ABSTRACT
E. Nesbit’s fiction is recognised for conveying the author’s unconventional stance upon issues of paramount concern to fin-de-siècle and post-1900 Britain, including socialism, women’s suffrage, and marriage. This essay reads her neglected novel Dormant (1911) through the lens of literary age studies to argue that it participates in the era’s imaginative re-shaping of life-course possibilities, which focused especially on women. It finds Nesbit’s notoriously contradictory feminist impulses mirrored by, and intersecting with, the novel’s representations of age and ageing. Through age-defying and un-ageing characters, Dormant tantalises with queer prospects and “second-chance plots”, which signify an expansive later-life potential that sits in seeming opposition to the youth-centric Bildungsroman. The eventual circumscription and withdrawal of such non-normative possibilities – through notions of “allotted time” and age-appropriateness – re-inscribes a narrative of decline in which age entails a narrowing of possibilities. Dormant’s navigation of these ambiguities, this essay contends, makes it a crucial but as yet understudied reflection upon the tensions evoked by re-negotiations of age and ageing, and how the limits of an individual life are structured by them.
In the 10 December 1892 issue of The Sunday at Home magazine, an illustration by the artist Leonard Linsdell depicts two women – one old, one young – walking arm-in-arm through a forested scene. In its pairing of youth with old age, Linsdell’s picture evokes various precursors in the Victorian painting tradition, including Hubert von Herkomer’s Christmas in the Workhouse (1876) and John P. Burr’s The Village Barber (1881). Through the framing of their aged subjects, such artistic representations contributed to shaping the discourse on old age at a time when it was becoming more fraught – as questions of provision for that life stage and the fearful spectre of “old-age pauperism” loomed ever larger.Footnote1 Considered in isolation, Linsdell’s illustration is a rich if enigmatic document of fin-de-siècle attitudes toward intergenerational sociality: joined via interlinking arms, its two figures suggest youth as a comfort to or support for old age, yet also the possibility for mutual affection to emerge from generational mixing. But, turning to the magazine’s next page, the picture is found to accompany a poem by the writer E. Nesbit. Entitled “Old Age”, the poem in fact juxtaposes that life stage with youth, thereby extending the duality of Linsdell’s image. The landscape that frames the walking women is endowed by Nesbit with ambiguous, symbolic weight:
Such questions of age and ageing are revisited in Nesbit’s 1911 novel Dormant. Despite being recognised as her “most ambitious and most complex narrative”,Footnote4 the novel remains wholly neglected within post-millennial scholarship, even as attention to Nesbit’s work beyond children’s fiction has proliferated.Footnote5 This essay reads Dormant through the lens of literary age studies, thereby extending the chronological remit of a recent turn towards examining New Woman fiction against the sociopolitical meanings of (old) age.Footnote6 In the form of characters who seem to “defy” their age, or who are extricated from the ageing process altogether, Dormant examines how age mediates or structures expectations about appropriate behaviours and roles. By doing so, the novel enters upon discussions intensifying in Britain from the 1880s around the evolving shape of the life course. Familiar narratives of development and self-realisation are frayed and then upstaged in Dormant by a gothicised story of radical life extension achieved via occult science. But the counter-normative, “queer” possibilities raised in the wake of this shift are permitted to develop only within limits and eventually accede to more conservative messaging. Nesbit’s ambiguous feminist allegiances are well-understood by critics; an “advanced woman” in her own habits and often advocating greater independence for women, she nonetheless displayed a striking antipathy towards activism and true equality.Footnote7 This reading contends that a similar, seemingly paradoxical mix of conservative and radical impulses surrounds her treatment of age and ageing in Dormant; indeed, the depiction of gender in the novel is so inflected by questions of age and ageing that it is unwise to consider them apart. Examining these understudied yet crucial representations complicates our understanding of Nesbit’s sociopolitical agenda, and that of British women’s writing as a whole in the early-twentieth century. Equally, doing so helps illuminate crucial issues of genre, such as the status of the Bildungsroman between its nineteenth-century heyday and the modernist “limit cases” that were to follow;Footnote8 as I demonstrate, the so-called “second-chance plot” (a plot with parallels to Barbara Frey Waxman’s Reifungsroman or “novel of ripening”Footnote9) works in opposition to the youth-centric narrative of formation and threatens to shift narrative priority towards the potentials of later life.
Re-imagining the Life Course in a “New Age”
In a 1909 Quiver magazine piece entitled “The Modern Young Woman”, the author is brought to admit, with no shortage of palpable consternation, that “a good deal of uncertainty exists at the present day as to what is woman’s place in the world”. The problem, as they see it, is that while marriage and motherhood remain the indisputable touchstones of success for women (“of course everyone is prepared to agree that a woman is meant to be a wife and mother”), the prospect of attaining them is now so uncertain as to force the contemplation of alternative goals. The complication stems not only from women’s increasing opportunities, but from a change in the life choices of men as well. Potential husbands, “marrying […] late in life, […] if they marry at all”, are in short supply.Footnote10 The author therefore finds themselves at a loss; celebrating the improved status of education for women that has brought newfound independence and prospects, they also decry the loss of a “purpose” – a socially-beneficial end – towards which this advantage might be directed.Footnote11 Without the certainty of marriage, what is the modern young woman preparing herself for?
Eric T. Juengst observes that “the social, technological, and biological dimensions of the typical human life story have been rewritten continually over our species’ history”.Footnote12 Yet there are times when such a re-writing process is undertaken self-reflexively and assumes the proportions of a cultural obsession. The Quiver piece, alongside other contemporaneous attestations, identifies the “new age” of post-1900s Britain as one such time.Footnote13 But it also implicitly identifies the preceding era – the fin de siècle – as another, and suggests their continuity on these grounds. Namely, if the author attributes the present situation to a “great change in the ideals of women” that has unfolded over the previous century,Footnote14 readers would be inclined, I suggest, to substitute a more modest timespan. Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) and its “child-woman” Nora, whose reversion to girlhood aims at a “different way of growing up” with respect to the normative hallmarks of marriage and motherhood,Footnote15 may be seen to have initiated an acute period of scrutiny around the life course. The establishment of the reformist Fellowship of the New Life in 1883 (to which Nesbit belonged) and publication of Olive Schreiner’s novel The Story of an African Farm of the same year (which introduced the New Woman avant la lettre) are also defining moments within this “epoch”, which was marked by a fervour for reorganising life according to new principles that was, if not unprecedented in scale, then more conspicuous and self-conscious than ever.Footnote16 “Turbulent change, loud debate, fierce partisanship, and anti-partisanship” is how Holly A. Laird defines these years.Footnote17 James Purdon similarly observes that the pace and scope of change at this time was exceeded only by the “ubiquitous rhetoric of transition”.Footnote18
It was the rewriting of the life course for women in particular – to include university education, political activism, extra-marital roles, and so on – that seemed to encapsulate the transitional status of the era. But change here could seem at once radically accelerated and interminably suspended. To the novelist Henry James, writing in 1899, the “position and outlook of women” in Britain was undergoing an unmistakable “revolution”, the effects of which would register in the novel form.Footnote19 Yet, only a year prior, the “working woman” P. E. Moulder had sought to counter such grandiose suggestions by drawing notice to the partiality of change; in respect of the drudgery experienced by many working-class married women, she detected no sudden shifts but rather insufferable stasis: “so it goes on, generation after generation”.Footnote20 Twenty years later, even after the climactic changes rendered by the First World War, the novelist Arnold Bennett continues to characterise women’s status as being in flux, deploying language not unrecognizable to the fin de siècle: “it is an age of transition […] Especially is it an age of transition for women”.Footnote21 One anonymous reviewer of 1888, by comparison, had deemed it “clear that women are in a time of transition”.Footnote22 Hence, joined to the sense of transformation in the early years of the twentieth century was the feeling that “individual developments had yet to coalesce into a decisive break with the past”;Footnote23 as in the struggle for equal voting rights, much still remained to be fought for. Moreover, as the 1909 Quiver piece indicates stridently, the desirability of such a break – of entering unambiguously into a “new age” – was also not without its discomforts for some.
Prompting and reflecting the changes to which James gestures were the “fictional types” that came into prominence in these years, including the spinster, the unmarried mother, and the suffragette, to name but a few. Such types fostered alternative modes of being and narratives of self-realisation.Footnote24 Following Andrea Charise, who discerns an “intriguing interface” between the so-called “counterfeit senility” of the era and the queer temporalities described by Jack Halberstam, I propose a parallel relation in terms of these new life-course possibilities being elaborated in fiction.Footnote25 Halberstam’s claim that queer subcultures work to pose futures extrinsic to the “conventional forward-moving narratives of birth, marriage, reproduction and death” gives an entry point into understanding the ideological work these fictions performed in terms of age and gender.Footnote26 In fact, it was the coverage of counter-normative potentials in fiction and elsewhere that licensed discussions of “queer” phenomena more strictly defined. In The Intermediate Sex (1908), Edward Carpenter declares his study of homosexuality necessary on account of either the increased numbers of those with a “mixed temperament” or else the “more than usual attention” they have received of late. In either case, he judges it symptomatic of broader changes poised to reformulate the species: “we do not know […] what possible evolutions are to come, or what new forms, of permanent place and value, are being already slowly differentiated from the surrounding mass of humanity”.Footnote27 Carpenter’s is a Darwinian-inspired vision of a Britain in which changing social conditions are destined to spawn unpredictable new types no less valid than their normative counterparts.
Despite the potential radicalism of such declarations, however, even those fictions attentive to these new types were not simplistically reformist. Just as fin-de-siècle New Woman fictions expressed the same internal differences that existed in the political movements with which they were affiliated (on issues of race, gender, and sexuality),Footnote28 so similar contradictions frequently appeared in second-generation New Woman novels and “sex novels” of the early-twentieth century. In Elinor Glyn’s bestseller Three Weeks (1907), for instance, the frank depiction of female sexuality in the adulterous affair between the protagonist Paul Verdayne and “the Lady” was sufficient to scandalise British critics. Yet, as Charlotte Jones discerns, this seeming iconoclasm is transmuted in the course of the novel into the more socially-acceptable form of maternal desire (for Paul’s child), whilst the Lady “pays the price” for her extra-marital liaison when she dies at the hands of her jealous husband.Footnote29 Closer to Dormant in its seeming focus on the Bildung of a young, female protagonist is H. G. Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909). The novel follows Ann as she defies patriarchal authority and seeks independence through the suffragist movement. But the radical prospect that seems to be prepared for – Ann’s development into an unmarried, educated, and politically-active woman – is tamed first by her imprisonment and then by her acceptance of matrimony. Ultimately, her freedom amounts simply to “greater choice with whom she procreates”, as Ann’s personal aspirations are folded within larger ambitions for a society led by eugenicist principles.Footnote30
Then as now, age determined life-course possibilities to an equally great extent as did gender, and often in conjunction with it. The “structuring” function of age unfolded in formal and informal ways – in the siloing of experiences and roles behind certain chronological milestones (dictating among other things the entry into formal education and, after the implementation of the Old Age Pensions Act 1908, the receipt of a pension), and in the way that, as Richard A. Settersen Jr. describes it, “age may be tied to common notions about appropriate behaviour or the proper timing and progression of experiences and roles”.Footnote31 Such determinism is often, as Kay Heath points out, “not fully or even largely in the conscious control of an individual”.Footnote32 Part of the disparagement levelled against the heterodox figure of the New Woman came through suggestions of her unnatural, asynchronous age – “not only young but also prematurely aged”Footnote33 – and that she was concealing her true age identity. In 1894, the authors of a “Character Note” accused the New Woman of “look[ing] older than she really is”, evidencing what Karen Chase finds to be the way that ageist tropes of youthful naivety were marshalled to deprecate her “adult act of resistance” as “an adolescent tantrum”.Footnote34 But age-based critiques more frequently targeted the inverse life stage of old age. In a Judy magazine illustration, again of 1894, the New Woman is charged with obsolescence: her iconoclasm is skin deep, for she is not “New”, but in fact “only an Old [Woman], repainted every morning”.Footnote35 The diatribe draws its sting from longstanding ageist and sexist tropes that deemed women’s cosmetic use artificial, dangerous, and deceptive.Footnote36 If the first decade of the new century formed the tail-end of a gradual softening in the attitudes towards concealing age via cosmetic usage, it was still a time of anxiety about what was permissible. The bind facing older women is captured by a 1911 Bystander piece, “The Age of Eternal Youth”, whose author admonishes neglect of the body and face but warns equally against “the fatality of emulation”.Footnote37 The older woman should neither show her true age nor too closely ape the appearance of youth.
Michelle J. Smith and Jane Nicholas assign such Victorian-era overhangs to the ongoing association of female beauty with the “markers of fertility”, or, in other words, a belief in the redundancy – even deceptiveness – of maintaining appearances after the loss of reproductive capability.Footnote38 The “climacteric” (menopause) gave a particular shape to women’s ageing, being seen to mark the irreversible entry into a new phase of life marked by distinct behaviours and roles. Whilst late-century medical voices like John Harvey Kellogg saw both women and men as aged out of sexuality, the threshold for the former was placed at the onset of the menopause rather than at sixty or sixty-five as it was for the latter.Footnote39 Yet, the implied superfluity of the “old maid”, her exclusion from prior habits and roles, and her deprecated status vis-à-vis the married woman, were all points of increasing contention. (Even the very nomenclature was up for debate: had the “old maid” been made “extinct” by the more voguish “bachelor woman”?Footnote40) In “Are Old Maids Unhappy?” (1904), an article from Woman’s Life magazine, the author defends such extra-marital possibilities as legitimate alternatives rather than as failings – the unmarried woman could, in their view, be among the “happiest of women”.Footnote41 In an Answers piece of 1912, equivalently, the point is made repeatedly that the older woman does not need to alter herself dramatically, but may still maintain a social life and “dress charmingly” as she did before.Footnote42 Of course, the need to insist upon these points implies the continuing strength of the counter-claim; and the subtitle of the Answers piece, “Discussing a Much-Maligned Lady”, makes clear that the mature woman remains, despite the new century, a figure still subjected to ageist and sexist stereotypes.
It is against this evolving picture of life-course possibilities, especially for women, that Nesbit’s Dormant was written and first published.
“More Than the Whole of Your Kingdom”: Life-course Possibilities in Dormant
Dormant’s concern for age and ageing is registered from the outset via the decidedly youthful age profile of its early parts.Footnote43 From the “boys” of the wharf whom Rose Royal wins over (4), to the “unshaved youths” (16) of the Swiss boarding-houses that admire her passing by, to the “young people” (35) that form her friendship circle, “the Septet”; – the novel’s initial cast is almost uniformly young. But the Septet’s youthfulness is as much shown in its sensibilities and behaviours as by the chronological age of its members. Its links to “University College”, then famous as the first British university to admit women on equal terms to men, gives the group an association with “the modern”. Unsurprisingly, each member is said to have “lived their own lives” (35) rather than follow social proscriptions; the omission of a “chaperone” (35) and the women’s smoking are patent signifiers of the group’s unconventionality. These themes of age, ageing, and life-course possibilities are also implicated on the structural level by the story’s initial correspondences with the genre of the Bildungsroman. The narrative co-originates with Rose’s inheritance of a property, Malacca Wharf, coincident with what she self-referentially acknowledges as her “coming of age” (9). Implicitly, it is Rose’s youthful status and the manifold possibilities enabled by it that legitimate the narrative endeavour – that make hers a story worth telling.Footnote44 In this respect, the novel’s inattention to the specifics of the inheritance (whose discussion would introduce contrary ideas of transience and old age) acts to preserve the youth-centrism of the opening.
The youthful age profile of Dormant’s early parts is affirmed by the introduction of a courtship plot.Footnote45 Anthony Drelincourt, a member of the Septet and friend to Rose, becomes the all-too obvious hinge on which such a plot might turn, the narrative voice going so far as to meta-textually identify him as such: “in the middle of the half circle […] sat Drelincourt, who is, I suppose, the hero of this romance” (38). His struggle is also decidedly one of young adulthood; he wants a “settled income” (42) to begin a career in chemical research – a route indexical of various prior gothic models, notably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), in which it is metonymic of the modern and new. From the outset, Dormant therefore invokes tradition and nonconformity, conservatism, and radicalism, by depicting young protagonists who are poised to tread well-worn narrative paths in novel ways.
But that qualification (“I suppose”) to Anthony’s status as the “hero of this romance” is an operative one. Several allusive moments reveal the extent to which he is guided by those norms of age-appropriate conduct described by Settersen Jr., even as he seems to neither want them nor be suited for them. In the chapter, “Family Secrets”, Anthony’s is presented as concealing his true nature and desires behind a facade of conformity. He feels “he was not one, but two”, before deeming even this to be too limiting, for he was “another thing – not a duad, but a triad” (58). The multiplicity of the self is, again, a theme with considerable gothic precedent. Through this intertextuality, Nesbit hints at a development that may result in anomalous or even monstrous outcomes. The precise components of Anthony’s split identity are unspecified, but his elaborate envisioning of his future life invites readers to speculate on the possibilities:
If he had been a farmer he would have married. He thought of the firelit farm-kitchen again, a woman coming in to put her arms round his neck, and ask if they had had a good run—a woman gentle, dark eyed, fragile, enchanting, as no woman was that he had ever met. No, a farmer's wife would have had to be energetic, vital, managing and organizing, a woman like Rose Royal. Then he thought of her for a little while. ‘Well, anyway I couldn't afford to marry any one now,’ he told himself, ‘even if—’ and stopped the thought there. (61)
Dormant’s concern for queer, counter-normative potentials and their mediation by age is intensified, however, with the introduction of Lady Blair and the shift in setting to the ancestral estate of Drelincourt. The aged second cousin of Anthony joins with the Jewish bookseller Abrahamson as one of the few figures of old age amongst the youth-dominated cast at the story’s beginning. Yet the difference in their roles could hardly seem starker at points. Abrahamson leverages his aged experience to facilitate the nascent courtship plot between Rose and Anthony, both in the form of his divination through card reading and his financial investment in support of the latter’s future success. As he says to Rose when he offers to read her fortune, “I only lay out the cards for hope and beauty and youth and the strength of youth” (27). Through this role, he enacts a well-worn trope by which the older person seems to suffer a “loss of erotic viability” (to use Heath’s phrase).Footnote47 Relegated to thwarting or supporting romances between younger persons, the aged figure is rarely afforded the central role themselves. If any expression of sexuality is identifiable in Abrahamson’s case, it is of the “senile” variety elaborated by Chase, which finds pleasures in “chance, stray, or fleeting encounters and interactions” such as he and Rose are drawn into.Footnote48 But theirs is a relationship that most strongly evokes the model of mutual affection and difference between old age and youth emphasised in Linsdell’s illustration of Nesbit’s 1892 poem “Old Age”. Abrahamson’s role is to foster opportunities for others that he himself once had, but which are now (at least as far as he sees it) incompatible with his life stage. As Nesbit in that poem had associated old age with the “lost pains, lost joys, that will not come again!”, so Abrahamson finds pleasure in bestowing a marriage gift upon Rose – in advancing a plot he cannot feature in: “you will not deny an old man who has now left so few pleasures; ah! so few, so few!” (263).
If a normative sense for the older person as aged out of sexuality is represented by Abrahamson, then it is contested by that fellow member of his age cohort, Lady Blair. From her introduction as the current occupant of Drelincourt, she is posed as extrinsic to and even potentially jeopardising of the marriage between Rose and Anthony. But her threat, in the mould of H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha and other gothic figures of old age, is specifically that she may act as a love rival in a romance between age peers.Footnote49 Discussing their intention to reside in the ancestral estate, Anthony designates Rose – by this time his fiancé – as the “supplanter” (90) of Lady Blair. The surface level reference here is to the occupancy of Drelincourt, but that choice of word also casts the two women as competitors after the affections of the speaker. When Rose tries to clarify the date by which Lady Blair will vacate the property, Anthony is prompted to recognise that such a union would ordinarily entail the departure of the aged resident: “when we’re married […] Yes, of course. I forgot that” (90). These deferrals of normalcy anticipate the first physical descriptions of Lady Blair, which register a powerful asynchrony between her chronological age and her appearance. She is “seventy-two” and yet, as Anthony tells Rose, “looks any age you please down to thirty” (99). Lady Blair’s profound resistance to appearing not only her age, but almost any specific age, recalls Charise’s claim that in the fin de siècle “female bodies removed from the reproductive circuit – the spinster, the odd woman, and the New Woman” were jointly seen as having “scrambled the reliability of a chronological age stamp”.Footnote50 Absent the physical signs of old age, Lady Blair’s case posits a more fluid, social definition of that and other life stages; her age is intuited only by her performance of certain age-associated roles and experiences: those of hostess, chaperone, or confidant. But one particular role, that of love rival, is sustained by the tell-tale milestone of “thirty”; that age puts her (rhetorically, if not physiologically) on the cusp of midlife and therefore in the realms of plausible (normative) marriageability.Footnote51 This sense of her ongoing viability to play the lover’s role is foregrounded in two romance-coded scenes shared between she and Anthony: a carriage ride in which she, “girlish in a large hat and white veil” (115), takes the reins, as well as an impromptu night-time picnic held inside Drelincourt. Unlike the conformity of her male counterpart Abrahamson, Lady Blair strains at the expectations foist upon her by old age, threatening to usurp her younger rival and positing an alternative romance plot at the centre of Dormant – one that is queer because it contains no prospect of reproductive futurity.
This resistance to age-based constraints and expectations soon encounters limits, however. It transpires that the romantic overtones of the carriage ride are intentional on Lady Blair’s part. Yet when she attempts to bring the courtship plot to its traditional climax in the form of a “love declaration” to Anthony, she acknowledges her age as an insurmountable barrier: “what I wish is more than the whole of your kingdom […] It’s in another dimension. […] I wish that I were twenty so that I might marry you” (119). Having been hitherto suspended, conventional notions of age-appropriateness are starkly re-imposed through Lady’s Blair’s declaration that she has aged beyond marriageability. (Anthony’s refusal to contest it is a subtle affirmation of the declaration’s “truth”.) In lieu of this, the only plausible alternative is found to be the platonic, intergenerational friendship already seen between Abrahamson and Rose. Whereas their initial differences had sustained an expansive sense of later-life potential (one that included romance), the belated convergence of Lady Blair and Abrahamson re-affirms the sense that ageing entails a narrowing of possibilities. The aged woman’s defiance of her chronological age therefore proves figuratively skin deep, since the socio-cultural associations of age – which she has internalised – remain decisive; in the context of normative ideas about the suitable age for marriage, her mention of being “more than seventy” (119) suffices to explain the non-viability of progressing the courtship plot further.
What is so curious, therefore, is the application of botanical metaphors to Lady Blair during this declaration scene (“budding beauty”, “bright bay”) (119). This second epithet, as a reference to the laurel tree, not only suggests her ongoing vibrancy, but echoes the amorous story of Apollo and Daphne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The aged woman is rhetorically positioned as a suitable candidate for love in the exact moment that the prospect of love is foreclosed. Nesbit’s fiction is recognised for its contrary feminist impulses – “sustaining and undermining the hegemony of conventional female roles”, as Amelia A. Rutledge writes – but in the depiction of Lady Blair we find an equivalent ambiguity about age-based roles and capabilities.Footnote52 The tension between her physiological viability for love and the sense that she is aged out of marriageability remains unresolved. Nonetheless, Dormant is clearer in what it suggests about the role of age as a structuring principle of narrative; Lady Blair’s recognition of her old age makes her destined to occupy the periphery – able to support though not displace plots reserved for the young. Queer romance between the older woman and younger man is therefore only briefly tenable before the normative associations of age and gender are re-imposed.
Lady Blair’s case implicates further aspects of early-twentieth-century attitudes towards age and ageing. Initially represented as innate, her youthful appearance is eventually revealed to be a product of cosmetics and other artificial interventions. The discovery is made when Anthony searches during the night for the entrance to a secret room within Drelincourt. Already gothic in its subject-matter, the encounter threatens outright supernaturalism when he perceives a spectre approaching: “a curious shiver disconcerted him. He felt suddenly cold. Then, as suddenly, the blood rushed hotly to his face, and he went to meet the thing, whatever it was […]” (128). His intense physiological reaction to the sight of what proves to be Lady Blair seems inexplicable, until he begins to describe the uncanny verisimilitude of her youthful appearance: the “almost perfect wig” and the “wonderful illusion” produced by the interplay of light, hair, and dress (128, 129). His horrified reaction has a twofold origin. It is first prompted by what Kathleen Woodward calls the “aging body-in-masquerade”: the host of strategies that add, remove, and modify features to deny the appearance of old age.Footnote53 The young man is made suddenly aware that what he thought was natural is in fact a carefully constructed artifice that conceals the reality beneath. Such strategies of so-called “soft rejuvenation”, as Smith and Nicholas term them, could still arouse consternation in the first decade of the new century. As noted above, contemporaries encouraged the maintenance of features (such as through hygiene), but fiercely deplored any attempts to pass as a different life stage; the “‘spectacle’ of the older woman who attempted to look younger was often described as horrific”.Footnote54
The reality of the decrepit aged body is the second source for Anthony’s shocked response, as indicated in the telling detail about the proximity needed to uncover Lady’s Blair’s masquerade: “it was only when one came quite close … ” (129). The ellipsis registers this body as something indescribably awful, evoking a long-standing strain of gerontophobic discourse that sees it aligned to tragedy, fear, and the unnatural.Footnote55 Conceived of in such terms, this body becomes suitable for treatment via a gothic register. In light of this ageist othering, the illusion is thus “wonderful” in a two-fold sense: on account of its verisimilitude (how closely Lady Blair “looked a girl” [129]), but also because it virtuously conceals the awful truth of the aged body. Such a disparaging treatment of old-age physicality is not repeated in the novel, but appearances are never again treated as a simple substitute for the biological facts of age – there is afterwards a charged sense of the realities concealed beneath surfaces. When Lady Blair is said to appear “about twenty-five” during a celebration at Drelincourt, it is with the decisive qualification that “the powder did not show at all at that distance” (181). Even if Dormant therefore rejects ageist and sexist tropes surrounding women’s passing as young (neither Lady Blair’s asynchronous behaviour nor her appearance are treated as farce), its depiction of an impulse to masquerade – and in the service of disguising an unnameable, gothic reality no less – nevertheless perpetuates negative associations around the aged body. In doing so, the novel thereby imposes further limits upon the older person; just as the play at youth’s courtship plot is tenable within certain grounds (as long as it never culminates in an earnest “love declaration”), so a youthful appearance is acceptable only if it is recognisably performative and unable to be mistaken for the original.
The night-time encounter also seems to elicit further horror from the fact that it lays bare the conceit by which Lady Blair seemed to avoid the perceived shortcomings of either youth or old age, and to possess the seeming advantages of each life stage. Until the artifice is revealed, she sustains the fantasy of rejuvenescence: of youthfulness co-existing with aged experience. As Smith and Nicholas argue, such qualities meant that the rejuvenated woman could seem the ideal form of womanhood in the early 1900s: a “near perfect combination of a beautiful and youthful body with a mature and responsible mind […] the idealized look of the thin, young, and beautiful flapper [separated] from her alleged immaturity and flightiness”.Footnote56 Such significations help explain Anthony’s esteem for his second cousin and the extent of her threat to the courtship plot; young in body and old in mind, Lady Blair is more than a match for the immature Rose. Before it terminates in the anti-climax of the love declaration discussed above, Dormant thereby threatens a replacement of marriage’s typical form – a union of age peers as the prelude to procreation – with what Margaret Morganroth Gullette and Kay Heath term the “second-chance plot”: the striving after experiences that failed to materialise during a normative time in the life course. Having been usurped in her youthful courtship of Anthony’s ancestor by the soon-to-be-revived Eugenia, the romance-coded scenes lay the ground for Lady Blair’s acquisition of what she “missed out on”. The fact that the target of her affections shares not merely filial ties to her former lover, but even the same name, means that her case promises to be an acute version of the second-chance plot.
Yet by raising this possibility, only to eventually deny it, the novel substitutes a liberating message for a conservative one; namely, in lieu of the second chance it posits an “allotted time” for life-course opportunities that, once exceeded, cannot be recouped. The shift is made the more abrupt by the fact that romantic love is not only prevented from proceeding but retrospectively overwritten. In the novel’s denouement, after Eugenia is returned to life by Anthony’s experiment and poised to usurp both Lady Blair and Rose in his affections, the queer potential of age-disparate romance is expunged altogether by the aged woman’s declaration that it was in fact familial love that was foremost in her liaisons with Anthony; she admits: “you’re the son I should have had if that woman had not come between my lover and me” (284). Lady Blair’s confession precipitates behavioural and physiological shifts that bring her into correspondence with the normative associations of old age; she begins to “cry the tremulous quick tears of age” (284) and suffers a rapid decline in her health, after which she dies. The physicality and performance of age, so Dormant seems to suggest, must be kept in lock step. Defying age-based expectations – as Lady Blair does via her appearance and role as a youth-coded suitor – suspends the ageing process but cannot deny it. Offering a prosaic variation upon the conclusions to Haggard’s She (1887) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), ageing unfolds in Nesbit’s novel over a radically shortened timescale and is swiftly followed by death. Those who act outside of age-based expectations, just like those who seek immortality, are punished by experiencing ageing as an accelerated, and therefore shockingly visible, process.Footnote57
The aborted second-chance plot involving Lady Blair is in fact taken up by Eugenia, through whom the themes of rejuvenescence, second chances, and allotted time are carried forward. A sense of renewed possibilities is recognised instantly when Anthony, having just effected her restoration via a chemico-occult process, refers to her as the “new life that he had not created, of course, but re-created” (223; emphasis added). Like the promise of the second-chance plot, this is “new” life in the sense of hitherto unrealised potentials, yet transpiring in the context of a life already lived. In contrast to Lady Blair, however, Eugenia does not perform the role of the rejuvenated woman by artificial means; instead, she literally combines a youthful (and now un-ageing) physicality with aged experience.Footnote58 Appropriately, given how this asynchronous age profile corresponds to the ideal of womanhood described by Smith and Nicholas, no sooner is she introduced than she supplants the “older” woman as the competitor (with Rose) for Anthony’s affections. But the difference in age between Lady Blair and Eugenia – and the meaning of “age” is progressively fractured as the story goes on – leads the latter to be regarded as a serious threat; in other words, youth is the pre-condition for Eugenia’s viability as a love rival. This implicit connection is made apparent when Rose, now caring for the revived woman, reflects with increasing concern on Anthony’s claim to have been unaware of whether Eugenia is young or old. After seeing the woman for herself, Rose deems her youth unmistakeable: “how could he not have known she was young?” (237; original emphasis). The question of how he could fail to know if she is “young or old” (238, 249) becomes a repetend. Its repetition in subtly different forms indicates how this question of age’s perceptibility is of utmost importance; in Rose’s mind, a recognition of Eugenia’s youthfulness is the pre-requisite for recognising her attractiveness and marriageability – so long as Anthony is ignorant of her age, she cannot be a threat. (By contrast, as noted above, Lady’s Blair’s age is the first aspect of her identity that Anthony conveys to Rose.) But Eugenia’s physiological youthfulness, her denial of age-as-biology, permits her to do what Lady Blair can only wish for: she becomes romantically involved with Anthony, first under the misapprehension that he is her lover of fifty years prior, but then, once corrected, with the recognition that he offers her a second chance at love. The more earnest treatment and greater success of Eugenia’s courtship vis-á-vis that of Lady Blair spotlights the decisiveness of age as it is socially determined; once her advanced age is common knowledge, no amount of masquerade or performativity can legitimate Lady Blair’s entry into the marriage plot.
Yet Dormant’s conservative impulses on the notion of second chances and allotted time run even deeper. They emerge following Eugenia’s discovery that she has been returned to life after an absence of fifty years (a past that she experiences as three days ago). This revelation coincides with another, namely, that the Anthony who revived her is not the man she fell in love with but instead his nephew. Recognising this, Lady Blair asserts the non-viability of their union by emphasising Eugenia’s temporal displacement: “you belong to my time, not his” (286). The declaration is a richly allusive one. It explicates the feeling of Eugenia’s asynchronicity with the present day: her ignorance of new customs and behaviours; her anachronistic dress; and her uncanny identification of things long since faded out of memory. But it also creates wider implications about the meaning of “belonging”. Lady Blair’s words posit this either as a time in which one’s own age cohort predominates – demographically or socially – or as synonymous with youth. In either case, the effect of such rhetoric is to marginalise old age, since it is associated with a loss of age peers and occupies the opposite end of the age spectrum to youth. Even though it applies neither in terms of biology nor even the duration of her lived experience, therefore, Eugenia becomes “old” because she originates in the distant past and is socially adrift; when she painfully observes that “every one else has gone” (285), she vocalises the fear of old-age isolation and superfluity.Footnote59
Having foisted the trappings of advanced age onto Eugenia, it is at this moment that Dormant tantalises with another variety of the second-chance plot and one equally (albeit differently) queer as the age-disparate romance between Eugenia and Anthony. Lady Blair declares that she has convinced the Eugenia to “go away with [her]” (293) and start a new life elsewhere. The repeated, effusive expressions of homosocial longing that follow give this suggestion the appearance of an elopement, situating it on the edge of the forbidden territory of same-sex desire: “she wants me […] I want her” (293).Footnote60 On the cusp of being resumed, the marriage plot is therefore once again disrupted by the alternative prospect of intragenerational sociality between (old-)age peers, which is cast as equally fulfilling from an emotional standpoint. Absent the prospect of reproduction or marriage, the proposal necessarily marks a rejection of those “conventional forward-moving narratives” that Halberstam cites as the cornerstones of the heteronormative life course.Footnote61
Dormant’s conclusion sees even this queer possibility thoroughly jettisoned, however. Eugenia reneges on her promise to Lady Blair, re-commits herself to Anthony, and dies alongside him in an attempt to make him ageless as well. The tragedy of their deaths is neutralised by the novel’s acknowledgement that they were aiming to achieve an unnatural condition which promised only dire repercussions; as Lady Blair says before dying herself, “she couldn’t [change Anthony into what she was]. Oh, thank God she couldn’t!” (308). In lieu of the second-chance plot and its prioritisation of later-life potential, Dormant ends with the belated resurfacing of the marriage plot and Bildungsroman via the pairing of Rose with one of the Septet, William Bats. The anticipated union between these youthful age peers sustains the prospect of reproductive futurity and other hallmarks of normative ageing that were risked by the life-extending ambitions of Anthony and Eugenia. It is only the last of many such cases in Dormant in which queer potentials are constrained and overwritten by normative alternatives.
This essay has demonstrated that Nesbit’s notoriously ambivalent feminist impulses are paralleled in the novel by her variously liberal and conservative depictions of age and ageing. From the glimpses of queer possibilities in Anthony’s vision of the future, to Lady Blair’s asynchronous appearance and behaviours, and Eugenia’s refusal to obey “allotted time”, the novel tantalises with age-defying life-course trajectories only to then withdraw or circumscribe them. The lens of literary age studies therefore has much to add to discussions about Nesbit’s sociopolitical orientation and its articulation in her fiction; and Dormant in particular merits further attention as a narrative in which these ambiguities are played out at length. Broader, it may be ventured that contemporaneous novels’ treatment of age and ageing is another way in which they reflect the internal differences within the socio-political movements and debates of the “new age” with which they were associated; the examples of Glyn’s Three Weeks and Wells’s Ann Veronica, already mentioned in this essay, might be the first port of call for answering this question. Dormant captures a moment of fluidity in terms of the shifting status of old age especially, as relaxing attitudes towards “soft rejuvenation” and greater extra-marital roles for women were countered by the persistence of gerontophobic attitudes to the aged body and notions of obsolescence. Although it gives her further space to explore them, Dormant finds Nesbit still suspended between the contrary impulses first seen in her poem of some twenty years prior, “Old Age”. If the novel substantiates that poem’s claim for the impossibility of the second-chance plot (“Never again, for me, Youth’s bane and bliss – ”), it assuredly contradicts the poem’s suggestion that “all the doubts and questionings are done”.Footnote62 Instead, as Lady Blair and Eugenia’s cases attest, there remains an irrepressible desire to imagine possibilities that defy traditional notions of the life course.
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James Aaron Green
James Aaron Green is a postdoctoral researcher (ÖAW APART-GSK) at the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna. His recent work is in literary age and aging studies, in particular fictions of radical life extension. He holds further interests in the gothic, sensation fiction, and game studies. His work has been published in Gothic Studies, the Journal of Victorian Culture, Wilkie Collins in Context (Cambridge UP) and Gothic Dreams and Nightmares (Manchester UP) among other places. His first monograph, Sensation Fiction and Modernity, is due with Palgrave Macmillan. A second, based on his current project, is due with Bloomsbury Academic.
Notes
1 Charles Booth, Pauperism (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1892). On such artistic representations of old age, see Jennifer McLerran, “Saved by the Hand That is Not Stretched Out: The Aged Poor in Hubert von Herkomer’s Eventide: A Scene in the Westminster Union”, The Gerontologist, 33.6 (1993): 762–71.
2 E. Nesbit, “Old Age”, The Sunday at Home, 2015 (1892): 82.
3 Ibid.
4 Amelia A. Rutledge, “E. Nesbit and the Woman Question”, Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, ed. N. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 223–40 (233).
5 See, for example, Nick Freeman, “E. Nesbit’s New Woman Gothic”, Women’s Writing, 15.3 (2008): 454–69; Victoria Margee, “The Feminist Orientation in Edith Nesbit’s Gothic Short Fiction”, Women’s Writing, 21.4 (2014): 425–43; Emily Alder, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin-de-Siècle (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 79–113.
6 See, for instance, Somi Ahn, Age, Degeneration, and Regeneration in Fin-de-Siècle British Fiction, Doctoral Dissertation, Texas A&M, 2019; Nathaniel A. Windon “The Slope of the Years: Sister Carrie and Narratives of Aging in Late Nineteenth-Century American Literature”, Studies in American Fiction, 46.2 (2019), 321–39; Jeanette King, Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
7 Freeman, 457; Margee, 425; Patricia Murphy, “A State of Discontent and Dismay: E. Nesbit Dissects Victorian Marriage”, Victorian Poetry, 58.4 (2020): 475–500 (477); Rutledge, p. 223.
8 Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (London: Verso, 1987); Charlotte Jones, “Gender, Biopolitics, Bildungsroman”, British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age? ed. James Purdon, pp. 346–64 (357).
9 The “second-chance plot” was coined by Margaret Morganroth Gullette, but I am most influenced by Kay Heath’s use of it; see Aging by the Book, 214, 118. On the Reifungsroman, see Barbara Frey Waxman, From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).
10 “The Modern Young Woman”, Quiver, 55.6 (1909): 533–35 (533–34).
11 Ibid., 533, 534.
12 Eric T. Juengst, “Anti-Aging Research and the Limits of Medicine”, The Fountain of Youth: Cultural, Scientific, and Ethical Perspectives on a Biomedical Goal, ed. Robert H. Binstock and Stephen G. Post (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 321–39 (330).
13 The term “new age” is used by James Purdon, “Introduction”, British Literature in Transition, 1900–1920: A New Age? ed. James Purdon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 1–40 (7). For contemporary statements on the period’s transitional status, see Purdon, pp. 8–9.
14 “The Modern Young Woman”, 533.
15 Claudia Nelson, Precocious Children and Childish Adults: Age Inversion in Victorian Literature (Baltimore, MD: John’s Hopkins University Press, 2012), p. 97.
16 Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: Sexchanges (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 62, 63.
17 Holly A. Laird, “Introduction: A Revolutionary Moment”, The History of British Women’s Writing, 1880–1920, ed. Holly A. Laird (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 1–20 (18).
18 Purdon, p. 6.
19 Quoted in Jones, p. 357.
20 P. E. Moulder, “The Lives of Working Women”, Good Words (January 1898): 636–39 (638).
21 Quoted in Purdon, p. 33.
22 Quoted in Angelique Richardson, Love and Eugenics: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 34.
23 Purdon, p. 7.
24 Jones, p. 357. See also Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Bloomsbury, 1990), p. 16.
25 Andrea Charise, The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (New York: SUNY Press, 2020), p. 137.
26 Jack Halberstam, “‘What’s that Smell?’: Queer Temporalities and Subcultural Lives”, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6.3 (2003): 313–33 (314).
27 Edward Carpenter, The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (London: George Allen & Co., 1912 [1908]), pp. 9–11. Emphasis in original.
28 See, for instance, Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 41.
29 Jones, p. 359. The conservatism readable in Glyn’s work was such that her novels were marketed to Catholic, female readerships in 1920s Spain; Alexis Weedon, “An Introduction to Elinor Glyn: Her Life and Legacy”, Women: A Cultural Review, 29.2 (2018): 145–60 (157).
30 Jones, p. 348.
31 Richard A. Settersen Jr., “Age Structuring and the Rhythm of the Life Course”, Handbook of the Life Course, ed. Jeylan T. Mortimer and Michael J. Shanahan (New York: Kluwer Academic, 2003), p. 81.
32 Heath, Aging, p. 149.
33 Ahn, p. 90.
34 “Character Note”, quoted in Ahn, p. 90. Chase, Victorians, p. 199.
35 “She Goes in For Being a New Woman, Doesn’t She?” Judy, 28 November 1894: 254.
36 On cosmetic use in the early- and mid-Victorian eras, see Sara Zadrozny, “Of Cosmetic Value Only: Make-up and Terrible Old Ladies in Victorian Literature”, Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 32 (2021): 19; for its later usage, see Michelle J. Smith and Jane Nicholas, “Soft Rejuvenation: Cosmetics, Idealized White Femininity, and Young Women’s Bodies, 1880–1930”, Journal of Social History, 53.4 (2020): 906–21 (911).
37 “Mrs. Jack May”, “The Age of Eternal Youth”, The Bystander, 403.31 (1911): viii–x (viii).
38 Smith and Nicholas, 912.
39 See Karen Chase, “Senile Sexuality”, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging in Nineteenth-century Culture, ed. Anna-Julia Zwierlein, Katharina Boehm and Anna Farkas (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2013), pp. 132–46 (132–33).
40 May Saxon, “The Bachelor Woman”, The New London Journal, 3.76 (1907): 570.
41 “Are Old Maids Unhappy?” Woman’s Life, 453 (1904): 296.
42 “The Old Maid: Discussing a Much-Maligned Lady”, Answers, 48.12 (1912): 289.
43 E. Nesbit, Dormant (London: Methuen & Co., 1911). Subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition.
44 This sense is fostered even more obviously by the US release, which is eponymously titled Rose Royal.
45 Chase deems the primacy of the courtship plot to be expressive of a youth bias in fiction; “Senile Sexuality”, p. 139.
46 Showalter, 16.
47 Heath, Aging by the Book, p. 151.
48 Chase, p. 144.
49 See, for example, Heath, Aging by the Book, p. 109.
50 Charise, 114.
51 On the significations of the age of thirty, see Heath, Aging by the Book, p. 149.
52 Rutledge, p. 223.
53 Woodward, “Masquerade”, 123.
54 Smith and Nicholas, 912. See, once again, “The Age of Eternal Youth”, viii.
55 Woodward, “Decrepitude”, 51.
56 Smith and Nicholas, 908.
57 For more on this, see Woodward, “Decrepitude”, 50; Jacob Jewusiak, Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 24.
58 Technically, her origins in the past lend Eugenia the vantage point of old age, minus the actual experience (duration) of aging.
59 On this notion of old-age superfluity and outliving one’s time, see Chase, Victorians, p. 181, 181n61.
60 D. H. Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow and its treatment of lesbian sexual desire appeared four years after Dormant, only to be subsequently banned from sale; see Purdon, p. 38.
61 Halberstam, “Queer Temporalities”, 314.
62 Nesbit, 82.