The Aging Mind and Body in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, 1680-1830

Aging Mind and Body offers a literary history of the concept of aging between 1680 and 1830. I trace the interplay between the century’s literature and developing medical theories of the human body, revealing the long eighteenth century to be a crucial cultural moment that transformed what aging meant both for writers and for the broader public. While in the early modern period authors predominantly associated aging with wisdom and spiritual growth, Enlightenment science reconceived aging as radically debilitating for both the body and the mind. I argue that this shift spurred significant literary innovations as writers exploited, negotiated, and subverted scientific assumptions about growing old. Excavating the history behind the emergence of derogatory terms for aging such as “senility” and “senescence,” I show that the literary portrayal of aging was effectively turned into a contested site for reimagining normative human life and progress. Each of my chapters examines a different supposed problem of aging—rising immobility, mental disability, changing physical appearance, and declining sexuality—as it emerges in the major works of Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Leapor, John Cleland, and Jane Austen. In particular, I undertake a critical re-reading of aging as it intersects with racism, sexism, ableism, and classism. Reading these works in terms of aging, I argue, complicates our traditional story of the long eighteenth century’s attention to progress, revealing not simply an ongoing struggle to marginalize the aging mind and body but also an important literary attempt that refigured “decline” as a constitutive and meaningful part of the whole life experience.