Ruth O. Saxton is the author of the new book The Book of Old Ladies: Celebrating Women of a Certain Age in Fiction. Her other books include The Girl and Approaches to Teaching Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. She is a professor emeritus of English at Mills College in Oakland, California.
Q: You write that as you grew older, “I
began to look for plots that might help me map a possible future beyond the
familiar fairy tale where the old woman is stereotyped as either the wicked
witch or the fairy godmother.” How did you eventually decide to write this
book?
A: I have always looked to fiction by
women writers to offer models of ways of being that allowed me to imagine
myself and others in new ways.
So, for example, after I became a mom in
1965, and when I was also trying to create a professional career as a scholar,
I read and taught narratives of mothers and daughters in literature, and
noticed how often mothers were the topics of artistic daughterly inquiry,
rather than being artists in their own right. This led to my courses and essays
on “Dead Angels: Mothers and Daughters in Fiction by Women.”
Then, in the 90s, when my younger daughter
was in middle school, and we were reading Charlotte Bronte’s Victorian novel Jane
Eyre, she asked me in all seriousness, “But who cares whether Jane marries St.
John or Mr. Rochester? Why is that interesting?”
Unlike her older sister, who shared my
love of the feisty character at its heart, she questioned the significance of
its plot--the familiar marriage plot of so many classic novels.
Whether in the 18th, 19th, or 20th
century, the protagonist of many novels by women was often a girl whose future
depended on her marriage.
As a mom of three children, and a
professor of literature at Mills College, where most of my students identified
as women, I wanted to find stories by women which did not center the marriage
plot but narrated the challenges of just growing up as a girl.
I read and taught works such as: Jamaica
Kincaid’s Annie John, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Cristina Garcia’s
Dreaming in Cuban, Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Jeanette
Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out
of Carolina and eventually published a collection of essays entitled The Girl:
Constructions of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women.
Noticing that older women appear around
the edges, not at the center of these stories, as grandmothers, aunts, and
neighbors, I began to see a course on old women as a mirror of sorts for my
earlier work on young girls. They had much in common in terms of being read by
their bodies, struggling with issues of dependence and independence, figuring
out their identity as their familiar bodies changed.
I too was aging, and as I became the age
of the older women, I began to look for stories that got inside the heads of
old women and saw the world through their eyes as earlier novels had done for
young women and girls.
I gathered a collection of such stories
into a new course that paired stories of girls and old ladies, “Coming of Age
and Coming to Age,” and I began to think about the next book, which eventually
became this one! For The Book of Old Ladies, I sought out stories that provide
models for aging--the kinds of stories I wish I had read earlier in my life.
Q: Can you say more about how you selected
the stories, and how did you figure out the book’s structure?
A: I read dozens of books, from children’s
stories to detective series, as well as memoirs, journals, biographies, and
books by experts in related fields. Eventually I decided to limit myself to
what I know best--fiction by women. I sorted the books as one would sort
laundry, or beads to string, trying out various groupings until I saw a pattern
that pleased me.
I decided to begin with what I call
“deathbed bookends,” stories in which the old woman is nearing death at the
beginning of the story and then dies, but in which the central plot is her
remembered youthful romance.
I had given a paper on “Sex after Sixty”
at a Doris Lessing Conference and discovered considerable interest in that
topic, which I eventually developed into a published essay. Although old women
experience losses of many kinds, they also defy stereotypes, sometimes
reinventing themselves in joyful and defiant ways, and I wanted to include
stories that celebrate their discoveries.
Each of the five chapters in my book had
its beginnings in a stack of books on my desk and eventually was winnowed into
stories that I had recommended to friends or taught in my courses or just
simply enjoyed.
Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and
what does it signify to you?
A: By the time I was choosing a title, I
was in my mid-70s, certainly an old lady but not fragile or senile, and I
wanted to use the word “old” without its negative baggage. “Ladies” is more fun
than “women,” less academic, with a wide range of connotations that I like and
that I wanted to play with.
Q: You conclude with Margaret Drabble’s The
Dark Flood Rises. Why did you decide to end with a look at that book?
A: I chose Drabble’s The Dark Flood Rises
because I enjoyed its three old ladies and the ways in which each of them
accepts the reality of her approaching death and manages to live her final
months to the hilt, whether tooling the highway to evaluate old age homes or
riding her bicycle to teach poetry to adults, or in hospice care at home, where
she still enjoys animated conversations with friends.
The setting for the novel engages many of
the issues crucial to our own time--climate change, national wars, and
competing philosophies for trying to make sense of life--and Drabble takes
these on with considerable knowledge and nuance in lucid prose.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: At present I am beginning to write a
blog as an extension of the book so I can continue to introduce new old lady
books and engage in conversations with a wider audience of readers than my
students, learning how to live during the pandemic and retirement, and playing
with ideas for what comes next!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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