“Are You Learning to Grow Old?”

“I have been growing old fast of late, aunty,” Kathleen, aged twenty-nine, tells Mrs. Ellicott in Ruth Lamb’s “A Wilful Ward”; slightly younger Lydia in Lamb’s “Her Own Choice” fearfully asks her husband-to-be, “We are not so very old yet, are we?” ¹ Surely, both young women are not “old”? However, as Margaret Morganroth Gullette has pointed out repeatedly, “whatever happens in the body, human beings are aged by culture first of all.” ² In a similar vein, Mike Featherstone and Andrew Wernick argue that “the aging body is never just a body subjected to the imperatives of cellular and organic decline, for as it moves through life it is continuously being inscribed and reinscribed with cultural meanings,” ³ and Kay Heath reminds us that “[a]ge is not as essentially involved with the body as with how we interpret it, both collectively and individually.” ⁴ The cultural concept of “old” age is situational, and it is clearly gendered: “In the world of the Victorian novel, the experience of age is strongly affected by whether a character is male or female. Whereas women contend with limiting stereotypes of spinsterhood and menopause, men are considered to age much later and with far more freedom.” ⁵ Hence it is significant that both characters are women, and whereas Kathleen is already married, Lydia calls herself a “spinster aunt” and is described by others as the “old maid of the family,” ⁶ pointing to the severe age restrictions for females on the “marriage market.”