Insult, Injury, and Age’s Redefinitional Violence

Abstract

Tracing insults about aging, alongside perceptions of aging as injurious to the self, this chapter explores the spectacular nature of public insults, real and imagined in fictions by Wharton, Lewis, Fitzgerald, Hergesheimer, Glasgow, and Ferber. These scenarios, which stress aging’s painful visibility, appear throughout assessments of female beauty. Aging patriarchs, who transform their lives in efforts to reinvent their identities, however, are treated somewhat more sympathetically, even when they fixate on early youth, impossibly precious success, and romances with much younger women. When such exercises fail, the texts stress aging’s inevitability. More positive accounts of aging, understood here as a rich maturity, by contrast, appear across agrarian fictions, which circumvent social contexts and instead depict cyclical patterns of natural renewal, thereby rejecting linear conceptions of age and embracing aging as part of a life of accomplished productivity.