[In the following essay, Woodward traces Sarton's approach to aging in her novels and journals, contending that her “portrayal of old age is a welcome departure from the Western literary tradition of gerontophobia.”]

If we do not know what we are going to be, we cannot know what we are; let us recognize ourselves in this old man or that old woman. It must be done if we are to take upon ourselves the entirety of our human state. And when it is done we will no longer acquiesce in the misery of the last age; we will no longer be indifferent, because we shall feel concerned, as indeed we are.

—Simone de Beauvoir The Coming of Age (1970)

Although Simone de Beauvoir is best known for her pioneering work in feminism, her monumental book on aging, from which the above epigraph is taken, is steadily gaining the recognition it deserves. It seems logical that de Beauvoir would come to her study of aging after her work on women, for the two topics are closely related. Statistically, elderly women survive men by eight years, only to live in greater isolation and poverty. Moreover, and more importantly, both feminism and ageism demand an analysis of the distribution of social power. But an understanding of the position of women or the elderly—or elderly women—requires more than theory or analysis. It requires imaginative identification, which literature can provide. As de Beauvoir counsels, if we project ourselves imaginatively into old age, if we recognize ourselves in this old woman or that old man, our commitment to the elderly will deepen: “we will no longer be indifferent, because we shall feel concerned.”

Over the years the writer May Sarton has been consciously concerned with both feminism and aging, and in this she is perhaps unique. With de Beauvoir she believes strongly that we cannot know what we are if we do not know what we are going to be, or would like to be. Her writing offers a vision of aging as a possible positive experience, but it also contains a warning: if we do not take care, in both senses of the word, the elderly may strike back, violently.

In the first part of this essay, I shall sketch the ideal of graceful aging as it appears in Sarton's work prior to 1973, focusing on the novel Kinds of Love (1970) and the autobiographical Plant Dreaming Deep (1967), and relate this ideal to her theory of art. I shall then turn to two of her books that were published in 1973—Journal of a Solitude, an autobiographical account of one year in her life, and As We Are Now, a protest novel about aging in America. In these books, Sarton confronts for the first time the inhumanity of American society toward the elderly and imagines the old as embattled, giving up their lives at the same time as they are fighting for them. The ideal of graceful aging yields to guerrilla warfare. In As We Are Now, Sarton's most powerful novel, a frail, single woman in her seventies struggles against the repressive structure of the nursing home and asserts the value of the total human being over the total institution.

I

Sarton's portrayal of old age is a welcome departure from the Western literary tradition of gerontophobia—fear of aging and disgust for the elderly—particularly since over the centuries the most vicious satire of the elderly has been leveled at female characters.¹ From Sarton's first novel The Single Hound (1938), whose heroine is an elderly Belgian poet, to Kinds of Love (1970), a passionate encomium to old age, her literary world has been populated with ideal portraits of aging characters and allusions to elderly persons—especially women, and often single women—whom she admires. Aging with grace and dignity has been a persistent, even obsessive theme in her work. It is as if over the years Sarton has been shoring up evidence against the possible ruins of old age by imagining positive models of aging. And indeed, such models can be transformative, shaping one's future. For the beliefs we cultivate over a lifetime, the images we assent to, the ways we develop of meeting the world—these we carry with us, for good or ill, into old age. With Sarton, it has been a long and careful rehearsal for the future which, as we will see, has not prepared her completely for the experience of old age.

Implicit in Sarton's view is a developmental theory of age, time, and work. The later years, she believes, can be a culmination of the life cycle, distinguished from the middle years by a unique quality of time. In middle age, one's conception of time is basically linear. One's concern is with where one has been and where one is going. Time is understood in historical terms, and the promises of the past are weighed apprehensively against the potentialities of the future. As Sarton writes in Plant Dreaming Deep, “the crisis of middle age has to do as much as anything with a catastrophic anxiety about time itself. How has one managed to come to the meridian and still be so far from the real achievement one had dreamed possible at twenty? And I mean achievement as a human being as well as within a career.”² Although Sarton does not speculate on the extent to which this anxiety is fostered by the expectations of one's culture, self-imposed personal demands, and/or biological changes, her insight is sound and perhaps unexpected. For a person to whom achievement is crucial, the fear of time running out is characteristic of middle age, not old age. In middle age, choice is still possible, but drastically narrowed. One simply cannot begin again at the beginning. But in old age, what we call career choices have been played out. Worries about linear time—about ambition and worldly success—can vanish because for most elderly people, career has been left behind. And since meaningful work is no longer defined economically, or in worldly terms, it can be construed freely, without social pressures, as “real achievement as a human being,” to use Sarton's phrase. We see this most clearly in the novel Kinds of Love, which is set in a comfortable rural New England village inhabited chiefly by the elderly; with the other residents, they are involved in preparations for the bicentennial celebration. The example of one major character should suffice to illustrate this point. Cornelius, the elderly husband of Christina, the central character, marvels that he can live so happily without the support of his profession (banking) or institutionalized friendship (his men's club): “I am a better man than I was a year ago, a richer man, a … happier man,” he exclaims to his wife.³

Thus, old age does not merely bring compensation for what is lost. It offers the possibility of special growth. Sarton believes that the foreshortening of linear time in old age can be accompanied by the deepening and opening out of time. Indeed, depth is made possible by the very narrowing of one's world. Cutting one's life back to the quick, as one cuts back plants in the fall (a common metaphor in Sarton's work), is a necessary condition for further development. In Plant Dreaming Deep, for instance, Sarton writes admiringly of a seventy-year-old woman: “Out of nothing, Jean Dominique was still making everything” (p. 134). And in Kinds of Love, there are moments privileged to the elderly when clock time disappears altogether, to be replaced by a time of pure presence. “‘The past and the present flow together,’” an elderly man remarks wonderingly (pp. 115-16). Time is stilled, and yet growth continues, hidden. In old age, the transparency of perception is possible. “Perhaps one of the gifts of old age,” Christina muses to herself in Kinds of Love, “is that nothing stands between us and what we see” (p. 401).

Sarton also believes that the threshold of old age is marked by the welcome passage from eros to agape. In Kinds of Love, she extols love between the old as superior to young love. Only between longtime mates and friends are such deep psychological unions possible. Why is this so? In Kinds of Love, Sarton assumes a deep continuity in relationships between people; there are no irrevocable, violent breaks in personal histories. Not only do the seventy-year-old Christina and her husband embark on a second honeymoon, but Christina reestablishes a vital connection with Eben, a man who has long loved her. In fact, it is because of their relationship to her—not to their work, or to other men—that both Cornelius and Eben can regard old age as an “adventure,” as they both call it. “‘What is young love compared to this—this incomparable truth of old age—that nothing dies, all is transformed’” (p. 452), declares Eben to Christina. Forgiving, caring, understanding—these are the ends of lives shared over a long arc of time in Kinds of Love. Like Sarton's notion of time in old age, this too is a sweet vision based on a faith in a gentle evolutionary curve which characterizes our lives. Even weakness Sarton turns to advantage. Recently crippled by a stroke, Cornelius must be cared for by Christina, but it is in fact his illness that unlocks barriers between himself and his wife. In their seventies, they both realize that “acknowledging weakness, dependency … has finally opened all doors between us” (p. 250). Thus the most meaningful intimacy between husband and wife is fostered by dependency in old age. Tragedy too is idealized in old age. Learning that an elderly couple have perished together in a fire outside of town, a character (herself elderly) in Kinds of Love observes that “‘there's something to be said for dying together in a big blaze when you're near ninety’” (p. 28).

To Sarton, the last phase of life is ideally devoted to the composing, in both senses of the word, of the self. This is the most important creative act of one's life, and it requires “conscious work,” as Christina calls it (p. 32). Wholeness is the goal; the result, wisdom. Christina muses tht “‘maybe the old make a strong impression because they have become themselves. … We're always, it seems to me, younger than the world we live in. And it is the old that give a place its atmosphere, make it what it is’” (p. 351). The pages of the autobiographical Plant Dreaming Deep are filled with vigorous old people who give the village of Nelson its atmosphere, “make it what it is.” Especially important to Sarton is her gardener Perley Cole, seventy-seven, “an untamed old man” who “has learned his own patience and his own rhythm through a long life” (p. 108, 111). And Sarton herself meditates on the “adventure” that old age promises to be, confiding that although she had recognized this to be true many years before, she had not experienced it. “Now,” she writes, “the adventure before me seizes me in the night and keeps me awake sometimes” (p. 179). Kinds of Love is the fictional counterpart of Plant Dreaming Deep. In the novel Sarton's theme that real maturity is achieved in old age reaches its fullest fictional expression.

Sarton does qualify her presentation of old age as the culmination of the life cycle. Old age is not equated with an untroubled serenity. In Kinds of Love, Jane Tuttle, a ninety-year-old woman who has never married, is the psychological center of the town of Willard, but she also serves to remind us of the miseries of old age: “consciousness without power, the cruel truth about life, that we suffer most from seeing without being able to do, carried to the highest magnitude” (p. 256). Many characters suffer from loneliness. And Christina confesses in her journal: “I used to envy the old; I always imagined old age as a kind of heaven. It never occurred to me that my knee would ache all the time or that I would fight a daily battle against being slowed down, that memory would begin to fail, and all the rest” (p. 71). But these instances are few, and the suffering of these characters is not felt as real.

In the closing pages of Kinds of Love, Christina weighs the advantages of old age against its disadvantages. I quote the following passage, to suggest the concluding tone of romance in the novel:

This is the year when we have learned to grow old, Cornelius and I. How I have dreaded it all my life—the giving up, the “not being able” to do this or that. But now that we are here, and truly settled in, it is like a whole new era, a new world, and I have moments of pure joy such as I never experienced before. It has to be set against pain, fatigue, exasperation at being caught in a dying body, but when I see the tears shining in Cornelius's eyes when he is moved, I feel as if every day the naked soul comes closer to the surface. He is so beautiful now. I said to Eben that I hate growing old—is it true? I suppose I said it because at that moment life seemed so perilous and love so frail—a breath, and we shall be gone. But now, this morning, I feel that life flows through me in a way it never did before. I can accept Eben's love now. It used to frighten me, and I had to put barriers up against it to protect myself and Cornelius. Now there is no danger, the current is not short-circuited and I feel lit up by it.

(pp. 462-63)

Newness, pure joy, beauty, and the love of two men—these are the gifts reserved for her old age.

Thus, Sarton's view of aging up to and through Kinds of Love is essentially romantic. This does not mean that in some cases it might not be accurate, or that it is not good to temper the last two centuries of gerontophobia with gerontophilia,⁴ or that we should not act as if Sarton's version of the pleasures of old age were possible, even knowing full well that they are probably not. Yet while Sarton may have imagined a graceful old age in hopes that it would be a self-fulfilling prophecy, there may be other reasons as well. Although she does not speak directly to the issue of how her social and historical context conditions her attitudes toward aging, this is a question we must ask of her work. She welcomes the movement beyond the public arena into a smaller, more personal world in the later years. But this is in fact institutionalized in the United States. Retirement forces release from the demands of work, and the “golden years” are celebrated in the mass media as a time of travel, leisure, and the gratuitous cultivation of the self. As we know, these cultural practices are based on the sliderule of economics: mandatory retirement was instituted during the depression, and the myth of the golden years helps to sustain that corporate practice. Thus we might not expect Sarton to endorse without serious questioning this mass-produced ideal of aging.

What may personally influence Sarton's presentation of old age? Sarton is female, homosexual, a writer whose reputation has only recently been lifted out of private spheres into larger public circles. She has lived her life as an artist and as a woman on the margins. The theory of aging to which she subscribes is primarily Jungian, based on a belief in permanent structures of the psyche and archetypes which guide our psychological growth. Might Sarton not be drawn to this model of aging because it refuses a rootedness in a sociohistorical context that she would deny? Perhaps her attraction to Jungian psychology is a way of setting herself apart from mainstream, male-dominated America. If so, her idealism of old age masks a criticism of the dominant values of youth-oriented, success-geared American culture. Sarton, in other words, projects into old age the way of life that she has in fact been leading in her middle years, thereby sanctioning it and at the same time constructing a safe place to dwell, out of sight, in the imagination.

We should also look critically at the way that she presents relationships between men and women in old age. In Kinds of Love the predictability and reciprocity of companionship in old age replace the power and instability of a tempestuous sexual relationship (we know from Sarton's autobiographical writing that she was appalled by the violence of her own emotional outbursts). While most would agree, I think, that honesty between men and women would be increased if men acknowledged their weaknesses, is it not odd that in Kinds of Love intimacy between a wife and her husband is most intense when he is crippled, aged, and dependent upon her? Is this not a way of defusing male sexual power? The traditional balance of power between male and female is reversed, and the male is in effect castrated. In one of the strangest speeches in the novel, Cornelius asserts that heaven is not being young; “‘it is being old and crippled and coming to see again everything so fresh, every person so precious’” (p. 171). Furthermore, it is only in old age that Christina will allow herself to accept Eben's “love,” which before she found threatening. Indeed, now she can use it. “Now there is no danger,” she thinks to herself, “the current is not short-circuited and I feel lit up by it” (p. 463).

Since we know that sexuality is very much alive among the elderly, Sarton's repression of it is significant. She may acknowledge passionate attractions, but she rejects sexuality itself. Thus she deals with the issue of male-female sexuality in old age by eliminating it, rendering it no longer problematic.⁵ Here, too, Sarton may envision in the realm of old age what she would desire for male-dominated, middle-aged America. For what appears “conventional” in old age would not so easily be accepted in a portrayal of middle-aged (or young) male-female relationships. Her strategy is both fascinating and strange: criticism of the dominant values of American culture is displaced into a “positive” depiction of old age. She would read the values she associates with old age back into prior stages of the life cycle. Her image of a good old age thus embodies a critique of our cultural devaluation of the elderly.

Sarton's theory of art is feminist and is related to her conception of aging and the life cycle. All her life, her writing has been based on the belief that at this point in history, detachment from traditional roles is essential to the making of the female self. This goal Sarton calls “wholeness,” but it differs from the Jungian concept which, although developmental, is primarily ahistorical. In Journal of a Solitude she writes that wholeness in this second sense is attained “when the entire being—spirit, mind, nerves, flesh, the body itself—are concentrated toward a single end.”⁶ This kind of wholeness, Sarton believes, has most often been achieved by men because traditionally the strength of women has been diluted by the demands of many roles. This tradition Sarton has spurned. Choosing to live on the edge of society for much of her life living alone or with another woman, she has rejected the notion that meaningful work for a woman is bound to family and marriage.

Sarton is in part sustained in this belief by the actions of women who lived before her, by a sense of a historical sisterhood. With Sappho, Dorothy Wordsworth, Christina Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson, she perceives herself as belonging to a special tradition of women poets who found it necessary to detach themselves from the world. As we read in “My Sisters, O My Sisters”:

Only when she built inward in a fearful isolation
Did anyone succeed or learn to fuse emotion
With thought. Only when she renounced did Emily
Begin in the fierce lonely light to learn to be.
Only in the extremity of spirit and the flesh
And in the renouncing passion did Sappho come to bless.
Only in the farewells or in old age does sanity
Shine through the crimson stains of their mortality.
And now we who are writing women and strange monsters
Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers.
Still hope that we may learn to lay our hands
More gently and more subtly on the burning sands.
To be through what we make more simply human,
To come to the deep place where poet becomes woman …(7)

Renouncing a passionate involvement with the world is itself a fervent gesture; in Journal of a Solitude, Sarton explains that detachment at its best is “critical perception at white heat” (p. 143). For women such as Sappho, Dickinson, and herself, wholeness is possible only if passion is channeled into writing, not the demands of society or love. It is poetry that is the primary self-making tool, not one's relationship to others. For in the busy social world, Sarton believes that a woman's strength can develop into creative receptivity. “The inner life, the life of solitude,” Sarton writes in Plant Dreaming Deep, “rises very slowly until, like an anemone, I am open to receive whatever it may bring” (p. 69). But like aging, such solitude is not without its miseries, and unlike Sarton's treatment of aging in her early work, they are not only theoretical. Her loneliness, which we feel acutely, is “fierce” and “fearful.” Solitude is the demanding and arduous discipline required for the slow growth and development of the self.

Just as Sarton welcomes the detachment from the social world that she believes old age brings,⁸ so she asserts the need for detachment from the dominant culture of America in order to do her work as a woman. The act of renunciation is a necessary condition for psychic health, as we read in the astonishing line from “My Sisters, O My Sisters”:

Only in the farewells or in old age does sanity
Shine through the crimson stains of their mortality.

Rejecting the traditional way of life for a woman, Sarton also imagines an old age which goes counter to the American grain of past years. Her view of old age as a meditative period contradicts the American media myth of the activity-filled golden years,⁹ and her view of aging as a positive experience—especially for women—contradicts the standard literary treatment of aging as a negative experience. In a poem entitled “Gestalt at Sixty,” she writes, “I am moving toward a new freedom born of detachment.” There need be no passive dwindling into old age. “One cuts back to the essential,” she asserts in Plant Dreaming Deep, “and in so doing releases explosive energies. … Old writers do not fade away; they ripen” (p. 183). Thus, over the years Sarton has consistently followed a policy of detachment, and it is indeed a policy, for it hinges not only on the preferences of temperament but also on an analysis of the specific historical conditions of women and the requirements for our development. For women, detachment would culminate in old age, a period of life to be anticipated when time would be one's own, not society's.

Sarton's work suggests that, ironically perhaps, women age with more grace—and vigor—than do men who have typically devoted themselves to the public sphere and in old age must suffer the anguish of disengagement, or what sociologists call “role loss” or “role exit.” But women have persistently been denied entry into this world, and in Sarton's case, this has worked to the best. In Kinds of Love, Sarton does in fact venture that the source of wisdom in women might be different from the source of wisdom in men (p. 71). Although she does not address this question directly in any depth, her work leads us toward an answer. We should not conclude that the source of wisdom is innate or “natural” (although Sarton has suggested from time to time in passing that women are innately more nurturing than men, closer to the biological rhythms of nature than men), but rather that it is the result of social and historical pressures that have forced women to internalize their lives. As she writes in Journal of a Solitude, “Women do not feel the need of a persona, but I have the idea that women are far more interested in self-actualization than men are. Women internalize their lives to a greater extent, and the poetry of internalization can be valid” (p. 97).

II

With the publication of Journal of a Solitude and As We Are Now in 1973, Sarton's depiction of aging and the single woman becomes more complex. The Journal's meditations continue to celebrate age as detachment, but As We Are Now portrays a character's desire for detachment that is repressed. Although ultimately different, these companion books mirror each other in important ways. Phrases reverberate between them. In both, the act of writing—of reaching into the self and outward toward others—moves the writer toward what knowledge and resolution are possible. Beginning at the same time of year, both chronicle in journal form the thoughts and feelings of a single woman who must come to terms with her turbulent emotional life. The titles of the two books are virtually interchangeable—curiously so, in fact, as the name of each one seems more appropriate to the other. But perhaps more important for our purposes, an event related early in the Journal appears to be the seed of the novel.¹⁰ Sarton's friend Perley Cole, about whom she had written with such love and admiration in Plant Dreaming Deep, is placed in a shabby, Dickensian nursing home, separated from his invalid wife, and he finally dies a lonely and meaningless death in an ambulance on the way to the hospital.

Cole's death apart, aging is portrayed positively in Journal of a Solitude. Sarton writes transparently of her life as she nears sixty, a year of health, activity, and major changes in her life. She perceives herself at almost all times as middle-aged and vital, not old. “I am proud of being fifty-eight,” she writes, “and still alive and kicking, in love, more creative, and potent than I have ever been. I mind certain physical deteriorations, but not really” (p. 79). Living alone in her New England village house, a self-proclaimed “nunnery,” she meditates on the conditions for the survival and growth of the self. She receives guests, works in her garden, reads and writes, and struggles to establish the routine essential to structure her life. Importantly, over the year she disengages herself from a passionate but now failing love affair.

She is destined, she realizes, to be a single woman, a woman alone. She no longer believes that one person, a loved one, might give structure to her life. For the single woman, “life itself” is “the creation” (p. 172), and in old age this life, she believes, will still be in the making. Elderly women come often to her mind. Sarton tells of Anne, a woman who never married, now in her seventies, whose “profile is still that of Nefertiti and her long stride that of a goddess” (p. 173). She remembers her mother who retained into her seventies “her swift impassioned walk” and savored “life more than anyone I have ever known” (p. 184). And she receives a letter from a friend in France who, also in her seventies, writes eloquently about her old age: “We have now arrived at a stage in life so rich in new perceptions that cannot be transmitted to those at another stage—one feels at the same time full of so much gentleness and so much despair—the enigma of this life grows, grows, drowns one and crushes one, then all of a sudden in a supreme moment of life one becomes aware of the ‘sacred’” (p. 117). These are the mysteries of old age, and accordingly Sarton understands letting go as a spiritual exercise. Her style, pared down, reflects her detachment. The path of renunciation she has followed all her life now widens. She embraces “the Hindu idea that a man may leave family and responsibilities and become a ‘holy’ man, a wanderer, in old age, in order to complete himself” (p. 117). And as if her life were a novel, at the end of the Journal we learn that Sarton has decided to begin a new life, to move from her present home in Nelson to a house by the sea in Maine.

More than ever before, Sarton's way of life is essentially training for the solitude of old age. She regards the demands and interruptions of the busy social world as a threat to the “open” time of the “inner world” when “images float up” from within. When her everyday life is dominated by the routines of housework, she feels “old, dull and useless” (p. 95). But the anguish of boredom is more than balanced by the process of creation, the development of the self. Life's meaning continues to be found, as she put it in Plant Dreaming Deep, in our own myth-making: “We have to make myths of our lives; it is the only way to live them without despair. This is not to dramatize so much as to look for and come to understand the metaphor that reality always holds in it” (p. 151).

These “myths” must be made, but they must also be unmade. In Journal of a Solitude, Sarton writes with a new toughness: “I see my function as quietly destroying myths, even those of my own making, in order to come closer and closer to reality and to accepting reality” (p. 176). The novel As We Are Now performs just this function, for it imagines an aging experience alien to her previous fictions. The words of Jung that Sarton ponders in the Journal seem to have a special significance to the turn her fiction takes: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making darkness conscious” (p. 110). The novel makes “conscious” what the Journal only hints at. In her Journal, she records Perley Cole confiding, “‘I did not think it would end like this’” (p. 14). Nor had Sarton ever imagined it. “How is one to accept such a death? What have we come to when people are shoveled away, as if that whole life of hard work, dignity, self-respect, could be discarded at the end like an old beer can?” (p. 23), she asks. But this is not the only hint of palpable fear of old age in the Journal. Sarton also quotes C., a woman in her eighties who lives alone in a country house and dreads the future. “I have acquired the habit of ‘thinking accidents,’” C. writes to Sarton, “and of feeling solitude as the certainty that I shall be without help should I have one” (p. 194). As We Are Now is the full expression, the imagining, of the dark cold and empty isolation of old age, to echo the words of T. S. Eliot. The novel is the shadow of the journal and as such represents a crucial kind of growth.

For Sarton, one of the myths that had to be questioned was the continuity of the growth of the self. She had to imagine severance from natural development, imposed from the outside. In As We Are Now she reverses the direction of the autobiography, turning it forward. Instead of looking into the past and shaping the lived experience of a life, she invents one of many possible destinies.¹¹ Like the genre of science fiction, which may prepare us for change in a technological society, this inverted form of the autobiography imagines the future of growing old in America. The novel explores not only the positive meanings but also the real miseries of old age—decrepitude instead of spiritual detachment, humiliation of the self instead of an intimate dependence, solitary confinement instead of the plenitude of solitude. Perhaps this is what the striking image of suffocating bulbs in the Journal was meant to point to: “For a long time, for years,” Sarton reveals, “I have carried in my mind the excruciating image of plants, bulbs, in a cellar, trying to grow without light, putting out white shoots that will inevitably wither. It is time I examined this image” (p. 57).

As We Are Now records the final days of Miss Caro Spencer, a seventy-six-year-old former high school math teacher. Never married, Spencer is now institutionalized: her only living relative, an older brother, has confined her to a small, unkempt, rural nursing home run by two overweight, callous women. He was fortunate enough to have recently remarried into youth, but what is sanctioned social behavior for men is taboo for women in American society. Spencer is abandoned to die. Worse, at Twin Elms, as the nursing home is called, she is initiated into evil. She confronts the corruption seemingly inherent in the relationship between master (the administrator) and slave (the patient). Her will is not broken, although her vulnerability is compounded by extreme poverty and a reversal of class roles (a cultivated woman, she is dominated by two uneducated lower-class women who despise her sophistication). These insights she gains, but at the expense of personal and social catastrophe. The story is a tragedy. The novel ends with her burning down the nursing home, taking the inmates and staff along with her. As We Are Now is no Harold and Maude. The suicide of this old woman is not the cheerful act of a free spirit who conveniently relieves society from facing the problem of caring for its elderly. The action of Spencer is a fiery protest against inhumane conditions which smother growth and prevent the best possible death. It is also an act of responsibility and a lesson in the politics of the elderly.

What leads Spencer to such an extreme act of violence? Although strong-willed and practiced in the arts of self-discipline and introspection (as we would expect a Sarton character to be), she is an innocent, a gentle person who has never experienced calculated cruelty on either the personal level or the social level. The situation baffles her. She does not quite understand why Twin Elms should seem a place of punishment—she has done nothing to deserve it. Resolving that it must be a test of character, she steadfastly sets out on a journey toward personal wholeness. But the tawdry humiliations and the material and spiritual poverty she experiences wear her down. Her senses are “starved.” As she puts it, “in a place like this where we are deprived of so much already, the small things that delight the senses—food, a soft blanket, a percale sheet and pillow case, a bottle of lavender cologne, a linen handkerchief—seem necessities if one is to survive.”¹² Enforced immobility quickly wastes her body and weakens her mind. Visitors are discouraged. Although nominally she has a room of her own, only in the bathroom that she shares with all the others does she have any privacy. A peaceful solitude, necessary to the making of the self, is shattered. The staff openly harass her. They give her tranquilizers. They put salt instead of sugar in her coffee. They threaten to commit her to the state mental hospital. When she complains to a visiting minister about the scandalous conditions, and he in turn calls the state inspector, they put her in the total darkness of solitary confinement for days on end.

Spencer soon learns that the rigid order of the nursing home feeds on a ritual of pretense and lies required of both staff and patients. She is forced to become an accomplice. “They never tell me the truth and I pretend to believe their lies,” she writes. “Then I lie to them and little by little every shred of truth, of reality is destroyed” (p. 122). In the course of this, she too is destroyed. Whereas she first imagined herself and the others as “caged animals” (p. 34), toward the end of the story she realizes that she has indeed been “murdered” (p. 107).

When she was first admitted to the nursing home, Spencer believed that anger was immoral and that unjust social conditions could be changed by peaceful measures. Now she recognizes that no help will come from outside the institution and that only her anger holds her together. Any self-pity she once had vanishes. “I have stopped crying,” she writes, “because I am dead inside” (p. 122). More important is her insight that the structure of the nursing home itself tends to generate cruelty. It is a total institution, as Erving Goffman has described it.¹³ As Spencer observes, “There is a connection between any place where human beings are helpless, through illness or old age, and a prison. It is not only the heroic helplessness of the inmates, but also what complete control does to the nurses, guards, or whatever. I wish I could have seen Harriet and Rose [the two women who run Twin Elms] as they were before they opened this ash heap for the moribund” (p. 49). In a sense, then, she forgives her enemies. But what they once were bears little resemblance to what they are now, to what they all are now, to echo the title of the novel. Spencer understands that “we each have a murderer and a torturer in us” (p. 49). She consciously aligns herself with minorities (the radical blacks) and decides to burn down the jail: “if I burn the place down some day, I can open this locked world—at least to death by fire, better than death by bad smells and bedpans and lost minds in sordidly failing bodies” (p. 89). She chooses her death, with what dignity she has left, and practices collective euthanasia out of compassion for the other inmates.

Spencer fights against the degradation of the self in two basic ways. First, she keeps a journal. Sarton presents the entire novel as the publication of Spencer's unedited manuscript which was found intact after the fire (she had hidden it in the refrigerator) along with a letter requesting that it be published. Spencer's words are her only constant companion, her only continuing support that gives her a sense of reality. As she describes her thoughts and experiences, she develops an understanding of her own point of view. Darkly, she calls her journal The Book of the Dead, explaining that she is writing everything down so that she will be able to see her situation clearly. The keeping of the journal is very literally the making of a map that will disclose her position to her: “this path inward and back into the past is like a map, the map of my world. If I can draw it accurately, I shall know where I am” (p. 10). Her journal, her point of view, is the only thing that she can trust, and she knows that it can be “dynamite,” her weapon, her means of resistance. Point of view—knowing “where I am”—entails a rejection of paternalism and the adoption of a conscious political position. Experiencing oppression, she now understands why blacks had to resort to violence. Her act of writing leads to an act of guerrilla warfare inside the closed world of Twin Elms and, Spencer hopes, may have an influence outside it. “Perhaps,” she writes, “if this story of despair could be published it would help those who deal with people like me, the sick in health and mind, or just the plain old and abandoned.” (p. 112).

Spencer's anger, which sustains her writing, is fueled by another patient, also a rebel, a man named Standish Flint who was apparently modeled on Perley Cole. But another character is equally important to Spencer, who is given a reprieve against isolation. It is a kind of “miracle.” Hope appears in the form of a kind woman, a farmer's wife named Mrs. Anna Close, who takes charge of Twin Elms while the owner goes on vacation. For a short time Spencer puts all her faith in the “pure human goodness” represented by this woman (p. 100). She allows herself to be nurtured by her. We can read this politically: a temporary alliance with a trusted, honorable half-member of the administration is possible. Sisterhood can be sustaining. Spencer is astonished by Mrs. Close. “She seems to understand me in a way I have needed for years. The room feels airy and clean when she has been there,” Spencer explains to herself. “But it is not that, it is being cared for as though I were worthy of care” (p. 92). Spencer falls in love with her. “On the brink of understanding things about love” that she has never understood before, she fears Anna Close's departure as if it were a death sentence, and it is. “It is a disaster, a real one,” she writes. “It cannot be transcended” (p. 98). For the structure of the institution will inevitably reassert itself. Mrs. Close is not corrupted by it, for she leaves in time, but the owner returns to undo all the good that has been done. The institution's systematic repression of the positive, uniting forces of love necessarily generates an equal and opposite force that eventually erupts in violence. The administration reads Spencer's journal and exposes her relationship with Anna Close. They accuse her of being a lesbian, humiliating her, stripping her of what dignity she had left. She is left with nothing. “Absolute nakedness may be madness” (p. 126), she writes in her journal, and in a fit of crazed energy, she sets fire to Twin Elms.

In both Journal of a Solitude and As We Are Now, the context of a tragic old age is politics in the broad sense of the term, the distribution of power in a society. We find in both books an increasing consciousness on Sarton's part of the repressiveness of social structures in the United States. In the Journal, her thoughts touch on black power, women's rights, Nixon, Vietnam, and the war crimes of Lieutenant Calley; everything is tainted by the corrupt policies of the U.S. government. In As We Are Now, Sarton imagines the destruction of the self by imprisonment in old age, oppression by a social structure from which she had long detached herself. This is a shocking departure from the earlier novel Kinds of Love, in which the rural community honors its elderly. But the village of Willard is quite literally a gerontocracy that is sustained by the New England traditions of fierce independence and communal responsibility, and in such a supportive social environment (which may exist only in the imagination), the potential tragedy of decrepitude is softened. In As We Are Now, the social context has changed. Desiring independence, Spencer had chosen not to marry, and now she has no family to depend upon. Her only sibling cannot look after her, nor can her friends. A nursing home is the only alternative. Sarton, and her fictional character Spencer, had long idealized a “natural” detachment from society that would allow her to grow toward wholeness. Instead of Jungian detachment, there is forced detainment. “I am in a concentration camp for the old,” Spencer writes, “a place where people dump their parents or relatives exactly as though it were an ash can” (p. 9).

The new complexity of Sarton's vision of old age is reflected in the quality of her writing. As We Are Now has a hardness to it that is lacking in her previous fiction, which is basically dominated by aphorism, not power or drama. Of all her work, it truly deserves to be called a fiction in Frank Kermode's sense of the term: it “inescapably involves an encounter with oneself, and the image of one's end.”¹⁴ And Sarton has carried this new understanding of the tragedies of old age into her writing since then. As we have seen, Sarton's vision of old age in her earlier work is unrelievedly romantic. But her recent writing is more cautious and more cognizant of the real physical and mental disabilities of old age in general and of the vulnerability of elderly women in particular.

In the novel The Reckoning (1978), the central character is Laura Spellman, a sixty-year-old widow who learns that she is dying of lung cancer. That a central character should die at such an early age is itself unusual, even odd, for Sarton. Spellman has two models of old age before her—her eighty-year-old aunt, an eccentric and energetic old woman who lives alone, and her mother, a once stunning beauty who has sunk into senility. Spellman thinks to herself that “though old age might be like Aunt Minna's, rich and passionate and angry, it could just as well be her mother's, a dwindling of intellect and spirit until there's nothing left but the needs of an infant.” And she concludes, “I'll be well out of it.”¹⁵ Her choice is not to fight for life but to manage a graceful, and early, death.

More so than The Reckoning, The House by the Sea (1977), a journal that covers a span of almost two years after Sarton moved to Maine, is preoccupied with growing old. Much of what Sarton thinks about the pleasures of the later years is by now familiar to us. “The sixties are marvelous years, because one has become fully oneself by then,” she exults. But looking ahead, she adds a painful disclaimer. When one is sixty, “the erosions of old age, erosion of strength, of memory, of physical well-being have not yet begun to frustrate and needle” (p. 62). Sarton's meditations on very old age are not spun of light, as once they were. She sees her closest friend, Judy, with whom she has lived for years and with whom she has spent every holiday for thirty years, sadly diminished by senility. Candidly, she admits not only to the anguish but to the frustration that Judy's condition causes her as well. She forces herself to admit that Julian Huxley and Celine, once exuberant friends, are now decrepit. She visits Marynia Farnham, another friend, in a nursing home. She laments that she has ceased to feel the impulse to write poetry, remarking ruefully that it has never occurred to her that she might not want to write poems after she reached sixty. And she confesses more openly to fears of living alone. What if she should fall? have a heart attack? Her relief is transparent when she sees her old friend Elizabeth Blair, eighty, who is still active. “It was a tonic to see her,” Sarton writes, “because so many of my friends are losing ground mentally, so many that my dream of a happy and fruitful old age seemed an illusion. But here,” she adds, “is proof that it need not be so” (p. 110). This is a significant admission. Her long held dream of a happy and fruitful old age may indeed be an illusion.

In As We Are Now, Spencer observes that “the trouble is that old age is not interesting until one gets there” (p. 23). This was never true for Sarton herself, who had always been fascinated with old age. But Spencer's next words may have held a truth that Sarton was only slowly coming to realize herself. Old age, Spencer explains in her journal, is “foreign country with an unknown language to the young and even to the middle-aged. I wish now I had found out more about it” (p. 23).

Notes

1. For a survey of gerontophobia in English literature, see Richard Freedman, “Sufficiently Decayed: Gerontophobia in English Literature,” in Aging and the Elderly: Humanistic Perspectives in Gerontology, eds. Stuart Spiker, Kathleen Woodward, and David D. Van Tassel (Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1978), pp. 49-61.

2. Plant Dreaming Deep (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 77.

3. Kinds of Love (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970) p. 234.

4. See David Hackett Fischer, Growing Old in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977).

5. In The House by the Sea (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), Sarton remarks that in old age men come to look like women and vice versa. This idealization of androgny in old age is paralleled by her notion of the artist as androgynous, a prevalent theme in her work.

6. Journal of a Solitude (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 55.

7. Collected Poems: 1930-1973 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), pp. 74-75.

8. Sarton's view of the aging process corresponds closely to the disengagement theory of aging. As presented by Elaine Cumming and William Henry in Growing Old (New York: Basic Books, 1961), the disengagement theory argues that the withdrawal of the individual from active social roles is a mutually satisfying process for both the individual and society. Functionalist in approach, the theory maintains that through disengagement, society prepares for the disruption in the social fabric that death inevitably brings, and the individual readies herself for the personal crisis of death. Disengagement, it is assumed, is a universal phenomenon, not a practice cultivated by certain societies only. Accordingly, the theory of disengagement, in its classic form, proposes that old age is a distinct phase in the psycho-social development of the individual, and that the process promotes the health of a culture as well as the spiritual realization of the individual.

9. The activity theory of aging is one many social gerontologists subscribe to. Largely developed in the forties, the classic statement of the activity theory of aging appears in Robert Havighurst and Ruth Albrecht's Older People (New York: Longman Green's, 1953). Successful aging is defined primarily by the social acceptability of behavior; the major standard of value is behavior as it is perceived by others, not by one's self. Interiority is not prized. On the contrary, a forward thrust into the future is valued as though death should not be confronted directly but rather denied because one is “too busy.” More popular than the disengagement theory of aging, the activity theory of aging is basically less congenial to Sarton's fictions of old age.

10. In The House by the Sea Sarton notes this:

    “My experience with senility has been gentle with Judy [her most intimate friend], but it was traumatic with Dr. Farnham. For mental torture the paranoia of one's psychiatrist directed against oneself is pretty bad. I was accused of trying to murder her. Lawyers were involved. But at last some of the anguish was transformed into As We Are Now, so it was not all waste”

    (p. 176).

11. Recent events in the other arts also follow this model for grasping what it is like to grow old in America. I will mention briefly two pieces, both by women who work as anthropologists, we might say, of old age, doing intimate fieldwork in the half-light of their own lives. First, in 1976 the performance artist Suzanne Lacey presented a piece on elderly widows at the American Theatre Association Convention in Los Angeles, the first part of which involved the cosmetic transformation of Lacey herself into an older woman; she was not making herself up into an aged character, but was imaging her own future, remaining herself as she would become. Secondly, Barbara Myerhoff's Academy Award-winning film Number Our Days, which documents the lives of the Venice, California, community of elderly East European Jews, is a personal odyssey into her own heritage, her own past, that will in some way become her future. As an anthropologist and a Jew who had never immersed herself in her own tradition, Myerhoff created this project to learn more about herself as well as about the “object” of investigation.

12. As We Are Now (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 66.

13. Asylums (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1961).

14. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 39.

15. The Reckoning (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), p. 60.