Representations of female ageing and sexuality in Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger, Angela Carter’s Wise Children and Doris Lessing’s ‘The grandmothers’

Abstract

The binary old age and sexuality is still taboo in contemporary society, despite the exponential ageing of the population. Age Critics such as Lynne Segal and Kathleen Woodward have argued that the negative cultural conceptions attached to the ageing body are the ones that relate old age to a lack of desire. In this sense, fiction is a powerful media that allows the reader to go into the deeper recesses of protagonists in their old age and witness the culturally-based contradictions which seem to limit desire and sexuality to youth and youthful appearance. By analysing two novels and a short story of well-known contemporary British writers, this chapter aims to discern the vicissitudes of sexuality and ageing as portrayed in these fictional texts..