Crones, Viragos or Wise Women? Discourses of Female Ageing 1850–1900

Abstract

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the growth of a women’s movement in which older women were active and visible. Such activities are, however, rarely reflected in the fiction of the period — and certainly not positively. The most well-known Victorian novel to deal with the suffrage movement — Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) — not only represents the movement satirically, but in Olive Chancellor creates the kind of strident and hysterical feminist spinster who was to become a stereotype, and whose implied same-sex desire threatens the proper heterosexual development of a younger woman. Readers of Victorian fiction will also be familiar with the caricatured images of older women which populate the novels of Charles Dickens: from menacing images of sterility like Miss Havisham, the repellent 70-year-old Mrs (Cleopatra) Skewton who tries to pass herself off as much younger, and the ironically named Good Mrs Brown, to philanthropists like Mrs Jellyby who would be better occupied with her own family, and helpless, pitiful victims such as Miss Flite.¹ These caricatures were, however, merely endorsing the dominant medical and sociological discourses of the period, which laid the foundation for the ideological construction of older women as undesirable surplus, best relegated to the corners of the living room and the text. And yet the lived experience of many older women, particularly those involved in the women’s movement, constituted a powerful challenge to these negative normative discourses of life after the menopause.²