The Embarrassment of Aging
In Felix Holt there are several aged character. Some are considered old by a number of years that today, I believe, we would not consider old. Mrs. Transome is the first character who
introduces us to the aged. As an ‘old’ woman of about 60 (old? Are you kidding
me? I’m glad we’ve moved away from dying this young) she is treated with
dismissive kindness by her son Harold. Despite running the estates and being
aware of how she was being cheated by an previous lover, Harold sees her as someone who should sit
on prettily cushioned chairs and let the real men run the estate. Father (also,
not the father of Harold) Transome is a doddering man who seems to need guidance in
everything. He is an object to be forgotten and an object of play for Harold’s
son, a depiction of the embarrassment of age. In Esther and Felix’s case their parents are sources of embarrassment.
Esther knows that Mr. Lyon will go off on long explications of anything
theological without a real awareness of his audience, and she secretly resents
his dissenting status. Felix’s mother is also a rambler that Felix puts up with
patiently as she extols her own virtues and waxes (never wanes) about the
tortures of her life. These speeches for both Esther and Felix are seen as
things they must suffer through. In this way, all aged parents are embarrassments.
To be endured because they are your
parents are supposedly incapable of seeing the reality. It’s interesting to see
how Mrs. Transome in her age is set up as one of the few people who are fully
aware. I’m not sure what to think of that. Is that due to position, wealth,
education, class? It seems to me that age is a minor theme to the novel that
Eliot is trying to get us to recognize.
However, I realize this may also
just be an area of hyper-awareness for me. One of the things that has
fascinated me recently in life has been watching people that our culture has
deemed ‘old.’ When they glance at us young ‘adults,’ I wonder if they are
resentful of our youth, bitter of their own past, or sagely shaking their heads
at what we do not know and the joys yet to be had in life. So when an ‘older’
person is portrayed in a novel, I am, likewise, fascinated by wondering what
gives the younger the knowledge of the older. How do you have insight into age
without going through the experience of becoming aged? Particularly, Felix Holt was published in 1866. That
means that Eliot was writing this around 47. What in her life gives her the
experience to feel that she can write well the thoughts of someone 20 or so
years older than her? I wonder how this novel would have been different if she
had written in her 60’s. Since she died at 61, she did not leave us too much
evidence of how age might be rewritten from her new perspective. But she did
marry someone 20years younger than her not long before her death and after the
death of her longtime lover George Henry Lewes (which was perhaps was one of
the greatest and saddest love stories). Maybe she had a young heart. However, just that phrase privileges youth in funky ways.
All this random thought to say,
what does this novel show us about the Victorian conception of aging? Well, my
guess, is that age was considered something of an embarrassment much like today. But it shouldn’t be. Check out this 62 year old model. Her
body has aged, and she is beautiful. 
Hannah, I am similarly captivated by Eliot’s treatment of age in Felix Holt, especially her characterization of Mrs. Transome. One of the striking things in looking at the obsession with Mrs. Transome’s age is the discrepancy between the perception of aging, especially related to the way characters and the reader visually encounter her age, and the actual psychological experience of aging. To the eye, Mrs. Transome looks just as she should, emblematic of the proper English grandmother. We see this in the depiction of Mrs. Transome in the lawn with Mr. Transome, young Harry, and the canine Nimrod: “The scene would have made a charming picture of English domestic life, and the handsome, majestic, grey-haired woman (obviously grandmamma) would have been especially admired” (8.112, ital. mine). If one were to paint the correct aged English gentlewoman, Mrs. Transome would be her, but what Eliot does particularly well in this novel is depict the psychological complexity of the aging process, especially for a certain kind of woman (a woman who was fortunate enough to wield some power and privilege in her younger years). Mrs. Transome’s experience of age is completely gendered, as she feels herself disempowered in the loss of the motherly authority that she had over Harold as a young boy, and the power of sexual allure that she once held over Mr. Jermyn: “She was as insignificant now in his [Jermyn’s] eyes as in her son’s…She felt herself loveless; if she was important to anyone, it was only to her old waiting-woman Denner” (35.335, 336, ital. mine). With Mrs. Transome as an example of the aging process, growing old as a woman seems to indicate that people can look at her and think all is right, look to her when it is convenient to do so, but more often than not they can just as easily divert their eyes. Knowing her own experience, however, Mrs. Transome represents herself far differently than how she is typically viewed—as “an old hag” (39.372)—an image that is much less appealing, and probably more captivating in its grotesqueness than the perfect grandmother.
ReplyDeleteDenner and Esther are the characters who seem to have the best knowledge of Mrs. Transome, though they can only understand her experience to a limited extent. Thus, it is the similarly marginalized characters who can see that there is more to Mrs. Transome than meets the eye and care enough about her to want to know about the person rather than just the image (while Esther is in a rather privileged class positioning and has the romantic power over Harold at this point in the novel, I would argue that her gender, as well as her history and possible future, helps her to relate to more marginal figures). What is significant among those with power, men like Harold Transome and Mr. Jermyn, is not that they find something repulsive about the aged woman, but rather that they see her as such a neutral and benign figure that she can just be ignored. I actually think with Mrs. Transome the issue at hand is more than mere embarrassment, because embarrassment implies that one has enough interest in another person to feel shame in relationship to them; the problem with Mrs. Transome is that many people just do not seem to care until they are made to do so.
Great picture! I think you're definitely on to something about age -- or perhaps, given the theme of inheritance that dominates the novel, perhaps "parents" would be a better rubric. I agree with Valerie as well -- I don't think Mrs. Transome is an embarrassment in the novel, even though Harold condescends to her. She's a powerful figure thetorically, even if she can't exert much of an impact on the plot.
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