Ageing in Irish Writing 1st ed.

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Heather Ingman
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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

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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
 1 INTRODUCTION: GERONTOLOGY AND ITS CHALLENGES 5

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
 1 INTRODUCTION: GERONTOLOGY AND ITS CHALLENGES 7

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.
 1 INTRODUCTION: GERONTOLOGY AND ITS CHALLENGES 9

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
 1 INTRODUCTION: GERONTOLOGY AND ITS CHALLENGES 11

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.
 1 INTRODUCTION: GERONTOLOGY AND ITS CHALLENGES 13

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
 1 INTRODUCTION: GERONTOLOGY AND ITS CHALLENGES 15

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.
 1 INTRODUCTION: GERONTOLOGY AND ITS CHALLENGES 17

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
 1 INTRODUCTION: GERONTOLOGY AND ITS CHALLENGES 19

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
 1 INTRODUCTION: GERONTOLOGY AND ITS CHALLENGES 21

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
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Calthrop, 184;
of Radiolaria, 83
Calycophorae, 300 f. 305
Calymma, 79, 82
Calymma, 420
Calymmidae, 420
Calyptoblastea, 275 f.
Calyx, of Echinus esculentus, 513;
of Echinarachnius parma, 545;
of Pelmatozoa, 579;
of Crinoidea, 580, 588 f.;
of Carpoidea, 580;
of Cystoidea, 580, 598;
of Blastoidea, 580, 599;
of Holopus, 592;
of fossil Crinoidea, 595
Camerata, 595
Campanularia, 280
Campanulariidae, 280
Campascus, 52;
test of, 55
Camptolithus, 346
Camptonema, 70, 73
Canalaria, 201
Canals, "feeding," afferent, or replenishing of contractile vacuole
system in Ciliata, 14, 143, 146;
of Stylonychia, 139 f.;
of Stentor, 156
Cannopora, 283
Cannopylaea (= Phaeodaria), 76
Cannotidae, 278
Capillitium of Myxomycetes, 90 f., 92
Capnea sanguinea, 383
Capria, 321
Caravella, 308
Carbohydrates, formation of, 33
Carbon dioxide, attracts Paramecium, 23;
 excretion of, 8, 13 f.;
secreted by Arcella, etc., 53
Carchesium, 138;
feeding of, 145, 158
Carinal ossicle of Asteroidea, 436
Carlgren, 378 n.
Carmarina, 295
Carpenter, P. H., on the classification of the Crinoidea, 589
Carpenter, W. B., classification of Foraminifera, 58;
on their true nature, 62;
on their structure, 63 f.;
on Arenacea, 65 f.;
on the nervous system of Antedon rosacea, 585
Carpoidea, 580, 596 f.
Carter, on Protozoa, 45;
on Sponges, 167, 180, 208, 237 n.;
on fossil Hydrozoa, 270 n.
Caryophyllia, 386, 398
Cash, on Rhizopoda, 58 n.
Cassidulidae, 554
Cassidulina, 59
Cassiopea, 324
Cassiopeidae, 324
Castellani, on Trypanosomic fever and sleeping sickness, 120
Catabolic, catabolism, 13 f., 24
Cataclysmal metamorphosis of Dipleurula, 613
Catallacta, 89
Catostylidae, 325
Cattle, Trypanosomic diseases of, 119 f.
Caudal cirrhi, 139 f.
Caudina, 575
Caullery and Mesnil, on Actinomyxidiaceae, 98 n.
Cavernularia, 359, 364;
C. obesa, 364
Cell, 3 f.;
definition of, 3;
nutrition of, 15 f., 35 f.;
 -membrane of ovum of Sea-urchin, 7;
-wall, 3;
in Flagellates, 109, 113;
in Dinoflagellates, 130;
-boundary in Flagellates, 113;
-division, 24 f., 25, 27;
Spencerian division, 31 f.;
-unions in Volvox, 126, 127;
collar-, of Choanoflagellates, 121, 122;
of Sponges (= choanocytes), 171, 176, 186
Cellular relationship explained, 10
Cellulose, 37;
cell-wall of holophytic Flagellates, 113;
in Dinoflagellates, 130
Central blood plexus—see Heart
Central capsule, 49, 76, 77, 82, 84;
its functions in regeneration, 35;
of Collozoum inerme, 76
Centrifugal force, stimulus of, 19 f.
Centriole, 25, 27
Centripetal canals, 289
Centro-dorsal ossicle, of Crinoidea, 580;
of Antedon rosacea, 582;
of Actinometra, 588, 594;
of Atelecrinus, 594
Centrogenous (used of spicules = meeting in a common centre and
growing outwards), 76
Centropyxis, 51;
test of, 55;
C. aculeata, reproduction of, 57
Centrosome, 19, 26 f.;
of Heliozoa, 72;
(= blepharoplast) in Flagellates, 115
Centrosphere, 25 f., 27
Centrostephanus, 522, 539;
C. longispinosus, 522, 532, 539
Cephalis (= uppermost chamber of monaxonic Radiolarian shells),
83
Cephalodiscus, 617
Cephalont of Gregarines, 98
Cephalopoda, erroneous reference of Foraminifera to, 62
Cephea, 325
Cepheidae, 324
Ceratella, 263, 271;
C. fusca, 271
Ceratellidae, 271
Ceratium, 110;
habitat of, 131
Ceratosa, 211, 220
Cercomonas, 116 n., 119;
C. dujardini, gametes of, 116 n.
Cereactis (family Actiniidae, 381);
C. aurantiaca, 378
Cerianthidea, 367, 373, 377, 409
Cerianthus, 328, 366, 409;
nematocyst of, 247;
C. americanus, 411;
C. bathymetricus, 411;
C. lloydii, 411;
C. membranaceus, 370, 410, 411;
C. oligopodus, 411;
C. vogti, 411
Cestidae, 420
Cestoidea, 413, 414, 416, 420
Cestus, 420;
C. pectenalis, 420;
C. veneris, 417, 420
Chaetetidae, 346
Chalarothoraca, 71
Chalina, 217, 223
Chalk, Foraminifera, etc., in, 69 f.
Challengeridae (a family of Phaeogromia, 79);
shells, skeleton of, 84, 85
Chambered organ, of Antedon rosacea, 584;
of Pentacrinidae, 592
Chambers, of Foraminiferal shell, 62
Chapman, on Foraminifera, 58 n., 70
Charistephane, 417
Charybdea, 311, 314, 319;
C. xaymacana, 310, 319;
C. marsupialis, 319;
C. grandis, 319
Charybdeidae, 318
Cheilostomella, 59
Cheilostomellaceae, 59
Chela (a complex microsclere derived from a sigma and consisting
of a curved shaft bearing recurved processes), 234
Chemical, reactions, of protoplasm and of vacuoles, 13;
substances in solution, 19, 22 f.;
rays of spectrum in relation to plant pigments, 36 n.
Chemiotaxy, 23;
its rôle in syngamy, 34;
of Coccidians, 100
Chirodropidae, 319
Chirodropus, 319
Chironephthya, 349;
C. variabilis, 338
Chiropsalmus, 319
Chitin, 37
Chlamydomonadidae, 111, 125, 126;
brood-division of active, 115
Chlamydomonas, 111, 125 f.;
barotaxy of, 20;
conjugation of, 115 f.;
Dill on, 119 n.
Chlamydophora, 71
Chlamydophrys, 52;
C. stercorea, reproduction of, 57;
habitat of, 57 f.
Chloramoeba, 110
Chloromonadaceae, 110;
trichocysts in, 113 n.
Chlorophyll, 36 n.;
in Flagellates, 115 n.;
bodies of Euglenaceae, 124 f.
Chloroplasts (= chlorophyll bodies), of Eutreptia viridis, 124 f.
Choanocytes, 171, 176, 186, 200, 237
—see also Collar-cells
Choanoflagellata, Choanoflagellates (= Craspedomonadidae, 111),
121, 122 f.;
in relation to Sponges, 41, 171, 181
Choanophrya, 159 f., 162;
C. infundibulifera, 162
Choanosome, 170
Chondrilla, spicules of, 233
Chondrioderma, 90;
C. diffusum, 93
Chondrocladia, 216
Chondrophoridae, 301, 308
Chone, 213, 214
Choristida, 212
Chromatin, 6 f.;
function of, in cell-division, 24 f.;
of ovum of Sea-urchin, 7;
of Radiolaria, 81;
-granules, 7, 24
Chromatophore, 13, 21, 36 f., 113, 115;
of Sphaerella, 126
—see also Chromoplastid, Chlorophyll, Plastid
Chromidia, 30;
of Rhizopoda, 51;
of Foraminifera, 67 f.
Chromoplastid, 21, 36 f.;
of Zooxanthella, 86
—see also Chromatophore
Chromosomes, 25 f., 27;
functions of, 28 f.
Chromulina, 110
Chrysamoeba, 110
Chrysaora, 312, 315, 316, 323;
C. isosceles, 311, 314, 323
Chrysogorgia, 355
Chrysogorgiidae, 355 (= Dasygorgiidae, 333)
Chrysomitra, 302, 309
Chrysomonadaceae, 110;
external plasmic layer of, 113;
symbiotic, 86, 125
Chun, 197 n., 300, 307 n., 308, 414 n.
Chunella, 360, 363
Chytridieae, movements and affinities of, 114 n.;
relations of, 40, 48, 119
Cidaridae, 530, 531, 532, 533, 558
Cidaris, 533, 534;
C. (Dorocidaris) papillata, 534
Cienkowsky, on Monadineae (= Flagellates and Proteomyxa), 40, 89;
on Radiolaria, 88;
on Zooxanthella, 86;
on Cystoflagellates, 135
Cilia, 17, 18;
of Protozoa, 47;
paroral, 156 n.;
preoral, 139;
of Trichonymphidae, 123;
of Opalina, 123;
of Maupasia, 124;
of Ciliata, 141;
organs formed of combined, 138, 141, 413;
sensory, of Stylonychia, 138;
Schuberg, A., on, 141 n.
Ciliary motion, 18;
mechanism of, 18 n.
Ciliata, 18, 41, 137 f., 181;
animal nutrition, 40;
conjugation, 149 f.;
contractile vacuole, 14 f., 143;
encystment, 147 f.;
 feeding, 145;
fission, 147 f.;
form of body, 141;
galvanotaxy, 22;
infested by Suctorian parasites, 160 f.;
gut, 146;
mouth, 145;
nuclear apparatus, 144 f.;
parasitic, 152;
pharynx, 145;
pellicle, 141;
regeneration, 35, 145;
relations to Metazoa, 41;
rheotaxy, 21;
Suctoria allied to, 159;
thigmotaxy of, 20;
tubicolous, 152;
Zooxanthella symbiotic with, 125
Ciliated, buds of Suctoria, 159, 160 f., 162;
epaulette, 607
Cilioflagellata (= Dinoflagellata, given by misinterpretation of
transverse flagellum), 130.
Ciliophrys, 75 n., 89
Cilium of Noctiluca, 133
Cinachyra, 212, 215;
C. barbata, 212
Cinclides, 369
Cinetochilum, 137
Ciocalypta, 225
Cirripathes, 408;
C. spiralis, 408
Cirrus, of Crinoidea, 430, 580;
of Antedon rosacea, 581, 585;
of Rhizocrinidae, 588, 590;
of Pentacrinidae, 588, 591, 592;
of Rhizocrinus, 591;
of Comatulidae, 594;
 of Actinometra, 594;
of Antedon, 594;
development of, in A. rosacea, 620;
of fossil Crinoidea, 595
Cladocarpus, 279
Cladocora, 373, 400
Cladocoryne, 272
Cladocrinoidea, 595
Cladonema, 266, 270;
C. radiatum, 267
Cladonemidae, 270
Cladopathes, 408
Cladophiurae, 491, 494, 502
Cladorhiza, 216
Cladotyle (a rhabdus on which one actine is branched, the other
tylote or knobbed at the extremity), 222
Claparède and Lachmann on Protozoa, 45;
on Suctoria, 162
Clark—see James-Clark
Classification, of Protozoa, 48 f., 50;
of Rhizopoda, 51 f.;
of Foraminifera, 58 f.;
of Heliozoa, 70 f.;
of Radiolaria, 76 f.;
of Proteomyxa, 90;
of Sporozoa, 97;
of Flagellata, 109 f.;
of Protomastigaceae, 111;
of Volvocaceae, 111;
of Infusoria, 136;
of Ciliata, 137;
of Suctoria, 159;
of Sponges, 183 f.;
of Coelenterata, 249 f.;
of Ctenophora, 417 f.;
of Eleutherozoa, 430 f.;
of Asteroidea, 459 f.;
 of Ophiuroidea, 491 f.;
of Echinoidea, 529 f.;
of Endocyclica, 532;
of Clypeastroidea, 548 f.;
of Spatangoidea, 552;
of Holothuroidea, 567 f.;
of Pelmatozoa, 580;
of Crinoidea, 589 f.
Clathria, 225
Clathrina, 186, 221, 231;
C. blanca, larva of, 227
Clathrinidae, 185 f.
Clathrissa, 223
Clathrozoon, 277, 279;
C. wilsoni, 279
Clathrulina, 71, 73, 74
Clava, 272;
C. squamata, 263
Clavatella, 267, 270
Clavatellidae, 270
Clavidae, 272
Clavularia, 330, 334, 344;
C. viridis, 329, 337, 343 f., 344
Clavulariidae, 344
Clearing of tissues, physical explanation of, 11
Climacograptus, 282
Cliona, 219, 224
Clionidae, 218
Cloaca of Holothuria nigra, 563
Clypeaster, 548, 549
Clypeastridae (= Echinanthidae), 549
Clypeastroidea, 529, 542 f., 556, 559, 566
Clytia, 280;
C. johnstoni, 275, 280 f.
Cnidoblast, 247, 248
Cnidocil, 248
Cnidopod, 248
Cnidosac, 300
Coalescence of individual Rhizopods during bud-fission, 55
Coccidiaceae, 97, 99 f.;
relations to Trypanosoma, 120
Coccidiidae, 97, 99 f., 101
Coccidiosis, 102
Coccidium, 99 f., 101 f.;
C. cuniculi, 102;
C. lacazei, syngamy of, 101;
C. schubergi, 99 f., 101
Coccolithophora, 110
Coccolithophoridae, in Chalk, 70;
wall of, 114
Coccoliths, 83, 110, 114, 242
Coccoseridae, 346
Coccospheres, 83, 114
Cockroach, Lophomonas parasitic in gut of, 123
Codaster, 599
Codosiga, 111
Coelenterata, 243 f.;
definition, 245;
almost all immune from Gregarines, 99
Coeliac canal of Antedon rosacea, 586
Coelogorgia, 349
Coelogorgiidae, 349
Coelom (including body-cavity), 428;
of Asterias rubens, 437;
of arm of Ophiothrix fragilis, 480;
of Echinus esculentus, 516;
of Holothuria nigra, 562;
of Antedon rosacea, 585;
development of first rudiment in larva, 605;
subsequent development in Dipleurula, 608, 609;
in Asterina gibbosa, 611;
in Antedon rosacea, 618, 619
Coelomic nervous system, of Asterias rubens, 448;
of Ophiothrix fragilis, 488;
 of Echinus esculentus, 524;
of Holothuria nigra, 566;
of Antedon rosacea, 584, 585
Coeloplana, 412, 422;
C. mitsukurii, 422
Coeloplanidae, 422
Coenocyte, 30
Coenograptus, 282
Coenopsammia, 404
Coenosteum, 371, 387
Coenothecalia, 344
Cohn, Ferdinand, on cultures of Schizomycetes, etc., 44
Cold-blooded Vertebrates, as hosts of Haemosporidae, 102
Coleps, 137;
mail-like pellicle of, 141, 152;
C. hirtus, group feeding, 150
Collar, of Choanoflagellates, 121 f., 122;
of peristome of Vorticella, etc., 156
Collar-cells, in Choanoflagellates, 121 f., 122, 171, 237;
of Calcarea, 186;
of Non-Calcarea, 176, 200
—see also Choanocytes
Collencyte, 171
Colletocystophores, 320
Collida, 77 n.
Colloblasts, 414
Collodaria, 77
Colloidea, 77
Collosphaera, 77;
symbiotic Diatoms in, 86
Collosphaeridae, 85
Collozoidae, 85
Collozoum, 77;
C. inerme, 76
Collyritidae, 559
Colobocentrotus, 532, 542
Colonial, cells, 31;
 Protista, 31
Colony, 31;
of Collozoum inerme, 76;
-formation in Polycyttarian Radiolaria, 84 f.;
in Flagellata, 113;
of Choanoflagellates, 121, 122;
in Vorticellidae, 158;
of Volvocidae, 126 f.;
of Pandorina, 128 f.;
of Eudorina, 129
Colour, red, of lakes and ponds, often due to Dinoflagellata, 131
Coloured vegetal nutrition, 36 f.
Colouring matter of chromatophores of Flagellates, 115 n.
Colpidium, 137;
C. colpoda, diagram of conjugation, 149;
nuclear relations in conjugation, 151
Colpoda, 137;
C. cucullus, 153;
brood-fission in cyst, 147
Columella, 370, 385
Columnals, 619 (= Stem-ossicles, q.v.)
Columnaria, 344
Comatula = Antedon, q.v.
Comatulidae, 594
Combs of Ctenophora, 141, 412
Comitalia, 201
Commensals, of Heliozoa, 73;
of Radiolaria, 80, 86 f.;
of Infusoria, 153 f.;
—see also Zoochlorella, Zooxanthella, and Symbiosis
Comminator muscles of Aristotle's lantern, 526
Commissure of radial cords of aboral nervous system of Antedon
rosacea, 585
Compasses (or radii) of Aristotle's lantern, 526
Conant, 319
Conaria larva, 302
Conchophtheirus, 137
Conchula, 380
Confervaceae, related to green Flagellates, 48
Confervoid form of Hydrurus, 113
Conjugatae, syngamy of, compared to certain Chlamydomonads,
126
Conjugation, 33 f.;
of Rhizopoda, 54, 56 f.;
of Trichosphaerium, 54, 56 f.;
exogamous, in Foraminifera, 68 f.;
of Heliozoa, 72, 73 f.;
of Sporozoa, 95 f.;
of Lankesteria, 95 f.;
of Monocystis, 96;
of Gregarines, 97, 100;
of Stylorhynchus, 99;
bisexual, of Sarcocystis tenella, 108 n.;
of Flagellates, 115;
of Bodo saltans, 117;
of Trypanosoma, 120;
by a fertilising tube in Chlamydomonas, 125;
of Volvocaceae, 127 f.;
of Volvox, 127 f.;
isogamous and endogamous, of Stephanosphaera, 128;
in Dinoflagellates, 131 n.;
of Noctiluca, 133;
of Ciliata, 148 f.;
of Paramecium caudatum, 148;
of Colpidium colpoda, diagram, 149;
of Peritrichaceae, 151 f., 157;
of Vorticella, 157;
of Suctoria, 161;
of meganucleus in Dendrocometes, 161, 162
—see also Syngamy, Fertilisation
Conoclypeus, 558
Constancy of type in Protista, 42 f.
Conte, 292 n.
Contractile vacuole, 5, 10, 14 f.;
 of Amoeba polypodia, 5, 10;
of fresh-water and brackish Protozoa, accessory spaces and
canals, 47;
of Rhizopods, 52;
of fresh-water Allogromidiaceae, 60;
of Microgromia socialis, 60;
of Heliozoa, 71, 72, 74;
of zoospore of Clathrulina, 74;
of Myxomycetes, 92;
of Flagellata, 110, 112, 115;
of Cryptomonas, 112;
of Diplomita, 112;
of Oikomonas, 112;
of Tetramitus, 112;
of Trachelomonas, 112;
of Bodo saltans, 117;
of Choanoflagellates, 122;
absent from Opalinidae, 123;
of Euglenaceae, 125;
of Volvox, 126;
of Ciliata, 143 f.;
in fission, 147;
of Stylonychia, 139 f.
of Stentor, 156;
of Vorticella, 157;
of Suctoria, 160 f., 162
Contractility, 8, 9;
muscular mechanism of, 14 f.
Contraction, of Amoeboid cell, 16 f.
Copepoda, infested by Epistylis, 158
—see also Cyclops
Coppinia, 280;
C. arcta, 280
Coprolites, Radiolaria in, 87
Copromyxa, 90
Coral, 326, 365;
Organ-pipe, 343;
 Precious (= Red), 326, 352;
Flexible (= various Alcyonaria), 326;
Stony (= Madreporaria), 326, 384 f.;
Brain-, 401;
Black (= Gerardia, 406, and Antipatharia, 407);
-Reefs, 390 f.;
Reef-, 389 f.
Coralliidae, 335, 352;
commercial importance, 328
Corallimorphidae, 383
Corallimorphus, 383
Corallium, 333, 350, 352;
C. boshuensis 352;
C. confusum, 352;
C. elatius, 352;
C. inutile, 352;
C. japonicum, 352;
C. johnsoni, 352;
C. konojoi, 352;
C. nobile, 340 n., 341, 352;
C. pusillum, 352;
C. reginae, 352;
C. stylasteroides 352;
C. sulcatum, 352
Corbula, 276
Cordylophora, 269, 272
Cormidia, 301, 305
Cornularia, 334, 344
Cornulariidae, 344
Cornuspira, 59;
shell of, 64
Corona, of Echinus esculentus, 504, 511;
of Endocyclica, 530;
of Cidaridae, 530;
of Echinothuriidae, 530, 535;
of Temnopleurinae, 539
Coronaster, 474
Coronata, 314, 321
Cortex, 190, 191, 213;
gastral cortex, 188
Corticata, 49 n.
Corydendrium (family Tiaridae, 273);
C. parasiticum, 269
Corymorpha, 263, 265, 266, 273;
C. nutans, 273
Corymorphidae, 273
Corynactis, 372, 383;
C. viridis, 383
Coryne, 272
Corynidae, 272
Cosmiolithus, 346
Costae, 385, 387;
of Ctenophora, 413, 416 n.
Costia, 111;
C. necatrix, produces epidemics in fresh-water fish, 119
Cothurnia, 138, 158
Cotte, 218 n.
Cotton-spinner, 564
Cotylorhiza, 325
Coupled cell, 31, 33 f.;
in Flagellates, 116 f.
—see also Zygote
Covering-plates, of arms of Ophiuroidea, 491;
of arms of Crinoidea, 589;
of Hyocrinus, 589, 590;
of Rhizocrinidae, 589, 591;
of Pentacrinidae, 589;
of Antedon, 589, 594;
of Thecoidea, 596;
of Blastoidea, 599
Crambessa, 325
Crambione, 325
Craniella, 213, 213, 214;
C. cranium, 222
Craspedomonadidae, 111, 115 n., 121 f., 122;
transverse division in, 115 n.
—see also Choanoflagellata
Crescent (gametocyte of Laverania), 104 f.
Cretaceous firestone of Delitzet contains Peridinium, 132
Cribrella, 457, 462;
C. (Henricia) sanguinolenta, 462, 463;
C. laeviuscula, 462
Cribriform organs, 470
Cricket, Mole-, Lophomonas parasitic in gut of, 123
Crinoidea, 430, 580 f.;
development of, 617 f.
Crinorhiza, 212, 216
Cristellaria, 59
Crotalocrinus, 595;
C. pulcher, 595
Crustacea, small, rheotaxy of, 21
Cryptabacia, 404
Cryptogams, Higher, spermatozoa of, 38
Cryptoglena, shell of, 113
Cryptohelia, 284, 287;
C. ramosa, 285
Cryptomonadaceae, 110
Cryptomonas, 110
Cryptozonate, 454
Crystals, in isospores of Collozoum inerme, 76;
proteid, 37
Ctenocella, 357
Ctenodiscus, 458, 471
Ctenophora, 412 f.;
comb-plates of, 141
Ctenophoral plates, 141, 412
Ctenoplana, 416, 421
Ctenoplanidae, 421
Cubomedusae, 310, 316, 318 f.
Cucumaria, 573;
C. crocea, 573, 602;
 C. laevigata, 602
Cuénot, on Sporozoa, 94;
on reproduction of Monocystis, 96 n.
Culcita, 453, 472;
C. tetragona, 453
Culex, host of Haemoproteus or Proteosoma, 103;
intermediate host of a Trypanosoma, 120
Cultures, pure, 43
Cunanthidae, 296
Cunarcha, 296
Cunina, 296;
C. proboscidea, 296;
C. rhododactyla, 296
Cunoctantha, 296;
C. octonaria, 295
Cup (= theca), of Flagellates, 113;
of Salpingoeca, 122;
of Acineta, 159, 160
—see also Theca, Tube
Cupulita, 307;
C. sarsii, 304
Current, 169, 171, 234 f.;
electric, stimulus of, 19, 22;
in liquid, relation of protoplasmic movements to, 7, 19, 21
Cuticle, of Dinoflagellata, 130;
of Gregarines, 96;
of Noctiluca, 133
—see also Membrane, Pellicle
Cuticular shell of Flagellates, 113
Cuvier, 245, 246
Cuvierian organs of Holothuria nigra, 564
Cyanaea, 311, 312, 324;
C. capillata, 311, 324;
C. lamarcki, 324
Cyanaeidae, 324
Cyathaxoniidae, 394
Cyatholiths, 114