The literary potential of old age in Simone de Beauvoir, The stone angel, and new Canadian narratives /

In an interdisciplinary study, I argue that narrative fiction centred around old women, through its appeal to readers' imaginations, can challenge the ageism which currently governs how old women are scripted and depicted.Chapter one situates media broadcasts amidst other discourses, such as academic theory, medical language, gerontology, and popular feminism, which confront---or avoid confronting---old women. To counter common, negative cultural depictions, chapter two examines Margaret Lock and Simone de Beauvoir's engagements with narratives of aging. I combine de Beauvoir's constructivist La Vieillesse and midlife fiction with Jean-Paul Sartre's What is Literature?, Martha Nussbaum's Poetic Justice, and Mieke Bal's Narratology to articulate how narrative fiction can compel what I call a committed reader to reimagine social possibilities for old women.Chapter three foregrounds old age as a new category of analysis for Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel, sifting through her metaphors of decrepitude to set up a model for studying three potential, late life, female social roles.Chapter four connects Joan Barfoot's Duet for Three with Hiromi Goto's Chorus of Mushrooms, which both depart from the previous age-as-decrepitude convention, to propose that the role of grandmother offers old women opportunities to give freely and benefit from non-possessive love, in a family context. In chapter five, I examine how gerontological nursing textbooks theorize institutional care to illuminate how Edna Alford's A Sleep Full of Dreams and Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night facilitate an intergenerational bond within nursing homes. Caregivers' communicative strategies in each text exemplify how readers' imaginative engagement could begin to counter negative cultural attitudes. In chapter six, I explore how female friendship, as depicted in Barfoot's Charlotte and Claudia Keeping in Touch and Cynthia Scott's The Company of Strangers, offers old women an interdependence which enables the self sufficiency they often (are considered to) lack, eschewing a old age versus youth binary opposition.I conclude that narrative fiction provides opportunities to shift cultural meanings of the conventionally negative term old, so that committed reading can transform imagined possibilities and lead to new perceptions of old women