Recovering the Body in Aging

Abstract

The relation between self and body is pivotal in aging. The physical alteration that accompanies growing old is commonly regarded as one of its most problematic aspects. The loss that is threatened with aging is not the sheer fact of physical decline, but the inevitable alienation from a body that is regarded as an imprisoning object. Such a body is uninhabitable, already a crypt from which death is the only release. The extreme expression of that alienation is the hopeless contradiction deBeauvoir describes between “the inward feeling that guarantees our unchanging quality and the objective certainty of our transformation.”’ In the imagery of Bradbury’s 90-year-old Miss Loomis, “a body like this is a dragon, all scales and folds. So the dragon ate the white swan. I haven’t seen her for years—I feel her, though. She’s safe inside, still alive.”2 With a final, desperate image, she adds, “I’m the princess in the crumbled tower, no way out.” Blythe’s elderly subject expresses the same anguish: “The old part of me worries the young part