Ageing in Welsh Fiction in English, 1906-2012: Bodies, Culture, Time, and Memory
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Ageing in Welsh Fiction in English, 1906-2012: Bodies, Culture, Time, and Memory Elinor Shepley A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Cardiff University 2018 i Abstract This thesis examines the proliferation of ageing characters to be found in twentieth and twenty-first-century Welsh fiction in English and argues that older people have a special significance in this body of literature. The study employs a mixed methodology, combining close comparative analysis of fictional texts with theoretical perspectives taken from cultural and literary theory, philosophy, sociology, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial studies. The introduction situates my work alongside the fields of literary gerontology and Welsh writing in English, giving focus to strands of research which have synergies with this thesis. Chapter 2 examines the influence of stereotypes of ageing on older characterisations in Anglophone Welsh fiction and argues that writers undermine and complicate these stereotypes. Representations of gossips, burdens, those with dementia, wise older people, inspirational grandmothers, older men and grandfathers, and unmarried women are analysed. Chapter 3 focuses on renderings of older subjectivity, considering protagonists’ experiences of physical ageing, alongside tensions between the changing older body and a more constant self within, and texts which represent changes in experiences of time and memory. Writers are argued to give voice to the frail and the marginalised and to reveal the influence of socioeconomic and cultural factors on experiences of ageing. Chapter 4 asserts that intergenerational relationships involving older characters tend to symbolise societal change and to reflect class and linguistic divisions between generations. Ageing characters, particularly older women, are shown to become links to the past and to act as remembrancers of local and national histories. They also signify a conception of Welsh identity grounded in speaking Welsh, devotion to Nonconformist worship, and a stoic determination to survive. These characters often perform the role of storyteller, passing on suppressed knowledge and traditional values. It is argued that, despite their regard for the past, the novels and short stories discussed avoid the dangers of nostalgia through the ambivalence of younger characters to the identities they are bequeathed, the self-reflexivity of several texts, and older characters who are grounded in the present and concerned about the future. ii Acknowledgements It is rewarding finally to be able to thank the people who have sustained me on my somewhat circuitous journey to submission. I am immensely grateful to my supervisor Katie Gramich for her insight, encouragement, and support. Katie’s extensive knowledge, detailed feedback, and enthusiasm for my work have regularly exceeded my expectations. I could not have asked for a better supervisor. Thank you to the staff in Cardiff University’s School of English, Communication and Philosophy who have provided me with help and advice in various forms, especially Melanie Bigold, Heather Worthington, Rob Gossedge, Carrie Smith, and Rhian Rattray. I am grateful to my friends and former colleagues at the University of South Wales, Siân Kathryn Cross, Steve Hogan, and Laura Roberts. Thank you for enabling me to work flexibly and for your kindness and sensitivity back in the dark days of 2014. I have enjoyed the company and camaraderie of my fellow PhD students, particularly Emily Blewitt, Helen McKenzie, and Emma Schofield. Thanks also to my dear friends Siân James and Ailsa Webster, who have always been supportive of my return to education as a mature student. Love and gratitude go to my parents-in-law Rosemary and Martin for their generosity and help in so many ways, and to my parents Marilyn and Alistair for their belief in me and generosity in recent years, but also for the decades of encouragement, affection, and books. Finally, thanks and love always to my husband Nick and our son Alexander, my silver linings who make everything worthwhile. iii Contents Abstract i Acknowledgements ii Chapter 1 Introduction 1 Review of Related Fields of Research a) Literary Gerontology 6 b) Welsh Writing in English 21 Original Contribution to the Field(s) 31 Structure, Methodology, and Theoretical Approach 33 Chapter Summaries 38 Chapter 2 Unsettling Assumptions: Older Figures and Character Types in Anglophone Welsh Fiction 44 Burdens and Dependants 46 Gossips 51 Cantankerous Older Characters 58 Dementia 64 The Wise Older Person 71 ‘Her gift-wrapped strength’: Inspirational Grandmothers 79 Ageing Men and Grandfathers 88 Unmarried Women, or Spinsters with Hinterlands 99 Chapter 3 ‘Clocks and mirrors: liars both’: Experiences of Ageing 113 Keeping Body and Soul Together: The Ageing Body and the Ageing Self 113 Older Women and Widowhood 151 Memory, Time, and the Past 159 Chapter 4 ‘You shall remember’: Older People, Family, History, and National Identity 181 Societal Change and Generational Difference 183 The End of the Line: Dynasties in Decline 202 Inheritance, Ancestry, and the Cycle of Generations 209 Storytellers and Custodians of the Past 220 Older People and Welsh National Identity 230 Conclusions 250 Bibliography 254 1 1 Introduction It seems that ageing is a preoccupation of our times. Improvements in health and social care throughout the twentieth century have resulted in increased longevity in both rich and poor countries. Coupled with advances in the availability and efficacy of contraception, these developments are changing the demographics of societies across the globe.1 Somewhat conversely, the dominant Western cultural discourse has been fixated by youth for some time. Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick argue that industrialisation valorised the young at the expense of their elders: Capitalist industrialization, with its continually revamped technologies of production also led to the transformation of domestic production and consumption. It idealized youth (including the eroticized youthful female body as the universal consumer image of desirability) while fundamentally weakening the value of accumulated life experience, both in itself and as a marker of social status. [...] The work society with its loss of function and income which came with mandatory retirement became bolstered by a consumer culture with its images of youth, fitness and beauty lifestyles which produced a new set of exclusions for older people.2 Those who feel the pressures of this idealisation of youthful beauty can now turn to the raft of anti-ageing products which jostle for attention on our supermarket shelves, or to the latest advances in cosmetic surgery. The effects of increased longevity and demographic change are also making themselves known in the political arena. Manifesto promises subjected to particular scrutiny during the 2017 UK General 1 United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, World Population Ageing 2015 (New York: United Nations, 2015) <www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/publications/pdf/ageing/WPA2015_Report.pdf> [accessed 17 March 2018]. 2 Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick, ‘Introduction’, in Images of Aging: Cultural Representations of Later Life, ed. by Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), pp. 1-15 (p. 7). 2 Election campaign included a Conservative Party pledge to dismantle the ‘triple-lock’ which guarantees a minimum increase in the state pension annually, and Theresa May’s hastily revised plan, dubbed the ‘dementia tax’, to make older people in England contribute more towards the costs of their social care.3 Furthermore, analysis of the results of the 2016 referendum on British membership of the European Union has foregrounded generational differences in voting patterns.4 Scholars have responded to population ageing by fostering new areas of enquiry, including social and cultural gerontology, which have moved beyond the biological focus of traditional geriatric medicine. This thesis aims to contribute to the developing field of literary gerontology, as well as to the study of Welsh writing in English, by analysing the representation of ageing in examples of Anglophone Welsh fiction from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and by arguing that older characters hold a special significance in this body of work. By way of an introduction to and justification for this undertaking, it is worth noting that older characters play important roles and ageing is a key theme in several influential Welsh texts and in the visual as well as the literary arts. In the early medieval englynion cycle Canu Llywarch Hen (The Llywarch Hen Poems), the titular character (literally ‘Llywarch the Old’) articulates the physical and social losses of his final years. Jenny Rowland states that ‘Llywarch’s age is an important factor both in the narrative and the 3 Sam Brodbeck, ‘State Pension “Triple Lock” to Go: What Will That Mean for Your Retirement Income?’, Telegraph, 18 May 2017 <www.telegraph.co.uk/pensions-retirement/financial- planning/state-pension-triple-lock-go-will-mean-retirement-income> [accessed 11 December 2017]. Anushka Asthana and Jessica Elgot, ‘Theresa May Ditches Manifesto Plan with “Dementia Tax” U- turn’, Guardian, 22 May 2017 <www.theguardian.com/society/2017/may/22/theresa-may-u-turn-on- dementia-tax-cap-social-care-conservative-manifesto> [accessed 11 December 2017]. 4 See, for example, Gabriel Ahlfeldt, ‘Every Generation Votes in Their Own Interest.