[In the following essay, Rubenstein explores how feminist authors have portrayed female aging and maturity in their works, particularly in Doris Lessing's Love, Again and French's My Summer with George.]

Nearly a half century ago, Simone de Beauvoir observed that the interval between “maturity” and “old age” is an especially problematic time for women. In her view, women who have outgrown their once clearly delimited social and biological functions as mates and mothers find no clear cultural scripts to guide them during the years and decades that succeed procreation and maternity. As she phrased it:

From the day a woman consents to growing old, her situation changes. Up to that time she was still a young woman, intent on struggling against a misfortune that was mysteriously disfiguring and deforming her; now she becomes a different being, unsexed but complete: an old woman. It may be considered that the crisis of her “dangerous age” has been passed. But it should not be supposed that henceforth her life will be an easy one. When she has given up the struggle against the fatality of time, another combat begins: she must maintain a place on earth.¹

Although one would like to declare de Beauvoir's statement “dated” by citing the many advances women have achieved in the decades since she published her groundbreaking analysis of the “second sex” (and, later, of “the coming of age”²), the fact is that midlife and the years that follow it still remain problematic for many women and disproportionately so for those who are not white, educated, or middle class.³ Despite the profound social transformation generated (if not secured) by feminist activism over the past three decades, one may legitimately ask: Has the women's movement that empowered an entire generation remained a movement for young(er) women? Have the changes that feminism catalyzed in the public sphere, notably matters of economic and social equity, bypassed more intimate personal matters, notably aging, sexuality, and what might be termed erotic equity, particularly in the years of midlife and beyond?

As the cohort of feminists whose political activism catalyzed the women's movement of the 1970s reaches midlife and beyond at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and as the focused energy of “second-wave” feminism has given way to the less-focused goals of “third-wave” feminism, these questions remain far from closed.⁴ The definition of midlife (the term that has replaced middle age) has itself advanced chronologically in tandem with gains in life expectancy during the past several decades. However, it seems to have expanded in the other direction as well. One scholar of aging states that in contemporary American and European cultures the designation encompasses “roughly ages 30-70.”⁵ According to another scholar on the subject of aging, the answer to the question, “When do the middle years begin?” is “When the culture gets you to say they do.”⁶

Certain elements of that impossibly broad category of midlife have recently been subjected to special scrutiny by feminists. Now that the cohort of women whose pioneering work defined the second wave of the women's movement has reached the life-stage of the women they once regarded as invisible or irrelevant, they have begun to address the challenges of aging from the perspective of their own experience as older women. Among others, Betty Friedan has bemoaned the outworn script underscored by de Beauvoir's assumptions about women and aging. Upon entering her sixties, Friedan began research for the book eventually published in 1993 as The Fountain of Age. Acknowledging her peers’—and her own—resistance to the subject, she wrote, “Why did we all seem to feel the need to distance ourselves from age, the closer we got to it?” Proposing the idea of an “age mystique” comparable to the paradigm-shifting “feminine mystique” she named and diagnosed in the sixties, she asserted, “If age itself is defined as ‘problem,’ then those over sixty-five who can no longer ‘pass’ as young are its carriers and must be quarantined lest they contaminate, in mind or body, the rest of society.”⁷

A number of other feminist activists and novelists who came of age politically during the second wave have in recent years turned from the larger subject of feminism to their private histories, feminist and otherwise. For example, several novelists whose “mad housewife” fiction defined critical issues for women during the 1970s shifted to nonfiction in the form of personal memoir during the 1990s. Alix Kates Shulman, author of one of the classic novels of the second wave, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (1972), recently published A Good Enough Daughter: A Memoir (1999). During the same year, Anne Richardson Roiphe, author of Up the Sandbox! (1970), another early and influential second-wave novel, published 1185 Park Avenue: A Memoir (1999). Two decades after writing the exuberant and taboo-shattering Fear of Flying (1973), Erica Jong articulated anxieties of another kind in the Fear of Fifty (1994), while in Getting Over Getting Older: An Intimate Journey (1996), activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin, author of How to Make It in a Man's World (1970), wrote a different kind of guide, using her own aging as the map. Similarly, academic feminist Carolyn Heilbrun, author of Reinventing Womanhood (1979), recently published The Last Gift of Time: Life beyond Sixty (1997).⁸

Female aging in patriarchy may be understood as a time-advanced version of what Friedan termed “the problem that has no name.” It is not yet clear whether contemporary feminist authors of fiction and theory have “named” the problem in ways that might enable women to imagine alternatives to culturally embedded negative scripts and to redirect our lives affirmatively during and beyond midlife. Pogrebin admits her wish that the words “older woman” might “evoke an image of a strong, wise, self-confident female, not a hag or a nobody. … It may not yet be possible in this society for a woman to have an ideal old age, but it is possible to imagine one.”⁹ Recognizing the difficulty in that very act of imagination, Heilbrun laments the paucity of emotional scripts available to independent women beyond midlife:

If we could discover a word that meant “adventure” and did not mean “romance,” we in our late decades would be able to free ourselves from the compulsion always to connect yearning and sex. If an ancient (by American standards) woman finds herself longing for something new, something as yet not found, must that something always be sex or till-death-do-us-part romance? The reason for the predominance of sexual aspiration, I have decided, is that no other adventure has quite the symbolic force, not to mention the force of the entire culture, behind it.¹⁰

The ideas of “adventure” and “romance” come to us through a variety of cultural expressions, including imaginative literature. There is a tradition of literature by and about women and aging that predates and overlaps with the period on which I focus here, including novels by (among others who might be mentioned) Margaret Laurence, May Sarton, Paule Marshall, Doris Lessing, and Anne Tyler.¹¹ If it is through the imaginative vision that many (then-younger) female readers discovered some of the issues concerning women's personal and political circumstances during the second wave, I would like to consider here two post-second-wave fictional “case studies” that extend comparable insights to women's later years. Both Doris Lessing and Marilyn French address in fictional form some of the questions that circulate between notions of eros and aging for women. Like many of the second-wave writers I have mentioned, Lessing and French reached ideological maturity in the shadow of de Beauvoir's pioneering words and moved beyond midlife as the century turned (Lessing and French were born in 1919 and 1929, respectively). I focus on two of their recent narratives not only because of the considerable influence of their fiction during the second wave but because, as they themselves have grown older, they have continued to write about matters of concern to women in later life-stages. From their positions as authors of galvanizing, era-defining narratives of young women's politically and erotically complex lives—Lessing's The Golden Notebook (1962) and French's The Women's Room (1977)—both Lessing and French have turned to matters of aging and loss but have maintained their attention to eros.¹²

In a rather remarkable coincidence of timing, two novels published the same year in the United States—Lessing's Love, Again: A Novel (1996) and French's My Summer with George: A Novel of Love at a Certain Age (1996)—revisit the subject of eros, this time focusing on mature, self-realized women who unexpectedly find themselves struggling to reconcile their self-sufficiency with the long-forgotten, overpowering pull of emotional intimacy and sexual desire.¹³ Both authors focus on female characters who wrestle with the disturbing disjunctions between hard-won positions of autonomy in the public arena and the more intimate and problematic realm of eros for older women; both authors dare to imagine their female protagonists as independent, older, desiring women as they anatomize the longings and losses that accompany even highly successful women's later years. Through the prism of aging, both authors propose that matters of the heart—what might be called struggles with erotic equity—continue to challenge even emotionally self-sufficient women well beyond midlife.

Despite their compelling resemblances, however, Lessing's and French's novels map different trajectories of late-midlife female self-discovery, demonstrating and drawing different conclusions from the powerful socially constructed script of the female life span. As Margaret Gullette observes in her analysis of the ideology of aging, contemporary culture offers two sharply contrasting cultural scripts of midlife development: “progress” and “decline.” Literary narratives that focus on midlife protagonists—usually female—typically reflect one or the other of these cultural scripts. In narratives of progress, “Recalling being younger is a way of expressing gratitude for having moved on in the life course. … The ‘progress’ such novels convincingly model is that it feels better to be older than younger.” Among the functions of such narratives of progress is that of “redefin[ing] heroism at midlife to include self-rescue.”¹⁴

However, not all novels about midlife articulate an affirmative process of “ripening” into age.¹⁵ Rather, narratives of decline focus on a trajectory of renunciation, loss, and a kind of “identity-stripping” that “requires the self to reject or consider inconsequential all the counternarratives that emphasize aging into wisdom or maturity or any valued progress.”¹⁶ Of the two cultural scripts, the default narrative—the one that is far more pervasive and influential in its pessimistic charting of physical and mental deterioration over time—is the latter: “Our culture provides subjects with a master narrative of aging—something like the master narrative of gender or race: popularly disseminated, semiconscious, so familiar and acceptable that it can be told automatically. The plot of this one is peak, entry, and decline, with acceleration on the downslope.”¹⁷ Moreover, although other cultural labels and sites of interpretation such as ethnicity or class may influence the cultural scripting of the body's progress or decline, gender is “probably the most important determinant of the details that give plausibility to the master narrative.”¹⁸

Lessing's and French's novels may be instructively read in light of this “master narrative” of aging as they expose assumptions about the female body, erotic desire, and the enduring traces of earlier experiences that continue to influence inner growth beyond maturity. In fact, Lessing explicitly introduces a version of the master narrative early in Love, Again, as Sarah Durham is drawn to the memoir of an unnamed “society woman once known for her beauty” (4), published when its author was nearly a hundred years old. This extended cited passage encodes the script of aging as decline:

Growing old gracefully … the way has been signposted. One might say the instructions are in an invisible script which becomes slowly legible as life exposes it. Then the appropriate words only have to be spoken. … The young do not know—it is hidden from them—that the flesh withers around an unchanged core. The old share with each other ironies appropriate to ghosts at a feast, seen by each other but not by the guests whose antics and posturings they watch, smiling, remembering.

(Lessing 3-4)

Over the course of both Lessing's and French's novels, the central characters—women in late midlife—confront the dark underside of the erotic yearnings that enmesh them: the realities of “longing and loss and the terrible knowledge of the impossibility of satisfaction” (French 242). While the reawakening of desire catalyzes for each woman a serious reflection on her past and obliges her (and the reader) to consider the relationships among aging, gender, desire, and loss, Lessing's narrative traces a darker and more convoluted path than French's. My Summer with George is, according to the author, “a satirical novel about an aging woman's ludicrous love affair,” written as an antidote to her experience of nearly fatal illness.¹⁹

The protagonists of both novels are attractive, successful women in their mid-sixties: Lessing's Sarah Durham, a scriptwriter and partner in a small London theatrical agency, and French's Hermione Beldame, “Queen of Hearts,” the prolific best-selling author of romance novels. Each has been married and widowed at least once; both have grown children who are absent from the narratives, although Sarah is occasionally sought out by an emotionally troubled niece for whom she has for years been the “effective parent” (Lessing 13). Though Sarah has not been in the arms of a man since her husband's death twenty years earlier, she finds herself suddenly catapulted into a state that mimics adolescent longing for such an experience. French's Hermione finds herself in a similar state, attracted to a man who makes her feel desirable for the first time since her fourth husband died ten years before. As she phrases it, “I missed feeling desirable, but even more, I missed feeling desire” (French 66).

In the process of charting the vagaries of eros, Lessing invokes the “great cartographers” (Lessing, frontispiece) of the territory of love, ranging from Shakespeare and Stendhal to D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot. Ironically, Eliot, a poet known more for his evocations of loss than of love, is one of the novel's presiding literary spirits. Whatever Sarah may think she is asserting about the progress of love, shadows of The Waste Land and of the loveless, emotionally stranded J. Alfred Prufrock insinuate a narrative of physical deterioration and decline. Through Sarah, Lessing laments the emotional sterility, the “desert of deprivation” (Lessing 141), that looms as unattached women (in particular) advance in age. Glossing from The Waste Land, Lessing transposes Eliot's image of Phlebas, the drowned sailor, into a woman who reprises “the stages of her age and youth, entering the whirlpool” (Lessing 164).²⁰ Similarly, French's Hermione Beldame is characterized as struggling against an undertow, “like a drowning person trying to keep her head above the waterline” (French 198). In both Lessing's and French's narratives, images of whirlpool and undertow come to stand for the contrary—and uncontrollable—pulls of desire and aging.

Further, Sarah, pondering her close friend Stephen Ellington-Smith's pathological romantic attachment to a long-dead woman, cites Eliot's Prufrock, whose acute emotional isolation is voiced in his lament, “‘I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing to me’” (Lessing 154).²¹ Interestingly, the ghost of J. Alfred appears in French's narrative as well. At the party where Hermione first meets George, she finds herself recalling—in a phrase whose irony is only later understood—“‘Time for you and time for me, / And time yet for a hundred indecisions …’” (French 21). Much later in the novel, after she has acknowledged the insubstantiality of her relationship with George, Hermione admits, in language that invokes another modernist poet's—Yeats's—famous words on the subject of aging:

I do not know how to think about the fact that I may reach some great age, my face skeletal beneath the wrinkled folds of flesh pulled away from the bone, my eyes sunken into dark pockets of pain, my walk tottery and unsure, my body a tattered coat upon a stick, and still be on the lookout, have an eye out for, be seeking always and ever, a certain voice and eye, a certain look, a hand reached out, breath swiftly drawn, a catch in the voice, an invitation to the waltz. … It is humiliating. … My spirit is still a girl's, trapped inside a deteriorating container.

(French 242-43)

One can legitimately wonder why, for both Lessing and French, the cultural reference points of aging are still framed in terms of images drawn from iconic male modernists who wrote during an era when women lacked even the right to vote.²² These allusions may reflect an ironic form of gender equity: Although it may be perceived differently according to cultural attitudes toward the two sexes in senescence, in absolute terms the “deteriorating container” of the body does not discriminate on the basis of gender.

Through their female protagonists' efforts to reach beyond culturally mandated scripts of youth and romance, Lessing and French explore elements that exist in a different realm from the material one: the indelible emotional traces that endure, like a fossil record in the strata of the psyche, in the history of one's affectionate relationships. Lessing pointedly situates her inquiry within a theatrical setting, a location that exemplifies an underlying psychological premise of the narrative: Over time, the roles one plays, the masks one assumes, drive the authentic self into ever deeper and more hidden regions, until the task of recovering that self becomes so urgent that it ultimately displaces all others. Images of the ancient paired theatrical masks of tragedy and comedy recur throughout Love, Again, underscoring the contradictory nature of love as “sweet poison” and “cold fever” (Lessing 116). Indeed, depending on the reader's predilection, the novel may be read through the comic or the tragic mask.²³ However, as the master narrative of decline would have it, what lies beneath Eros's youth's comic grin is Thanatos's grimace.

The catalyst for Lessing's anatomy of the collision between Eros and Thanatos is her central character's involvement as scriptwriter in the production of an opera. The story, based on the tragic life of a beautiful, talented woman who suffers—and loses—three lovers of different social ranks and ultimately ends her life by suicide, offers a perfect subject for operatic treatment. Virtually every participant in the production of the opera Julie Vairon is affected by the romantic story on which they collaborate. The melodramatic narrative of hearts broken and loves lost thus provides a text for Lessing's exploration of other kinds of scripts, namely the competing narratives of romance and aging. As the heightened intimacy and unreality of the production situation spill directly over into the group's personal lives and associations, Sarah Durham finds herself erotically reawakened and uncontrollably attracted to several men in the company, virtually all of whom are young enough to be her sons. In turn, several men, though not the same ones, are attracted to her. At times the story suggests the dreamy ambience as well as the irrational, mismatched lovers of A Midsummer Night's Dream, in this instance rescripted to highlight the more problematic misalignments between age and youth.

At other times, the narrative suggests a kind of ghost story, for each character in Love, Again brings to the experience of love a whole cast of phantoms of earlier attachments. Initially, Sarah observes these phantoms in other members of the company; soon, however, she is prompted by the seductive power of the collective theatrical experience to confront her own phantoms. Drawn involuntarily into the whirlpool, she struggles against the cultural master narrative of decline, which judges harshly an older woman's denial of bodily disintegration. Concurrently, she engages in a struggle with love as a primitive and entirely irrational force: an elixir closer to poison, infection, affliction, and madness than the scripts of romance would have us believe.

For French's Hermione, the season of romance is initiated by an encounter with a man a decade younger than she, a journalist to whom she is drawn at a friend's party. Infatuated with George, she fantasizes about a long-term relationship based on a comically minimal amount of time actually spent with him. To each of her friends, she repeats the magical mantra-like phrase, “I've met a man.” Their respective responses provide a cross section of women's tenacious romantic expectations—feminist politics notwithstanding—regarding intimate relationships and the potentiality for genuine mutuality at various phases of the life cycle. As Hermione expresses it to her friends, “I though I had a happy life until I met him. … Meeting him triggered something. You know—the happily-ever-after button? And what is so upsetting is discovering how powerful it is” (French 77).

What gives particular poignancy to both of these narratives of erotic intoxication and romantic fantasy is the authors' unsentimental attention to their characters' postmenopausal circumstances, registered in the women's “reading” of their bodies and physical appearance through—or against—the cultural script of aging. As Gullette characterizes this influential cultural narrative:

Even our feelings [about aging] are learned, starting with anticipatory fear of midlife aging, including envy of or anger at the currently young, nostalgic reminiscence that amounts to envying oneself when young, sorrow or even shame about “losses,” and premature fear of dying. Middle-ageism is a set of stereotypical meanings pumped out over the age class. Hyping special clothes, foods, interests, exercises, attitudes to sex, children, and death, in thousands of ways both superficially and deeply it governs the “experience” of approaching the mid-life or living it. The ideology wizens the middle years.²⁴

French's Hermione agonizes far less about her physical aging than does Lessing's Sarah; indeed, she claims that her body is “still firm and fit, despite [her] years” (French 132). Moreover, while she is drawn to a man only moderately younger than herself, Sarah is attracted to far younger men, as Lessing acerbically illuminates the reality of a double standard that obtains far beyond youth: While it is easy and socially acceptable for older men to form relationships with young women, the reverse remains both unconventional and suspect.²⁵

During the course of Lessing's narrative, Sarah frequently examines her “double”—her reflection in the mirror—attempting to reconcile her still-youthful inner image with her outward appearance. Interestingly, de Beauvoir anticipated this preoccupation of aging women with the discrepancies between inner self-image and mirror reflection:

When one feels oneself a conscious, active, free being, the passive object on which the fatality [of aging or death] is operating seems necessarily as if it were another … this cannot be I, this old woman reflected in the mirror! … The woman puts her trust in what is clear to her inner eye rather than in that strange world where time flows backward, where her double no longer resembles her, where the outcome has betrayed her.²⁶

More recently, Pogrebin echoes this process of reflection (in both senses) regarding the aging female body, nothing:

I am standing now in front of a full-length mirror ready to document my deterioration item by item from the top down. I don't love what I see; the discrepancy between my inner spirit (still thirty-six) and this outer body is hard to reconcile, but … the exercise of cataloguing my own physical collapse is the best way I know to redefine the ‘flaws’ of aging as the norm of aging.²⁷

Pertinently, Kathleen M. Woodward has theorized a “mirror stage” of old age, “the inverse of the mirror stage of infancy” proposed by Lacan, wherein “what is whole is felt to reside within, not without, the subject. The image in the mirror is understood as uncannily prefiguring the disintegration and nursling dependence of advanced age.”²⁸ In other words, the mirror image of the fully realized self of midlife (or even before and certainly thereafter), far from providing an “accurate” reflection of the self, mocks the achieved spirit with cruel reminders of the visibly deteriorating flesh. The discrepancy between inner and outer realities is what Thomas R. Cole calls the fundamental paradox of aging—“the tragic and ineradicable conflict between spirit and body.”²⁹

It is precisely those absolute and irreducible discrepancies—between outward appearance and inward self, between negating cultural script and inner self-regard, between corporeal and spiritual dimensions of being—that animate Lessing's and French's narrative explorations of the problematic negotiation, for self-realized women in particular, between eros and aging. Lessing's Sarah “makes herself return to the glass, again, again, because the person who is doing the looking feels herself to be exactly the same … as she was at twenty, thirty, forty” (Lessing 245). In a variant of the truism that youth is wasted on the young, Sarah acknowledges that youth is a “privileged class sexually” that one takes for granted at the time, only to relinquish it involuntarily as the peak of eroticism and physical attractiveness give way, inevitably and regretfully, to a “desert of deprivation” (Lessing 141). Or, as French's Hermione phrases it, “It wasn't that twenty-odd-year-old boys no longer appealed to me (although, in truth, they no longer did). But mainly I dreaded being perceived as acting flirtatious or seductive toward anyone who might find my no longer young person repulsive” (French 65). The observation is a telling reiteration of the power of the cultural narrative of diminished expectations.

Lessing's and French's protagonists lament not so much the physical changes that their mirrors unsparingly register as the social and psychological consequences. Despite the inner strength, self-esteem, and worldly success that a mature woman may have acquired, she may still find herself vulnerable to the culturally inflected negative meanings that affix themselves, with her unwilling collaboration, to her aging body. Gullette uses the term “masochistic nostalgia” to describe the psychic residue of the influential cultural narrative of aging: “Every woman I know goes through some version of this age-graded dissatisfaction, learning the life-weariness of nostalgia as she goes. Accepting the formulas of nostalgia means learning that you are not beautiful or not sexy or not something, any more.”³⁰

In these fictional representations of the trajectory of aging, each woman's reading of her body's decline is also powerfully influenced by the unfinished business of past attachments. Phantoms of emotional history dating back to core experiences of childhood and even infancy increasingly break through both women's previously “solid and equable” positions as emotionally self-sufficient women (Lessing 113). Sarah, prompted by the gap the mocking mirror exposes between her chronological age and her attraction to young men, concludes that old age is “a secret hell populated with the ghosts of lost loves, former personalities” (Lessing 177). During her state of infatuation with first one and then another younger man, she is haunted by “apparitions” (Lessing 265); one night, “ghostly lips kissed hers. A ghost's arms held her” (Lessing 253). Again, de Beauvoir presciently describes the specters that haunt Sarah, observing that the aging woman's dreams are “peopled with erotic phantoms. … she falls secretly in love with one young man after another.”³¹

With amusement, Lessing's Sarah recalls her “first love,” when she was only six and the object of her affections was a year younger. Although the scene that she had “put into a frame long ago” (Lessing 109) bears comic qualities, what she retrieves from the memory this time is its darker emotional residue, that of loss. At various points, she fleetingly connects the image of the “plump little boy” who first broke her heart with that of her younger brother, Hal, now a corpulent, insensitive doctor for whom she feels more contempt than affection. Yet that plump child was once loved—“God, how I did love you, my little brother, how I did love you” (Lessing 285)—a feeling Sarah recovers, in astonishment, through her attraction to one of the company members, Henry, whose name even echoes her younger brother's.³² As a child, she had also hated that baby with equal intensity, an emotional truth that she recuperates through a recalled image of herself as a child “stabbing [a] doll” (Lessing 208).

Although Sarah concludes that her destructive behavior was an expression of sibling rivalry, a deeper psychoanalytic explanation is that she was acting out rage not toward her baby brother but toward her mother—anger that, as a young child, she could neither acknowledge nor express. From birth, her brother was “her mother's favourite. … He was the much wanted and loved boy, and she had taken second place from the moment he was born” (Lessing 86-87).³³ To acknowledge her younger brother's preeminence in her mother's affections and to recall so distinctly her own sense of inadequacy is to confront the profound effect that such emotional deprivations and losses may impose on later relationships. The narcissistic wound, experienced so early and so damagingly, may never entirely heal but may continue to bleed into and sabotage subsequent attachments, unless it is confronted and integrated into conscious awareness.³⁴

Eventually Sarah reaches back to “that region where the baby in her lived” (Lessing 16). Once, she awakens from a dream in which she has occupied a “phantom body,” a baby body filled with “a longing so violent the pain of it fed back into her own body” (Lessing 163). Beneath the masks of her adult life she discerns

the faces she had had as a young woman, as a girl, and as a baby. …

She was dissolved in longing. She could not remember ever feeling the rage of want that possessed her now. Surely never in her times of being in love had she felt this absolute, this peremptory need, an emptiness that hollowed out her body, as if life itself was being withheld from her.

Who is it that feels this degree of need, of dependence, and who has to lie helpless waiting for the warm arms and the moment of being lifted up into love?

(Lessing 164-65)

On another occasion, she yearns to hold a baby against the “hollow of her left shoulder,” only to admit that she longs to occupy that space herself: “an infinite vulnerability lay there: Sarah herself, who was both infant and what sheltered the infant” (Lessing 307).

French's Hermione also reflects, though less deeply, on the formative circumstances of her life. She reviews her personal history in an effort to recover her bearings and to reconcile her current life of success, wealth, and independence with an unhappy childhood, an unfortunate early marriage, and a legacy of emotional needs that illuminates her vulnerability to the myth of romantic love. The youngest of five children of a mother widowed when Hermione was only two, she has no memory of her father and recalls her mother as a self-sacrificing martyr. Family life was “bleak with depression, which hung over us all like black umbrella” (French 33). Hermione's optimism at breaking away from her dreary family life to attend college was quickly crushed when her sole adolescent sexual experience led to pregnancy, quickly followed by marriage to a boy she didn't love, because, at the age of twenty in the 1950s, she could not envision either seeking an illegal abortion or bearing an illegitimate child. Several decades and several marriages later her attraction to George catalyzes the feeling of being “sexually reborn” (French 66), although it also leads her to feel literally sick with longing for intimacy.

Though both French's and Lessing's female protagonists regard their condition as a kind of illness, Lessing goes further to establish links between what are ostensibly two different kinds of sensual longing. In Love, Again, the “again” is significant: the affections of adulthood are inevitably mapped onto submerged but still influential emotional patterns of attachment and affection (or their absence) experienced literally from the cradle. Sarah, aroused at one point by a young male company member's physical presence, feels her body reacting sensually, “alive and vibrant, but also painful. Her breasts burned, and the lower part of her abdomen ached. Her mouth threatened to seek kisses—like a baby's mouth turning and turning to find the nipple” (Lessing 186). Reflecting a similar but developmentally later phase of arousal, Hermione, stimulated by her fantasies of George, feels like “a horny adolescent”: “My skin throbbed and my breasts ached” (French 98). Even the vocabulary of passion reflects the ambivalence of such erotic feelings: the expression “raging with desire” (Lessing 120) captures the sense that a reserve of (infantile) rage may lie just beneath Eros's mask.

Sarah's further descent into the vortex is analogous to a kind of psychological regression: “Forgotten selves kept appearing like bubbles in boiling liquid. … She was obviously dissolving into some kind of boiling soup, but presumably would reshape at some point” (Lessing 212).³⁵ Through feelings and sensations awakened from a long dormancy, she experiences nostalgia for the idealized bliss of infancy, colored by the inevitability of loss: “Perhaps the paradise we dream of when in love is the one we were ejected from, where all embraces are innocent” (Lessing 187). French's Hermione similarly recognizes the ever-beckoning fantasy of Eden, in the form of a person whose intimate presence might finally fill “that hurt empty spot that never goes away, that has been hurting since you were born, it seems. It would be wonderful. Paradise. I'd be happy for the rest of my life” (French 150). Hermione acknowledges that her unexpected yearning for emotional and erotic intimacy is beyond her control precisely because she has so successfully insulated herself from such feelings, only to discover that “maybe the punishment for that is being thrust back into adolescence, forced into the humiliating experience of love and longing, here on the edge of the grave” (French 236). While French traces the sources of Hermione's intoxicated longings only as far back as adolescence, Lessing locates Sarah's in the very earliest stage of emotional attachment, approaching the “desolation of being excluded from happiness” (Lessing 197) that dates from her earliest years of childhood.

Significantly, virtually all of what occurs in the passionate dramas of the narratives takes place only within the women's own imaginations: Scarcely a single embrace or kiss is actually exchanged between Sarah and the young men whom she privately desires, apart from a single fraternal kiss on the cheek from Henry. Acutely aware of the age gap between herself and the objects of her longing, she feels prohibited from acting on her desires, a fact that only intensifies her emotional distress as she retreats from impossible erotic liaisons. Similarly, Hermione kisses George once on the lips in an unreciprocated gesture that she promptly realizes is “a terrible, maybe fatal mistake” (French 200). Lessing engages more pessimistically than does French with the narrative of decline, interrogating the relations among desire, aging, and loss that, while initially seeming unrelated, are ultimately revealed to be inextricably entangled. First, Sarah questions Nature's obscure purpose in drawing an older person of either sex into intoxicated longing for a younger one. Later, the question assumes another form as she is consumed by grief not only for her friend Stephen, a casualty of unrequited (and unrequiteable) love, but for all of her own past loves and past selves. She wonders, “Why grief at all? What is it for?” (Lessing 327).

The relationship between grief and growth is central to understanding both Lessing's and French's narratives of late midlife erotic reawakening. The process of emotional review that both protagonists undertake parallels the “life review” that many psychologists and gerontologists, such as Robert N. Butler, regard as a fundamental task of aging:

a naturally occurring universal mental process characterized by the progressive return to consciousness of past experiences and, particularly, the resurgence of unresolved conflicts; simultaneously, and normally, these experiences and conflicts can be surveyed and reintegrated. Presumably the process is prompted by the realization of approaching dissolution and death, and the inability to maintain one's sense of personal invulnerability. It is further shaped by contemporaneous experiences and its nature and outcome are affected by the life-long unfolding of character.³⁶

However, the resolution of this life review is not inevitably positive, according to Peter G. Coleman: “The individual may remain obsessed with events and actions he [sic] regrets, find no solution and no peace, and develop chronic feelings of guilt and depression.”³⁷

Accordingly, following an interval of several months after the conclusion of her involvement with the production of Julie Vairon, Lessing's Sarah examines her image in a mirror again. She appears to have “aged by ten years. … Her hair, which for so long remained like a smooth dulled metal, now has grey bands across the front. She has acquired that slow cautious look of the elderly, as if afraid of what they will see around the next corner” (Lessing 349).³⁸ Indeed, she has surrendered, although not altogether willingly, to the narrative of decline: Relinquishing Eros, she acquiesces to old age. By contrast, French's My Summer with George concludes somewhat more sanguinely. Hermione, relinquishing her imaginary “relationship” with George, concedes that she has projected onto an unsuitable man amorous fantasies not too far removed from those that constitute her own formulaic romance fictions. Painfully wrenching herself away from those scripts, she likens herself to “an animal caught in a trap I could escape from only by tearing off my leg or arm” (French 215).

Ultimately, French permits her protagonist a somewhat more affirmative resolution than Lessing does hers. As French has acknowledged, the novel intentionally foregrounds “not intellectual argument but mocking glances at serious ideas; not profound emotional conflict but absurd emotions couched in everyday language.”³⁹ Accordingly, Hermione finds in her disillusionment the inspiration for a new novel based on her extravagant erotic fantasies, wherein “the heroine and her lover are drunk with desire” and make passionate love in a number of romantic settings: “What would make it unusual is that at the very end, the reader discovers that the entire affair has taken place only in the heroine's imagination, that nothing actually happened with the man, that he rejected her early on, and that throughout the virtual time of the novel, she is wandering listlessly around, helpless with desire, dreaming it all up …” (French 219). However, Hermione acknowledges that, even as an author, she (like French herself) cannot invent a “happy ending” for her story without trivializing the experiences that constituted it. Nonetheless, the first-person narrator voices an affirmative female identity even in late midlife. Hermione, having struggled in the seductive vortex of romantic fantasy that disguises a destructive undertow, validates what she has discovered in that experience: “the sorry fact, or is it triumphant?” that “the unending drive, the geyser spurt of desire that is life, goes on and on, will not be stilled, in body or spirit. Till death do us part” (French 243).

For a female/feminist reader, the degree of ideological (if not aesthetic) satisfaction with Love, Again and My Summer with George may be equivocal. Given the novels' quite different conclusions, one may legitimately ask: As feminism settles in to the new millennium, and as the American population increasingly faces “the coming of age,” which text provides a more honest imaginative map for guidance at the crossroads of female aging and desire? While the resolution of French's narrative, inflected by romantic fantasy, may be more comforting to readers wrestling with the disjunctions between eros and aging, Lessing's novel exposes the darker subtext in which these matters are embedded. My Summer with George, with its lighter—even self-mocking—tone, is defiant in its accommodations with aging. By contrast, the cost of Sarah's descent into the whirlpool is the defeat of her resistance to the master narrative of decline. In place of the self-renewing energy of eros is a much more muted process: the resolution of mourning for her lost younger selves, marked by her acceptance of the older woman she has become.

Just behind Sarah Durham and Hermione Beldame stand Doris Lessing and Marilyn French, wrestling equally—along with other women of their generation—with the unappeased phantoms of early life and the not-entirely-appeasable demons of advancing age.⁴⁰ Intrepid pathfinders in the less willingly traversed terrains of what Lessing terms “love's country,” both authors dare to chart the hazards they discover in the landscape—or what Colette V. Browne terms the “agescape.”⁴¹ Through their imaginative explorations of deeply imbedded, and conflicting, cultural scripts associated with desire and decline, both authors enable us to imagine women's capacity for emotional renewal and growth during and beyond midlife. In illuminating the midlife version of “the problem that has no name,” they demonstrate the power of forces, both internal and external, that hinder women's progress towards true erotic equity.

Notes

1. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (1952; reprint, New York: Knopf, 1993), 649.

2. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Coming of Age, trans. Patrick O'Brian (New York: Putnam, 1972).

3. As did feminism, the study of age and aging has begun to evolve from generalizations based on white, middle-class experience to an acknowledgement of differences based on race, class, ethnicity, and nationality. See, for example, essays in Welcome to Middle Age! (and Other Cultural Fictions), ed. Richard A. Shweder (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

4. Naomi Wolf, a “third-wave” feminist, observes that “even as more and more of feminism's ideals cross over into mainstream culture, more and more women distance themselves from the word ‘feminist’” (Fire with Fire: The New Female Power and How It Will Change the 21st Century [New York: Random House, 1993], 57). A number of books published in the last decade illustrate the preoccupation within feminism with “generations.” Devoney Looser and E. Ann Kaplan, coeditors of a collection of essays titled Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), observe that “divisions among feminist ‘waves’ or generations are named only to be broken down. … Despite all of the difficulties involved in defining the beliefs (or even the members) of any given generation, we need more conversations about how we have come to perceive each other as feminists according to ‘age’” (35). They conclude that “most feminists use third wave to refer to the ‘new’ feminisms and feminists emerging in the late 1980s and 1990s, many of whom purport to interrogate race, nation, and sexuality more thoroughly than did the second wave, and many of whom are skeptical about the unity of the category ‘women’” (38).

5. Shweder, Welcome to Middle Age!, vii.

6. Margaret Morganroth Gullette, Declining to Decline: Cultural Combat and the Politics of the Midlife (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 159, emphasis in the original. Gullette also notes that the significant changes in life expectancy during the twentieth century have occurred not during the later years but in the first five years of life (Declining to Decline, 254 n. 1).

7. Historian Lois W. Banner speculates that because feminist scholars of the second wave were, like herself, typically “young women, working out the dynamics of their own lives in their studies” that “aging remained obscure to us partly because we were in rebellion against older generations perceived as antifeminist. Moreover, reflecting traditional attitudes, we chose to look on old women as invisible and on our own youth as the real reality” (In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power, and Sexuality [New York: Knopf, 1992], 6). Betty Friedan, The Fountain of Age (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), 21, 60, 50. Despite Friedan's sustained and impassioned analysis of the subject of aging, her book did not catalyze a cultural paradigm shift, as did The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963). That may be in part because social activist groups had already staked out some of the same terrain that Friedan addresses in her argument for positive constructions of aging. Organizations such as Gray Panthers and, of course, the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) actively lobby politically on behalf of various “age classes” as they pass through and beyond midlife. Margaret Gullette uses the term “age class” to identify “a culturally constructed unit” based solely on age: “Discourse about an age class takes for granted, as well as often explicitly asserting, a commonality that is supposed to override gender, class, race, sexual orientation, national origin, personal psychology, politics, and so on” (“Midlife Discourses in the Twentieth-Century United States: An Essay on the Sexuality, Ideology, and Politics of ‘Middle-Ageism,’” in Shweder, Welcome to Middle Age!, 3). However, within an “age class,” there are indeed differences among people of different genders, races, and other aspects of socially labeled identity.

8. Alix Kates Shulman, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen (New York: Knopf, 1972), and A Good Enough Daughter: A Memoir (New York: Schocken, 1999); Anne Richardson Roiphe, Up the Sandbox! (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970), and 1185 Park Avenue: A Memoir (New York: The Free Press, 1999); Erica Jong, Fear of Flying (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973), and Fear of Fifty (New York: HarperCollins, 1994); Letty Cottin Pogrebin, How to Make It in a Man's World (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970), and Getting Over Getting Older: An Intimate Journey (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996); and Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Reinventing Womanhood (New York: Norton, 1979), and The Last Gift of Time: Life beyond Sixty (New York: Dial, 1997).

9. Pogrebin, Getting Over Getting Older, 308, 310.

10. Heilbrun, The Last Gift of Time, 103.

11. See Margaret Laurence, The Stone Angel (New York: Knopf, 1964); May Sarton, As We Are Now (New York: Norton, 1973); Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow (New York: Putnam's, 1983); Doris Lessing, The Summer before the Dark (New York: Knopf, 1973); and Anne Tyler, Breathing Lessons (New York: Knopf, 1988).

12. Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962). Three of Lessing's earlier novels—The Summer before the Dark, The Diaries of Jane Somers (New York: Knopf, 1983-84), and If the Old Could … (reprinted in The Diaries of Jane Somers, 1984), the latter two under the pseudonym Jane Somers—also reflect the author's interest in the female experience of aging. French's three novels published between The Women's Room (New York: Summit Books, 1977) and My Summer with George: A Novel of Love at a Certain Age (New York: Knopf, 1996) include The Bleeding Heart (New York: Summit Books, 1980), Her Mother's Daughter: A Novel (New York: Summit Books, 1987), and Our Father: A Novel (Boston: Little, Brown, 1994). Though the first focuses on romantic matters and the latter two involve family relationships, none of them focus on matters of female aging.

13. Doris Lessing, Love, Again: A Novel (New York: HarperCollins, 1996); and French, My Summer with George. (Further references to these works are cited in the text parenthetically).

14. Gullette, Declining to Decline, 86, 82.

15. Barbara Frey Waxman has coined the term Reifungsroman, the novel of ripening, to describe literary narratives that complement the traditional Bildungsroman in which a character matures from adolescence into adulthood (From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature [New York: Greenwood Press, 1990]).

16. Gullette, Declining to Decline, 197.

17. Gullette, Declining to Decline, 161.

18. Gullette, Declining to Decline, 161.

19. Marilyn French, A Season in Hell: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 1998), 186.

20. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Hartcourt, Brace, 1934), 41.

21. The allusion invites recall of the preceding lines in the ironically titled “Love Song,” in which Prufrock frets, “I grow old … I grow old / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.” Arnold H. Modell suggests that Eliot, who wrote “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” when he was in his late twenties, was “preternaturally middle-aged” (“Object Relations Theory: Psychic Aliveness in the Middle Years,” in The Middle Years: New Psychoanalytic Perspectives, ed. John M. Oldham and Robert S. Liebert [New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989], 17).

22. Interestingly, Eliot's importance for Lessing dates back to the beginning of her career: The title of her first novel, The Grass Is Singing (London: M. Joseph, 1950), echoes another phrase from The Waste Land.

23. In a reading of Love, Again that emphasizes the narrative's comic and satiric dimensions, Veronica Geng draws conclusions opposite from those I develop in this essay. She regards Lessing as a “comic dramatist” who develops various scenes as a “revue of psychological satires” with connections to popular love songs (“There's No People Like Show People,” review of Love, Again, in The New York Times Book Review, 21 [April 1996], 13).

24. Gullette, Declining to Decline, 6, emphasis in original.

25. Lois Banner challenges this negative view of “age-disparate” relationships between older women and younger men, arguing that myth and history provide notable examples of independent older women—from Greek goddesses to Chaucer's Alison of Bath—whose relationships with younger men are regarded as socially acceptable. Although “the European tradition did not accord women high regard in their waning years, once they had become postmenopausal … there was an alternative point of view, one under which they could be, like Alison's crone, people of wisdom, spirit, and, ultimately, desire.” However, “the emergency of romantic love as a major factor in marital choice … played a part in the decline in cross-age relationships between aging women and younger men” since the “youthful ideal” of physical and sexual attractiveness gained primacy as the essential matrix of romantic passion (In Full Flower, 185, 244).

26. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 645.

27. Pogrebin, Getting Over Getting Older, 127.

28. Kathleen M. Woodward, Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 67, emphasis in the original.

29. Thomas R. Cole, The Journey of Life: A Cultural History of Aging in America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 239.

30. Gullette, Declining to Decline, 58.

31. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 644.

32. The names of both Henry and Hal—Sarah's younger brother's name—echo the name of Lessing's actual younger brother, Harry.

33. The emotional pattern closely parallels events in Lessing's own childhood, as she has revealed in more than one autobiographical account. Describing her early relationship with her mother, she reveals that her mother wished for a son when Doris was born and felt no compunction about letting her daughter know

    that I was not wanted in the first place; that to have a girl was a disappointment that nearly did her in altogether … ; that she had no milk for me and I had to be bottle-fed from the start and I was half-starved for the first year … ; that I was an impossibly difficult baby and then a tiresome child, quite unlike my little brother Harry who was always so good. … My memories of her are all of antagonism, and fighting, and feeling shut out; of pain because the baby born two-and-a-half years after me was so much loved when I was not.

    (Doris Lessing, “Impertinent Daughters,” Granta 14 (1984): 52-68)

34. Milton H. Horowitz describes a psychoanalytic case study that bears startling parallels with Lessing's narrative: A woman in midlife,

    fearful of her loss of sexual attractiveness, agitated by her scanty menstrual periods and approaching menopause, frightened of death[,] had a passionate interest in much younger men. She gave the highly plausible explanation that younger men were more sexually vigorous, had better bodies, made her feel more youthful, and put her in touch with younger people. … Behind the seemingly realistic story was a lifelong fantasy of being a boy like her adored younger brother who had always claimed her mother's love. This fantasy had been expressed in a variety of vastly different forms throughout life. A wishful self-image had been transformed into an object-choice.

    (“The Developmental and Structural Viewpoints: On the Fate of Unconscious Fantasies in Middle Life,” in Oldham and Liebert, The Middle Years, 14-15)

35. Sarah's “descent” into the whirlpool, during which she confronts painful and long-forgotten emotional experiences, recalls several of Lessing's earlier novels, including The Golden Notebook, which records Anna Wulf's disintegration into several different “selves.” The opening passage of Briefing for a Descent into Hell (New York: Knopf, 1971) describes the lost Charles Watkins going “around and around and around” in the whirlpool-like currents of the Sargasso Sea (26).

36. Robert N. Butler, “The Life Review: An Interpretation of Reminiscence in the Aged,” Psychiatry 26 (February 1963): 66, quoted in Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, Fred Davis (New York: The Free Press, 1979), 69.

37. Peter G. Coleman, Aging and Reminiscence Processes (New York: John Wiley, 1986), 12.

38. The image recalls Kate Brown of Lessing's The Summer before the Dark, who, after having an affair of the heart with a younger man, returns home to declare her acceptance of middle age by permitting her dyed hair to grow back in its natural gray.

39. French, A Season in Hell, 219.

40. The observation acquires additional poignancy in the light of French's agonizing struggle against esophageal cancer, diagnosed in 1992. She began to write My Summer with George during her recovery from multiple and nearly fatal complications precipitated by aggressive treatment for the disease (A Season in Hell, especially 187, 218-19).

41. Collette V. Browne, Women, Feminism, and Aging (New York: Springer, 1998), 258.