Aging Women’s Transgression In Contemporary British Female Reifungsroman

This dissertation undertakes as its task to figure out how the idea of transgression plays into the representation of aging women in contemporary British female reifungsroman.As a subgenre of women’s fiction,female reifungsroman that chronicles women’s journey from middle age to old age is still far from the spotlight of literary studies due to the marginality of old age in literary studies.In the midst of increasing population graying and accompanying social issues,a proper research on female reifungsroman has already become an imperative to reestablish the link between critical discourse and the perception of old age.The concept of transgression experiences a series of transformations having been involved in many different humanitarian fields.But it is not until British scholar Julian Wolfreys’s neat categorization of literary transgressions that this thesis finds a theoretical framework to further the research.In Wolfreys’s lucid argument,he comes up with four common assumptions that inform any definition of transgression as having to do with:（a）form;（b）a movement or motion and therefore implicitly temporality;（c）spatial position;（d）relational position.He also recognizes the important role transgression plays in the constitution of our identities,arguing that it is "identity needs believe in its own stability for the conventions of transgression to apply.”Wolfreys’s categorization is not simply a taxonomic effort for convenience’s sake;it serves as a framework to neutralize an inherent burst of energy of the concept of transgression.It also lays theoretical groundwork for the development of this thesis in that some of the most exemplar works of contemporary British reifungsroman have all exhibited certain features of the four categories of transgression.In a selection of four contemporary British female reifungsroman,this thesis offers a concrete analysis of the elements of transgression in terms of the body（form）,temporality,space,and ethics（relational）to find out how transgression gears for aging women’s self-empowerment and identity reformation in their old age.Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn（1977）celebrates the boldness of an aging woman’s bodily transgression in the form of Bakhtian grotesque with varying intensities.In the weaker version of grotesque body,transgression mainly serves as a means to achieve jouissance that sharpens feminine identity.In a desperate attempt to attract maze gaze to compensate for her loss of a major sexual organ,Marcia seeks to hide her "body of lack" by dressing herself as a young woman in a mimesis of youthful body-image.Here,Marcia’s bodily transgression clearly violates certain code of conduct for an aging woman by wearing seductively pink underwear.Whereas in the stronger version of the grotesque body in which the body openly flaunts and defies the cultural hegemony that victimizes aging women’s body,the force of transgression becomes so explicit that it challenges institutional power.Marcia intentionally dresses herself as a madwoman in an extreme version of mimesis to provoke disquietude amongst her former colleagues.The transgressive spectacle of the grotesque body breaks the silence that the normative order seeks to sustain.Penelope Lively’s Moon Tiger（1987）is a tour-de-force of how transgression takes place by challenging the notion of temporality in women’s old age.In Lively’s convoluted narrative,the dying historian Claudia Hampton keeps making temporal transgression in her final main d’oeuvre.Methodologically,she introduced present tense into historiographical writing when she turns to face-to-face testimony as her source of information.Sitting next to the testifying subject,the contingency of history that accounts for traumatic experience and emotional turmoil becomes a relevant factor in the narrative of historiography.Structurally,Claudia’s historiographical writing overthrows traditional linear chronology and turns to an embodied historiography that destabilizes the organizing principle of traditional historiography.Written in a form that answers to "ecriture feminine",the structural transgression of temporality draws its creative energy from female body to come up with a uniquely feminine version of historiography to affirm women’s status as knowing subjects in history.For Margaret Drabble’s The Seven Sisters（2002）,one goes back to the most primary and literal form of transgression:spatial transgression.Candida Wilson,a new divorcee who just moves from the suburb to downtown London begins a journey of spatial transgression after this life-changing experience.In the beginning,Candida claims her home ownership upon leaving suburban household.The acquisition of "a room of one’s own" signifies the first transgression of space in terms of property ownership.She is able to walk out of the space of confinement to concentrate on building a life of autonomy that allows her to do the things far from her housewife experience.After her self-reinvigoration in her "home of one’s own",Candida’s keeps stepping into new territory thanks to her audacious spatial transgression.She enters the city for the first time as an exploring flaneur to experience the hustle and bustle of London.The spatial transgression in the city enriches her urban experience and leads Candida to the belief that her psychic well-being is tightly connected to the dynamic of the city.When Candida eventually crosses the border between countries to follow the track of Aeneid as she stands in ancient ruins and witnessing the reincarnation of the woman in Aeneid,Candida wakes up to her Dasein and Being-towards-death as the juxtaposition of the thrill of life and the loom of mortality marks a full stop of spatial transgression.In Doris Lessing’s Diary of a Good Neighbour（1983）,transgression becomes an ethical（relational）concern.The unlikely friendship between Janna the fashion magazine editor and Maudie the strong-willed poor woman in her 90s testifies to the power of ethical transgression in the age of encroaching urban individualism.Janna crosses the interpersonal borderline to demystify the otherness of old age,which enables an ethical transgression to invalidate the marginality and mysticism that used to interpret otherness as foreign,inapproachable or even punishable to justify the set-up of the boundary.Instead,the transgressing subject becomes aware of the Other’s subjectivity when she transcends herself into the domain of the impossible.In the meantime,it also gives the transgressing subject an opportunity to understand the difference between age groups and a critical space to reflect on one’s own old age.Janna demonstrates how one invests an ethically transgressive spirit into building up a space where middle age and old age converge,coexist and mutually thrive.Despite some thematic and stylistic differences,the four modes of aging women’s transgression in question according to Julian Wolfreys’s theoretical cartography testify to aging women’s unflinching efforts to rewrite the narrative of old age.Each of the four heroines steps beyond the boundaries unjustifiably marked by the force of stereotype,cultural bias and a widely pervasive ideology of ageism.To transgress those boundaries means to upgrade the system of representation in which old age can be redefined,and the act of transgression is inseparable from refreshing an epistemology of old age and（re）formation of age identity in the socio-political environment.As a symptomatic literary phenomenon,transgression offers new lens to scrutinize the representation of aging women and their identity（re）formulation.Thanks to Wolfreys’s nuanced categorization,the idea of transgression becomes a functioning paradigm for the reading of contemporary British reifungsroman.Swaying between the cultural stereotype of“sweet granny" and "wretched witch",literary transgression expands the hermeneutic space for aging women in literature.Whether transgression takes place through body,temporality,spatial position or relational position,it sheds some light on aging women’s resistance to stereotypical images and the stigmatization of old age.For them,transgression is not something that the youth should take for granted.It becomes an urgent task for them to prove that aging women could also become transgressing subject to go beyond the enclosing circle that encases them in a stagnant impasse.The idea of transgression poses two questions that inform this dissertation:how could transgression refashion aging women’s identity when they suffer from acute loss of identity?How could transgression redefine the notion of old age so that the epistemology of old age can revolutionize itself,despite an uninterrupted and invasive agenda gerascophobia?The convergence of literary transgression and reifungsroman signifies an effort on the part of literature to engage with social issues in the cross-disciplinarian context.As the force population greying becomes increasingly menacing,to perceive old age differently becomes an urgent task within and beyond the academy.In this light,transgression helps extend the boundary of literary studies and reinvigorate literary criticism,waiting for another "J’accuse!" moment as that of Emile Zola’s sonorous appeal more than a century ago.