six - Representations of female ageing and sexuality in Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, Angela Carter’s Wise Children and Doris Lessing’s ‘The grandmothers’

Summary

Introduction

In her Out of Time: The Pleasures and Perils of Ageing, Lynne Segal (2014: 7) explains that Simone de Beauvoir despaired when she turned to her fifties since she thought she would never be able to ‘experience new desires or to display her yearnings publicly’. As de Beauvoir herself explains, ‘it is not I who am saying goodbye to all those things I once enjoyed, it is they who are leaving me’ (Segal, 2014: 7). Despite the exponential ageing of Western populations, there are a number of deep-rooted cultural ideas that contribute to present late-middle age and old age as a time of unstoppable decline in which certain emotions and human drives, together with the biological ageing of the body, seem to magically disappear all of a sudden. This is the case with regard to desire and sexuality. However, in recent years, this limited understanding of old age and sexuality has been counterbalanced by an image of ageing and sexuality which can be found at the other extreme of the spectrum, namely, that of the ‘sexy oldie’ (Gott, 2005: 23). Research conducted by Gott and Hinchliff (2003) and Katz and Marshall (2003) shows how, in recent years, the message has proliferated that looking and staying sexy and having an active sexual life is the best way of fighting against the losses of ageing.

This chapter aims to present these two extremes of the continuum in relation to how sexuality and ageing have been culturally presented, especially with regard to female ageing, within the fictional texts of three contemporary British authors, namely Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger(1988), Angela Carter's Wise Children(1996) and Doris Lessing's short story ‘The grandmothers’ (2004). The protagonists portrayed in these three texts, all of them women in their seventies and eighties, neither conform to these models of female ageing and sexuality nor to a normative understanding of relationships. The fictionalised form of the two novels and the short story allow the readers to get into the inner thoughts of the protagonists in order to witness how they think and feel, as well as to understand the ways in which they establish an interrelationship with their social background and communities.