The Frustration Granny Was Jealous

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The Frustration Granny Was Jealous


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Accueil Numéros 49 De-gendering the “grannies.”
1 On August 2 nd 1929, Lawrence writes to Orioli about his own mother-in-law: “Truly old and elderly women are ghastly, ghastly, eating up all life with hoggish greed, to keep themselves alive” ( Letters VII 399). This is unquestionably a reaction to the behaviour of Frieda’s mother at a particular moment and therefore cannot be taken as Lawrence’s general idea about elder women – and such a general idea does not seem to exist anyway in his writing. But starting from this typically Lawrencian declaration, my purpose is to look at specific examples when Lawrence de-genders the elderly women. If, in some parts of Lawrence’s oeuvre, the old woman is positively introduced as a wise figure, 1 even powerfully feminine, elsewhere she somehow happens to be reduced to an elderly person, regardless of her femininity, of her gender.
2 The first question that must be addressed is how to define “old” age. Though a rational synthetic answer is impossible – for some will define it as a biological phenomenon only, while other theorists will go as far as to say that it is a social construct – one may attempt to define it as a stage in one’s lifespan that is at once a biological, psychological, social and cultural. Simone de Beauvoir, in her substantial study, Old Age ( La vieillesse 1970 ), writes: “Old age is something that happens to people when they get old; the variety of experience attached to it cannot be summed up either in a concept or even in a notion” (De Beauvoir 343). 2 And it is also sometimes reduced to a social status given to someone who has reached a certain age, though he or she may not physically nor mentally feel old. Even the question of its beginning remains unclear, especially as we, nowadays, look back at texts which are a century old. Evidence concerning this blurred limit shows up in Lawrence’s work where the “old” women’s age greatly varies: if Granny in The Virgin and the Gipsy is, at the beginning of the novella, expectedly “old” as she is “nearly ninety” ( The Virgin 14), both Lydia Lensky as a grandmother, in The Rainbow , and Walter’s mother in “Odour of Chrysanthemums” are sixty-year-old “old” women; and in his essay “Women are so cocksure,” for instance, Lawrence condemns to “oldness” modern women as soon as they reach fifty – “it is then that the play is over” ( Phoenix 168).
3 The question of aging women in Lawrence also inevitably needs to be contextualized in relation to social changes in the early twentieth century when the number of elder people increased thanks to improved medical treatments and far better living conditions. The elderly were now socially visible. And indeed this is true also of literature, in which, but for a few exceptions, the old woman had so far remained marginal, a witch or an old crone. Among the fundamental transformations of their status, we can mention the introduction in 1908 of the first pension act for everyone above seventy years old though, quite ironically, in 1911, in England, women’s life expectancy was sixty-three (so hardly anyone benefited from the newly-introduced pension entitlement and in 1921, sixty-eight (though back statistics were not really accurate). In any case, as Pat Thane puts it, “in twentieth-century Britain, for the first time in history, it became normal to grow old” (Botelho 207, my emphasis). Physiologically, old age could not be ignored. And socially, it started to be taken into account. And yet there seemed to remain a gap between the normality of this experience and, on the other hand, the way it was culturally apprehended and represented (or rather not represented) in literature. The aged person – and especially the old woman – is rarely centre-staged. She is often ostracized, exiled in a domestic sphere. Simone De Beauvoir aptly renders this ambiguous state of “normal” biological evolution and “anomalous” social status when she defines female old age as a “normal anomaly” (De Beauvoir 349). And this anomaly is experienced by women differently than by men. For while there is no “rite of passage” proper from mature to old age – ageing being a progressive process – unlike men, women go through the crisis of the menopause, a critical turning point which irretrievably deprives them of their reproductive abilities and may make them feel somewhat anomalous.
4 Their femininity, already waning with their declining physical appearance, too commonly associated with beauty and sexual desirability, now needs to be (if it can) experienced differently. Female agedness is then stereotypically read (especially a century ago) as an anomalous contradiction to the ideal image of a “normal” femininity, that is one presumed to be that of fertile, erotically appealing young flesh that has a role in the society. The aged woman, on the contrary, is stereotypically dependent, a “relative” being who lives with or close to her family and who is economically powerless and socially unusable. Some critics, such as Catherine Silver, have even pointed out that the elder woman perceives herself and is perceived as just old, no longer a woman. She writes: “Gender categorisation becomes less salient than age as a way to self-define and as a basis to stereotype elder people” (Silver 387). We might assume then that there is a sort of converging perception of old people, regardless of their gender. This is the idea defended by Stephen Katz too, when he argues that the “convergence between older masculinized women and feminized men was evident in sexology and gerontology in the early 20 th century” (Calasanti, ed., 78).
5 Now is this de-gendering of elder women visible in Lawrence’s ways of outlining and referring to some of his senescent women? To what extent does he present to his readers women whose femininity withdraws behind the features of old age? How is femininity treated as an experience of the past which has gradually or suddenly disappeared? We will have to keep in mind that these “grannies” are depicted from the double distance of a younger male author who never reached old age.
6 After the death of her second husband, Lydia Lensky (or Brangwen), sixty years old ( R 254), withdraws from the frenzied immediate world. She yearns for a pause, a break from the surrounding, too lively, activity. “Unsettled” ( R 252) by her sudden widowhood, she strives to find some peace in “loitering” aimlessly ( R 253) and in “watching the scant world go by” ( R 253). Such deliberate passivity goes along with a domestic exile 3 in which time is reduced to immediacy and expectations are non-existent. She cannot even keep up with the pace of her own sons’ lives, as is suggested in this free indirect speech passage:
Of her sons, she was almost afraid. She could see the sombre passion and desire and dissatisfaction in them, and she wanted not to see it any more. Even Fred, with his blue eyes and his heavy jaw, troubled her. There was no peace. He wanted something, he wanted love, passion, and he could not find them. But why must he trouble her? Why must he come to her with his seething and suffering and dissatisfactions? She was too old.
Tom was more restrained, reserved. He kept his body very still. But he troubled her even more. […] And how could age save youth? Youth must go to youth . Always the storm! Could she not lie in peace, these years, in the quiet, apart from life? No, always the swell must heave upon her and break against the barriers. Always she must be embroiled in the seethe and rage and passion, endless, endless, going on for ever. And she wanted to draw away. She wanted at last her own innocence and peace. She did not want her sons to force upon her any more the old brutal story of desire and offerings and deep, deep-hidden rage of unsatisfied men against women. She wanted to be beyond it all, to know the peace and innocence of age ( R 253, my emphases).
7 She wants to be cut off from the turmoil of adult love; she yearns to be left untouched by the confusion and passionate appetite which are the driving forces of younger age. The blunt effect of the short basic answer “She was too old” sounds as the final expression both of her exhaustion and of her deliberate renunciation to her motherly role: she is now too old to save these young men. She therefore wishes to return to a pre-maternal, pre-adult stage, to be carried again by the peace of childish innocence – before she was a woman.
Her femininity only surfaces as a thing of the past, when Ursula, allured by Lydia’s two wedding rings, triggers Lydia’s memory back to her two marriages. Her rings, material traces of her past condition as a wife, thus initiate Lydia’s remembrance of herself as Lensky’s submissive “girl-bride” ( R 256). With mixed nostalgia, she sees herself again as a young slave to the mature “clever surgeon” ( R 256). Reading her then condition in the light of her second, more mature, marriage, she sees her young self as Lensky’s mere object, as a receptacle for his kisses: “In her idea, the man kissed, and the woman examined in her soul the kisses she had received” ( R 257). But her poor sexual experience with him, translated in the fact that “He had lain with her, but he had never known her” ( R 258), as well as her unsatisfactory maternal experience (but for Anna, their children were dead), were reversed when she met Tom Brangwen, who “served her” ( R 258). From a submissive unfulfilled and slaving girl-bride, she became a loved wife – a woman. But as she tells the story of her life to Ursula, in the domestic enclosure of her bedroom, these “sayings and stories” acquire a “mystic significance” ( R 260). Her girlhood, womanhood, attractiveness, fecundity, are now the frozen mental pictures of a past which has lost touch with immediate reality and has become material for mystic stories. Lydia now is “too old,” reduced to her status of a grandmother (which, socially, is no official status and biologically is only a remote one 4 ), after having more or less de-gendered herself confining her status of a wife to mystic stories and refusing to struggle with her status as a mother. Her femininity belongs to an unreal past.
8 While Lydia’s (de-gendered) aged condition is thus pictured by Lawrence as an aspiration to peace and quiet – a sort of rehearsal before death – on other occasions he focusses on specific moments of crisis which reveal the intrinsic violence of female senescence, a violence which brings the elder woman outside her femininity.
9 In 1949, in The Second Sex , Simone de Beauvoir insists that the social status of women depends on their physiological evolution, women being still much caught in their “female functions” (De Beauvoir 1949, 456). She apprehends a woman’s life as a succession of three crises: puberty, sexual initiation and menopause, wh
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