Looser, Devoney

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Devoney Looser

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ISSUE 3  •  AGE CULTURE HUMANITIES   249ReviewsAgeing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature: Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman. Heike Hartung. New York: Routledge, 2016. Pp. 252. $148 (hardback); $54.95 (ebook).Reviewed by: Devoney Looser, Arizona State University (devoney.looser@asu.edu).The German word “Bildungsroman” (with bildung often translated as education and roman as novel) is a well-known term among students of  English literature. It signals not only a novel of  education but a novel of  development—sometimes called a coming-of-age narrative. The Oxford English Dictionary identifies the emergence of  the term in the language in the early twentieth century. Later twentieth-century feminist critics worked to revised its standard focus on young heroes to heroines, with some identifying the alternative tradition of  a female bildungsroman. Rarely, however, have humanities scholars of  any stripe taken seriously the “age” dimension of  the Bildungsroman’s coming-of-age dimensions. Heike Hartung’s book shows us, in a care-fully theorized and researched literary historical account, just how much we stand to gain by doing so. The Bildungsroman, as Hartung argues, “narrates age as life in time” (221).Hartung begins her study in the late eighteenth century, not only because it saw the wide, popular emergence (often called the “rise”) of  prose fiction, but because it also coincides with the emergence of  what Michel Foucault calls “biopower,” the “beginning of  the political control over life.” This concept, as Hartung persuasively argues, maps on to “the experience and representation of  aging” (2). She identifies both “an individual and a biological story of  development” in the emerging Bildungsroman (2). The historical and literary conventions of  Bildungs-roman narratives, as she tells it, are deeply marked by age-related matters, as well as by gender. The book’s introduction offers useful insights and concepts from leading voices in age studies scholarship, showing how and why these thinkers should be brought to bear on the Anglophone Bildungsroman of  the late eighteenth century to the present. The book’s opening section presents 250   AGE CULTURE HUMANITIES  •  ISSUE 3its foundational arguments, as well as material on what Hartung calls the “burden narrative,” a form she identifies as common to stories of  childhood and old age alike. She provides engaging readings of  Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period and P. D. James’s The Children of  Men, showing their “shared eugenic undertones” and transformation of  “the burden narrative of  old age into one of  ‘demented’ or ‘diseased’ old age” (36). Section two considers the eighteenth-century origins of  the age-inflected Bildungsroman, with a particular focus on illness, looking at the writings of  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) and Frances Burney (Evelina and The Wanderer). Goethe, she argues, shifts “the epigenetic concept of  growth to a concept of  education” (58), providing “a composite concept of  ageing which transcends the binaries of  youth and age by including potentiality, open-endedness and error in its notion of  development” (69). With Burney’s fiction, she considers the now-infamous foot race between two elderly women in Evelina, as well as paratextual materials. The nineteenth-century novel is the focus of  section three, with readings of  the fiction of  Maria Edgeworth (Belinda and Helen), Jane Austen (Persuasion), Charles Dickens (Great Expectations), and George Eliot (Middlemarch). As Hartung argues, using Franco Moretti, “one of  the features of  the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman is its exploration of  a social space that effectively dismantles the continuity between generations in favour of  ‘mobility and interiority’” (115). She builds on her premise that “the emergence of  the life sciences in the late eighteenth century has promoted a notion of  development as a dynamic and teleological principle” (109). Especially interesting is her reading of  Persuasion, arguing for our seeing Austen’s last completed novel as presenting “a differentiated picture of  gendered ageing” and exploring different “ageing styles” (131; 139). Hartung also argues that Dickens’s texts “abound in images of  old age, often represented in stereotypical figures who combine the attribute of  old age with another social identity that is regarded as dangerous or troubling” (146). In her reading ISSUE 3  •  AGE CULTURE HUMANITIES   251Reviewsof  Eliot’s Middlemarch, Hartung demonstrates that maturity is illuminated in “different contexts,” with age categories “used as symbols in the novel’s complex reference system and multiperspec-tival narration” (155). Section four moves readers into the twentieth century and to dementia narratives, ranging through a large number of authors, including Diana Friel McGowin’s Living in the Labyrinth: A Personal Journey Through the Maze of Alzheimer’s, Thomas DeBaggio’s Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Alzheimer’s, and Dutch writer J. Bernlef’s Hersenschimmen (“Out of Mind”). The age-inflected and illness-inflected writings of dozens of other authors are considered, including Elinor Fuchs, Alice Munro, and Don DeLillo. Hartung also includes an extended section on Samuel Beckett’s Ohio Impromptu. The last section of the book argues that “the burden narrative of dementia becomes prevalent in the late twentieth century in the form of realistic rather than satirical or dystopian fiction” (36). Throughout the book, Hartung provides “new readings . . . of canonical novels from the perspective of age” (221). Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature is a well-written, convincing book that will be of  particular value to those who have yet to grasp the significant links among histories of  fiction, gender, subjectivity, aging, and old age, from the eighteenth century to the present. Hartung strongly argues for the need for and value of  our deepening such links. As she puts it, the Bildungsroman “turns ageing as a process into the central topic of  the novel” (222). She generously gives credit to the many theorists of  age studies and critics of  the novel who have inspired her work. If  the book has a weakness, it is in selecting texts that have already received significant treatment in humanistic studies of  midlife and old age. Trollope’s dystopian The Fixed Period, and Dickens’s Great Expectations, with its unforgettable Miss Havisham, have been investigated by previous scholars of  age studies in the Victorian period. So, too, have the texts by Burney, Edgeworth, and Austen, previously treated by scholars of  age and aging in the late eighteenth century and the Romantic period. To 252   AGE CULTURE HUMANITIES  •  ISSUE 3be sure, Hartung builds on this work by previous critics, often in ways that prove fruitfully connective and that will serve to move our field forward. But the book will be particularly useful to readers for whom the ideas of  age, and old age, as useful categories of  historical analysis are not yet familiar ones. Hartung’s book introduces and illuminates a rich body of  literary, historical, and scientific material—on narrative, development, gender, age, old age, illness, and dementia—with grace and clarity, as well as with great critical skill. 

Review of 'Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature: Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman' by Heike Hartung

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Review of 'Ageing, Gender and Illness in Anglophone Literature: Narrating Age in the Bildungsroman' by Heike Hartung

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