Old Age in Early Modern TImes
Old age is less the result of a biological reality, than the by-product of a cultural and social construction. Each culture and society determines its age and rites of passage relative to specific life stages, but more importantly, this social construction influences and dictates how old people experience aging and are supposed to live it. Modern society is plagued by a fear of old age, an experience which lingers in the dark corners of our horizons and haunts us, and by a widespread, overwhelming ageism. Ageism is a very unusual and disquieting form of social: it is not directed against a different “other”, but against our future self, while also being one of the most socially condoned and institutionalized forms of prejudice.
We also have a tendency to believe that different eras treated old age in different ways, but is this actually the case? Or aren’t we falling into the trap of believing that “nowadays the youth does not respect their elders anymore”, an idea as ancient as Plato’s Republic.
My aim, in my next book project, is to focus on literary, artistic and theatrical representations of old age in the 17th and 18th century. Very few works exist on the subject: with the exception of David Troyanski’s and Philippe Ariès’s works on old age and death respectively, only sparse chapters or articles actually address this issue.
My goal is twofold: 1) to map representations of old age or aging from a gendered perspective and their use in different genres and 2) following Edward Said’s Late Style and the exceptional longevity of certain authors such as Madeleine de Scudéry, Fontenelle, Le Sage, Voltaire and others, to explore how their old age affected their writing and their representations of characters. In Voltaire’s case, I have already identified, along with a growing focus on physical suffering, a shift in the choice of characters, proposing more and more, as he ages, positive images of old men mentoring and guiding the youth.