AT AGE FIFTY-TWO, THOMAS HARDY was beginning to feel uneasy about aging. On October 11, 1892, he wrote to his friend Arthur Blomfield: “Hurt my tooth at breakfast-time. I look in the glass. Am conscious of the humiliating sorriness of my earthly tabernacle…. Why should a man's mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his own body!” (F. Hardy 13–14). This moment of specular disgust was ultimately recorded in a poem:

As Martin Seymour-Smith notes, critics have resisted reading the poem as simply “making a universal statement about how men and women feel about ageing” (461–62), linking it instead to marital dissatisfaction and Hardy's attraction to younger women (Millgate 330–32). Whatever the specific motivation for its creation, however, language about the body in the poem as well as the note to Blomfield–“humiliating sorriness,” “precarious,” “wasting,” “shrunk,” and “fragile”–reveals Hardy's disgust toward age and its manifestations. By interpreting a middle-aged man as too wasted and fragile to follow heart “throbbings” that seem inappropriately–and therefore painfully–youthful, Hardy's poem condemns the aging body as unfit for love and writes it into affective decline.

Hardy's words are typical of the specular self-judgments we often inflict upon ourselves as we age. The mirror appears to reveal self-evident and difficult truths, especially in cultures that routinely devalue aging. In the poem, the speaker constructs a narrative of decline as he notes signs of age and then attaches certain meanings to them. This concept of age-as-loss is part of a powerful cultural construct, one in which we often unconsciously participate (Gullette, Declining 4). We tend to view age uncritically as an unvarying and inevitable process, a stable element of being that is a biologically determined and uniform progression occurring in virtually the same way at all times in all places. Only recently has age's malleability begun to be recognized (Lock 47), and only when we question what seems “natural” to us about aging do we become aware of the ways in which our perceptions are fashioned by cultural cues. As Featherstone and Wernick put it, “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” (2–3)–meanings which we assimilate and impose upon ourselves. Age is not as essentially involved with the body as with how we interpret it, both collectively and individually.

In the twenty-first century we tend to be highly age conscious, but is Hardy's poetic equation of age with affective decline a typical nineteenth-century construction of aging into midlife? Searching for Victorian depictions of middle age in various genres, I have found a repeated pattern of age anxiety in novels, especially those with marriage plots. In this paper, I will focus on the largely unexplored question of how the Victorian novel constructs age by examining mirror scenes as windows into the aging fictive psyche. These scenes reveal not only how psychological aspects of aging were imagined in the nineteenth century, but they also show how fiction instructed Victorians to think about age.¹

I interpret these scenes from the perspective of Kathleen Woodward's mirror stage of old age, a theory that investigates how association with or dissociation from the signs of age affects identity, and I show how a character's attitude toward age can influence his or her relationship to the gendered paradigms of aging in Victorian fiction.

Anthony Trollope's Phineas Redux and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray depict, respectively, female and male characters who age prematurely when they identify with signs of age in the mirror despite their relative youthfulness in years. In contrast, Trollope's Miss Mackenzie, as well as Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved, show that when a male or female character interprets the mirrored image as youthful, aging can become independent from the actual number of years lived, with men having a far greater latitude of youthfulness than women. Finally, Trollope's The Way We Live Now reveals the power of the Victorian marriage plot to overcome issues of aging when a woman attempts to avoid love and deny cultural age prescriptions' ability to affect her happiness. The mirror scenes I examine link age not only with chronology and gender but also with self-construction, indicating that age can be a surprisingly protean category of identity in Victorian life, at least as it is imagined in fictive worlds.

In her discussion of ageism in Western culture, Kathleen Woodward explores the complex psychological process behind the ways we reject agedness in ourselves as we look at our reflected image. Woodward posits a “mirror stage of old age” (59) that inverts Lacan's infant mirror stage. Lacan proposed that between the ages of six and eighteen months, an infant experiences a recognition of her or his reflection in a mirror that contrasts with a simultaneous disunified existence in a “fragmented body” (2, 4). Lacan posits that “the discrepancy between the visual image and the lived experience…gives rise to the I” or perception of the self (Woodward 59). This mirror stage “situates the agency of the ego…in a fictional direction” (Lacan 2), and functions as a “drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation–and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality” (Lacan 4). Through this fiction, the young child produces an idealized image of a more unified self, the ideal ego.

In Woodward's mirror stage of old age, the elderly adult is repulsed by the mirror image and separates the inner self from the image but with the terms reversed: “the harmonious whole resides within the subject, and the imago prefigures disintegration” (60). The aging person sees the image in the mirror as something other than the “true self” and resists it. Woodward argues that this disidentification with age may be a salutary move, because it is unwise “to recognize oneself as old, to accept one's mirror image as a true measure of one's self,” especially “when one has the desire to achieve something” in life instead of fading into death (62). She asks, when we face decrepitude in the mirror, “Is it not healthier (that is, life-sustaining) to reject that image?” (60).²

From this perspective, a reversal of the infant mirror stage, a disidentification with the image, is a normal and advantageous response to aging, because the mirror image no longer suggests an ideal unity but an increasing degeneration that ultimately ends in annihilation.

I would like to expand on Lacan's and Woodward's ideas to argue that, while the child contrasts a fragmented body with the mirrored whole, for the elderly adult to compare an image of disintegration with an inner sense of wholeness he or she must construct an image of an earlier unity called youthfulness that is a necessary prerequisite to an imagined future of increasing fragmentation. Instead of anticipating mastery, the elderly individual suspects its loss, taking an opposite “fictional direction” than does the child. The earlier youthful self is experienced retroactively as one begins to long for an idealized past body that may not have been perceived at the time as either youthful or ideal. Rejection of the aged imago is reached through years of scrutinizing gradual changes, challenging and negotiating their relevance and meaning, so that, by the time one is elderly, a dialogue between the body and inner age consciousness has long been established.

Not only are mirror scenes depictions of this dialogue at work, but, by their very nature, they may themselves evoke age anxiety because they exist in the tension between the imaginary and the symbolic–the image and the words that interpret that image. Participation in the symbolic, which earlier had allowed for mature individuality, is potentially threatened by the body's aging. With the possibility of senility or even a modicum of memory loss, thought and language can be at risk. While the mirror stage of old age inverts the identification with wholeness in the imago, aging also inverts the individual's relationship to the symbolic: early in life we move into that order at the end of the mirror stage, but late in life the elderly individual may become estranged from it. And, it is during midlife that the first manifestations of this problem are experienced–the first slowings of memory, the first searchings for a lost word–developments that suggest further decline. As we stand in front of the mirror and consider our own aging image, a wrinkle or gray hair may be interpreted as the signal of a mounting disintegration which includes a diminution of the very ability being used, a meaningful participation in the symbolic.

Mirror scenes, then, tend to show age anxiety at its height, functioning as fictive records of moments in this life-long dialogue. As characters in Victorian novels regard their mirrored faces, they decide whether to associate with or dissociate from age in a conversation with self that becomes highly relevant to the outcome of their plot. This interplay between the mirrored image and the characters' words is an uneasy negotiation, a tension never fully resolved, because conscious intentions formed while contemplating the imago may make only a small contribution to outcomes due to the power of the unconscious that is always at work. In addition to these psychological factors, gender also plays a major role in ways characters view their imago. As we shall see, women looking into the mirror tend to evaluate themselves as objects of desire, while men usually calculate their abilities as pursuers (though The Picture of Dorian Gray, for a variety of reasons, challenges this generalization), and females pay a much higher price for becoming older than do males. Though aging results from biological imperatives, is influenced by gender scripts, and is not fully or even largely in the conscious control of an individual, in this essay I will show the surprising extent to which it can be affected by a character's conscious articulations, despite other factors.

In the world of the Victorian novel, the experience of age is strongly affected by whether a character is male or female. While women contend with limiting stereotypes of spinsterhood and menopause, men are considered to age much later and with far more freedom. A gendered paradigm of midlife onset ostensibly heralds the end of youth and marriageability at different points for males and females. Though statisticians discussed midlife as a set period for both genders–ages thirty to fifty according to the 1871 census (Benson 9)–literary evidence shows that women were aged into midlife earlier than men, due specifically to the marriage market which relegated single women into the category of spinsterhood at age thirty. Early in the century Jane Austen sets ages fifteen to thirty as the boundaries of female marriageability when Frederick Wentworth comments in Persuasion (1818) that “[a]ny body between fifteen and thirty may have me for asking” (86; ch. 7), and the eldest Elliot daughter, Elizabeth, feels “her approach to the years of danger” at age twenty-nine (38; ch. 1). In contrast, men at thirty are still young. Jane Eyre comments of Rochester that he “was past youth, but had not reached middle age: perhaps he might be thirty-five” (114; ch. 1.7). Craik's Hannah says that “men are quite young still at thirty” (21; ch. 2), and Lady Laura in Anthony Trollope's Phineas Finn observes that a “woman at forty is quite old, whereas a man at forty is young” (74; ch. 1.8).

There is no category of spinsterhood for men, and in contrast to women they are not called “middle-aged” until their forties and remain marriageable into and past this decade of life. In Phineas Finn, the narrator specifically points to Robert Kennedy's marriageability in terms of age: “Mr. Kennedy was an unmarried man, with an immense fortune, a magnificent place, a seat in Parliament, and was not perhaps above forty years of age. There could be no reason why he should not ask Lady Laura to be his wife…” (55–56; ch. 1.6). Kennedy has all the requisites for marriageability, and his forty years are included in the list.

Male anxiety about aging out of the marriage market does appear in men in their thirties and forties when they pursue younger women. In Frances Trollope's The Widow Barnaby, Colonel Montague Hubert, age thirty-five, agonizes over his attraction to sixteen-year-old Agnes Willoughby. When the forty-ish Roger Carbury falls in love with his young cousin Henrietta in The Way We Live Now, he believes he must “let his time for love-making go by” (668; ch. 87). Arthur Clennam in Dickens's Little Dorrit castigates himself when, in his forties, he first desires the twenty-year-old Pet Meagles and then Little Dorrit, who is twenty-two. He tells himself that “the time had gone by him, and he was too saddened and old” for romance (799; ch. 27). Standards for age and affect are more mutable for men than women, and though Roger Carbury does not win Henrietta, Hubert and Clenham find that they are not too old for love or sexuality. Each marries and produces a child, indicating the wider boundaries of marriageability and sexuality for males.

In addition to their early aging into unmarriagability due to spinsterhood, women's lives were also circumscribed by an extremely limiting paradigm of menopause. Edward John Tilt reported in the 1883 edition of his successful book The Change of Life in Woman that forty-five is the average age for “normal” cessation of menses (13), so in the mid- to late forties certain behavior associated with the change of life was expected. As the eminent obstetrician J. Braxton Hicks described in 1877, at menopause a woman had “a tendency to revert to the neutral man-woman state” and entered a period of healthy and happy androgyny, because by “losing sexuality and its various impulses, she becomes more capable of rendering herself useful” (475). She must become the sexless matron and grandmother who works to further the sexuality and reproductive activities of the next generation. The dominant model of male sexuality for the majority of the nineteenth century, however, was one of libido and fertility continuing uninterrupted from puberty through old age. In 1883, Tilt described the typical male as one in whom, at puberty, the “sexual apparatus is, in general, fully effective and all-sufficient to ensure its permanent activity until extreme old age” (8). Texts concerning longevity present impotence as a function of sexual excess unrelated to how old a man might be (Gullette, “Male Midlife” 62, 70). For most of the century, male sexuality and fertility were figured as fairly immune to aging, necessitating only cautious moderation to remain functional.

While these gendered differences for aging are paramount in Victorian texts, the novel demonstrates that they are not all-powerful. Both male and female lives are influenced by individual interpretations of aging. Age paradigms can be overridden by obvious factors such as the sudden acquisition of money, which we will see in the case of Trollope's Miss Mackenzie, but more arresting is the extent to which self-construction can influence how age is manifested as well as its impact on a character's plot.

The power of specular association with or dissociation from signs of age is made clear when we consider the case of Lady Laura Kennedy in Phineas Redux. In the second of the Palliser novels, Lady Laura is pursued by Phineas Finn, but she marries Robert Kennedy. They later separate because of incompatibilities, and when she becomes a widow in Phineas Redux, she wishes Phineas to renew his intentions of marriage. As a widow, Lady Laura faces a prejudice against her remarriage: Victorian diaries and letters show that while widowers were encouraged to remarry (Jalland 253), widowhood was seen as “a final destiny, an involuntary commitment to a form of social exile” (Jalland 231). Providing they were young enough, however, many widows did take new husbands, and Lady Laura is only in her early thirties. She has another reason to question her viability as a wife, however: Lady Laura believes marital discord and separation have aged her though she is only thirty-two, a belief made clear as she considers her chances on the marriage market:

Lady Laura bars herself from romantic affect by associating with early signs of aging. Even though chronologically young, she calls herself an “old woman” at thirty-two with complete conviction. This may seem odd and even a bit histrionic by today's standards, but Lady Laura believes herself to be making a rational, conscious decision as she ages herself out of love. What we would read as unhealthy unconscious mechanisms of self-punishment and repression are presented by the novel as a realistic though somewhat tragic option for women over thirty, because the spinster paradigm made it a thoroughly tenable response in Victorian England.

When Lady Laura accepts deterioration as her identity, she begins to act the part. Though the same age as Phineas, she performs the role of an elder: “Lady Laura took upon herself the tone and manners of an elder sister,– of a sister very much older than her brother” (108; ch. 1.12). Phineas then begins to see her in this way: “she was to him as some aunt, or sister, so much the elder as to be almost venerable…were she free to marry again to-morrow, he knew that he could not marry her. She herself had said the same thing. She had said that she would be his sister” (176; ch. 1.20). Because of her perceived age, both she and Phineas dismiss her from any possibility of romantic love, and they assume sibling roles. By seizing an identity based upon a belief in her own deterioration, Lady Laura weds herself to a future of decline. This is fully realized when she becomes lonely and bitter, refusing near the end of the novel to retain even a friendship with Phineas because he is marrying another woman, Madame Max Goesler.

This self-imposed aging-out-of-affect is not the only possibility for women in Phineas Redux, however. Lady Laura's premature aging contrasts with the extended youthfulness of her rival, Madame Max. While the novel seems to reign in midlife female sexuality with Lady Laura's loss of erotic viability, Marie Goesler's plot reintroduces and valorizes it. She has devoted three years of her life to acting as companion to the ailing and elderly Duke of Omnium, and after his death she experiences age anxiety in regard to her chances of marriage: “She told herself…that the time had now gone by, and that in losing these three years she had lost everything” (266; ch. 1.30). Like Lady Laura, she is thirty-two at the time of these fears.

Though Marie worries about time running out, she does not internalize an image of herself as aged or perform herself as “old.” She falls in love with Phineas and takes action by fighting for him, providing evidence that frees him from unjust incarceration. She is not only described as having youthful looks, but the novel actually subtracts years from her age (Epperly 24). When she is introduced midway through Phineas Finn, she is “probably something over thirty years of age” (25; ch. 2.40), several years older than Phineas, but halfway through Phineas Redux she is “hardly yet thirty” (267; ch. 1.30), and later she is said to be a few months younger than Lady Laura (Redux 225; ch. 2.65), who is the same age as Phineas, now thirty-two (Redux 96; ch. 1.11).

This sequence of events reveals limits to self-determination's power over age: the novel works this fictive magic to make Marie and Phineas more compatible mates by Victorian standards, because it will not allow an ideal wife to be older than her husband. Madame Max's eventual marriage to Phineas as his equal shows a midlife woman as attractive and marriageable at midlife, in shining contrast to Lady Laura's end. Though in Phineas Redux we have no mirror scene that reveals Marie's response to her aging face, she follows her initial fear of age with an aggressive approach toward Phineas's problems and toward her own life, an energy the inverse of Lady Laura's passive capitulation to decline. Phineas Redux's differing marriage plots–one that figures female midlife affect as improbable and the other as a possibility (even though moderated by fictive sleight-of-hand)–demonstrate how important the conscious aspects of a woman's psychological stance toward aging can be, especially just past the fateful age of thirty.

In contrast to Lady Laura's plight, Victorian males faced far lesser consequences for aging than did women. For example, they were not considered unmarriageable “spinsters” after thirty, but lived the “bachelor” life–a category associated with carefree living instead of age decline–and, as I have argued, they were not written into sexual and affective decline in midlife as were women. However, mirror scenes do depict men both worrying about aging and attempting to change it through self-construction. A complicated case of a character dismissing himself from affective viability at a young age occurs in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. Though the portrait at the center of the novel's plot is not literally a mirror, it serves a specular function, giving Dorian information about aging.³

Wilde's novel operates within the realm of the fantastic, and Dorian calls the portrait “the most magical of mirrors” (87; ch. 8), because it provides a literal depiction of the psychological and moral changes within himself. All signs of age are deflected from his body onto the painted canvas, and Dorian escapes aging by a method that even he himself does not understand. Though the portrait appears to make it possible for him to dissociate entirely from age, the opposite actually occurs. When Dorian stares at the portrait, he sees vice and age intertwined and embraces them as his true identity. Though only thirty-eight years old by his death, and chronologically young for his gender in Victorian terms, by intentionally associating himself with specular signs of age he becomes grotesquely aged beyond his years.

A hatred of aging begins early in the novel when Dorian is twenty, at the height of his youth and beauty, and his mentor Lord Henry delivers a “strange panegyric on youth” (20; ch. 2), declaring it to be “the one thing worth having” (17; ch. 2). He warns Dorian, “You will become sallow, and hollow-cheeked, and dull-eyed” and “suffer horribly” (18; ch. 2), because with age “[w]e degenerate into hideous puppets” (19; ch. 2). It is only after this lecture that Dorian recognizes his own youthfulness and, while gazing at the painting, fears losing it:

Like a bite taken in Eden from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, fear of aging reveals to him both his beauty and its vulnerability over time.

As do the other characters I discuss, Dorian links age and loss of affective viability, and he fears aging out of desirability. He says to Basil: “How long will you like me? Till I have my first wrinkle, I suppose. I know, now, that when one loses one's good looks, whatever they may be, one loses everything. Your picture has taught me that…. Youth is the only thing worth having. When I find that I am growing old, I shall kill myself” (21–22; ch. 2). Even at age twenty, Dorian begins to worry about a future when he will be dropped as both an aesthetic and romantic object. He capitulates completely to Lord Henry's ageist assessment of human value to the point of predicting his own suicidal end. By associating his personal value with youthfulness, he predisposes himself to interpret the first sign of age as cataclysmic.

Of course, these excessive fears of age are presented in the context of same-sex desire: Dorian's concern that Basil will no longer “like” him. Many critics have explored the novel as a coded gay text, but as Alan Sinfield cautions, “[t]he book should be viewed not as the cunning masking of an already-known queerness, but as reaching out towards formulations of same-sex experience that were…, as yet, nameless” (102–03). He points out that though all Lord Henry's “sexual involvements seem to be with women,” and Basil “is in love with Dorian, but apparently not in a sensual way” (100), yet the novel “invokes the queer image, to some readers at least, despite at no point representing it” (103). Dorian also is represented as, at least ostensibly, having love affairs with women throughout the novel, from his ill-fated attraction and disenchantment with Sybil Vane to “the girl whom he had lured to love him” at the end of the book (180). While I agree with Ed Cohen that “Dorian fears that time will rob him of the youth that makes him the object of male desire” (81), my focus is not on whether Dorian's desire is for men, women, or both, but on his perception and construction of aging. His fears of age and loss of desirability stand apart from the nature of his love objects, though his excessive emphasis on male physical beauty seems to place him outside the boundaries of heterosexual paradigms for Victorian males.⁴

An important aspect of The Picture of Dorian Gray that sets it apart from the other novels with which I deal is Dorian's conflation of aging with moral corruption. In this fictional world, sin “writes itself across a man's face” and “cannot be concealed” but is seen “in the lines of his mouth, the droop of his eyelids” (122; ch. 12). The body itself becomes a canvas upon which one's spiritual state is represented in the most public, obvious, and unavoidable ways, a fate Dorian is able to avoid as the hidden portrait “bear[s] the burden of his shame” (86; ch. 8). But, because he understands that the painting “reveal[s] to him his own soul” (87; ch. 8), he believes himself to be thoroughly corrupt. This preoccupation with “soul,” however, is always linked to physical aging, consistently displayed in a hyperbolic fear and loathing of growing old. The signs of “sin” that so offend Dorian in the painting are always depicted in terms of aging–wrinkles, drooping skin, protuberant veins, sallow coloring, and faded hair (100; ch. 10). Aging and sin are conflated throughout the book, by their juxtaposition and the descriptions of age as corruption, to the point that Dorian cannot decide “which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age” (105; ch. 11). The book is riddled with an indictment of aging, and Dorian eventually interprets age as a greater evil than moral failure.

Is Dorian's physical ruin, then, a result of what the text represents as his excesses or of age itself? At a certain point, he wonders about this, asking whether a reformation may reverse the corruption he sees in the painting: his “nature” may “grow finer” if “[s]ome love might come across his life, and purify him” (100; ch. 10), transforming the cruelty revealed by the portrait. He concludes, though, “No; that was impossible. Hour by hour, and week by week, the thing upon the canvas was growing old. It might escape the hideousness of sin, but the hideousness of age was in store for it” (100; ch. 10). As Sinfield describes it, “[t]he ageing process is made to represent moral degeneracy” (103). Wilde was an astute social critic, and this aspect of the novel suggests that even outside his hyperbolic fictive world aging may have been perceived psychologically as some kind of personal failure.

That Dorian's true identification is with the aging painted image rather than with his unchanging physical body is evident in the manic triumph combined with disgust that he feels while looking at the portrait. Dorian uses his youthful body to pursue Lord Henry's philosophy of the New Hedonism in public, initially unconscious of any changes within himself. After he has spurned Sybil Vane, he first discovers an alteration in the painting– “lines of cruelty round the mouth” (74; ch. 7)–and is taken aback. The portrait functions as a mechanism that reveals his unconscious content, an index of repressed guilt. Repressed self-hatred and abnegation also become evident when he begins to enjoy a “real pleasure in watching” the changes in the painting in secret (87; ch. 8). He returns again and again to compare the painted face of age to his own youthful face in a mirror and becomes increasingly “enamoured” with the image, “more and more interested in the corruption of his soul” displayed there (105; ch. 11). The text accelerates his aging beyond the norm and presents it as grotesque and almost reptilian by describing Dorian at twenty-five with “hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth” (105; ch. 11). As he stares at this image, Dorian deploys his own version of the mirror theory of old age: instead of rejecting an outwardly aging body and identifying with an inner youthfulness, he embraces the age and corruption in the painted image as his true identity even though his body does not evince it.

When Lord Henry comments at a dinner party, seemingly in jest, “The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young” (178; ch. 19), he states the psychological principle of aging that functions throughout the novel, a system consistent with Woodward's mirror stage of old age. Lord Henry and Dorian despair at the signs of age, because they associate a sense of a true self with youth. At the first sign of age in the painting, Dorian believes himself to be fatally flawed. Eventually, he is driven by despair to stab his specular self in the portrait, which causes him to fall dead, “withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage” (184; ch. 20). Though the description of his face as “loathsome” may refer to an outward manifestation of the moral failings the book so incessantly invokes, the words “withered” and “wrinkled” are beyond doubt comments upon Dorian's unnaturally accelerated aging at thirty-eight. In the stabbing he acts out, whether consciously or unconsciously, his youthful determination–that he will kill himself when he looks old.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, age is not only indicted as a great evil, but Dorian's inability to dissociate outer physical age from inner corruption lead to his desperation and ultimately to his premature death. Even had he been able to reform his moral corruption, he was unable to live with what he saw as the greater “hideousness”–age. He takes his judgement of age one step further than does Lady Laura. While she despairs of her ability to be loved and removes herself from affective viability, Dorian decides at a young age that he will not be worthy of life when he grows old and then brings that fate upon himself.

While the previous examples show that age can accelerate when characters embrace it, perhaps even more surprising is how far youthfulness can be extended when agedness in the imago is resisted. The protagonist of Anthony Trollope's Miss Mackenzie negotiates the complex borders between spinsterhood and marriageability, showing that, despite strong cultural prescriptions of spinsterhood, specular dissociation can make age pliable and more self-determined for women on the margins of midlife.⁵

In her mid-thirties, Margaret Mackenzie is considered to be a spinster, and, as her sister-in-law calls her, an “old maid” (11; ch. 1). Margaret's mirror scene shows the complex negotiations between culturally dependent age markers, concepts of marriageability, and self-reading. As she looks at herself in a mirror, she sees a few gray hairs and finds herself “shaking her head, as though owning to herself that she was old” (111; ch. 9). Margaret does not, however, draw this conclusion: Margaret is six years past the portentous thirtieth birthday as she assesses marks of age on her body. When she is described as thinking herself “old” the passage suggests not just that the “few” gray hairs show she is beginning to age, but that within her cultural context it is now appropriate to pronounce, “I am old.” Margaret does not, however, draw this conclusion. Her laugh and tear suggest that the contest can go either way– she can focus on the gray hair or the fresh bloom. She shakes her head only “as though” she is old, dissociating herself from age and associating with her features that are still youthful. Important among these is her sexuality. As she inventories her body, the cascading rhythm of the text, with its clauses linked by the repeated “and,” propels her toward a sensuality revealed by the mirror. Trollope provides a celebratory moment of female sexuality, and Margaret reads her body as a tool to make her viable on the marriage market.

Though Margaret is able to overcome spinsterhood past thirty only because she has inherited a sizeable income, the novel suggests that money alone cannot trump age. Margaret has actually improved with age: “[s]he was a woman who at thirty-five had more of the graces of womanhood than belonged to her at twenty” (8; ch. 1). In addition, she has retained youthfulness: “this money had come to her before her time for withering had arrived. In heart, and energy, and desire, there was still much of strength left to her…she had come so late in life to whatever of ripeness was to be vouchsafed to her…at the age of thirty-six Margaret Mackenzie was still a young woman” (26; ch. 2). Margaret is described as “lucky” to still appear young at thirty-six, which emphasizes how much at risk women are for aging. The process may be individually variable and therefore can be temporarily reversed in Margaret's case, but the invocation of “ripeness” underscores the importance of physical youthfulness to marriageability for women. The novel would age women out of affect at thirty, which seems shockingly young by today's standards, placing them in a fairly inviolate category of unmarriageability.

Age stereotypes about women past thirty are not so easily overcome as the mirror scene suggests, however. A short time later Margaret reconsiders her confidence in her own youthfulness:

Margaret's self-confidence is not immediately powerful enough to overcome the hegemony of deeply engrained age paradigms, and conscious choices are not as powerful as unconscious forces. Her celebration of her sexuality is also an evaluation of herself as an object of male desire, a calculation of how much attractive power she has toward men. With her outward change in status from spinster to marriageable woman, she must negotiate an inner transformation from an asexual to a sexual being who is desired and pursued, yet with the knowledge that the transformation is brought about by money. Her self-concept is dominated by cultural “prescriptions” of spinsterhood that seem sacred or “ordained” as well as unconscious factors such as repressed desire, shame, and all the other psychological freight that comes with being rejected by cultural norms that devalue aging. The text emphasizes that these age stereotypes are largely unconscious; she is not aware of how she despises her own aging self. Instead, she had become reconciled to spinsterhood, and, despite her autoerotic moment, still questions whether she is desirable. Spinsterhood seems only a public acknowledgement of what she has believed herself to be all along, a romantically untenable figure. To reverse that self-judgment and the powerful cultural construct from which it arises, Margaret must struggle with the image of lack she internalized as a spinster.

An interfering neighbor, Mrs. Stumfold, reinforces this age anxiety. Arguing her case with an intentionally offensive emphasis on age, the busybody warns Margaret away from being courted by Mr. Maguire who, she claims, is engaged to another woman: “‘Another young lady,’–with an emphasis on the world young…‘not above thirty years of age, and quite suitable in every way to be Mr. Maguire's wife. She may not have quite so much money as you; but she has a fair provision, and money is not everything; a lady in every way suitable’” (157; ch. 12).

Though she is furious and ushers Mrs. Stumfold out of her house, the humiliated Margaret thinks: “to have been called old and unsuitable–for that was, in truth, the case…was not all this enough to make her cry?” (158–59; ch. 12). Margaret's tearful response shows how deeply entrenched is her internalization of spinsterhood. The acquisition of a modest fortune at a few years over the magic boundary of thirty does not guarantee a reversal of Margaret's divided consciousness.

Margaret does marry, however. She is courted by her cousin John Ball, ten years her elder, whose suit for her hand is initially based on his desire for her fortune. Though eventually John is proven to be the true heir of the money and can possess the fortune without having also to take the woman, he continues to pursue Margaret. He even offers to split the inheritance with her, putting an independent life in her power. Ultimately, Margaret's disidentification with mirrored signs of age triumphs and she sees herself as a suitable love object, agreeing to marry him. That Sir John marries her without the money is a plot twist prioritizing affect over pecuniary considerations, allowing the early-midlife “old maid” to become un-spinstered for love instead of money. Margaret is older than Lady Laura and is a spinster, not a widow. While both factors should make her even more unmarriageable than Lady Laura, Miss Mackenzie imagines the possibility that spinsterhood and its ageist/sexist paradigm can become reversed.

Two mirror scenes in Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved offer a case of male specular disidentification overriding age stereotypes. Jocelyn Pierston's case goes far beyond Margaret's and shows how much more pliable age boundaries can be for men, even though the plot eventually defeats his youthful self-construction. Jocelyn constantly seeks an idealized woman, the Well-Beloved, even though she has “flitted from human shell to human shell an indefinite number of times” (13; ch. 1.1).⁶

Most notably, he looks for the Well-Beloved in three women, a grandmother, mother, and daughter, all named Avice. He woos each when she is in her twenties, but he, of course, becomes successively older–first twenty, then forty, and finally sixty when he falls in love with the youngest Avice. The pursuit of the ever-vanishing Well-Beloved is predicated upon Jocelyn's belief that he is an appropriate love object, a suitability always understood in terms of his youthful looks and emphasized by his constant reassurances to himself that he not only appears to be, but is, a much younger man than his chronological age indicates. As the section titles constantly reiterate with increasing irony, Jocelyn remains young, no matter what his age: he is “A Young Man of Twenty,” “A Young Man of Forty,” and eventually even “A Young Man of Sixty” (Ryan 177).

Mirror scenes reveal his self-construction that makes an extended youth possible for a time even at sixty. At this age, he would have been considered elderly as a male in Victorian England.⁷

Jocelyn, however, considers himself to be a much younger man: “He was not exactly old he said to himself…as he beheld his face in the glass” (159; ch. 3.3). He does see signs of age and deliberately catalogues them: “his brow was not that blank page it once had been,” he thinks, noting some “pale wiry hair,” and skin that is a bit “wrinkled” and “drawn.” These marks of time's passing are irrefutable, and he concludes, “Time was against him and love, and time would probably win” (160; ch. 3.3). The word “probably” evinces, however, his continuing belief in his viablity as a romantic object, and with that word he leaves himself the option to dissociate from age.

His success in distancing himself from age soon becomes clear. In the next mirror scene, he catches a glimpse of himself in bed early one morning when his looking glass swings into a vertical position: “The recognition startled him. The person he appeared was too grievously far, chronologically, in advance of the person he felt himself to be…. [N]ever had he seemed so aged by a score of years as he was represented in the glass.…While his soul was what it was, why should he have been encumbered with that withering carcase…” (166; ch. 3.4). At first reading, this passage seems to indicate that Jocelyn has begun to conceive of himself as elderly, but, though he acknowledges signs of age, he then proceeds to dismiss them. His insistence that the mirror image only “appears” or “seems” to be himself reveals his continued self-distancing from the aged imago. Woodward's theory of a split between the image and a sense of a younger and truer inner self is especially applicable when Jocelyn draws a distinction between his “soul” and his “withering carcase” (166; ch. 3.4)–a body from which he distances himself psychologically, enabling him to override an identity of debility and continue to pursue a woman forty years his junior.

As long as he resists the mirror image and constructs himself as a young man who is affectively and sexually viable, Jocelyn continues to pursue the Well-Beloved, despite his age. Michael Ryan argues that as a sixty-year-old lover, Jocelyn is “a figure of fun” (178), but the text takes him seriously as a worthy suitor. The second Avice, who is twenty years younger than Jocelyn and the mother of his final Well-Beloved, considers the sixty-one-year-old man a most appropriate match for her twenty-year-old daughter, an assessment based not only on his money and social position but also upon her perception of his youthful appearance. This estimation is shared by women of her daughter's age: “Not a young woman on the island but was envying Avice at that moment; for Jocelyn was absurdly young for three score, a good-looking man, one whose history was generally know [sic] here; as also were the exact figures of the fortune he had inherited from his father, and the social standing he could claim” (179; ch. 3.6). In this passage, though Jocelyn's fortune is considered an important component of his desirability, his youthfulness is not depicted as a sham or ridiculous self-deception but instead as authentic and the basis of genuine attractions.

Jocelyn's May/December romance is challenged, however, when the plot turns against his resolve to remain young. In spite of his conscious determination to appear young, his unconscious fears ultimately become realized. As Ryan points out, he woos the third Avice in the dark, knowing she thinks him younger than he is (178; ch. 3.5). When she sees him in the light of morning, the third Avice is taken aback, “so overcome that she turned and left the room as if she had forgotten something; when she re-entered she was visibly pale” (166; ch. 3.4). And, though she does agree to marry him, she ultimately reneges by running away with a man who is her age peer.

Jocelyn's amorous pursuit is then changed not by his chronological age, but by alterations in his own construction of himself resulting from Avice's assessment of him as old. Her elopement with a younger man and the sequence of events set off thereby–her mother's death and Jocelyn's catching cold at the funeral–result in his capitulation to age and a cessation of the quest. The emphasis here is not on illness having aged his body out of affect but on a change in his own reading of himself. A period of fever seems to burn the vision of his own youthfulness out of him, and he gives way to decline.

Helena Michie argues that sickness serves in Victorian fiction to mark the advent of sexual arousal in a young woman, as she often becomes ill in the critical period between her realization of love for a suitor and his reciprocal declaration in a marriage proposal, thus “punishing…her body for its desires” (25). While young women's illnesses serve to chastise the advent of desire early in life, Jocelyn's sickness seems to punish male desire prolonged into old age. Of course, Jocelyn's relinquishment of his quest is not entirely, or perhaps even wholly, in his conscious control. Biology dictates that at some point, no matter how young his mate, Jocelyn must acknowledge the eventual approach of old age. His repressed fears and ageist self-hatred come upon him so suddenly in the sickness and its aftermath that they seem an almost petulant fit of suicidal surrender. After he recovers his health, Jocelyn becomes “conscious of a singular change in himself …. The malignant fever, or his experiences, or both, had taken away something from him” (197; ch. 3.8). He has lost his aesthetic sense and “the sensuous side” of his nature (198; ch. 3.8). Beauty in women now seems “a stupid quality” (198; ch. 3.8), but he greets this change with relief, telling his former love interest Marcia, “Thank Heaven I am old at last. The curse is removed” (202; ch. 3.8). Surrendering all sexuality and desire, he no longer views himself as a pursuer of women but finally relegates himself to old age and ceases his quest, contradicting the ageless potency paradigm for men and following instead a male version of the menopause model, though at a much later age than would a woman.

Jocelyn's capitulation to age becomes visible in his own self-fashioning, and he changes from presenting himself as a young to an old man. Before his illness, he is “well preserved, still upright, trimly shaven, agile in movement; wore a tightly buttoned suit which set off a naturally slight figure; in brief, he might have been of any age as he appeared…at this moment” (152; ch. 3.2). After his illness, however, he “changed his style of dress entirely,” wearing “a homely suit of local make” thirty years out of date, letting his “iron-grey beard grow as it would” along with “what little hair he had left from…baldness.” As a result, at sixty-two, he appears to be seventy-five (202; ch. 3.8), though a few months earlier he had been seen as “absurdly young” by women in their twenties (179; ch. 3.6).

After Jocelyn surrenders to age, the novel vilifies elderly affect by placing him in a passionless marriage with his former sweetheart Marcia, who is depicted as too old to be desirable. Both Jocelyn and his wife are transformed radically and quickly from apparent youth to age, a change brought about in part by their decisions about whether or not they are elderly. At age sixty, Marcia has appeared to be thirty-five due to her skill with cosmetics learned in Paris. After Jocelyn loses his desire for female beauty, she reveals her freshly washed face, apologizing lest she “shock” him, because, without makeup, he sees her as “the image and superscription of Age–an old woman, pale and shrivelled, her forehead ploughed, her cheek hollow, her hair white as snow.” A great beauty at twenty, she has now been altered by “the raspings, chisellings, scourgings, bakings, freezings of forty invidious years” (200; ch. 3.8). Jocelyn responds that she is a “brave woman” with “the courage of the great women of history” to reveal her visage thus unadorned, but her valiant deed is rewarded with a revelation that his passion for her is gone because it has been based on appearance. He declares, “I can no longer love; but I admire you from my soul” (200; ch. 3.8). Her value and affective viability are completely undermined by physical age, and after this, she is depicted as elderly and debilitated. For example, Marcia is so incapacitated by rheumatism that she must be brought to their wedding in a wheel chair (204; ch. 3.8).

In this marriage, affect and age are portrayed as completely incompatible. John Kucich comments that “[t]he couple's mutual honesty about aging puts them both beyond desire, in a companionate marriage more extremely chaste even than Victorian domestic ideals” (233). Kucich here participates in the novel's construction of age-as-loss by depicting passionlessness as the obvious and only route a marriage between sixty-year-olds can take. Jocelyn's response to the signs of age in Marcia as making her worthy of admiration but unworthy of love, as well as his own performance of himself as older than his chronological years, are not necessarily “honesty about aging” but a construction that signals his interpretation of age as a loss.

When Jocelyn ceases dissociating from age, he capitulates to a decline narrative, a serious loss from which he never recovers. Eventually, Jocelyn's self-construction is overcome by both age prescriptions and the marriage plot; the third Avice rejects him as an elderly man and then he, too, views himself as aged. Despite his debilitation at the novel's end, however, Jocelyn's story remains remarkable for the extent to which a male can prolong his youth. While Margaret Mackenzie can overcome spinsterhood at thirty-six, Jocelyn is able to override age by self-construction into his sixties, and even his decline results from a young woman's rejection convincing him he is old rather than from physical changes. In the eyes of the second Avice and other women of the town, he was a seriously viable romantic candidate at sixty. The novel implies that other young women would have accepted him as a husband, and it is in large part his changed attitude that causes him both to appear elderly and to marry an age peer.

As we have just seen, characters' self-assessments of age in the imago are not infallible indicators of how a novel will end, and the imperatives of the plot can overcome both cultural scripting and conscious intent. When this happens to Lady Matilda Carbury in Trollope's The Way We Live Now, the limitations of age paradigms for women are simultaneously reified and challenged, a movement that attributes a certain protean quality to female Victorian midlife. Lady Carbury attempts to dissociate herself from age and its repercussions by resisting marriage and having a career, making her atypical as a Victorian heroine, in fact, a “new woman” in many ways. A forty-three-year-old widow who earns a living as a writer, at the beginning of the novel she perceives herself as youthful, a quality she uses to assist in “the procuring of bread and cheese” through literary endeavors (3; ch. 1). At the beginning of the book, she describes herself in a letter to Broune, her publisher, as an “old woman,” but the narrator assures us that “she was satisfied to do so by a conviction that no one else regarded her in that light” (2; ch. 1). She uses her looks “with a well considered calculation,” smiling at her publishers with intimate glances so they will “give her good payments for indifferent writing” (2–3; ch. 1).

This system of exploiting her youthful looks has been successful, but in her mirror scene, Lady Carbury confronts another reality: “As she sat opposite to her glass, relieving her head from its garniture of false hair, she acknowledged to herself that age was coming on her…there it was, stealing on her with short grey hairs over her ears and around her temples, with little wrinkles round her eyes easily concealed by objectionable cosmetics, and a look of weariness round the mouth” (89; ch. 12). After this initial association with age via gray hair and wrinkles, she then attempts to dissociate from age by deciding that she has a future unconnected to her physical appearance: “she was not a woman to be unhappy because she was growing old…. She, however, had not looked for happiness to love and loveliness, and need not therefore be disappointed on that score. She had…some hazy aspiration after social distinction and literary fame…. But at the present moment her great fears and her great hopes were centred on her son” (89; ch. 12). A few weeks earlier, she had resolved that “The time for love had gone by, and she would have nothing to do with it” (12; ch. 2), and her look in the mirror reaffirms her plan as she represses her fear of age's power, attempting to deny it. This double movement of both association with her aging imago but dissociation from its culturally scripted repercussions in regard to marriageability can be explained as her acceptance of the menopausal paradigm set forth by physicians. Lady Carbury attempts to enter Braxton Hicks's post-menopausal “neutral man-woman state,” dismissing her own affective viability and thus her sexuality, so that she is free to center her identity and efforts on “rendering herself useful” as Braxton Hicks prescribes (475) by attending to the marital fortunes of her adult children and her aspirations as a writer.

However, despite menopausal scripts, her attempt to both pursue a career and remain independent of the marriage plot is an undertaking doomed to failure. Lady Carbury's literary aspirations are tainted from the first chapter by the low quality of her work and descriptions of her machinations to achieve publication. As Michie points out, her desire to work makes her suspect anyway, and would “necessarily remove her from the moral purity of her daughter and other leisure-class Trollope heroines” (33). Her hopes for her son are also obviously misplaced. The novel gives her only marginal literary success, and she is gravely disappointed by Felix. In the end she “repents” (though seeing her errors only “with a broken light”) and decides that her literary career and hopes for her son obtaining money and a higher position in the peerage are all “vanity” (756; ch. 99). It is at this point that the marriage plot takes over, despite her former intentions, and her self-construction is soundly contradicted.

Trollope resolves Lady Carbury's plot by providing a union that disciplines her attempt at independence through her subjection to Broune and, as a result, overrides the menopausal model. At the beginning of the novel, when she and Broune are friends on equal footing and he proposes to her, she turns down his offer of marriage because she conceives of herself as a self-sustaining woman. Later, however, when she has lost all her money and her son is involved in a scandal, Broune begins to take over her affairs, and she sees him as masterful, even omnipotent. When, at the book's end, Broune tells her she should not write novels anymore, she gives up her career. Her son is exiled to Germany to avoid his tarnished reputation and her daughter prepares to marry a man whom she does not approve, and Lady Carbury's life seems barren, her confidence shattered.

As Broune proposes for a second time, her dependence is evident when she kneels at his feet and claims she has nothing to offer. The text opines, “Was it not a career enough for any woman to be the wife of such a man, to receive his friends, and to shine with his reflected glory?” (759; ch. 99). Instead of redirecting her life in response to the resolve she makes in front of the mirror, Lady Carbury's self-determination dissolves when she accepts an identity as the reflection of her husband, and she becomes, in effect, Broune's mirror. He accrues greatness through her view of him and her relation to his success: he has all the money, the status, the career, the ideas, and she is stripped of those things she has dreamed of, achieving them only at second hand. Her “vanity” in wanting independence is chastised through a marriage based on her dependency.

Lady Carbury's marriage at forty-three both reifies and contradicts Victorian paradigms for women, because, though the novel allows her to marry, thus suggesting that she is not too old for love in her forties, it does so only at the cost of her independence. More striking, however, is the way in which Trollope contravenes the menopausal model by defending the middle-aged female body as appropriate for romance and passion, denying that four decades disqualify her from marriageability and, more specifically, sexuality. Mixed with the subordination of Lady Carbury to Broune's masculine mastery is a valorization of midlife passion, though cautiously qualified:

The text will not allow itself to present this passage as a straight love scene–made clear by the necessity of the words “considering their ages” –but is compelled to qualify the moment in terms of age. The description of the embrace as “awkward,” “absurd,” and lacking “grace” because the lovers are forty-three and fifty, removes the scene from the hazy idealization of sexuality that characterizes depictions of younger couples embracing in Victorian novels. However, the narrator overrides these negative descriptors with the more positive “pleasant,” the almost hyperbolic “holy,” and then the scene fades to black with the word “mysteries” and an injunction against “profane eyes.” By attributing “passion” to the couple, Trollope valorizes female midlife sexuality, showing that Lady Carbury has definitely not lapsed into Braxton Hicks's “neutral man-woman state” even though she has reached the average age of menopause. Through their atypical love scene we see that Lady Carbury's “time for love” definitely has not “gone by.” The Way We Live Now demonstrates the power of the Victorian marriage plot to override other considerations of age with which Victorian heroines had to struggle. Though age has a definitive effect on female marriageability, even when a woman attempts to follow the menopausal paradigm and give up on love, romance can still triumph. Self-construction may be able to overcome limitations of age and gender, but in the world of the novel, love conquers all.

This essay would seem to suggest that, should life mimic art, Hardy's poetic identification with a decline narrative at age fifty-two would signal his conscious removal of himself from affect and desire through his construction of age as loss. But, though his poetic mirror scene suggests he may have concluded that his time for love was over, his life suggests otherwise. Hardy became a widower in 1912 at the age of seventy-two, and less than two years later married a much younger woman.

Of course, Hardy's life is not fiction, and we can only speculate about the relationship between his life and his art. In Victorian novels, however, characters' mindsets about aging in mirror scenes can be causal factors in how plots resolve, as attitudes interact with other factors such as the unconscious, gender, and cultural prescriptions. From the vantage point offered by these scenes, we can see age being constructed by individual interpretations of the specular self in Victorian fiction. They demonstrate that a certain amount of self-determination in regard to age and marriageability was available in Victorian life, even if only in an imagined world.