The Silent Echo: The Middle-Aged Female Body in Contemporary Women's Fiction

by Helen Paloge

Overview

The Silent Echo examines the texts and subtexts of a number of English and American contemporary women's novels dealing with middle age. These novels of midlife chart the brief development of a female protagonist in early or late middle age as she achieves some measure of emotional and physical contentment or wisdom. Author Helen Paloge clearly shows that, in fact, these novels, which claim to confront in narrative terms the gender-bound implications of aging, generally reveal an unconscious denial of the truth of aging's significance for women, a consistent dishonesty on this score, and an ultimate refusal to confront the issues they claim to examine.
The Silent Echo explores fiction by such authors as Margaret Atwood, Joan Barfoot, Fay Weldon, and Joyce Carol Oates, in search of the middle-aged woman's body and its decline unto death. If the quest for happiness or meaning in most of these novels proves successful, it is despite, rather than because of, the middle-aged body. The aging female body might present no hindrance to happiness, but it must be acknowledged and engaged.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780739121726
Publisher:	Lexington Books
Publication date:	12/24/2007
Pages:	200
Product dimensions:	6.31(w) x 9.37(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Helen Paloge is lecturer in teacher education at Sakhnin College in Sakhnin, Israel.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Preface
Chapter 2 Chapter 1. Introduction
Chapter 3 Chapter 2. The Midlife Novel or The Female Bildungsroman of Second Adulthood
Chapter 4 Chapter 3. As Time Runs By
Chapter 5 Chapter 4. Waking Up to Change
Chapter 6 Chapter 5. The Image of Aging
Chapter 7 Chapter 6. Body
Chapter 8 Chapter 7. Mirror, Mirror...Double, Mothers
Chapter 9 Chapter 8. Subject and Voice / The Gaze and Silence

Editorial Reviews

Feminist literary scholarship has amply engaged in the subject of the exclusion of women from their full share in the themes and ideas of the bildungsroman. It has critiqued its androcentric nature and, accordingly, outlined the poetics of the female narrative of growth, initiation, coming of age, development and maturity - all which may afford women with social and cultural inclusion. Paloge takes on a further significant step by exposing insights offered by a great number of women novelists: she focuses on the dynamic aspect of women's lives and of their coming into middle age, thus losing the symbolic and corporeal accoutrements of their sex and gender. She explores the second episode of maturation, when it is no longer society's concepts and norms of femininity and womanhood that prescribe the journey of development for women but rather it is when they become - once again - excluded. This is a brilliant demonstration of literary scholarship's ability to provide a torch for our understanding of those biases and blind spots which govern women and men in their self creation and mutual association. Another sex/gender gap is discovered here in a rich and engaging argument.

Hannah Naveh

I find this book truly refreshing and original in its critical stance and its readiness to read through much feminist gesturing, which all-too-often serves as a palliative for the unresolved problems of aging and decline, both in life and in literature. The book is extremely well written, theoretically informed but readily accessible, and its exposure of the inconsistencies, the denials, and sometime the blatant dishonesty of middle-brow literature is done with both genuine empathy and humor.

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan

Feminist literary scholarship has amply engaged in the subject of the exclusion of women from their full share in the themes and ideas of the bildungsroman. It has critiqued its androcentric nature and, accordingly, outlined the poetics of the female narrative of growth, initiation, coming of age, development and maturity - all which may afford women with social and cultural inclusion. Paloge takes on a further significant step by exposing insights offered by a great number of women novelists: she focuses on the dynamic aspect of women's lives and of their coming into middle age, thus losing the symbolic and corporeal accoutrements of their sex and gender. She explores the second episode of maturation, when it is no longer society's concepts and norms of femininity and womanhood that prescribe the journey of development for women but rather it is when they become - once again - excluded. This is a brilliant demonstration of literary scholarship's ability to provide a torch for our understanding of those biases and blind spots which govern women and men in their self creation and mutual association. Another sex/gender gap is discovered here in a rich and engaging argument.--Hannah Naveh, Tel Aviv University

I find this book truly refreshing and original in its critical stance and its readiness to read through much feminist gesturing, which all-too-often serves as a palliative for the unresolved problems of aging and decline, both in life and in literature. The book is extremely well written, theoretically informed but readily accessible, and its exposure of the inconsistencies, the denials, and sometime the blatant dishonesty of middle-brow literature is done with both genuine empathy and humor.--Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, The University of Haifa

From the Publisher