Long-Term Caring: Canadian Literary Narratives of Personal Agency And
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Long-Term Caring: Canadian Literary Narratives of Personal Agency and Identity in Late Life Patricia Life Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctorate in Philosophy degree in English Faculty of Arts Department of English University of Ottawa Patricia Life, Ottawa, Canada, 2014. Life ii This thesis was inspired by Muriel Yewer. It is dedicated to Jonathan Life and Richard Life in gratitude for their love and encouragement. Life iii Abstract This thesis analyses thirteen key literary texts taken from the last century of Canadian English-language publishing to assess how each text reveals, reinforces, and /or resists narratives of natural-aging, decline, progress and positive-aging. When considered together, these texts illustrate overall patterns in the evolution of age-related beliefs and behaviours. Stories have a potential emotional impact that scholarly readings do not, and thus the reading and study of these texts can serve to promote conscious intellectual consideration of the issues surrounding age and aging. My analysis focuses on how our Canadian literature envisages aging into old age, primarily addressing stories set in late-life-care facilities and comprising what I am naming our ‘nursing-home-narrative genre.’ Although my chapters follow a chronological progression, beginning with Catharine Parr Traill’s 1894 Pearls and Pebbles and concluding with Janet Hepburn’s 2013 Flee, Fly, Flown, I am not arguing that each age-related belief is replaced by a succeeding one. I would assert instead that over time Canadians have accumulated an assortment of age ideologies, some of which mesh and some of which duplicate or even contradict others. For example, although many people have embraced new positive-aging ideologies, aging-as-decline narratives still circulate strongly. Using social and literary theory as support, I argue that the selected literary texts of my analysis (Traill, Wilson, Laurence, Shields, Wright, Barfoot, Munro, Tostevin, Gruen, Hepburn, King) reveal a genre that is evolving quickly in both form and content. The nursing-home-narrative genre begins with gothic stories of fear of the nursing home, of aging and of death, expands to include darkly humorous stories featuring increasingly empowered residents successfully living within care homes, and is introducing, during the Life iv twenty-first century, fantastical stories of escape from the home and of return to youthful behaviours and preferable habitats. This most recent narrative joins the earlier ones to create a new master narrative in which aging people can overcome fear with agency and thus ultimately reject the nursing home and old age itself. However, in the most compelling of the new agency and escape narratives, authors lay a thin icing of entertainment over a dark undercurrent of reality. Life v Acknowledgements No dissertation is solely the work of one person, and I am deeply grateful to many people and organizations for their assistance and support. First I would like to offer my sincere appreciation to my supervisor, Dr. Janice Fiamengo, for her scholarly expertise, her indefatigable work ethic, her genuine interest in this age studies project, and her kind and encouraging support. I am also grateful for the support of the University of Ottawa English Department and, in particular, for the assistance of Dr. Gerald Lynch, Dr. Cynthia Sugars, Dr. David Staines, Dr. Thomas Allen, Dr. Irena Makaryk, Dr. Mary Arseneau, Dr. Robert Stacey, Dr. Ina Ferris, and Dr. Geoff Rector. Prior to my Ph.D. work at the University of Ottawa, I completed B.A. and M.A. degrees at Trent University, and I would like to express my gratitude to the English Department and to the Frost Centre for Canadian Studies and Indigenous Studies for first introducing me to the world of academic scholarship. I would like to extend special thanks to Dr. Stephen Katz, Dr. Sally Chivers, Dr. Michael Peterman, Dr. Julia Harrison, Mr. Maged El Komos, Dr. Margaret Steffler, Dr. Sarah Keefer, and Dr. Zailig Pollock. I would also like to express my appreciation for the financial support that I have received from the University of Ottawa, Trent University, the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. Life vi Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One 50 Before Ageism: Measuring Maturity in Pearls and Pebbles and The Innocent Traveller Chapter Two 76 Assembling Identity: Decline and Progress Narratives in The Stone Angel and The Stone Diaries Chapter Three 102 From Horror to Hotel: Transforming the Nursing Home in Sunset Manor and Exit Lines Chapter Four 128 Shaking off Shackles: L.T.C. Havens in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” and The Other Sister Chapter Five 150 Walking out the L.T.C. Door: Cages, Fantasy, and Freedom in Water for Elephants and Flee, Fly, Flown Chapter Six 177 Outside the Nursing-Home-Narrative Genre: Race and Gender Exclusions in Green Grass, Running Water Conclusion 194 Works Cited 207 Life 1 Introduction When Stephen Leacock asked himself in 1942 “how old age feels, how it feels to have passed seventy,” he used the metaphor of a soldier venturing through No Man’s Land to express the future he envisioned for himself – a lonely decline towards inevitable death. While the imagery is compelling, the message is dire: Old age is the ‘Front Line’ of life, moving into No Man’s Land. No Man’s Land is covered with mist. Beyond it is Eternity. As we have moved forward, the tumult that now lies behind us has died down. The sounds grow less and less. It is almost silence. There is an increasing feeling of isolation, of being alone. We seem so far apart. Here and there one falls, silently, and lies a little bundle on the ground that the rolling mist is burying. Can we not keep nearer? It’s hard to see one another. Can you hear me? Call to me. I am alone. This must be near the end…. (173) Leacock’s grim description of his anticipated journey through old age expresses perhaps the most common of aging tropes of the twentieth century: the decline narrative,1 which equates aging with loss. Leacock concludes the sketch (“Three Score and Ten – The Business of Growing Old”) with the gloomy comment “Give me my stick. I’m going out to No Man’s Land” (179). The request for his stick may suggest that he intends to tackle aging with some pluck, yet clearly he has negative expectations of old age. While it is true that all of us are 1 Jean Francois Lyotard explores ‘grand’ narratives in The Postmodern Condition, repositioning the term ‘narrative’ to mean a circulating story carrying connotations of ideology or bias. He argues that overarching belief systems embraced by culture infiltrate all aspects of life to the point where they become naturalized, inevitable and possibly invisible to those who live in their shadow. Lyotard argues that even writers and story- tellers are affected; thus, culturally prevalent beliefs and habitual behaviours are intentionally and/or unintentionally included in all artistic productions. As a result, thoughtful art criticism has the responsibility and the capacity to reveal which narratives have been internalized and to what effect. Life 2 mortal and that many will encounter aspects of decline prior to death, each person’s late- life experience is individual and not all are so bad that they resemble stumbling through the frontline of a war into oblivion. This decline narrative, however, has been pervasive in our Western culture.2 As theorist Sally Chivers puts it, old age has been construed as a time of “disease, decline, and death” (From x). Until they reach its border, people prefer not to think about their own decline or trip to “No Man’s Land,” picturing old age as something that has happened to other people, not as something that will inevitably happen to us all as we progress along our life courses. Yet more recently, the topic of age has become a focus of public and media attention – primarily due to the supposed financial threat associated with the aging of the Baby Boomers born following WWII. The public has long viewed aging negatively, but now the old, a large and growing demographic cohort, are increasingly depicted by the media as a problem confronting government and its purse. For the last several decades in Western society, the politically volatile categorizations of race, class and gender have drawn public interest and critical academic enquiry. Arguably, age is an equally volatile social differentiation, yet it has been largely ignored in the humanities in general and in the study of literature in particular. Consider that while we will probably not ever experience living in a different gender, class, or colour of skin, each one of us, barring premature death, will experience our own version of Leacock’s trip through “No Man’s Land” (179). Age as a category of difference should be 2 I use the term ‘Western culture’ as a catch-all term to refer to the norms, values, ideologies, customs, systems, artifacts, and technologies that evolved and are evolving in response to England and its language, origins, and empire; to the larger European community; and to the consequent world-wide influence and counter-influence. Life 3 of compelling interest to us all from both a personal and an academic perspective, and yet most scholars have thus far dismissed it as a topic of little concern. In the 2011 text Agewise, cultural theorist Margaret Morganroth Gullette argues that “ageism is to the twenty-first century what sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism were earlier in the twentieth – entrenched and implicit systems of discrimination, without adequate movements of resistance to oppose them” (“Introduction” 15).