’, 40
‘Circus Animals’ Desertion, The’,
W 42, 43
Waxman, Barbara Frey, 8–10, 20, 35, ‘Dialogue of Self and Soul, A’, 40
52, 59, 60, 65, 67, 72, 83, 85, ‘Lapis Lazuli’, 42
93, 96, 103, 111, 116 ‘Municipal Gallery Revisited, The’,
Webb, Beatrice, 30, 32, 38 41
Weekes, Ann Owens, 87, 137, 149 ‘News for the Delphic Oracle’, 43,
Weil, Simone, 95 48
Wellesley, Dorothy, 41, 43, 51, 53–55 ‘Prayer for Old Age, A’, 41
Wessels, Andries, 64, 84 ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, 38, 39, 43
Whelehan, Imelda, 12, 44, 54. See also ‘Spur, The’, 41
Gwynne, Joel Tower, The, 39–41
White, Kathryn, 196 ‘Vacillation’, 40
Whyte, James, 114, 120, 121 ‘What Then?’, 42
Wilde, Oscar, 19, 20, 29–37, 39, 43, ‘Why Should Not Old Men Be
48, 50, 156 Mad?’, 41
‘Critic As Artist, The’, 34, 48 ‘Wild Old Wicked Man, The’, 41
‘Decay of Lying, The’, 36 Winding Stair, The, 40, 41
Dorian Gray, 20, 29–36 ‘Woman Young and Old, A’, 41
Winnicott, Donald, 9, 70, 71, 86,
185, 186

3rd Meeting - Introduction - Heather Ingman - Ageing in Irish Writing - Strangers To Themselves-Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

3rd Meeting - Introduction - Heather Ingman - Ageing in Irish Writing - Strangers To Themselves-Palgrave Macmillan (2018)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Ageing

ISBN 978-3-319-96429-4 ISBN 978-3-319-96430-0 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018948657

Cover illustration: Aydin Aksakal/EyeEm

I am, as always, grateful to staff and students in the School of English,

1 Introduction: Gerontology and Its Challenges 1

2 Ageing, Time and Aesthetics: Dorian Gray, W. B. Yeats

3 Resisting the Narrative of Decline: Molly Keane, Time

4 Ageing, the Individual and the Community in the Fiction

5 A Voice of Their Own: Portraits of Old Age in the Irish

6 Frail Old Age 153

7 Epilogue: The Bedbound and Dying 181

Ageing is a worldwide phenomenon but it is also a sociopolitical identity

Gerontology and Its Challenges

© The Author(s) 2018 1

intergenerational understanding.2 We in the west live in a highly

of attitudes towards ageing going back to Roman times, drawing on

in earlier writing on gerontology and forms part of the recent cultural

Wyatt-Brown was lamenting that, compared with discourses around race,

Less concerned with others’ approval, no longer burdened by ­society’s

in which writing careers may change as a result of the ageing p ­ rocess,

wide range of contemporary fiction by such authors as Anita Brookner,

and social contexts. Her study demonstrates the advantages of ­limiting

This focus on women has arisen partly because of the influence of

The Irish Context

when workhouses were set up in Ireland priority was given to the

In an article marking the opening of Mercer’s Institute for Successful

However, rather than a concern for older people themselves, there is a

fixed biological or chronological process, but an open-ended subjective

growth. Since it is part of Waxman’s argument that women show more

characters as a way of exploring social change in Irish society, but leaving

to look at portraits of the bedbound and dying in Iris Murdoch’s Bruno’s

5. Chris Phillipson, Reconstructing Old Age: New Agendas in Social Theory

25.  Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, ed. Anne M.

Cole, Thomas R. 1992. The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in

Ageing, Time and Aesthetics: Dorian Gray,

Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray (1891)

© The Author(s) 2018 29

in 1861, Gladstone, Disraeli, and Palmerston, among others. Victorian

Feeling middle-aged in a period dominated by middle-class prejudice,

‘British aestheticism was emphatically young’ pitting itself against a

innocence, Dorian acknowledges the effect of Lord Henry’s words: ‘Yes,

separation between ethics and art through a series of aphorisms such as

Wilde’s resistance to Victorian realism, choosing instead to set his novel

Yeats’s Later Poetry

Seamus Heaney commented on Yeats’s belief in the intertwining of his

on ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ for the BBC, not subsequently used, Yeats

accepted as more suited to an ageing man since it is related to the mind

Gray, becomes linked with artistic innovation. In Yeats’s case, this

Elizabeth Bowen, The Little Girls (1964)

The Coming of Age (1972), presented a largely negative portrayal of age-

At this point in her life, female friendships appear to have represented

I sometimes wonder whether even you, knowing me as well as you do,

‘Yes, but I have to get back.’

The statue is concentrated in one moment of perfection. The image

Unlike the painting of Southstone, Bowen’s novel, by employing a tri-

work, leading on to the fractured postmodernism of her final novel, Eva

21. Wilde, Dorian Gray, 69.

101. Glendinning, with Robertson, Love’s Civil War, 398.

Resisting the Narrative of Decline: Molly

© The Author(s) 2018 59

Molly Keane, Time After Time (1983)

Durraghglass confers, however, certain advantages: already outside the

Gerontology and Its Challenges

Less concerned with others’ approval, no longer burdened by society’s

in which writing careers may change as a result of the ageing p rocess,

and social contexts. Her study demonstrates the advantages of limiting

5. Chris Phillipson, Reconstructing Old Age: New Agendas in Social Theory

25. Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, ed. Anne M.

Ageing, Time and Aesthetics: Dorian Gray,

21. Wilde, Dorian Gray, 69.

101. Glendinning, with Robertson, Love’s Civil War, 398.

Resisting the Narrative of Decline: Molly

37. Donald W. Winnicott, ‘Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self’,

62. Madden, Time Present and Time Past, 221.

82. Enright, The Green Road, 261.

Ageing, the Individual and the Community

12. Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea, 15.

42. John Sturrock, ‘Reading Iris Murdoch’, Salmagundi 80 (1988):

65. Smith, John Banville: Art and Authenticity, 15.

102. Banville, Shroud, 25.

128. McGahern, The Barracks, 204.

152. See Carmel Gallagher, The Community Life of Older People in Ireland

A Voice of Their Own: Portraits of Old Age