Ruth O. Saxton - The Book of Old Ladies: Celebrating Women of a Certain Age in Fiction

The Book of Old Ladies is an inspiration for what life can be like in my future.

SKY BERGMAN, award-winning filmmaker and professor of photography and video at Cal Poly State University

In The Book of Old Ladies, Ruth Saxton offers readers, through curated conversation, the opportunity to defy the sweet-as-the-day-is-long stereotype and to examine the more fully developed andthank goodnessrealistic senior woman.

JENNIFER KING, director of the Downtown Oakland Senior Center

With an engaging, conversational style and feminist lens, Ruth Saxton guides us through an array of twentieth- and twenty-first-century novels and stories... An essential read.

EILEEN BARRETT, editor of American Women Writers: Diverse Voices in Prose and professor of English at California State University

Saxtons work will delight, inform, educate, and enlighten all who read her book.

VIJI NAKKA-CAMMAUF, president of the Alumnae Association of Mills College

Copyright 2020, Ruth O. Saxton

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Published 2020

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-1-63152-797-5

ISBN: 978-1-63152-798-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020902519

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To all the old ladies in my life
and in books who have inspired me
to see possibility, embrace change,
and find joy in becoming
a woman of a certain age.

I have always read fiction to find models for how to live, how to be. I am not alone; we search for ourselves in story, often seeing our own lives in fictional plots and imagining our potential futures through the lenses of fictional lives. Stories offer us ways to make sense of our pasts and to forge a way of being in our presents and futures. The stories we read, the plot-lines we encounter, impact our sense of ourselves and what is possible.

From a childhood drenched in testimony and storytelling by old women, including my grandmother and her sisters, I learned a love of narrative, even as the plotlines offered to me as a girl were notably limited. I grew up feeling as if I personally knew the characters in my favorite girlhood novels. Louisa May Alcotts Jo March, Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre, Jane Austens Lizzie Bennet, and Willa Cathers Antonia were my introduction to smart female characters who loved books and education, though their major life choice was only whom to marry. These books, and books like them, eventually led me to be the first in my family to go to college.

As a college student, I scoured my syllabi for books by any women at all, but the only fiction I was assigned to read was by men. As a young mother in the feminist movements of the 1970s, I returned to school for my masters degree and was introduced to American women such as Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Flannery OConnor, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Zora Neale Hurston, and dozens of others, whose work I taught in my community college classroom and shared with friends. I read these books hungry for a story in which I could see myself, through which I might find plots that would aid me in my attempts to manage being a daughter, a wife, a mother, a feminist, and a teacher, but I often found myself torn between Virginia Woolfs Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe, never allowed both to rock the cradle and to write the book in the same (life) story.

When I was in a doctoral program in the early 1980s, several of my professors commented that there were simply not many women worth serious study; a graduate course on women writers, taught by a visiting professor, resulted in our discovery of original editions of eighteenth-century books with uncut pages shelved on the open stacks, unread. I continued to read the women writers Id studied in my masters program, such as Woolf and Doris Lessing, whose female characters were not simply the foil for male characters development.

Later as a professor, I taught, wrote, and edited books on Woolf and Lessing, as well as books about contemporary womens fiction, girlhood, mothers and daughtersalways searching for female fictional limitations and possibilities. As I aged, my focus turned from the girl and the mother to the grandmother, or the woman my age, and I began to look for plots that might help me map a possible future beyond the familiar fairy tale where the old woman is stereotyped as either the wicked witch or the fairy godmother. In my forties, I had noticed that I was the age of all those dead mothers littering my favorite novels by women, the heroines always the adult daughter. In my sixties, I noticed once again the unseemly collusion of fictional portrayals with social stereotypes, the ways novels and short stories would caricature old women and confine them in plots like fictional shut-ins.

Those characters were not present, not still engaged with the messy currency of living. I kept running into the same old stories in which the older women are simply beside the point. From the formative nineteenth-century womens novels of my girlhood to contemporary fiction, older women are almost never the ones whose story matters; the older woman or grandmother is either absent or important only as she affects the (younger) heroine. Think, for example, of Little Red Riding Hood, in which the granddaughter is the focus and the old woman is read as lacking desire and therefore vitality. Even in the various contemporary feminist revisions in which the wolf tells his version of the tale, the grandmother is still food for the wolf, and the fodder that generates the story. The story is never, really, about her.

And so, I began a serious search for fictional stories that have old lady protagonists who are not simply marginal. I found old women to be plentiful in detective fiction, and I enjoyed novels in which Miss Marple or Mrs. Pollifax is able to solve criminal mysteries precisely because her physical appearance as an old lady renders her invisible. But I wanted to read realistic fiction in which I could see through the eyes of an old woman, not simply appreciate her as an excellent plot device or character, just as I had so often viewed the world through the eyes of younger women. I searched for stories that get inside the heads of old women. I wanted to gather examples of good aging, of wise or surprising women over sixty and into their nineties, like beads on a string, a secular rosary to help fend off the fear of becoming elderly in a society whose mainstream vision of aging women is marked by fear, loathing, refusal, or reduction. I wanted to read the novels in which fictional older women prepare for the journey of aging, inhabit the territory, and become increasingly their truest selves.

As I read books touted to be focused on an older woman, however, I saw that she mostly remained a shallow cipher. And when she was central, the novel often fell into a category that I began to term Deathbed Bookendsopening and closing with her aged consciousness, the focus of the book being her memory of a youthful (usually romantic) past. In a cultural climate of advertising that urges us to postpone the inevitable by purchasing products or relying on plastic surgery to maintain the appearance of youthful bodies, perhaps it is natural that fictional old women are portrayed at the end of their lives remembering their youth rather than looking inward or outward at their present situations. Writers and readers may also have difficulty imagining new adventures for older women because youthful romance is such a familiar plot for women. However, I wanted to find stories about womens firsthand experience in the present time of life, not ones where they are stuck in the past.