Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain (review)

The marriage plot, generally considered a determining paradigm of nineteenth-century popular fiction, achieves a very different significance and reveals surprising new twists when we read the often remarked age differences not along easily typecast assumptions on gendered double standards but instead through the lens of age anxiety. Kay Heath's probing exploration of the literary and larger cultural representations of aging exposes this concern as a Victorian invention. Victorian culture transformed middle age, changing it from the "prime of life" into a period of decline, for men as well as for women. Previously considered "the apotheosis of adulthood" (6), it became an age of anxiety, of worries about status in society and in the work force, about marriageability, and about waning masculinity. Signs of aging were no longer an indicator of maturity, experience, wisdom, and hence increased status, but were instead anxiously watched as physical symptoms of decay in health, strength, beauty, or virility. While Heath acknowledges the expected double standard—which is significantly still with us—that "a gendered paradigm of midlife onset heralds the end of youth and marriageability at a much earlier point for females than males" (149), she also shows the effects this new invention had on men. An important number of heroes in Victorian novels suffer from the new anxiety, just as women worry about attractiveness (and fertility) or widows capitalize on the allure of experience. Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit (1857) springs to mind as one of the most self-conscious middle-aged men, as does, of course, the seemingly ageless Dorian Gray in the eponymous novel at the end of the century. But Heath discloses a range of otherwise very different male and female protagonists, minor and major, who struggle or come to terms with the changing perception of their age. As a result, this cultural history of midlife's invention also offers a new approach to nineteenth-century fiction: a literary history of aging heroes and heroines.

The spectrum of novels—both canonical and non-canonical—that Heath covers is impressive, inviting us to go back to and reread them, to search them out, or also to apply the paradigm (the tracing of age anxiety as an interpretative tool itself) to other novels of the time. A self-reflexive proviso in the introduction alerts us to the sheer pervasiveness of aging as a theme and the consequent development of what Heath calls "midlife plots" (13). At conferences at which she has been presenting and discussing her research, Heath stresses, "one of the most frequent comments has been the suggestion of yet another novel to include" (17). Clearly, "midlife is a Victorian issue so ubiquitous it would not be feasible to cover even a fraction of eligible texts" (17), while it also invites further study. Heath's method of selecting texts is as impressive as her coverage of the "fraction" she has sought out. In fact, what makes her study a delightful read as well as informative are the connections she establishes between outwardly very different texts, comparing and contrasting them across genres. While she supplements her perceptive close readings with equally insightful analyses of medical literature, demographic data, and advertisements, treating them as constructed texts as well, she importantly states from the beginning that she is going to "center [her] attention most extensively on Victorian novels" (3). Stressing that fiction "indicates a much more complicated scenario" (9) and shows finer distinctions, especially in such a culturally loaded and constructed discourse as the invention of a new and continuously shifting life stage, she thereby also illustrates how novels form such a revealing and often particularly intriguing insight precisely because they are "problematic bearers of cultural freight" (18). It is indeed a major strength of the study that it draws on a wide range of works, analyzes representative texts in detail, and thereby presents a different key to tracing literary history along the marriage plots of novelists including...