The Creative Crone: Aging and the Poetry of May Sarton and Adrienne Rich (review)

I approached the writing of this review with both trepidation and curiosity. I was curious to see how Sylvia Henneberg would bring the work of Adrienne Rich and May Sarton together. My trepidation had to do with the fact that later this year I will turn fifty. Like the rest of North American culture and against my own best interest, I seem to participate in what Henneberg describes as a “decline ideology that sees aging as a systematic downward spiral into decline, decrepitude, and death” (p. 2). Happily, Henneberg’s thorough, thoughtful, engaging, and wide-ranging discussion of aging and the poetry of May Sarton and Adrienne Rich offers alternative approaches to life in our—particularly women’s—later years. In the face of what she calls “late-life rolelessness,” Henneberg demonstrates the ways that “May Sarton and Adrienne Rich offer two radically different but richly complementary strategies for breaking the silence surrounding age, filling the void created by the virtual absence of a sustained cultural discourse on aging in the humanities” (pp. 3, 4).

Although I am generally suspicious of the comments that publishers place on the back covers of books, Barbara Frey Waxman’s description of The Creative Crone as “[a] satisfying, mature, and major piece of scholarship” is accurate. Henneberg’s feminist approach to the question of aging begins with Simone de Beauvoir’s “monumental study” The Coming of Age (1972) and proceeds to examine not only all of the available scholarship on aging and literature but also the full range of textual, biographical, and critical scholarship on the work of both Rich and Sarton (p. 2).

Henneberg’s engagement with Sarton seems more obviously crucial to the argument since “even the most cursory glance at her many poems, novels and journals reveals” that Sarton was always “interested in aging” and “obsessed with all things old” (p. 1). In contrast, the more subtly relevant attention to Rich’s later work is important not only because “a book focusing on the second half of her career is long overdue” but also because “Rich brings to advanced age ‘the same consciousness, intensity, hard work, standards, and demands for growth and success’ as before” (pp. 1, 156).¹

Why study them together? Henneberg makes the compelling argument that “we need Sarton to recognize what might be considered the single most unexplored facet of Rich’s work, age, [and] we need Rich to help us identify omissions in our critical examination of Sarton. Read in conjunction with Rich, Sarton takes on hitherto unacknowledged political and feminist dimensions” (p. 20).

Despite the welcome alternatives to “our culture’s equation of aging with loss” that this book presents (p. 153), I continue to feel, as William L. Randall and A. Elizabeth McKim say in their book on the poetics of growing old, that “aging is hardly for the faint of heart.”² Clearly the work of Sarton and Rich does give us what Henneberg calls “counterstories” of and by strong, passionate, and capable aging women. Unexpectedly, Henneberg’s study also challenges us to value characteristics that our feminism has taught us to try to overcome. She sees as radical Sarton’s “ability to accept and even claim many things we generally shun—dependence, passivity, solitude, even the wrinkles” (p. 9). Henneberg has given us a lot to think about and I, for one, am grateful.