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Access Type
WSU Access
Date of Award
January 2024
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Department
English
First Advisor
Lisa Maruca
Abstract
This project explores representations of aging women in eighteenth-century courtship novels to interrogate the ways that these novels so seemingly focused on youth are actually grounded in and constructed through representations of old age. More specifically, it looks at representations of aging women in the middle period of their lives, to argue that depictions of aging in novels by Frances Burney, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, and Sarah Scott play a central role in the development of the courtship narrative in the eighteenth century and beyond. This dissertation argues that aging women serve as figures who actively undermine or disrupt the prescribed course of life for young women (courtship, marriage, motherhood) that these novels seemingly seek to inscribe as the ideal future. The older characters in each of these novels range in their presentation from stereotypically grotesque to emblems of virtue and goodness; however, they all repeatedly disrupt and defer the marriage plot, take over the narrative space, draw continued attention to the past and memory, or court premature aging, and in doing so can manipulate or circumvent heteronormative marriage. Through an exploration of these novels, I argue for a close link between representations of aging and of temporality. Ultimately, I argue, that in their continual disruption of the normative ‘course of life’ these representations offer glimpses of alternative timelines, timelines not focused on linear progress toward the future ending in marriage, but rather ones that make space for alternative kinship structures centered on female friendship.
Recommended Citation
Zynel, Melanie, "“a Tedious And Comfortless Uniformity Of Time”: Narratives Of Aging In The Long Eighteenth Century" (2024). Wayne State University Dissertations. 4009.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/4009
