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IN PRAISE OF OLDER WOMEN

From harridans to gossips, interfering husband hunters to bitter old maids, fiction is rarely kind to older women. Patricia Duncker explains why it is time to drop the clichés and show how interesting women of a certain age really are.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in her funny, clever, Amazonian Utopia Herland (1915), imagines three men arriving in a world ruled and occupied by women. But the women are old, and this disarms the intruding men, who only know how to engage with women as sexual objects – through seduction, romance or force:
‘In all our discussions and speculations we had always unconsciously assumed that the women, whatever else they might be, would be young. Most men do think that way, I fancy. “Woman” in the abstract is young and we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother.’

The representation of older women in women’s writing is not usually so witty, original and encouraging. Remember Jane Austen’s Mrs Bennet? ‘She was a woman of mean understanding, little information and uncertain temper.’ Or that monster of greater magnitude in Pride and Prejudice (1813), Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who is capricious, rude, overbearing, arrogant, snobbish and stupid? We all rejoice when Elizabeth refuses to be intimidated. Older women in Jane Austen’s novels are either brimful of malice, discredited petty tyrants or unnecessary poor relations. Think of Mrs Norris in Mansfield Park (1814) who spends her time sponging off her rich relatives, the Bertrams, or shit-stirring from her secure position on the sofa. The vulgar Mrs Jennings in Sense and Sensibility (1811) can’t wait to get the girls married off, so that they too can pass into private ownership and become invisible.

Old women in literature have no authority, no dignity and the power they wield over the young is always used to thwart and destroy. Consider the sinister figure of Mrs Reed in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847). She acts out the role of wicked stepmother to the orphan Jane. Brontë’s novels are replete with frequent showdowns between younger upstart women and spiteful old bitches. Madame Beck in Villette (1853) is dedicated to the destruction of the heroine’s happiness. Brontë is more lucidly feminist than Austen in her defence of women’s aspirations and her portraits of female independence, but older women reduce her to clichés. Older women are the enemy and the moral is clear – women, beware women.

I am not suggesting that the great classic writers I mentioned above are in the grip of some hideous hate campaign against every woman who lives past 28. Malicious, cruel, ancient female monsters are certainly out there and their vindictiveness does sometimes spring from rage at their own wasted lives or sheer love of power. I was taught by some, worked for others and am related to many more. But the literary landscape does seem to contain dozens of ogresses and witches while remaining feebly spattered with fairy godmothers. The situation for older women down among the men is even less encouraging. Old women are not numerous in male plots, apart from elderly whores, meddling aristocrats, and sickly, rich despots, who frustrate the action by not leaving all their money to the young couple with sufficient rapidity – see Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847).

Shakespeare sports some horrors in the history plays. Henry James credits older women with intelligence, but they are exploiters, seducers and manipulators, one and all. The worst offenders are the writers who bump off their mothers. Think of Mrs Morel in D H Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers (1913): thwarted, incestuous, jealous, frustrated and mad. The masculine version of the growing-up novel always ends with the death of the mother. The mother, even when she is adored and revered, as is the charismatic Mrs Ramsay in Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse (1927), is always an ambiguous figure. Mrs Ramsay, a useful tool of the patriarchy, just as keen on marrying other women off as Mrs Jennings was, exhausts herself holding her family up like a pit prop. When she crashes down, so do they all.

A woman past child-bearing age, can, in some cultures, cease to be altogether necessary. And many women as well as men feel there is something disgusting and obscene about the sexual life of old women.

The alternative identity, more recently open to women, which does offer a measure of financial independence, if not always respectability, for those who are successful, is the role of the artist. A calling in the arts is viewed as a vocation, possibly a successor to the convent, which enables a woman to grow older gracefully, without husband or children. The painter Lily Briscoe is still there at the end of To The Lighthouse, still painting; Vashti, the actress in Brontë’s Villette, is the emotional pressure gauge against which Dr John is measured – and found wanting. But the most powerful and convincing of these women is George Eliot’s Alcharisi, the opera singer in Daniel Deronda (1876). Deronda’s glamorous, savage, dying mother is one of the few older women in English Literature who makes no apologies and harbours no regrets. When Deronda empathises with her frustration at her father’s tyrannical attempts to thwart her ambitions, she takes him down a peg or two:

‘No’, said the Princess, shaking her head, and folding her arms with an air of decision. ‘You are not a woman. You may try, but you can never imagine what it is to have a man’s force of genius in you and yet suffer the slavery of being a girl….’ Alcharisi boasts that she has a man’s mind in a woman’s body. She is menaced with a conventional woman’s life when she lays claim to genius.

The most pressing deadly question for the Women’s Liberation of the 1970s – in which I played an active, passionate and often dissenting part – was not ‘what is a woman?’ or ‘what do women want?’ but ‘what is a woman for?’ And what purpose does she serve if she refuses to be a wife and mother? In some parts of the world this is a very dangerous if legitimate question. A woman past childbearing age, can, in some cultures, cease to be altogether necessary. And many women as well as men feel there is something disgusting and obscene about the sexual life of old women.

The Women’s Liberation Movement, which was dominated by lesbians, expended an astounding amount of intellectual energy trying to imagine a lesbian identity, which both encompassed and exceeded a sexual identity. Lesbians at that time had more reason than any other group to create and maintain the idea of a collectively organised women’s community. And this flourishing community would bring some significance and dignity to the Old Dykes’ Retirement Home; a project in which we were all encouraged to invest.

In the 1970s and 1980s lesbians were the women who wrote about getting old, being old and who posed those uncompromising questions about women’s lives. What does it mean to be an old woman? Wherein lies the power of the old woman? What is the significance and value of a woman’s life? Several memoirs from the 1980s, notably those by Rosemary Manning, A Corridor of Mirrors (1987), and Barbara Deming, A Humming Under My Feet: A Book of Travail, published by the Women’s Press in 1985, a year after the author’s death, confronted these questions with rare candour and fearlessness. Both books addressed the reality of lesbian lives during the 1950s and 1960s, before the Women’s Movement, and described the sadness of their own existential courage and loneliness. Both memoirs have hallelujah happy endings.

The ideology of the women’s liberation movement was unflagging: the spinster is the woman who re-invents herself, chooses her own life, her own lovers, savours her liberty. A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion. But the independent women we all longed to be were always imagined within a community of like-minded free spirits. We were never isolated, abandoned, alone.

The heroine of my latest novel, Miss Webster and Chérif (Bloomsbury, 2006), is an elderly spinster, on the cusp of old age, who is utterly alone. She has no close family or friends, has been forced out of her job, despite the fact that she wanted to continue until she was 65, and is generally disliked in the small rural East Anglian community where she lives. At the beginning of the book Miss Webster reaches her lowest point: she is no longer needed, she has never been loved. She comes to a dead halt in her sitting room.

The dark night of the soul which she endures in hospital is in fact her moment of choice. She can either seize her future and insist on her right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or she can face the wall and sink into the dark. Her subsequent engagement with the world, her journey to the Sahara desert and her friendship with Chérif, the young man who comes to live in her house, leads her into a dramatic sequence of utterly unexpected adventures.

Miss Webster and Chérif is a story about a friendship between two people, an old English woman and a young man, who are different in every way: they come from different cultures, religions, generations, even different climates. The age gap between them is 50 years. They do not even have a first language in common. I included a love poem by Abbas Ibn Al-Ahnaf (750-809), a poet I have always adored, as one of my epigraphs to the book and a reply from a younger imaginary poet, also called Abbas, who argues against his master for celebrating passionate sexual love: ‘Let me praise friendship.’ My contention is that friendship itself creates equality between people, across their differences. Sexual passion is not always an emotion that allows us to choose its object. Friendship is a matter of choice.

One of the themes of the book was Englishness. What does England mean to us – especially to those of us, like myself, for whom it is an adopted home? What does England mean as a landscape, language and mass of cultures, each with its own several histories and traditions? What does England look like to the stranger within our gates? At the climax of the book two English women, Carmen Campbell, a Black woman from South London on the run for murder, and Miss Webster herself, finally meet in the Sahara desert.

‘They stared at the Sahara desert and imagined England. The old woman from the country of dark soil and big skies and the Black girl from a nice suburban neighbourhood and a church-going family found themselves thinking of strangely linked, yet different things. Carmen remembered Eastenders going up to three times a week and the theme tune from Thunderbirds. Miss Webster remembered frost on the lawns in the mornings and her Michaelmas daisies, pale purple against the red brick walls of her vegetable garden. Carmen recalled the sweaty smell of the Northern Line and the CDs packed under the bathroom sink in Pepper’s flat. Miss Webster saw her potting shed and Chérif’s dark curls shining through the glass, as he planted out the seedlings.’

Miss Webster and Carmen would never have met in England. They come from different class backgrounds and radically different social strata in English society. Yet when Miss Webster hears Carmen swearing at the gate of her hotel in the desert she recognises her fellow countrywoman immediately: ‘She heard an English voice.’ Here in the desert, once they have finished quarrelling, they are well on the way to becoming friends. I gave Carmen the last word on friendship. Carmen asks Miss Webster to post a letter to a man they both know, once she returns to England: ‘Is he your father?’ ‘No,’ said Carmen, as if she was scoring a crucial point in the argument, ‘he was my manager. And he’s my friend.’ She pronounced the word friend as if it should be spoken only by princes, as if it was the one thing that was faithful and infinite, a loyalty and a passion that surpassed all other bonds, forgave all things, and knew no betrayal.’
I have never described women as victims. And I never will. Miss Elizabeth Webster isn’t always a likeable woman; but she learns how to be more tolerant, compassionate and less racist. She interprets the world anew, through the eyes of the young man she defends. I imagined her as someone at once extraordinary, yet immediately recognisable, a woman that is powerful, courageous, uncompromising, sharp-tongued – who learns how to be generous. 

PATRICIA DUNCKER was born in the West Indies and still dreams about heat, earthquakes and hurricanes. She is the author of four novels, Hallucinating Foucault (1996), James Miranda Barry (1999), The Deadly Space Between (2002), and Miss Webster and Chérif (Bloomsbury, 2006). She has also published two collections of short fiction. Her critical work includes Sisters and Strangers: An Introduction to Contemporary Feminist Fiction (Blackwell, 1992). She is a Professor of Creative Writing (Prose Fiction) at the University of East Anglia.

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From Issue 30 ◊ Jul/Aug/Sep 2006

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