“Nothing but change”: Women\u27s economies of aging, 1919–1939

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the ideal of femininity shifted from the Victorian matron to the sexualized adolescent girl. The process of aging became a source of increasing anxiety for women, a “crisis of the imagination,” as Susan Sontag puts it, “in which women continuously project themselves into a calculation of loss.” This dissertation examines the ways in which women writing novels in Britain between the two world wars articulated and redefined the implications of aging for women through gendered economic models of not only loss, sacrifice, and waste, but also accumulation, consumption, and exchange. They experimented with approaches to the treatment of time, age, and narrative form, and imagined alternatives to the narratives of depletion frequently associated with aging. Drawing on psychoanalytic, sociological, economic, and physiological models that gained prominence in the early part of the century, this project reframes the critical conversation around gender and modernism by recognizing that, in addition to new approaches to time and consciousness, the innovations of British modernism were also responding to and enabling new perspectives on the relative value of youth and age. An introductory chapter covers the historical, cultural, and literary contexts in which age became increasingly devalued and youth idealized after World War I. Subsequent chapters examine the effects on women of economic dependence as depicted in Rose Macaulay\u27s Dangerous Ages ; the tension between self-interest and self-sacrifice in May Sinclair\u27s Mary Olivier and The Life and Death of Harriett Frean; the dual role of women as sexual commodities and ideal consumers in Jean Rhys\u27s early novels; and Virginia Woolf\u27s economies of temporal consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves. In each case, the implications for women\u27s aging are investigated not only thematically but also through the author\u27s narrative strategies. Finally, extending beyond potentially reductive period boundaries, the dissertation closes with an epilogue on Doris Lessing\u27s 1983 novel, The Diary of a Good Neighbor, a text that demonstrates the intensification of the “culture of youth” over the course of the twentieth century and probes its social, psychological, and economic consequences for women as they age