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Journal of Aging Studies 36 (2016) 1016

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Journal of Aging Studies


journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jaging

The complexities of female aging: Four women protagonists in


Penelope Lively's novels
Maricel Or-Piqueras
Department of English and Linguistics, Universitat de Lleida, Catalunya, Spain

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 13 September 2015
Received in revised form 20 October 2015
Accepted 1 December 2015
Available online 30 December 2015
Keywords:
Female aging
Contemporary fiction
Cultural gerontology
Narrative gerontology
Literary gerontology

a b s t r a c t
Penelope Lively is a well-known contemporary British author who has published a good number
of novels and short stories since she started her literary career in her late thirties. In her novels,
Lively looks at the lives of contemporary characters moulded by specific historical as well as
cultural circumstances. Four of her novels, published from 1987 to 2004, present middle-aged and
older women as their main protagonists. Through the voices and thoughts of these female
characters, the reader is presented with a multiplicity of realities in which women find themselves
after their mid-fifties within a contemporary context. Being a woman and entering into old age is a
double-sided jeopardy which has increasingly been present in contemporary fiction. Scholars
such as Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and Susan Sontag (1972) were among the first to point out a
double standard of aging when they assured that women were punished when showing
external signs of aging much sooner than men. In Lively's four novels, the aging protagonists
present their own stories and, through them, as well as through the voices of those around them,
the reader is invited to go beyond the aging appearance of the female protagonists while
challenging the limiting conceptions attached to the old body and, by extension, to the social and
cultural overtones associated with old age.
2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Introduction
Being a woman and entering into old age is a double-sided
jeopardy which has increasingly been present in contemporary
fiction. Feminist scholars Simone de Beauvoir (1997) and Susan
Sontag (1972) pointed out a double standard of aging when
they condemned the punishment of women for showing signs
of aging much earlier than men. More recently, Kathleen
Woodward (1999) and Jeannette King (2012), among others,
have investigated the limiting options still present for women
as they age by analysing representations of older women both
in fiction and art. In Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations
and Discourses of Aging in Fiction and Feminism: The Invisible
Woman, Woodward and King, respectively, agree on pointing
out that women after their fertile years still occupy an invisible
position. They either conform to the traditional roles within the
Pl. Vctor Siurana, 1. 25003, Lleida (Catalunya, Spain). Tel.: +34 973 702339.
E-mail address: maricel.oro@dal.udl.cat.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jaging.2015.12.007
0890-4065/ 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

domestic space or they are presented as rebels unable to achieve


happiness outside the domestic space. Moreover, they are
largely expected to act according to the way they look; in other
words, their wrinkles, white hair and sagging skin seem to make
them inadequate in most public contexts, unless they conform to
a motherly and/or grandmotherly role. As Woodward argues, a
woman's placement, her social context and thus in great part her
sense of herselfcan largely determine whether she is seen and
sees herself as a little old woman (1999: xii). That is the reason
why feminist gerontologist scholars coincide in pointing out
the need to look for plausible and creative options for women
entering and in old age in a time in which the worldwide
population is aging exponentially.
Although contemporary British writer Penelope Lively has
never defined herself as a feminist, most of the female
protagonists she has depicted in her novels since she started
her writing career more than forty years ago, when she was
almost in her forties, defy traditional images of the submissive,
domestic-enclosed female character in different ways. This

M. Or-Piqueras / Journal of Aging Studies 36 (2016) 1016

specially applies to the aging female characters who are the


protagonists of four of Lively's novels published in different
periods during Lively's writing career: Booker prize-winning
Moon Tiger (1988), Passing On (1990), Spiderweb (1999) and The
Photograph (2004). In these four novels, the main protagonists
are women from their mid-fifties to their eighties whose
portrayal does not conform to the idea of perfect mothers and
grandmothers, even less to perfect housewives. On the contrary,
they are women who, despite being well aware of the signs of
aging on their bodies and of the social expectations awaiting
them after having left behind their youthful traits as well as their
reproductive years, decide to explore new pathways on their
own. In these four novels, a critical moment in the lives of the
aging protagonists makes them confront the mirror and come to
terms with the changing image they have in front of them. This
confronting the mirror and their present appearances is
followed by a process of introspection in which past and present
come together to review their life trajectories. The protagonists
revise the choices they have made in life but also the real
opportunitiesboth in the professional and personal terrain
they have been offered within the specific social environment in
which they were brought up and lived through. At the end of the
day, none of the four protagonists perceive aging as having to
conform to what is expected of them as women getting older in
a specific time and place. As they have done in other periods of
their lives, they will come to terms with their aging processes by
integrating this new vital phase within their life trajectories that
have always been defined by their personalities, beliefs and
values. In her last memoir Ammonites & Leaping Fish, Penelope
Lively claims that like, I think, most people, I have not paid too
much attention to old age. To individuals, yesfamily, friends.
But the status has not been on my radar (2013: 5). Similar to
Penelope Lively's sudden realization that she has actually
become old, the four female protagonists acknowledge their
aging process after a critical moment in their lives which makes
them confront past and present, and their changing bodies
against limited and limiting cultural and social expectations. In
Lively's novels, stereotypes and limiting cultural beliefs are
questioned as the reader is invited to look into the insights of her
female protagonists and the complexities of their particular
aging processes.
Fictionalizing the aging female body
In an interview published in The Guardian online in 2013,
Penelope Lively stated that old age is forever stereotyped
(2013: 1). In Western culture, the external appearance of the
body has been and is associated with immediate stereotyping.
A body showing the signs of aging is read as the emblem of loss
and decline; especially so in women, since, as Beauvoir and
Sontag pointed out, aging comes sooner to women than to men
with the menopause perceived as a most feared marker. Drawing
on Glenda Laws' (1994) article Understanding Ageism: Lessons
from Feminism and Postmodernism, Woodward asserts the
need to understand ageism as a set of social practices with the
aging body as its target (1999: xiii). For Woodward, avoiding
the essentializing of the aging body is a first step to understand
the life course as a continuum rather than as set and limiting
stages with strict cultural norms and, as a consequence, abandon
models of age-appropriate behaviour and experience (1999:
xiv). In her Learning to be Old: Gender, Culture and Aging,

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published in 2002, Margaret Cruinkshank (2002) supports the


idea that ageism is very much related to the cultural conceptions
attached to the aging of the body. As she states, learning to be
old means fully experiencing the physical, bodily changes that
accompany aging while at the same time recognizing that those
changes occur in a particular social setting, influenced by our
ethnicity, class, gender, political and economic climate (2002:
1). Actually, Cruickshank compares the situation of old women to
those of colonized people, namely, thought less intelligent,
judged solely by appearance, encouraged to imitate the
dominant group, figures of fun, scapegoated, internaliz[ing]
messages of inferiority (2002: 4).
In the 1990s, feminist scholars Germaine Greer (1992) and
Betty Friedan (1993) published two books in which they
question the limiting conceptions related to women once they
have gone through their fertile years and present postmenopause as a stage in which women can truly liberate
themselves from social subjugations and become what they
really are and want to be. However, the images of women in
their mid and late fifties onwards in literature and art, even
more in media, are still far from this reality. Within fictional
texts, there has been a proliferation of novels with female
protagonists entering and in old age who have questioned the
restricted stereotypical image of the older woman and who
have problematized the limited options left to women once
youth has disappeared from their bodies. To give an example,
Doris Lessing's novels The Diaries of Jane Somers (1984) and
Love, Again (1996), present women in their late fifties and well
into their eighties who fight to keep their independence, in
terms of agency, but they also try to distance themselves from
the social and cultural undertones attached to an aging body.
By the end of the 1980s and entering the 1990s, Margaret
Moganroth Gullette (1988) and Barbara Frey Waxman (1997)
theorize about a new tendency: the appearance of novels in
which the aging female protagonists are not set in a narrative of
decline but are open to find new routes for themselves, as aging
women at the end of the twentieth century. Whereas Gullette
referred to these novels as midlife progress narratives (1988:
xiv), Barbara Frey Waxman named the genre Reifungsroman
or novels of ripening (1990: 2). These novels neither show a
rosy picture of old age (1990: 16), as Waxman contends, nor
portray heroines or heroes in a classical way (1988: xiv), to
use Gullete's words; however, in these novels, there is an
opening up of life after weaknesses have been overcome and
some kind of resistance has been achieved. Gullette and
Waxman coincide in considering fiction a powerful source to
resist set stereotypes in relation to young and old, appearance
and personality due to the fact that these narratives allow
the reader to go into the realm of aging female protagonists
and those who surround them. To use Waxman's words,
intimate narration, realistic characterisations, strongly evocative descriptions of mental and physical baggage by the old
and interior views of their treatment by younger characters
all blur the boundaries between young and old, reality and
fantasy, belonging and Otherness, integrity and fragmentation,
rationality and senility (1990: 17). Both Woodward, in
Figuring Age: Women, Bodies Generations, and Gullette, in
Declining to Decline (1997) and Aged by Culture (2004), have
claimed the power of narrative, personal narrative as well as
fictionalized narrative, to change social attitudes towards old
age and old women.

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M. Or-Piqueras / Journal of Aging Studies 36 (2016) 1016

In Ageing, Narrative and Identity: New Qualitative Social


Research, Nick Hubble and Philip Tew (2013) have resorted to a
combined analysis of respondents' life narratives and fictional
narratives in order to get insight into the experience of
aging since they consider that, on the one hand, people's life
experience is predominantly mediated by their narrative
(2013: 2) and, on the other hand, representations of aging in
culture and society shape social attitudes and age identities
(2013: 2). In other words, the real life based narratives as
well as the fictional ones drink from one another in both
shaping and questioning conceptions of aging and old age. In
Lively's four novels, the aging protagonists present their own
stories and, through them, as well as through the voices of
those around them, the reader is invited to go beyond the aging
appearance of the female protagonists while challenging
the limiting conceptions attached to the old body and, by
extension, to the social and cultural overtones associated with
old age.
The narratives of Lively's female protagonists
Penelope Lively's writing style has been described by Mary
Ann Moran (1997) as achieving this equilibrium between a
realist style and the use of modernist and postmodernist
literary narrative resources which pose both ontological and
epistemological questions (1997). One of the recurrent techniques in Lively's fiction is what Lively herself names kaleidoscopic narration. Through this technique, Lively presents the
same episode narrated by different characters so that the reader
gets different perceptions of the same character or situation.
Thus, readers are invited to get insight into the aging female
characters' thoughts and feelings and to see how others perceive
them. Moreover, readers become witnesses of the relationships
established between late middle age and older female characters and other characters of the same generation but different
sex as well as among characters of different generations.
Seventy-six-year-old Claudia Hampton is the protagonist of
Moon Tiger, one of Lively's most acclaimed novels as well as
female protagonists. She is the oldest of the four protagonists
from the four novels analysed in this article but she is probably
the most contentious too. She is presented as being bed-ridden
and actually dying. However, following her own life trajectory,
she neither conforms to the roles of the medicalized dying
person nor to that of the old woman. That is why, the first
words we hear from Claudia and the words that open up the
novel are: I'm writing a history of the world (1988: 1). The
nurse's reaction conforms to Cruickshank's definition of the old
woman within a still prevalent ageist society, since the nurse
actually dismisses Claudia as a demented old lady. As it is
described in the novel, she [the nurse] looks down at this old
woman, this old ill woman. Well, my goodness, [] That's
quite a thing to be doing, isn't it? (1988: 1). The narrative of
the story challenges ageism by giving a strong voice to Claudia;
externally, she may be judged as an old and impaired woman,
as pointed out by the character of the nurse, but through her
irreverent voice, Claudia turns out to be far from a conventional historian, never the expected archetypal chronicler,
never like that dried-up bone of a woman who taught me the
Papacy at Oxford time out of mind ago (1988: 3). From a very
young age, Claudia realizes that history shapes our lives but we,
human beings, are the ones who shape the retelling of the past.

That is why Claudia's main aim before dying is the retelling her
story, the piece of history through which she has lived, by
entangling her story with the story of others. Actually, she
considers that as long as one can name things and tell stories,
one is in control of one's situation. In the same way as naming is
essential to Claudia's keeping of independence, the retelling of
her own story on her deathbed allows the reader to get into
Claudia's thread of thought and extensive life experiences. Thus,
Lively sets the focus of the novel in Claudia's life experiences and
trajectory rather than her old external appearance and fragile
body. By consciously retelling her story without following a
chronological order, Lively, through Claudia's voice, is challenging both personal and collective history since the reader is asked
to make his or her own interpretations of Claudia's life
experiences. As Moran argues, whenever Lively renders an
episode from a particular character's point of view, she carefully
hones the scene to fit the consciousness of that character,
including only those details he or she registers and employing a
style that simulates the character's unique voice and thought
processes (1993: 103).
Words are important elements in Claudia's understanding
and contribution to her world. For Claudia, words define who
she is and what things are. Words can either make you free or
enslave you, as it is shown in the episode with which the novel
opens, in which the nurse defines Claudia as a demented poor
old lady. To give an example, Claudia does not allow her
daughter Lisa to call her Mummy; neither when she was a
child nor as an adult. As her daughter Lisa explains when she
was a child, Claudia is really Mummy, but she does not like
being Mummy so you have to say Claudia. Granny Hampton and
Granny Branscombe both like being grannies so it is all right to
say Granny. Mummy is a silly word, whereas Claudia is my
name (1988: 45). Claudia rejects establishing a dependency
relationship with her daughter; and, actually, Lisa is brought up
by her grandmothers more than her mother. Motherhood is a
controversial issue in Moon Tiger and also in The Photograph, the
two novels where the aging female protagonists are mothers.
The female protagonist in The Photograph, Elaine, is presented as
a sixty-year-old successful gardener, married and with a
daughter. The Photograph starts when Glyn, Elaine's brotherin-law, finds a photograph of his late wife and Elaine's only
sister, Kath, holding hands with Elaine's husband Nick. Despite
the fact that twenty years separate that photograph from the
present moment of the novel, the finding of the photograph
triggers a crisis between Elaine and her husband at the same
time as Elaine goes back to her past to try to understand her
sister's feelings just before she committed suicide. Even though
Elaine's relationship with her daughter is more fluid than
Claudia's relationship with Lisa in Moon Tiger, Elaine admits that
she found it difficult to connect with her daughter Polly when
she was a child.
Both Claudia and Elaine are presented as self-assured, selfmade women who did not really need men or children to feel
fulfilled. Claudia never married, although she had two longterm relationships. In the case of Elaine, despite having been
married to Nick for a long time, their relationship is closer to
that of flatmates than husband and wife. As Nick himself admits,
[j]ust occasionally, Nick looks at Elaine and is disconcerted. He
gets this odd feeling that she is someone else, a person he
doesn't know all that well. Which is absurd, she is the woman
with whom he has been getting into bed every nightwell,

M. Or-Piqueras / Journal of Aging Studies 36 (2016) 1016

most nights, admittedly Elaine is elsewhere rather more often


nowadaysfor God know how many years (2004: 89). In both
cases, the men who have been close to Claudia and Elaine have
not been significant in directing their lives, as neither have the
expectations society had for them as women. In that sense,
neither Claudia's nor Elaine's old age is going to be defined by
the limiting characteristics attached to old age in women,
despite the fact that they are defined as old women in the first
place due to their aging appearances.
The Photograph is constructed through the voice of different
characters that Elaine and her brother-in-law, Glyn, visit in
order to find out whether there really was an affair between
Elaine's late sister and her husband. Through the kaleidoscopic
narration which is presented by the retelling of a same episode
by different characters, readers get different perspectives of
Elaine's personality together with her fears, hopes and
expectations. Although probably not such a controversial
character as Claudia Hampton in Lively's Moon Tiger, Elaine is
presented as a self-determined and strong woman who has
always followed her mind and her good instinct for business.
Actually, both Elaine and Claudia are presented as successful
professional women who would not collapse easily in front of
any harsh situation. None of them conform to the domestic
space and, thus, to the dominant image of femininity prevalent
during their youth years. According to Moran, Lively's
kaleidoscopic multiple-points-of-view method creates a weblike effect, an impression of Claudia's identity merging with
others which enhances a uniquely female sense of self
(1997: 126). Through their strong and discernible voices, it is
suggested that Claudia's and Elaine's entering and living
through old age will challenge restrictive cultural and social
conceptions attached to older women, as they have challenged
those that were supposed to define them as younger women.
In the case of Helen Glover and Stella Brentwood in Passing
On and Spiderweb, respectively, neither of the female protagonists has ever been married or has had a long-term relationship.
However, both women are presented within quite different
social and professional contexts. Whereas Helen Glover has been
recently freed from the domineering and pervasive influence of
her mother Dorothy, Stella Brentwood is a retired anthropologist
who has spent her life analysing different cultures, is something
of a free soul, and decides to move to a house in the country in
order to enjoy the peace and quiet. At fifty-two, Helen Glover in
Passing On, absorbed by the dependent and unhealthy relationship with her mother Dorothy, admits that she has never fallen
in love and, almost without realizing, she starts being close with
a man her age, Giles Carnaby. However, when she confronts
herself to the mirror she sees age and decay (1990: 20) and
could not see how her body could arouse desire (1990: 53).
Actually, her desire for Giles keeps on growing and when, while
in a party, she feels jealous because Giles accidentally brushes
his arm against another woman, she thinks [t]his sort of thing
was bad enough at eighteen []; at my age it is ludicrous and
humiliating (1990: 117). As Helen goes on dating Giles, her
mother keeps on appearing and criticizing all her moves. Giles
turns out to be a man who likes to entertain women and be
admired by them but who has no intention of involving himself
into an adult mature relationship. However, for Helen, Giles
represents the person who awakens her from a long sleep in
which she perceived herself as too old and too ugly to interest
anyone. During the time in which she dates Giles and her

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mother's presence is less and less recurrent, Helen undergoes a


process of self-discovery. She realizes that she cannot only be
pretty and desirable in her fifties, but she actually feels a very
vivid sexual desire shown by the fact that she keeps on
dreaming about having fierce sexual relationships. In her The
Older Woman in Recent Fiction, Zoe Brennan (2005) refers to the
inappropriateness that other female aging protagonists express
when feeling desire or falling in love. As cultural and social
tenets have equated love and desire to youth, the fictional texts
with the aging female protagonists presented here openly
question such assumptions and set to the front the restrictive
cultural stereotypes attached to female aging. In this sense,
Lively's female protagonists match Lynne Segal's (2014) claim of
the need for intimacy and love throughout one's life, also in late
middle age and old age. In the case of Helen Glover, desire is a
constructive force which allows her to separate herself from a
limited image of middle age, supported by her mother and her
social background, and imagine herself within different standards. For Helen's mother and most of the inhabitants of her
village, a middle-aged woman is opposed to youth and, thus,
deprived from intimacy and love.
Despite the different social and professional backgrounds of
the two single protagonists, Helen and Stella, Stella goes through
a similar retrospection and re-definition process to the one
experienced by Helen Glover in Passing On. When Stella moves
to the country, her closer neighbours are a couple who live with
a grandmother and two teenage children. The situation of the
grandmother attracts Stella's attention immediately, since she
spends most of her time in the house and is treated as a sack of
old bones (1999: 68) by her family members. Once set in the
countryside, Stella starts seeing the husband of one of her best
friends who died a few years ago, Richard, and also keeps a close
relationship with one of her best friends, Judith. By the end of
the novel, both Richard and Judith propose Stella join forces and
move in together to face entering into old age. Richard is quite
practical in his letter in the sense that he presents economic,
intellectual and also sexual advantages to such a union.
However, the novel finishes with a piece of news published in
the local newspapers in which it is explained that there was a
fire in the Hiscox cottage and the only member left behind was
the eighty-year-old grandmother, suffering from shock and
smoke inhalation (1999: 218). Looking back over her life as
a single, independent woman, Stella realized that her most
natural state would be to continue to live alone and follow her
own standards.
Passing On and Spiderweb are narrated from the point of
view of a third-person narrator who follows the two protagonists along their journey of coming to terms with their new
situation, namely, deposing herself of the pervasive influence of
her mother, in the case of Helen, and redefining herself as a
retired anthropologist, in the case of Stella. The narrative of
both characters moves from past to present as they recall
specific episodes of their past to try to find their present voices.
The personal narratives of the protagonists are entangled with
letters, legal documents, present-day conversations and the
presence of memories with people who had been significant in
their lives and who keep on haunting them. In the same way as
Claudia and Elaine, Helen and Stella have to discern their own
voices in order to find their position as aging women within
their particular social contexts. At the end of the day, none of
the four protagonists will conform to the stereotypical image of

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M. Or-Piqueras / Journal of Aging Studies 36 (2016) 1016

the bitter solitary spinster, the wicked oversexualized stepmother or the sweet grandmother prevalent in fairy tales and
fiction up until the last decades which are portrayed by
Sleeping Beauty's stepmother and Cinderella's godmother, in
the case of fairy tales, or by Charles Dickens' Miss Havisham and
Louisa Alcott's aunt, in the case of fiction. Contrarily, by defining
their own voices after a crisis, through their narratives, the four
protagonists are ready to see their last years as an open road,
to use Waxman's expression.
Overcoming the mirror, overcoming chronology
A common feature expressed by the four aging protagonists
and present in all the novels is the fact of confronting the
mirror and not recognizing their real selves in their present-day
faces and bodies at the same time as they start noticing that
those around them also interact with them differently due to
their increasingly aging appearances. In this respect, cultural
gerontology critics highlight the capacity of fictional texts to look
into the most inner recesses of aging protagoniststheir feelings,
emotions and thoughtsat the same time as they account for the
relationships established between aging protagonists and their
family, friends and acquaintances. Kathleen Woodward (1991,
1999), Munson Deats and Tallent Lenker (1999) and Mike
Hepworth (2000) were among the first critics who considered
fictional texts as valuable sources to discern the ways in which
the aging process is perceived at a social and cultural level.
According to Munson Deats and Talent Lenker, literature,
the arts, and the media not only mirror society's conventions,
but also create them (1999: 1); thus, a reciprocal response is
constantly established between fiction and everyday reality.
In his Stories of Ageing, sociologist Mike Hepworth analyses
conceptions of certain stereotypes through the analysis of
contemporary novels. For Hepworth, [w]hatever variation
they may adopt, stories of aging always invite us to relate self to
others; to imagine our own and the implications of this mental
vision for the way we treat other older people. There is a sense
in which stories of aging never really stand on neutral ground
(2000: 28). In this respect, fictional texts are valuable data
to analyse and understand how the mirror stage of old age,
defined by Woodward as the horror of the mirror image of the
decrepit body [] understood as the inverse of the pleasures of
the mirror image of the youthful Narcissus (1986: 104), is
experienced by late middle age female protagonists and, thus,
how identity is managed throughout the aging process when
confronting the mirror.
Mike Hepworth (2000) and Julia Twigg (2004) identify
mirror scrutinizing as the result of a society based on constant
production and consumption in which youth is valued whereas
the signs of aging should be kept at bay and disguised when
they start to show. According to Twig, [t]echnologies for selfmonitoring and surveillance, such as photographs, mirror, or
bathrooms where the whole body can be observed naked,
allow for a new form of reflexive self-scrutiny in which the
body and its changes become the focus for acute attention
(2004: 61). For his part, Hepworth argues that the mirror is
not a device for discovering the truth about the body (2000:
44); rather, through the mirror, we construct a self-image of
ourselves and the way others see us. When focusing on female
aging and the mirror, Kathleen Woodward (1999) and Nancy K.
Miller (1999) consider that after a first shock of recognition

(Woodward, 1999: 5), it follows a process of refusal, disguise


or gradual acceptance. Without denying the biological aging
of the body, Twig and Hepworth consider that if the female
aging body was disposed of cultural associations to ugliness,
infertility and loss and the Cartesian dualism between body and
self was re-interpreted as a whole that gradually evolves during
a lifetime, aging would be perceived as an enriching experience
rather than a diminishing one.
In Lively's novels, confronting the mirror as both the object
from which the protagonists scrutinize their external appearance and the mirror through which they see and, in some cases,
question, society's gaze on the increasingly visible signs of age
on their bodies is a recurrent element in all the novels. In the
case of Claudia Hampton in Moon Tiger, she defines her face as
containing a strata of faceshers as an appalling caricature of
what it once was (1988: 20). In the same way as Claudia
believes that her body is failing her because of having to be
bed-ridden despite her head and intellect being alive and alert,
she believes that time and aging has turned her face into
an expensive garment ruined by the laundry (1988: 20).
However, as she has done all her life, she is not going to be
fooled by appearance nor let others judge her by her external
appearance only, that of a very old woman. In Spiderweb, Stella
Brentwood also has difficulties in matching her chronological
age and her external appearance and the age she feels inside. As
she explains after moving to her new cottage in the country,
[t]he various papers in Stella's desk told her that she was sixtyfive. The face in the mirrorat which she gave only the most
perfunctory glances these daysseemed like some disturbing
distortion of her real face (1999: 132). Despite feeling that
their faces do not match their real selves, Claudia Hampton and
Stella Brentwood realize how others, especially younger
generations, see them as merely older women. For instance,
Stella's new neighbours refer to her as the old woman
(1999: 158). This mismatch between the external appearance
of their bodies, the way they feel and the way younger
generations judge them is made evident in both novels and
puts to the front the limiting conceptions still attached to
the external appearance of aging and old age, especially in
women.
This mismatch is defined by Stella Brentwood, in Lively's
Spiderweb, as a Lewis Carroll state in which, according to Stella,
you don't know who or where you are at all (1999: 132).
Claudia and Stella share this feeling when they are confronting
the mirror or the others' gaze. In this respect, the fictional form
of the novel allows the reader to be acquainted with this
mismatch through the inner thoughts and feelings of the female
protagonists and through the narrative of their stories; a
mismatch which is cultural and which, in an increasingly aging
population, should be questioned and overcome. In her Out of
Time, Lynne Segal refers to an interview with British writer Doris
Lessing in which she considered that one does not really change
much in terms of character and personality over one's adult
years. As Lessing explains, the great secret that all old people
share is that you really haven't changed in seventy or eighty
years. Your body changes, but you don't change at all. And that,
of course, causes great confusion (quoted in Segal 2014: 31).
For Segal, Lessing's comment is related to the fact that aging is a
complex human experience which has been oversimplified and
stereotyped over the centuries but, particularly so, in our
Western contemporary society in which youth equates to

M. Or-Piqueras / Journal of Aging Studies 36 (2016) 1016

beauty, health, productivity and progress whereas old age


equates to exactly the opposite.
Actually, Penelope Lively challenges restricting conceptions
of age and aging in these two novels when she makes both
female protagonists question linear conceptions of time and
chronology. Both Claudia Hampton and Stella Brentwood are
the narrators of their own stories. Whereas Moon Tiger is
narrated in the first person, with Claudia guiding the reader
along her singular story, and Spiderweb is narrated by an
omniscient narrator who tells the story from Stella's eyes, both
novels, through their late middle-aged protagonists, picture
time lived as an entanglement of memories and experiences
which human beings try to fit into clock time and into
expressions of age which turn out to be culturally charged. In
other words, in cultural and social terms, one is supposed to
behave one way or another according to the age one is; the
mirror is one of the objects one uses to establish such
boundaries. In this respect, by allowing the reader into the
inner recesses of two aging protagonists; into their memories
and experiences, hopes and fears, Lively turns our attention to
the fact that, at the end of the day, age is a constructed category.
Without denying the biological consequences of aging, both
protagonists feel not too far away from younger selves and,
thus, they do not really recognize themselves within the
negative overtones of old age. As Stella Brentwood explains,
[i]t is not true that people diminish with ageit is those earlier
remembered selves who are in some way pared down,
depleted, like those who look out all unaware from old
photographs (1999: 205). In the case of Claudia Hampton,
from the very beginning of the novel she states that
chronology irritates her (1988: 2). She considers that
lifetime is not linear, but instant. [] It is feeling that survives;
feeling and the place; and when she remembers the happiest
and saddest periods of her life, she realizes that [t]here is no
sequence now for those days, no chronology (1988: 73). In a
similar way, when she tries to put together the experiences she
lived with the important people in her life, she explains that
[i]n my head, Jasper is fragmented: there are many Jaspers,
disordered, without chronology. As there are many Gordons,
many Claudias (1988: 10).
In the case of Helen Glover in Passing On, whereas the
mirror makes her see herself as a too old and too inappropriate
to feel passion, despite being in her early fifties, her body tells
her that her sexual desire canalized through the figure of Giles
Carnaby is livelier than ever before. After one of her dates with
Carnaby, Helen got home and,
removed all her clothes and stood in front of the long mirror
in her bedroom. She saw a body with heavy thighs, legs
with the purplish blotches on incipient varicose veins,
breasts that sagged and a belly that was far from at.
Viewed dispassionately, she could not see how this body
could arouse desire. It was demonstrably female, but very
distant from the female bodies displayed in advertisements
or on covers of magazines. (1990: 54).
As mentioned in a previous section, the novel pictures a
deep change in Helen's image of herself as well as in the
cultural constraints that make her believe that she is too old to
feel desire and be desired. In the same way as Helen turned out
to be fooled by Giles Carnaby's polite and charming appearance,

15

she learns to dispose herself of those constraints which are also


based on external appearance and social expectations. As one of
the last quotes of the novel shows, human time cannot only be
expressed through clock time and age conventions. On the
contrary, every aging experience is as varied as any life lived:
Helen closed the door and sat down again. The hall clock
struck. As its last discordant note died away Helen thought, I
shall sell that thing (1990: 210). Helen actually manages to be
herself and follow her own drives once she recognizes and
accepts herself in front of the mirror and decides to follow her
own path.
For Elaine, in Lively's The Photograph, her industrious and
ordered life is set upside down when an episode from the past
with her late sister as protagonist comes to the fore. When
Elaine is forced to revise her past, she realizes that she is in her
sixties, that she has been married to Nick for a very long time
and that her daughter is an independent grown-up. When she
sees Glyn again, after quite a few years without having seen
each other, she observes that his external appearance has aged
and realizes that she probably looks older too. In that sense, for
Elaine, looking into the past and losing vision of her immediate
future makes her aware of her aging process. Thus, as in the
case of Claudia Hampton and Stella Brentwood, for Elaine,
aging is just an accumulation of experiences which contribute
to shape you but not to change your essential self. In the
moment of her life in which past, present and future merge,
Elaine realizes that time is essentially subjective, and so are the
categories which human beings associate to time.
Conclusion
Through her four aging female protagonists, their particular
situations and nuances, Lively tackles the complexities of the
experience of aging in four novels which become valuable
cultural references with which readers will interact. As Mike
Hepworth argues in his Stories of Ageing, fiction evidently adds
a further dimension to our understanding of the quality of the
experience because it is a creative mental activity requiring
author and reader to extend her or himself imaginatively into
the minds of other characters (2000: 5). Through fiction, wellrooted cultural conceptions of aging and old age as a time of
loss and decline are brought centre-stage. Moreover, as pointed
out by Sontag and De Beauvoir, such conceptions apply more
poignantly to women and, usually, sooner. Without negating
the biological aging of the body, Claudia Hampton, Stella
Brentwood, Helen Glover and Elaine do not conceive their
aging processes as a finite time in their lives; in other words, as
the moment to sit quietly until the end. On the contrary, the
novels present a continuity within the life course of the female
aging protagonists which is expressed by an opposition to the
norms and expectations they are supposed to follow as women
of a certain age.
Claudia and Elaine are defined by the same self-assured and
independent character they had shown in their youth years.
They are professional women who have never felt comfortable
within the domestic space and who will not allow anyone to
speak for themselves, especially in old age. For her part, Stella
chooses to keep her independence rather than try to follow the
conventions set for her as a woman after retirement. That is
why she decides to leave the house in the country and reject
both Richard as well as her friend Judith's proposals to live

16

M. Or-Piqueras / Journal of Aging Studies 36 (2016) 1016

together throughout their old age. Finally, Helen actually starts


an open road to late middle age and old age as she rediscovers
that emotions and desire do not diminish with age. Moving
away from the fictional stereotypes of the bitter solitary
spinster, the wicked oversexualized stepmother and the
sweet grandmother, Lively's female aging protagonists decide
to listen to their own voices, ignoring the Othering discourses
of their social backgrounds which are based on their external
aging appearances equated to infertility and loss, and follow
their own paths. In this sense, Lively's novels fall into the
category of Reifungsroman or novels of ripening, as defined by
Waxman and Gullette.
At a narrative level, the interrelationship of past, present
and future within the novels as expressed through the female
characters' views and thoughts reinforce their rejection to
conceive time as chronologically bound and life as set stages
from which one cannot escape. Past, present and future move
irrationally in any person's mind at any age. In Ammonites &
Leaping Fish, Lively argues that this human perception of time
in which past and present merge actually accelerates with the
accumulation of years: the sense of having entered some new
dimension in which the cantering days and weeks are quite
out of control (2013: 130). Thus, Lively's female characters
recognize they are aging because of their accumulation of years
and memories; however, their expectations, concerns and
hopes have remained the same over the years and they define
them as much as their experiences and memories. With this,
Lively highlights the fact that, even in a society lured by youth
culture and the keeping of youthful external appearances,
especially so in women, aging is a process that forms part of an
ongoing life course, despite the limiting stereotypes still
attached to the aging process and to old age. As Penelope
Lively expressed in the 2013 interview in The Guardian online, a
few months after turning eighty, [i]t is an old accustomed
world now, but invested with fresh significance. This old age
self is just a top dressing (2013: 1). Despite the fact that death
is part of the picture within the four novels, either through the
realization that some of their closest family members and
acquaintances had died in the last years or by becoming aware
of their own proximity to death in the case of Claudia Hampton,
all narratives show their female protagonists going through a
process of personal growth derived, precisely, from their life
trajectory and reflection on past experiences.

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