Coming of Age: A Cultural Studies Approach to Aging

Kathleen Woodward, ed., Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. xxix + 362 pp.; ill.; no bibliography. ISBN 0-253-33450-0 (cl); 0-253-21236-7 (pb).

Philosopher Simone de Beauvoir's Coming of Age (1970) and feminist Betty Friedan's The Fountain of Age (1993) exemplify a rich tradition of thought and analysis on aging. ¹ Yet despite this heritage, in Figuring Age, Kathleen Woodward argues authoritatively that society, in general, and academics, in particular, remain culturally illiterate about aging. Woodward's edited volume on aging documents, problematizes, and extends the existing tradition of scholarship on age, as well as explains why aging is often overlooked.

Figuring Age consists of twenty-two original essays. Most were first given as papers at the conference on aging that Woodward held in 1996 at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Woodward has long been a leader in the fields of cultural studies and aging, both in her own writing about psychoanalysis and in promoting the work of others through conferences, working papers, and edited volumes. She is to be congratulated for her leadership and pioneering work, especially the present compilation.

For scholars already familiar with aging as a category of analysis, Figuring Age is a rich compendium of recent research; for those new to the field, it provides a useful introduction. The book begins and ends with scholars' personal accounts of the experience of aging. As has been the recent practice in cultural studies, many of the essays have an autobiographical component, which invites readers to focus on their own experience of aging. The collection also includes a photographic study of aging women's bodies as well as an excerpt from a piece on aging by performance artist Rachel Rosenthal. Several essays focus on the aging process as it relates to such cultural icons as Marlene Dietrich and Joan Crawford.

Many of the authors in Figuring Age are concerned with the aging body and its fetishization in Western culture as decrepit and sexless--most recently, as riddled with osteoporosis. Some focus on cross-generational tensions among aging mothers and aging daughters. As Woodward points out, this tension is also being played out metaphorically among older and younger women in academic women's studies. Interestingly, in her suggestive study of cross-generational relationships among lesbians in France, Marie-Claude Pasquier reflects that their model for same-sex relationships is not based on a narcissistic mother-daughter relationship but, rather, on a positive older sister-younger sister combination.

Postmodern and psychoanalytic theories also figure in the arguments of some of the authors who contest psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's notions of postmenopausal women as harridans; they draw on "the mirror" and "the gaze" as ways to understand aging women's internalization of their oppression. E. Anne Kaplan, for example, uses trauma theory to argue that becoming old is a life trauma as significant as being born. Mary Russo uses feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray's theory of female genealogy to establish links among generations and thus empower aging women. Both Woodward and the authors in her edited collection wisely view aging as a process and old age as a plateau which can shift and vary both individually and socially.

Probably because I am a historian, I liked best the three essays explicitly historical in analysis. I especially enjoyed Stephen Katz's essay on psychologist Jean Charcot, in which Katz analyzes twenty-five hundred elderly women who resided in Charcot's famed Salpêtrière Hospital. I also found compelling Teresa Mangum's essay on portrayals of aging women in nineteenth-century children's literature, in which she suggests that author Lewis Carroll based the Red Queen character in Alice in Wonderland on Queen Victoria.

Although my reaction to Figuring Age is mostly positive, I must point out that the authors pay no attention to race or class...