The Formulation Of Old Women’s Identity From The Perspective Of The Body In Barbara Pym’s Quartet In Autumn

Published in1977and shortlisted for the Booker prize that year, Quartet in Autumn is widely acclaimed as Barbara Pym’s most artistically mature and socially conscious work. Noted for her shift of attention onto old women characters in her last two novels published in Pym’s sixties, this paper undertakes as its task to shed some light on the formulation of old women’s identity via a series of body strategies within the theoretical framework of contemporary feminism, centering on one of the main characters in Quartet in Autumn, Marcia Ivory.Chapter one offers a brief review on Barbara Pym’s life and work as a writer, also available in this chapter are a review of literature which concerns the study on the old women characters in English literature and the structure of the paper. Chapter two serves as a foundational section leading up to later discussions by making explicit a political and theoretical imperative to diagnose old women’s reality and understand their most private experience. This chapter is equally divided into two parts:an analysis on old women’s exclusion from the current third-wave feminism resulting from a radically constructed bias and its possible explanations constitute the first part, while the second part sets out to postulate old women’s possible alignment with feminist movement by making their bodies a possible site for their political aspirations.Chapter three and four are all devoted to the textual analysis in terms of old women’s use of the body to either fit into or subvert a patriarchal society in pursuit of a stable and legitimate identity centering on the character of Marcia Ivory in Pym’s novel. These two chapters can be seen as counterpoint to each other when taking into account Marcia’s change of body politics. In the first part of chapter three, Marcia seeks to reconstruct her femininity through the embellishment of an incomplete body after having lost women’s most essential sexual organ, her breast. By conforming to the patriarchal standard of femininity, she desperately tries to ascertain her identity as a woman. When her attempt at reconstructing her feminity has ended up a total failure, Marcia turns to inhabit in a Foucauldian discursive body of madness since "madwoman" is a cultural image of the old women concocted by patriarchy, preexisting old women’s authentic experience. In so doing, Marcia is able to grasp an expedient yet utterly negative identity: a madwoman. The fourth chapter proposes two types of readings that see Marcia’s politicization of her body as containing subversive energies against patriarchy. The first part concentrates on Marcia’s self-starvation as her silent campaigning to address old women’s needs and human right in an ageist society by sacrificing her own body as the locus to effect political change. The second part offers an alternative reading of Marcia’s fitting into the discursive body of a madwoman and her self-starvation under the guidance of French post-structuralist feminism, corresponding to the Irigarayan notion of "mimesis" and the Kristevan notion of "the abject" which both generate a specifically feminine energy in defiance of patriarchy in a masochistic fashion:jouissance. Thus, Marcia is able to transform the negativity in her body strategies into transgressive power to resist being manipulated by patriarchy.While encapsulating the main arguments presented in this paper, the last part duly draws the conclusion. Doubly marginalized by the patriarchal society as well as the feminist movement, old women must strive to reformulate their identity in a non-patriarchal, socially positive way and make their anger and discontent heard through the politicization of their bodies. What is of crucial importance is for the general public to recognize old women as a socially active group that constitutes the society as an organic whole.