Out of Time (3 page)

Beauvoir was just fifty-five when expressing her words of anguish in that book: we learn that she loathed observing her own face in the mirror, lamented finding herself without any lover, perhaps all the more so as she watched the oversupply of beautiful, desiring women flocking around the man she claimed as her own lifetime companion, the by then physically frail and fast deteriorating Jean-Paul Sartre. Most of all, she despaired that she would never again be able, never again be allowed, to experience any new desires, or to display her yearnings publicly. ‘Never again!’ she laments, naming the passing of all the things now slipping away from her grasp. Listing her former joys, plans and projects, she wrote: ‘It is not I who am saying goodbye to all those things I once enjoyed, it is they who are leaving me.’
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I’ve read that same sentiment so many times from women, sometimes expressed piteously, other times more flippantly, as in the words of the north American novelist, Alison Lurie: ‘Soon after I reached sixty I was abandoned by
Vogue
magazine and all its clones … Without intending it I had permanently alienated them, simply by becoming old. From their point of
view, I was now a hopeless case.’
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Beauvoir’s thoughts are much heavier when she closes her book with the cry: ‘Memories grow thin, myths crack and peel, projects rot in the bud; I am here, and around me circumstances. If this silence is to last, how long it seems, my short future!’
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‘Never again’, Beauvoir mourned, seemingly inconsolable, in her mid-fifties. Never again would she be in control of her life, able to realize or allowed to express desire, whereas once she had been ‘drawn into the future by all [her] new plans’. And yet, it turned out that Beauvoir would afterwards shift many times in relation to what, if anything, she was again able to do and to say. Indeed, her ‘never again’ was a sentiment never again repeated in the same bleak way in any of her subsequent writing. Just under ten years later, writing
All Said and Done
(first published in 1974), we find that things were neither all said nor, even less so, all done. Beauvoir was busy taking control and making changes after all.

Thus, in another assertive contradiction of her title, we find that much had shifted in her life, along with changing political contexts and new personal attachments, among other things. Indeed, now in her sixties, Beauvoir had no new man, apparently, but interestingly she had found new joy, a new love, even a new sense of unity. This time it was not simply with Sartre (she never moved very far away from her attachment to him) but with a woman, Sylvie Le Bon, who was thirty-three years her junior. Furthermore, she was committed to new projects and even had a new political identification, with feminism. ‘Today I’ve changed,’ she said around this time, ‘I’ve really become a feminist.’
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However, what is especially significant was that while Beauvoir herself had managed to make another turn in her life,
by at least partly bonding and identifying herself with a much younger partner, she was nevertheless determined to document the plight of the old in her later writing (if no longer exactly her own plight). Beauvoir’s thoughts on ageing provide one of the threads that will weave throughout this book, surveying how she explored the ways in which the old are positioned as culture’s subordinated and negated other; just as twenty years earlier she had once described women as symbolically always in a secondary position to men and masculinity.

The need to tackle her own very deep fear and horror of ageing launched Beauvoir’s second major piece of theoretical research,
La Vieillesse
, published in 1970.
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She used her now familiar formula, once again contrasting the marginalized Other (the old) with the norm (the young and male). Here again, she insisted that the disparaged meanings attached to this abject or demeaned Other are not fixed in the body, but contingent upon a comprehensive cultural situation of neglect and disparagement: ‘man never lives in a state of nature’, she wrote. Nor women either. Moreover, despite her own dread of ageing, Beauvoir was not simply in denial, as we might say, when she set out to reclaim old age, and to speak on its behalf. Her point was that whatever our age we must also see the ‘old’ within ourselves, even though – frighteningly – the face of the ‘old’ we must be prepared to recognize ourselves in was, in her description, almost always a somewhat pitiable thing. It belonged to a creature whose situation, economically, socially and psychically, had mostly been, and remained, deplorable. Thus, on the one hand, Beauvoir insisted: ‘We must stop cheating: the whole meaning of our life is in question … let us recognize ourselves in this old man or that old woman.’
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On the other, she loathed the ageing body, particularly her own. As we shall see, in her
novels, she had portrayed the older, abandoned woman, with little sympathy.

So, Beauvoir recognized her ageing self, and yet, simultaneously, she repudiated it. She dreamed, in her case quite literally, of escaping old age: ‘often in my sleep I dream that in a dream I’m fifty-four [which at the time she is], I awake and find I’m only thirty. “What a terrible nightmare I had,” says the woman who thinks she’s awake.’ And then she finally wakes up. Sometimes, she added, ‘just before I come back to reality, a giant beast settles on my breast: “It’s true! It’s my nightmare of being more than fifty that’s come true!” ’
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Beauvoir’s earlier analysis of the situation of women as men’s culturally disdained female Other had not led her, as it would later lead some feminists, to repudiate men or masculinity, but instead to insist on women’s possible unity with them as ‘free and autonomous beings’.
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Similarly, Beauvoir’s analysis of the privileging of the young against the old did not lead her to criticize youth, but rather to work to establish forms of unity with a younger generation (both with a particular young woman, Sylvie, and with a new political movement, feminism), making her, she felt, young as well as old: ‘The better I knew Sylvie, the more akin I felt to her … There is such an interchange between us that I lose the sense of my age: she draws me forwards into her future, and there are times when the present recovers a dimension that it had lost.’
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Yet however extreme her ambivalence about accepting her own age, what was critical about Beauvoir’s writing was her repeated insistence that ‘old age’ is an Other which lives within everyone, whatever our age. Short of premature death, no one can escape it, no matter how much we may try to distance ourselves from it. Moreover, and crucially, Beauvoir wondered whether recognizing the inevitability of ageing could help us all
to re-conceptualize our responsibilities towards those we are so often inclined to reject.

There seem, however, to be certain inevitabilities around generational conflict as youth enters adulthood, often in distinctly different historical conjunctures. Forging their own pathways, the young have always eyed with suspicion the generation preceding them. Nowadays, this suspicion may well be of the privileges or status acquired mid-life by professional men and women, or perhaps it is a hostility to what is seen as older people’s attachment to yesterday’s orthodoxies, or simply, and emphatically, a suspicion of the old as Other, and all that might suggest about the losses and difficulties of ageing. Meanwhile, as we shall see illustrated in later chapters, the old have often expressed resentment, even fear, of the young, perhaps seeing in them not just the threat of redundancy, but also the source of feelings of shame, embarrassment and more, in a world that nowadays begins to eject them from its continuous recycling of the new early on.

Feminist Constraints

Nevertheless, we might expect feminists to be the very first to cultivate Beauvoir’s hopes for cross-generational recognition, at least between women. Feminism not only hoped to reach out to all women, but also strongly rejected the ways in which women are surveyed and defined in relation to their bodies, while often deploring the many hours of a day, of a lifetime, women spent trying, and sooner or later failing, to prove themselves desirable creatures in the world at large, the world of men. ‘Stay young and beautiful if you want to be loved’, was sung with
glorious irony by the overwhelmingly young women at the very first national march of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Britain, on International Women’s Day in 1971.
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I was on that march, but few if any of us joyously singing along then could appreciate what some of us later came to experience as the bitter gravity of our words. On that day, many of us had our boyfriends or girlfriends, alongside many other friends, marching with us. Yet the fading of our youthful confidence and togetherness left us no more prepared than anyone else to deal with the dilemmas of ageing. As she grew older, Sue O’Sullivan – a feminist on that march who has remained an activist for more than forty years, from day one of women’s liberation in Britain – expressed her dismay that ‘feminists, so confident in their youthful twenties and thirties about the ephemeral nature of “attractiveness”, and its male-defined meanings, began to waver and lose confidence in their forties and fifties’.
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As feminists we had consciously disdained the dictates of the youthful beauty culture. It was easier to do when we were young ourselves, and hence less vulnerable to being ignored as intrinsically outside its radar. Yet we still remained largely unprepared for the dismay, fears, anxiety, even for many the sudden horror, which the ageing woman can experience on looking into the mirror and seeing a face she cannot accept, yet one uncannily familiar. It is frequently the face of her own ageing mother, from whom she had often struggled to distance herself. It was, for example, another very committed feminist in the USA, the cultural studies scholar Vivian Sobchack, who proclaimed in her book
Carnal Thoughts
: ‘I despair of ever being able to reconcile my overall sense of well-being, self-confidence, achievement, and pleasure in the richness of the present with the image I see in the mirror.’
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Ageing affects us all, and affects us all differently, but it is women who have often reported a very specific horror of ageing. It is associated, of course, with the place of the body, and fertility, in women’s lives; above all, with what is seen as beauty, attractiveness, good looks, in defining the quintessentially ‘feminine’, however fleeting, however unattainable, this will prove. ‘Beauty is always doomed’, as William Burroughs declared (even if only a tiny minority of men actually kill their young ‘wives’, as he did, accidentally).
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Nothing, in my view, quite prepares us to deal easily with this. We live in an atmosphere where youth, fitness, speed, glamour are so prized that somehow, even as we age, we must still try to remain forever young, but women, in particular, must struggle vainly to retain their youthful allure. This is what has triggered that cry of women’s despair, echoing down through the ages, especially when older women have tried to embark on new love affairs. Colette, for example, was busy recording this in her novels written in the early twentieth century, as she charted all the activity required ‘to disguise that monster, an old woman’.
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‘That monster’, which Beauvoir, Colette and Sobchack recognized, has something to do with the distinct horror attached to the image of the ageing female. Fears of ageing are fed almost from birth by terrifying images in myth and folktale – the hag, harridan, gorgon, witch or Medusa. Such frightening figures are not incidentally female, they are quintessentially female, seen as monstrous because of the combination of age and gender. No such symbolic resonance trails through time from the male Gods of old – despite Cronus, for instance, being depicted mythically as an old man with a sickle, who had castrated his father and would later eat five of his own children. As will be evident in later chapters, men’s fears of ageing, their
yearning for the potency and the pleasures of their youth, are certainly on record, sometimes indeed issuing in howls of rage and ongoing fears of powerlessness and death. But there are far fewer texts from men that express quite the same level of repulsion, the same degree of dread and disgust, that we hear from, and far more often about, older women, evident from their early middle age. It is still apparent everywhere that our cultures of ageing are gendered. ‘Growing old is mainly an ordeal of the imagination – a moral disease, a social pathology – intrinsic to which is that it affects women much more than men’, protested the well-known writer and cultural critic Susan Sontag, in 1972, in an early piece addressing ‘The Double Standard of Aging’.
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Younger feminists were slower to register the full extent of this social pathology. It is now clear that despite a few older women’s memories of ageing in the exciting, and for them welcoming, arms of a shared ‘sisterhood’, many older feminists recall feeling marginalized in what was at first predominantly a movement of young women, determined to reject the lives of their mothers. The once prominent British sociologist, the late Meg Stacey, for instance, already in her late forties at the birth of second-wave feminism, wrote of all she gained from women’s liberation, yet also of what she saw as the ageism of that movement:

As well as finally leading me to this personal liberation, the WLM did cause a good deal of pain, then and later … Not only was I, along with other women of my age, not invited to consciousness-raising groups … it was made clear to me that I was one of the ‘traitor generation’ who had retreated after the Second World War to marriage and family … how much one could have done with sisterly support in that male-dominated world [of academia]!… The sense of sisterhood, although I was personally excluded by the ageism of the movement, seemed to me a most important and valuable feature of the WLM.
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