Recent Publications

In addition to co-editing the Cambridge Companion to Anthony Trollope, I have published articles in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Prose Studies.

Book in Progress

In this project, I examine the relationship among aging, productivity, and gender in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. In a culture obsessed with time, production, and the aesthetics of youth, old age signifies bodies that are unregulated, unproductive, and unattractive. These undesirable qualities are written along gendered lines, biological and professional markers identifying women and men’s distinct social marginalization. Yet, that marginalization is not to be found in the novel, where literary representations of old age abound. From George Eliot’s Silas Marner to Charles Dickens’s The Aged P to H. Rider Haggard’s She Who Must Be Obeyed, authors throughout the nineteenth century characterized what it meant to be old. Not merely reflections of contemporary debates about aging, representations of old age serve as the literary mediation between the gendered body and discourses of productivity. Through these older characters, the novelists I examine illuminate the mutual dependence of social constructions of gender and ideologies of productivity. Individuals register as old in Victorian culture because of their perceived non-productivity. That perception, however, is shaped not only through the work of culture but also through the bodily process of approaching senescence. Victorian novelists engage both the cultural forces that impinge upon the gendered body and the psychic consequences of living with a perceived loss of capacity. That engagement becomes the means of understanding the relationship between gender and productivity from a new vantage point. Aging is a narrative both of a body and of a culture. By re-reading that narrative through a literary lens, I seek to uncover what is at stake in the literary privileging of that which Victorian culture finds hardest to value.

The authors this project discusses—Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Margaret Oliphant—destabilize social constructions of gender and age to provide alternative views of what it could mean to be visibly, productively old. Whether it is on the topic of “fixing the period” of men’s retirement, cosmetic usage, spinsters’ sufficiency, or women in the workforce, these novelists use formal conventions to disrupt the imprint of gender on temporality, thus disrupting the socially stigmatized narrative of aging. To view how gendered identity was conceived of in relation to aging and productivity over time, I cover the period from the 1840s to the 1890s. This time period provides an historical arc, framed as it is by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908, which were moments of a heightened social awareness of the aging population.

I employ a theoretical methodology that blends feminist, historical, and sociological age studies with cultural studies. As recent collections edited by Marilyn Pearsall and Kathleen Woodward, The Other Within Us (1997) and Figuring Age (1999), have shown, age as an identificatory category has yet to be interrogated with the rigorous critical attention that other categories such as race, gender, and class have received. I contribute to the dialogue that Pearsall and Woodward’s collections began and take that dialogue into the arena of nineteenth-century literary studies. To explain aging as a social phenomenon, critics such as Woodward draw on psychoanalytic, formational, theories, while critics such as Margaret Morganroth Gullette depend upon a strictly cultural methodology. What my project seeks to do is illumine the mutually imbricated spaces that exist between these two approaches. By examining and incorporating the work of seemingly discordant age studies scholars like Woodward, Gullette, Simone de Beauvoir, Peter Laslett, Stephen Katz, Teresa Mangum, and Pat Thane, I provide a more richly contextualized approach to aging studies, while expanding the scope of nineteenth-century studies of gender and productivity.

Copyright © 2011 Lisa Niles