Problem with No Name: Ageing and Age Identity in Wendy Wasserstein’s Plays

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper relies on a feminist perspective on ageing to analyse Wendy Wasserstein’s plays. The Pulitzer-Prize winner Wendy Wasserstein (1950–2006) is good at dramatising the experience of women, especially their experience of ageing anxiety and ageing crises in their middle age. Their quest for identity is problematised in the paper in order to show the fluidity of identity through the passage of time and to represent human life as a continuity. The paper first studies feminist writings about ageing. It asserts that ageing is socially and culturally constructed, instead of biological in nature, and it also argues that women suffer more from the conspiracy of ageism and sexism. Then the paper focuses on Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig (1991) to examine the influence of the ageing process for middle-aged women and the way they re-identify themselves. Wasserstein also depicts different experiences of female ageing in Isn’t It Romantic (1983), The Heidi Chronicles (1988), An American Daughter (1997), and Third (2005), which constitutes the third section of the paper. Finally, the paper concludes that Wasserstein’s plays demonstrate a feminist analysis of ageing, illustrate diversity of ageing experience, and remind us about social differences in the understanding of female ageing.