Aging Well: Shaping Age Identities in the Literature of the British Welfare State

AGING WELL: SHAPING AGE IDENTITIES IN THE LITERATURE OF THE BRITISH WELFARE STATE BY KATHERINE SKWARCZEK DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Jim Hansen, Chair Assistant Professor Andrew Gaedtke Professor Vicki Mahaffey Professor Robert Markley ABSTRACT This dissertation traces a literary genealogy of old age and argues that British literature offers both a systematic challenge to the regulatory models of the life course solidified during the twentieth century and emerging from the welfare state, as well as a necessary caveat concerning recent processes that individualize, multiply, but also potentially dismantle social provisions for the elderly in late life. By examining such topics as retirement, intergenerational relations, and narrative ethics, I create a literary-historical archive that resists easy internalization of socio- economic, cultural, and medical-scientific practices and discourses—such as the “alzheimerization” of old age—that seek to manage the “problem” of an aging population, while likewise sharing with the broader field of aging studies the goal of disassociating old age from damaging equations with decline and loss. Beginning with the postwar decades and extending to early twenty-first century texts, this study examines the creation of aging subjects who must negotiate both individual agency and collective social responsibility. I show how the anxious depictions of labor and late life in the mid-century plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter still inform current debates about retirement, pensions, and social welfare provisions. Other chapters, including one discussing the work of B. S. Johnson, explore how the depiction of subjective dimensions of aging (including anxiety about growing older) can simultaneously register the material, historical imprint of exclusionary age-related policies (such as the failings of institutional care). In later chapters on life writing, the “neuronovel,” and colonial and postcolonial literature, I highlight the changing and often contradictory disciplinary constructs, cultural norms, and social policies that idealize some forms of aging “well,” but which then morally burden individuals with the achievement of such ideals or serve to marginalize other already-vulnerable groups, such as women and migrant communities. ii To my parents and to Russell iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For their insight, friendship, and generosity, special thanks to my committee members, my professors, and my fellow graduate students at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction MANAGING AGE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE…………………………………...………1 Chapter 1 CREATING POSTWAR RETIREMENT: SAMUEL BECKETT AND HAROLD PINTER………….……46 Chapter 2 “THE FUTURE DWELLING-PLACE”: B.S. JOHNSON, ANTI-INSTITUTIONALISM, AND THE SPACE OF OLD AGE………………………87 Chapter 3 MURIEL SPARK AND THE ETHICAL VIOLENCE OF NARRATING AGE…………………..……….153 Chapter 4 IAN MCEWAN AND THE ALZHEIMERIZATION OF OLD AGE.……………………………………...211 Conclusion THE EMPIRE RETIRES: THE PROBLEM OF POSTCOLONIAL AGING……………………………....246 Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………………………….301 v INTRODUCTION MANAGING AGE IN TWENTIETH CENTURY LITERATURE In Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Darkling Thrush,” a solitary speaker contemplates the darkening and wintry landscape at a particular moment, the end of the nineteenth century, grimly figured in the poem as a “corpse outleant.” The “fervourless” speaker eventually finds in art some semblance of hope despite the death-like grimness of time and landscape, specifically, in the song of an old, shabby-looking bird, “An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, / In blast- beruffled plume.” The bird’s worn-out shabbiness initially seems an uninspired choice for both the poem, which uses it as symbol of qualified hope and new beginnings at what seems a momentous turning point, as well as for this study, which argues that changing definitions of old age shape twentieth-century British literature in important yet unacknowledged ways. As age emerged as a social problem in the twentieth century, so too did it emerge as a literary problem, acquiring a new weightiness that disrupts its acknowledged use in literature as metaphor, archetype, or universal truth. In both the poem and this study, the choice of a somewhat unflattering portrait of aging is deliberate. For Hardy, the bird’s unimpressive appearance is precisely what allows it to function as a hopeful symbol; the bird’s shabby frame signals its experience and its perseverance despite difficult circumstances, where an unmarked body might be read as simple inexperience and naiveté. For this study, the poem’s description of the encounter between an anxious observer and the frail, elderly thrush stages many of the tensions inherent in representing old age and elderly subjects, tensions that stem from social and personal anxieties about growing old and the forces that purport to “manage” those anxieties, tensions that literature is particularly situated to capture and complicate. This project shares with other cultural studies of aging the desire to overcome 1 what Cynthia Port and Aagje Swinnen call, in the inaugural issue of the journal Age, Culture, Humanities, “a damaging binary cultural system that idealizes youth and devalues older age” (1). In particular, it seeks to identify how British literature of the second half of the twentieth century responds to this devaluation, both in its critique of the marginal status of the elderly in society and as it itself “ages” beyond modernism. After all, “The Darkling Thrush” conjures up a new aesthetics in response to the speaker’s lament over a perceived loss of productivity and cultural relevance. A key part of dismantling that damaging binary and recognizing the value in late life involves recognizing aging as a continual process rather than as a static existential state, one which requires a constant negotiation between personal narratives of a changing self over time with socially normalized models of aging (which themselves change over time). The life course is a useful concept that mediates between these two poles, as, per Melissa A. Hardy and Linda Waite’s definition, it “represents the dynamic counterpart to the set of roles/positions that people occupy at any point in time” (8). An individual’s life course, i.e., his or her transitions within social roles, such as education, employment, retirement, marriage, etc., is also regulated by historically specific forces. Sociologists suggest an overall historical pattern wherein the life course was “institutionalized” beginning with modern processes of industrialization and expansion of the bureaucracy; the result was “an increasing reliance on age as a criterion of social organization” (Dannefer and Miklowski 36). This dissertation focuses on the postwar welfare state, including the universalization of retirement, as a key example of such an “institutionalization of the life course.” Furthermore, evidence suggests that this institutionalization may be fragmenting; there is a possibility, Dale Dannefer and Casey Miklowski suggest, that “the destabilizing effects of economic globalization and postmodern 2 cultural trends are creating a counter-tendency of deinstitutionalization within [these] same late modern societies” (37). This project suggests that the escalating contemporary/late twentieth- century mandate to age “well” is part of the process of this process of fragmentation and individualization. Thus, I show how the literature of this period must negotiate aging as a subjective experience and as one structured by external social and material cultural forces/institutions. All this occurs within a historically changing age landscape, particularly in regards to the welfare state and the concept of social “welfare” more broadly, which I discuss in this study through the tropes of retirement, recognition, and care. Analyzing this dialectic also requires that we go beyond merely reversing or correcting crudely negative stereotypes of old age, instead recognizing how the social anxieties about an aging population that fuel such stereotypes map onto personal anxieties about aging: the fears of being a “burden,” dependence, physical frailty, social ostracism or isolation, and loss of economic prowess and productivity.1 The devaluation of the “old” in preference for the “young” that so profoundly underscores ageist attitudes also extends to literature and shapes the trajectories of twentieth- century British literature, beginning with modernism. Cynthia Port, for instance, understands Ezra Pound’s famous declaration to “make it new” as a “tacit imperative to ‘keep it young’” (142). She demonstrates how the valuing of youth (one strongly gendered as masculine) was a notable feature among the avant-garde and modernists; in this, the modernists reflected a wider “cult of youth” (whether real or perceived) in popular discourse of the first few decades of twentieth century, especially in the inter-war period in Britain. The war was itself one popular explanation given for the increased visibility of youth culture, in that blame for the war was attributed to the out-dated traditional values of an older generation, both of which the young now 1 Despite their relevance to old age, neither fear of death nor mortality is a main focus for this study, as these

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