Over the Hill and Out of Sight
Over the Hill and Out of Sight
Locating Old Age in Regionalism
The fourth chapter reads New England regionalism as a response to this pathologization of old age. The old maids, spinsters, and widowers that populate the short fiction of Mary Wilkins Freeman and Sarah Orne Jewett stage a subversive dialogue with the scientific and cultural denigration of the elderly, particularly elderly women, and resist the homogenizing effects of this discourse. While much scholarship acknowledges the prevalence of elderly people in regionalism, linking old age to the passing of old modes of living, this chapter urges us to see the elderly characters in this genre not as metaphors for dying ways of life but as representations of elderly bodies and subjectivities in their own right. These authors force us to question the celebration of independence and autonomy imbricated in fantasies of adulthood and in American identity itself.
Keywords: elderly, dependence, regionalism, women, old age, autonomy, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett
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