Introduction
In Gender and Later Life: A Sociological Analysis of Resources and Constraints, Sara Arber and Jay Ginn (Reference Arber and Ginn1991) acknowledged work by British sociologists on older women but noted an urgent need for British gerontologists to give more attention to gender among older people. Four years later, they still lamented the inadequacy of theoretical writing on the relationship between gender and age (Arber and Ginn Reference Arber and Ginn1995). Although Shulamit Reinharz (Reference Reinharz1986) argued 20 years ago that American feminists had been developing analyses of ageing since the 1970s, and that feminists were active in movements to combat ageism, it remains the case that ageing and old age have been notably absent from the concerns of mainstream 20th-century feminism, with the obvious exception of Simone de Beauvoir's (1949) Le Deuxième Sexe (her work is considered later in the paper). Second-wave feminism (c. 1960–90) was primarily concerned with issues of great urgency for younger women, such as education, reproductive rights and sexual equality, and by contrast paid little attention to the impact of old age on female identity and overlooked the combined effects of ageism and sexism on the oppression of women. Associated as they were with the youth culture of the 1960s, prominent feminists tended to dissociate themselves from previous generations. Reinharz (Reference Reinharz1986: 512) herself acknowledged that feminist theory ‘has been conceptualized without regard for age and ageism’.
While feminism has consistently challenged social constructions of gender, it has paid little attention to the social construction of old age, and although theories of the body have been central to feminism's understanding of the construction of femininity, few feminist theorists have engaged with the representation of the ageing female body. Catherine Itzin (Reference Itzin and Wilkinson1986) made age visible in media studies, but, ranging more widely, a search of the indexes of collections of essays on women's or gender studies rarely produces a single reference to age apart from occasional mentions of the menopause – even these are far less frequent than references to menstruation. Yet the scant attention paid by feminism to women's experience of old age has only lately received comment (Segal Reference Segal2007). Given this lacuna in 20th-century feminist discourse, I argue that it has been left to novelists such as Virginia Woolf, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood and Toni Morrison to explore the experience of ageing from a female point of view. By analysing There Were No Windows, a novel that was first published in 1944 by a less familiar author, Norah Hoult (Reference Hoult2005), this paper sets out to demonstrate what fiction has to offer to those involved in the study of ageing.Footnote 1
In recent years, the representation of old age in literature has attracted growing scholarly interest. This is partly because established novelists on both sides of the Atlantic have made older women their central protagonists, after years in which mainstream fictional narratives rarely paid much attention to representations of the older female. Yet feminist criticism has seemed reluctant to engage with the issue of gendered ageing. As Anne Wyatt-Brown (Reference Wyatt-Brown and Rosen1993: 1) has said, ‘aging [sic] is a missing category in current literary theory’. She went on to quote Kathleen Woodward's (Reference Woodward and Benstock1988: 90) observation that, in contrast to the attention given to race, gender and class, ‘age has remained invisible, not subject to analysis’. In contrast, sociologists such as Mike Hepworth (Reference Hepworth2000, Reference Hepworth2005) have taken an interest in fiction as a gerontological resource because it imaginatively constructs subjective experiences of ageing that are inaccessible to conventional methods of analysis.
Jill Manthorpe (Reference Manthorpe2000, Reference Manthorpe2001, Reference Manthorpe2005) has written more specifically on representations of dementia in contemporary adult and children's fiction, and emphasised the value of fiction for all those involved in the care of people with that condition.Footnote 2 Recent research by Carol Brayne has suggested that there is no difference in the overall rates of dementia between men and women (Brayne Reference Brayne, Huppert, Brayne and O'Connor1994; Ruitenberg et al. Reference Ruitenberg, Ott, van Swieten, Hofman and Breteler2001),Footnote 3 but gender differences in mortality rates and other demographic factors mean that older women are more likely than men to find themselves living alone or in care-homes, so that the experience of living with the disease is likely to differ by gender. As Hepworth (Reference Hepworth2000: 34) pointed out, as individuals lose the ability to reproduce or control the story of their own lives, they become dependent on others to become the ‘custodians’ of that life, that self. For those who have no living significant other, ‘the self’ is therefore all the more vulnerable. Moreover, its potential inaccessibility makes the representation of this experience deeply problematic. As Manthorpe (Reference Manthorpe2005: 313) put it, ‘dementia today is clearly being shaped by popular culture, but largely through accounts of family carers [that] have achieved a popular readership … and also have had their stories translated into film media’. Even such illuminating non-fiction accounts as John cBayley's (1998) Iris and Linda Grant's (Reference Grant1998)Remind Me Who I Am, Again inevitably put the subjectivity of the carer at the centre, rather than that of the person experiencing dementia. Only imaginative reconstruction can hope to explore the experience of memory loss beyond the point when the very attempt to write fails.
While not wanting to under-estimate the value to the field of both fiction and the study of imaginative writing, I believe that seeing literature as a ‘mirror’ of the experience of old age is problematic. There is a tendency to overlook the ways in which imaginative writing mediates and constructs ‘reality’.Footnote 4 Manthorpe (Reference Manthorpe and Johnson2004) argued that novels illustrate aspects of contemporary residential care, perhaps particularly those that ‘are familiar’ or ‘not uncommon’ (2004: 25), but as a novel reader I can assess a novel's reliability as a sociological document only by referring to the work of gerontologists. I believe that it is necessary to consider the ways in which fiction interacts discursively with non-fictional work on ageing. For the individual with dementia, or older people in general, the starting point must be the complex and conflicting discourses that ‘describe’ or ‘explain’ their condition. The ‘reflection’ model in imaginative literature fails to take full account of the way in which these discourses shape both the experience of ageing and how it is perceived and represented by others. If we are to understand the power of fiction to articulate the full complexity of this gender issue, I believe there is a need to study fictional representations in the broader contexts of our understanding of gendered ageing.
Older people and women as ‘the Other’
By focusing on There Were No Windows, this paper attempts to show the function of these discourses in constructing the older woman as the ‘Other’, in the sense that Simone de Beauvoir derived from existentialist philosophy, and popularised. She saw ‘Other’ as a constituting factor in the self-image that a subject (the self) builds up. According to de Beauvoir (Reference De Beauvoir1988: 16), man defines himself in relation to woman: ‘she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other’. Woman is what man is not, always seen as his negation, and constructed in terms of lack. The older woman is doubly Other, both Other to man and Other to youth – the positive stage of life in modern western cultural ideology. To reinforce the position of the subject, the difference between self and Other must be constantly reinforced through discourses which work to prevent any recognition of the self in the Other, or vice versa. Women and the aged are not, however, equivalent categories of the Other, since age is an essentially unstable category. While male rarely becomes female, the youthful – assuming survival – inevitably become aged. With regard to old age, the distinction between self and Other is always provisional and deferred, making the need to assert the precarious distance between one's youthful-self and aged-Other increasingly important.
As Arber and Ginn (Reference Arber and Ginn1991: 30) pointed out, we can all become victims of ageism, unlike sexism or racism, and although this should predispose us towards empathy with the old, the dread of becoming old ourselves instead causes hostility and distancing. ‘Othering’ therefore carries particular psychological and emotional urgency, as Hoult's novel suggests. Her novel shows how those subjects who have most power or influence over her protagonist, Claire Temple, are able to use discriminatory discourses to construct Claire as Other, refusing to acknowledge that sense of identity on which her sense of her self as subject depends. The primary threat to Claire's identity is, however, memory loss.
There Were No Windows
The novel is set in London during the Second World War, when the tribulations of a city experiencing the Blitz and the blackout reflected the terror and inner darkness experienced by the minor novelist Claire Temple, under the onslaught of dementia (what Julia Briggs, in the novel's Afterword, calls the ‘ultimate terror of old age – to be left alone in the dark, and to be shut in upon yourself’) (Hoult Reference Hoult2005: 341). As she loses her short-term memory, Claire's grip on the present becomes weaker, so that she drifts into ‘that No Man's Land territory in which she [finds] herself marooned between the old house and the new, the past and the present’ (p. 3). But while she may be able to remember her own history – or at least her own version of it – her perception of that identity is not shared by those around her. It therefore in a sense no longer exists. As Clare Colebrook (Reference Colebrook2004: 14) put it, ‘how we relate to or speak about a subatomic particle may not change how that particle behaves, but referring and relating to a person in a certain way undoubtedly determines that person's being. A person is not an essence, but a relation, an existence’. For a lonely single woman like Claire, there are no sympathetic ‘custodians’ of her past, to use Hepworth's term. Instead Hoult conjures up the darkness that threatens those who are ‘othered’ by the discursive constructions imposed upon their already confused sense of identity.
There Were No Windows constructs the character of Claire through the combination of her own often-disordered thoughts and the perspectives of those who live with or visit her. While each external perspective offers a ‘window’ on Claire, the window often turns out to be more of a mirror, telling the reader more about the observer than about Claire herself, so that there are in fact ‘no windows. Everyone was shut in upon themselves’ (p. 245). Those ‘mirrors’ are not means of enlightenment for the characters themselves, since each individual is too self-absorbed to be able to imagine how they might appear to and be judged by others. Most were unable to integrate that judgment into the self-knowledge that could develop into the ‘looking-glass self’, which for Cooley (Reference Cooley1998: 164–5) constituted the healthy development of the social self. The obstacle to this development is the lack of communication created by the different discourses behind which they hide, in which each is always the subject, shielded from any perception of the self as Other, or the Other as self. Each observer uses a different discourse to ‘name’ Claire and diagnose her behaviour, and repeatedly call up sexist and ageist stereotypes.
Kathleen, the cook, fell back on the ancient stereotype that associates female madness with deviant female sexuality, in attributing Claire's ‘madness’ to her earlier promiscuity, which has left its mark in ‘the wickedness of her mind’ (p. 88). Refusing to understand that Claire's persistent, distressing enquiries about the health of Mrs White's dead husband are caused by her memory loss, Kathleen insists that Claire ‘wants to talk about men, that's all’ p. 49). Ignorant of the mores of the bohemian upper-class society in which Claire has spent her life, Kathleen believes her employer's status ‘makes it even more terrible, the way she's bent on disgracing herself in every way’ (p. 56). And Claire's age makes her ‘deviance’ even more repugnant, since she should no longer be concerned about her femininity or sexual relationships. If female stereotyping has traditionally worked to deny female sexuality, it works even more powerfully to deny sexuality in the older woman.
Like Kathleen, Edith Barlow, Claire's writer friend and first visitor, emphasises the gendered nature of her friend's decline. Like other characters of Claire's age, she can only defend herself against becoming the aged-Other by emphasising any difference that she can cite between herself and her friend. In her case, this is achieved by allying herself with the masculine subject. She sees Claire as the typical ‘Victorian female who considered marriage the necessary crown of her existence’, and then ‘transformed herself into another Victorian institution, the Widow’ (p. 105). Edith scorns that femininity, which is for her simply a form of weakness, leaving Claire dependent on the praise and support of men. From a sociological perspective, Edith's diagnosis is correct, in the sense that a woman's relationships with men can only ever provide temporary immunity from the effects of powerlessness, which re-emerge with divorce or widowhood, when she is no longer protected by the male world (Reinharz Reference Reinharz1986: 512). More significantly, however, Edith diagnoses the cause and result of Claire's excessive dependence on men in terms of the stereotype of ‘female unreason’. Claire's relationship with her ‘husband’ Wallace, to whom her interior monologue refers with so much anguish, is thus discounted as a romance, a fiction without foundation. Similarly, Edith dismisses Claire's writing as a ‘frail feminine talent’, her wit ‘not of the head but of the more feminine personal order’ (p. 105). Claiming for herself a ‘masculine mind’ (p. 92), Edith is a ‘devotee of the Age of Reason’ (p. 108), and therefore invulnerable to the emotionalism that drives Claire to such loss of dignity. But her evident satisfaction in seeing their previous status reversed, in seeing the ‘allegedly amusing Claire Temple’ reduced to ‘a drooling, not too clean, semi-deranged old woman’ (p. 93), throws her apparently dispassionate diagnosis into question. Smugly superior to the evidence of Claire's decaying mind, Edith achieves a reinforced sense of her self as subject only by constructing Claire as Other to her own ‘masculine’ rationality.
According to Claire's final visitor, Francis Maitland, Claire conforms to the stereotype of the neurotic ‘arty’ woman, whose memory loss can be attributed to a life of constant tension, generated by playing the role of literary hostess. Maitland reflected, ‘[for Claire] there had been a continual striving to be amusing and entertaining; now, she was an old actress, running about, mouthing her lines, gesticulating and weeping on an empty stage in front of no footlights, no audience’ (p. 179). He is repelled, like Edith, by the intensity of Claire's unhappiness, and the demands it makes on him. Nora Hoult portrayed his intense feelings well:
Mr Maitland felt his skin contract coldly with distaste. So it had come at last, that cry of the heart; those emanations of naked misery. One of the doors which, during the course of a fairly long life, he had generally been successful in creeping past, head carefully turned in the other direction, had opened emitting its full blasts of the fogs and vapours of depression (p. 157).
Like Edith, he takes refuge in the concept of ‘masculine’ reason, reinforced by the ideology of sexual difference that guarantees him rationality. He may be allowed his eccentricities, because his masculine objectivity will protect him from the ‘phrensie’, which he projects onto the essentially female Other (p. 178).
Claire's companion, Miss Jones, another older woman, initially adopts the discourse of the professional carer to cope with the situation. She faces the problem still faced by predominantly female carers of predominantly female patients. According to Helen Evers (Reference Evers, Hutter and Williams1981: 114), the patient is an ‘image of the nurse's future self, engendering conflicting responses of total rejection and profession of care’. Seeing Claire as a difficult child, she professes pity for her, which enables her to withstand Claire's often-cruel comments but totally precludes the empathy which would respond to Claire's sexual and emotional directness and make companionship possible, since she considers Claire's question about her love-life too ‘indecent’ to be answered (p. 208). And as a lady's companion, her stereotypical view of what constitutes a lady excludes not only female sexuality but also display of female anger. As Claire's behaviour deteriorates, Miss Jones adopts the discourse of mental illness: if Claire is ‘mental’, all her words become ‘innocuous’. This enables her to normalise behaviour that is otherwise outside her sphere of understanding, to recuperate it as comprehensible if reprehensible behaviour. When Claire finally becomes violent, Miss Jones's diagnosis is confirmed, since sexuality, anger and violence in a woman are stereotypical evidence of insanity. Claire is no longer merely ‘mental’ but a ‘maniac’ (p. 282), the most abject form of Other.
The most compassionate response to Claire comes, as one might expect, from her doctor, an old friend. But even his professional response is affected by his sense of her gender, since Claire appeals to him both as a man and as a doctor. With his flirting, he constructs for her the role of ‘his most distinguished and charming patient’ (p. 259). The identity offered by this stereotype of femininity is at least one in which Claire feels at home, so that her defective memory causes no problems; she is able to be simply a woman, rather than a confused old woman. Male company brings Claire's ‘still lively femininity’ into play (p. 67). Maitland's son John, and John's American friend Lance, are full of admiration for what they see as the ‘vivacity of a young girl’ (p. 163) in this ‘wonderful old lady’ (p. 169). One says, ‘In America, we'd be inclined to look on an old lady like that as a kind of institution’ (p. 177). This accolade is not so far removed from Francis's conclusion that ‘she's as mad as a hatter’ (p. 177), since both responses interpose a distance between the man and the old woman, rather than inspiring real empathy. They represent that aspect of ‘othering’ by which women are constituted as what de Beauvoir (Reference De Beauvoir1988: 278) called the privileged Other, man's necessary and desired Other: ‘everything that accentuates difference in the Other makes her more desirable, since what man wants to take possession of is the Other as such’ (de Beauvoir Reference De Beauvoir1988: 224). Youth enables John and Lance to enjoy Claire's eccentricity without having to engage with the darker side of her condition that reminds her older visitors of their own frailty and mortality. Sexual difference makes for pleasanter conversations, but not necessarily for real understanding, even by a professional, Doctor Fairfax.
It is useful to consider what professional discourses were available to a doctor during the 1940s by which to describe a woman in Claire's condition. A search of the contents of The Lancet from 1935 to 1950 found very little work on older women, apart from discussions of the menopause. While in western countries today, the menopause is experienced by women arguably still in their prime, historically it has been seen as a climactic event in a woman's life, after which she in a sense ceases to be a woman, having lost the ability to bear children.Footnote 5 Post-menopausal women could therefore be seen as standing on the brink of old age and degeneration, becoming doubly Other. From the mid-1930s to 1950, the debate focused on whether or not the physical symptoms of the menopause were responsible for ‘nervous manifestations’ such as irritability and loss of memory, or whether the menopause merely precipitated ‘involuntary melancholia’ in patients who were already unstable.Footnote 6 The terms are not dissimilar to those used in the 19th century to debate the connection between disorders of the womb and hysteria,Footnote 7 and are relevant to Claire's condition as a post-menopausal woman. Maitland's diagnosis of her ‘phrensie’ echoes this discourse. Note also the advice given in a Lancet article against prescribing hormone treatment, ‘which has toxic side effects including increased sexual feelings’, exaggerating those aspects which ‘contribute to the psychosexual conflict which is in part responsible for the development of the psychosis’ (anon 1941: 706). These medical arguments endorse Kathleen's attribution of Claire's mental disorders to her inappropriate interest in sex. Dr Fairfax refers to no such theories, nor does he have recourse to any other psychiatric diagnosis of the problems faced by an older woman. Since the psychiatry of old age was still in its infancy during the 1940s, the absence of a gendered discourse of ageing is unsurprising.Footnote 8
It is surprising, however, that Dr Fairfax diagnosed Claire's problems and her very identity in terms which were not only gendered but implicitly feminist. While he agreed with Edith that Claire was excessively immersed in a separate sphere of personal relationships, he attributed this not to personal failings, but to the situation of women in general. He comments: ‘Like most women, Claire Temple has learned to judge and value herself in terms of her ability to attract men, and with the coming of old age, finds herself unwanted and ignored’ (p. 336). Dr Fairfax like others recognises that Claire has lived out the role of a Romantic heroine, but finds pathos in this rather than absurdity, since it has made her a victim of social mores, abandoned by her family as a ‘deviant’ because she chose to live out of wedlock.
The doctor's acuity is all the more surprising given that it did not reflect contemporary concerns in the feminist movement. Between 1928, when the immediate goals of the suffrage movement were achieved, and the beginnings of second-wave feminism in the 1960s, have customarily been seen as a period of hiatus in feminist activism, although in recent years attempts have been made to trace continuities. Most histories of British women during the 1940s have concentrated on their involvement in the war effort, but Sue Bruley (Reference Bruley1999: 108) argued that the war saw a renewed interest in feminist issues (see also Banks Reference Banks1981). No historian, however, has found evidence of any consideration of the specific position of the older woman during this period, even though ageing itself was becoming an issue for psychologists. Indeed Margaret Gullette (Reference Gullette, Wyatt-Brown and Rossen1993: 44) suggested that ‘as feminism appeared to gain strength, so too did the subversive force of ageism’. She noted that during this period the view of ageing as decline became increasingly widespread, and was particularly applied to the creative faculties. In contrast, she noted, ‘the Bloomsbury set, the Harlem Renaissance, and the various groups calling themselves modernists felt they were a “young” generation overthrowing the outworn styles or ways of thinking of the old’ (Gullette Reference Gullette, Wyatt-Brown and Rossen1993: 26). Hoult herself could be said to contribute to such a view in so far as Claire has lost that ability to write which, from a feminist perspective, might be expected to provide a bulwark against the loss of identity consequent on the loss of a ‘husband’. In her growing confusion she realises, ‘until one had collected one's thoughts, how impossible to withdraw from them, like a shining jewel, le mot juste’ (p. 12). What Hoult does not do, however, is allow the reader to dismiss Claire's right to continue to be understood as the subject of the own discourse, rather than the objectified Other of the normative discourses imposed on her.
In France during the 1940s, of course, one eminent feminist wrote about the situation of older women. Simone de Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe, first published in 1949 although not translated into English until 1953, offers a devastatingly bleak account of ageing for women, which she too represents as a consequence of the menopause. Once a woman reaches ‘maturity’, she has ‘no future’. This dramatic fall from grace follows the loss of ‘the erotic attractiveness and the fertility which, in the view of society and in her own, provide the justification of her existence and her opportunity for happiness’ (de Beauvoir Reference De Beauvoir1988: 587). Here is a discourse that explains not only Claire's condition but also that of all the older women in the novel:
[The older woman] sees in the world no objectives towards which she might reach out in a free and effective manner. Her activity takes an eccentric, incoherent, and fruitless form, because she can compensate only in a symbolic way for the mistakes and failures of the past (p. 590).
Unlike men, whom de Beauvoir associates with ‘transcendence’ or the ability to engage in some worthwhile activity or project, women are associated with ‘immanence’, which confines them to self and routine, oppressed as they are by their biology. Seeing older women as void of purpose other than the desire to regain male attention, de Beauvoir represents them as being reduced to living vicariously through their children, or justifying their existence through good causes, like Claire's ex-secretary, Sara Berkeley, one of those women who, according to de Beauvoir (Reference De Beauvoir1988: 605), ‘bless the wars and famines which transform them into benefactresses of humanity’. Others try to fill in time, even while the mind remains vacant, by taking up such activities as knitting, which Miss Jones feels could have prevented Claire's mental decline: ‘with the needle or the crochet-hook, [a] woman sadly weaves the very nothingness of her days’ (de Beauvoir Reference De Beauvoir1988: 604). De Beauvoir's theories of gendered ageing suggest the limitations of Dr Fairfax's ‘feminist’ reading of Claire, since in responding as he does to her femininity, he is perhaps guilty of a sexism which enables him to analyse her situation with compassion, but prevents him from responding with equal compassion to Kathleen and Miss Jones, whose dependence is equally the product of the limited choices available to women in a patriarchal society. In contrast, de Beauvoir's proffered solution requires the abandonment of that very femininity: the only escape is on ‘the day a woman consents to growing old’, when she becomes ‘unsexed but complete: an old woman’ (de Beauvoir Reference De Beauvoir1988: 595).
In de Beauvoir's account of the end of women's lives experienced as Other, older women therefore emerge as monstrous parasites and ‘insatiable ogresses’ (de Beauvoir Reference De Beauvoir1988: 594). Yet in one phrase, ‘the sorry tragedy of the aged woman’ (Reference De Beauvoir1988: 603), she introduces an alternative discourse which ultimately forms the basis of Hoult's narrative. For Claire Temple is not a monster. Hoult makes no attempt to minimise such alienating characteristics as her snobbery, her verbal cruelty to her dependants, and her solipsism. Her preference for male company makes her judgmental and lacking in empathy for other women. Nor does Hoult gloss over the tedium and irritation of conversation with someone who endlessly repeats herself. Those who are inclined to sentimental platitudes about older people are given short shrift by both Claire and Hoult. Hoult nevertheless steers the reader into a position that invites compassion for Claire. It is not simply that she is the main focus of the narrative, but that the negative judgments passed on her by others rebound to her advantage. Their readiness to judge Claire and their reluctance to judge themselves tip the scales in her favour, since the awareness she demonstrates, both of her own condition and of the difficulties she presents to others, makes her behaviour easier to forgive than their's. The reader glimpses in Claire the seed of a ‘looking-glass self’ whose growth is sadly curtailed by the communication problems resulting from memory loss. While often remembering, paradoxically, that she is losing her memory, she retains enough insight to recognise that she is becoming a repetitive bore, increasingly likely to be left alone and lonely.
By inviting the reader to share these feelings from the inside, Hoult solicits compassion for Claire's terror of loneliness. Since she has always depended on others to reflect back that sense of identity essential to sanity, that fear is understandable. It is ‘the most fearful bogey, the worst shadow of all’ (p. 21) because ‘that way madness lies’ (p. 222).Footnote 9 She both longs and fears to be named, for how others see her is not only of academic interest. The sense of being Other is not in her case purely an existential issue, since in her household the usual power relations between employer and employee had been reversed; and as we have all learned from Foucault, power is embodied in discourse. Even Claire, who has made a profession out of words, cannot resist those stereotypical discourses that others impose on her. Kathleen becomes a real threat to Claire once she uses ‘the forbidden word’ – mad – since Claire knows that such naming could instigate her removal to the asylum (p. 22).
Claire's essential human loneliness is heightened by the contingent loneliness of the spinster. If it is difficult to conceive of her as a tragic figure, this is partly because her sex militates against her articulating the nature of the tragic vision, so that she is ultimately silenced by her gender. Much earlier in her life, on hearing a woman scream in the street, her lover refused to go to the woman's aid, saying, ‘Let it be for us just the sound of a woman screaming in the night’ (p. 69). This prefigures Claire's final predicament. For a woman to express her anger has always been less acceptable and more dangerous than for a man, since the verbal and physical aggression that might follow have often been read as symptoms of instability, irrationality and hysteria, invalidating any legitimate cause for the anger. Such behaviour is also seen as inherently unwomanly, further positioning the angry woman as an aberration, to be discounted. Even as recently as the 1960s and 1970s, angry women were labelled as a threat to family life, as mentally ill, requiring medication or even incarceration for behaviour which, in a man, was regarded as within the normal range (see Rickles Reference Rickles1971). Since the anger aroused in Claire by her situation is unacceptable in a woman, there can be for her none of Dylan Thomas's ‘rage against the dying of the light’, and none of the rage that Lear's ‘divine madness’ articulated against the storm. Instead she must be sedated by hyoscine into an ‘easy’ death, a powerful and disturbing image.
The novel appears therefore to dramatise Markson and Taylor's (Reference Markson and Taylor2000: 137) thesis that ‘our fears of ageing are projected onto older women more than they are onto older men’. With its timely reissue by Persephone in 2005, There Were No Windows highlights the inadequacy of discourses of gendered ageing in Hoult's own time, and invites the reader to reflect on those of their own. While it is a truism to say that the language(s) we have at our disposal shape(s) our comprehension of perceptions and experiences, Hoult's novel suggests that the most well-meaning of us may hide behind discourses that make older people and particularly older women Other. This impedes the kind of identification that can be a basis for understanding. Because Hoult's narrative enables the reader to share the inner life of Claire Temple, the reader is required to listen to Claire's narratives of self – even if they are misremembered – and to recognise that she constitutes her own subject and has an identity which goes beyond that of ‘the old woman’. We may, as a result, learn to resist the ‘othering’ that follows from the too-easy use of normative discourses of gendered ageing.
