Miroir, mouroir: (Dis)figuring the Ageing Woman in Simone de Beauvoir's La Vieillesse

Abstract:This article looks at Simone de Beauvoir's pioneering text, La Vieillesse, the most significant female-authored text on ageing published in France in the twentieth century. It examines in particular the text's quasi-occlusion of a female-centred perspective on the role played by the body and sexual expression in women's experience of ageing. Often viewed as a(n older) sister text to the feminist treatise Le Deuxième Sexe, La Vieillesse's relative silence on the specifics of women's ageing is remarkable, yet has received little critical attention. Acknowledging the radicalness of the work's clarion call in advocating for improved residential care for France's ageing population, this article analyses the overwhelmingly pessimistic representations of the perils of ageing that resonate from such a call. It presents the text as espousing a myopic vision of female ageing firmly anchored in the specular, rather than one embracing the many pleasures of ageing bound up with the palimpsestic layering of the experiential or the intellectual. By its predominant focus on literary as well as living accounts of ageing, La Vieillesse foregrounds the informative and transformative role of literature, yet its own reluctance to question many of the commonplaces surrounding ageing undermines its potential as a pedagogical tool to help us all age better.Résumé:Cet article se penche sur le texte précurseur de Simone de Beauvoir, La Vieillesse, le texte le plus important qui ait été écrit par un auteur féminin sur la vieillesse en France au vingtième siècle. L'article examine en particulier la quasi-occultation dans le texte d'une perspective féminine sur le rôle joué par le corps ainsi que l'expression sexuelle dans l'expérience du vieillissement chez les femmes. Alors que La Vieillesse peut être considéré comme le texte sœur du traité féministe Le Deuxième Sexe, le silence relatif de son auteure sur les spécificités du vieillissement féminin est tout à fait remarquable, mais a suscité peu d'attention critique jusqu'à présent. Reconnaissant la radicalité de l'appel de Beauvoir en faveur d'une meilleure prise en charge de la population française âgée dans sa dimension résidentielle, cet article analyse les représentations extrêmement pessimistes des périls du vieillissement qui résonnent d'un tel appel. Il présente le texte comme épousant une vision myope du vieillissement féminin fermement ancrée dans le spéculaire plutôt qu'une vision embrassant les nombreux plaisirs du vieillissement liés à la stratification palimpsestique de l'expérience, existentielle ou intellectuelle. Par l'accent prédominant qu'il pose sur les récits littéraires et sur les témoignages vivants du vieillissement, La Vieillesse met en avant le rôle informatif et transformateur de la littérature. Cependant, sa propre réticence à remettre en question bon nombre des lieux communs entourant la vieillesse sape son potentiel en tant qu'outil pédagogique qui pourrait nous aider tous et toutes à mieux vieillir.

Until recently, French fiction by women has appeared reluctant to view senescence as a topic worthy of serious consideration, with the few existent accounts endeavouring to render their content more palatable by sugar-coating it in 'humour' and/or sentimentalism. 5 More thoughtful first-person texts by contemporary older authors such as Annie Ernaux and, in particular, Noëlle Châtelet are beginning to emerge. 6 In academia, while humanities courses have been keen to embrace diversity and inclusion by focusing on gender and ethnicity, they have been less expeditious in promoting courses on age and ageing -the one inevitable category into which we will all hopefully fall. Why are we so reluctant to find out more about the 'pleasures and perils of ageing', and to think about different models of senescence? Is there a socially facilitated dose of mauvaise foi involved in the non-representation of, and thus non-confrontation with, the existentially inevitable in spite of the fact that, as Kathleen Woodward puts it, ageing 'necessarily cuts across all our lives, and our bodies, in a way that other differences fundamentally do not '? 7 This article investigates such non-representation through a specifically female optic by analysing one of the earliest critical studies of ageing in French, Simone de Beauvoir's La Vieillesse, published during the early years of the contemporary feminist movement that began with May '68. Beauvoir's treatise of almost 700 pages examines France's treatment of its ageing subjects, ostensibly providing a wide-ranging critique of the many injustices inflicted upon the silent and silenced population of the aged. I contend that the representations of ageing put forward in this text are fundamentally male-oriented: at best, they may be deemed somewhat 4 Many of these 'factional' accounts are based in care homes. See, for example, La Vie en maison de retraite: comprendre les résidents, leurs proches et les soignants (2003) by Claudine Badey-Rodriguez, and Journal d'une vieille dame en maison de retraite (2014) by Jean Tirelli, both of whom have been psychologists in care homes, or L'Âge fragile (2018) by Valérie Mollière, who is a nurse and care-home manager. More recently, Victor Castanet's investigative Les Fossoyeurs: révélations sur le système qui maltraite nos aînés (2022) documents the financial and medical abuses of the Orpéa care-home chain in France. 5 Examples of self-proclaimed humorous accounts would be Pascale Gautier's Les Vieilles (2010) or Anne-Gaëlle Huon's Le Bonheur n'a pas de rides (2017), although the prevalence with which the term 'humour' graces the dust jackets of many texts dealing with ageing smacks of a rather desperate existential displacement ('elle nous raconte avec humour…'). Earlier women authors of fiction, such as Benoîte Groult with La Touche étoile (2006) and Beauvoir herself in La Femme rompue (Paris: Gallimard, 1967) and Une mort très douce (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), examined the ageing process for women, as of course did Colette in texts including La Maison de Claudine (1922) or La Naissance du jour (1928). Writing in 1989, Paul J. Archambault remarks that older people, despite their ever-increasing numbers in French society, have 'failed to inspire the French novel in the past twenty-five years'; Paul J. Archambault, 'From Centrality to Expendability: The Aged in French Literature', in Perceptions of Aging in Literature: A Cross-Cultural Study, ed. by Prisca von Dorotka Bagnell and Patricia Spencer Soper (New York: Greenwood, 1989), pp. 51-69 (p. 56). 6 If Ernaux's engagement with ageing remains at times frustratingly tangential -she is happy to examine her relationship to the ageing mother or to present herself as a sexually active/seductive older woman, but not to represent ageing from a more personal, existential angle -other recent, more explicitly autobiographical accounts of ageing include Isabelle de Courtivron's L'Été où je suis devenue vieille (2020), or Laure Adler's La Voyageuse de nuit (2020), both of which bemoan the lack of literary works available to accompany older people on their senescent journey. A number of works also discuss euthanasia as a proactive solution to difficult ageing. See, for example, Jacqueline Jencquel's Terminer en beauté (2020) or Châtelet's own La Dernière Leçon (2004) about her mother's euthanasic death. Châtelet's mother, Mireille Jospin, was an active member of the Association pour le droit de mourir dans la dignité. 7 Kathleen Woodward, 'Youthfulness as a Masquerade ', Discourse, 11 (1988-89), 119-42 (p. 127).
unnuanced and mono-focal in their assessment of ageing -despite Beauvoir's emphasis in this article's epigraph on ageing as a disproportionately female 'expérience personnelle'. Unlike its sister text Le Deuxième Sexe, i and ii (1949), 8 this pioneering work on ageing has only recently begun to emerge from the critical wilderness. Le Deuxième Sexe's thesis, underpinned by an innovative range of interdisciplinary evidence, has long been seen by feminists and cultural theorists as an avant-garde and ultimately optimistic treatise in its radical deconstruction of the socialization process to which (overwhelmingly middle-class) French women were subject. In contrast, La Vieillesse appeared at a time when gerontology was an emerging discipline that relied principally on science-and medicine-based evidence; Beauvoir's eclectic approach to a gamut of specialisms including ethnology, sociology, and history was thus viewed as 'unacademic', and as potentially undermining the coherence of the discipline. 9 Coupled with the text's philosophical pessimism and its absence of subjective reflection/investment -but not subjective judgement or interpretation -the text spoke neither to contemporary gerontologists nor to feminists. Beauvoir may have been sixty-two when she published La Vieillesse but she seems strangely absent from the text, in that her comments are typically Other-centred, and only very rarely self-referential or 'personal' in any revelatory sense, undermining her famous exhortation, 'ce vieil homme, cette vieille femme, reconnaissons-nous en eux'. 10 Beauvoir also narrated and starred in Promenade au pays de la vieillesse (dir. by Marianne Ahrne, 1974), a film that gave cinematic form to many of the theses put forward in La Vieillesse. 11 Old age is Beauvoir's own personal experience, yet she rarely mobilizes that inner self to subvert or challenge the many ageist cultural stereotypes and idées reçues portrayed throughout the work. This article interrogates Beauvoir's examination of female ageing in La Vieillesse, a work which, like the women it depicts, has largely been erased from the cultural landscape. In that landscape, old women are 'over the hill', in other words the date limite of their (re)productive usefulness has been reached and, until recently, they have been remarkably inconspicuous in francophone literature and criticism -both out of sight and mind. The year 2020 marked La Vieillesse's half century and it too is beginning to receive more critical attention, most notably in the anthology Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Age, which considers the work from the perspective of phenomenological existentialism, and in Oliver Davis's important study, Age Rage and Going Gently. 12 In her Introduction to the anthology, editor Silvia Stoller refers to Beauvoir's 'gender-indifferent' approach to ageing, and the work's first section is dedicated to an examination of gender in La Vieillesse. 13 Contributions tend either to offer up justification for this glaring lacuna -for example, Beauvoir's belief that women find ageing less traumatic accounts for their neglect in the work -or compensate for it through reading La Vieillesse in dialogue with the rest of Beauvoir's corpus, in particular Le Deuxième Sexe, in order to shed more light on her views on female senescence generally. This article contributes to the recent wave of critical interest in Beauvoir's La Vieillesse by examining the work principally through its narrowly specular representations of a (non-)sexualized ageing female physiology; 14 however, it differs in its view that Beauvoir is resolutely not gender-indifferent but often hostile towards, and dismissive of, the ageing woman. It also seeks to foreground the vital pedagogical and preparatory role that textual accounts of ageing can play. As my epigraph highlights, Beauvoir views literature as fulfilling an in/formative role vis-à-vis social attitudes to ageing; 15 indeed, that belief accounts for the existence of her book. Yet despite her acknowledgement of a gender imbalance in literary and critical representations of ageing, La Vieillesse does little to redress it, failing to harness that literary potential to feminist, or even vaguely feminocentric, ends, in an endeavour to redraw the contours of the politicized ageing female body in French society. Instead, this leading feminist figure of the twentieth century can state that 'la querelle du pouvoir n'intéresse que le sexe fort'.
As a spokesperson for 'le deuxième sexe', what does interest Beauvoir? Beauvoir makes clear that the impetus behind La Vieillesse is to break taboos and to counter the general silencing that surrounds the ageing process. She very deliberately wants to sound a note of discord in what she views as the American-influenced drive to harmonize all potentially difficult life experiences. 16 Beauvoir argues that the main differentiating factor in how individuals experience ageing is class. Her critique of the social treatment of the aged is one that takes place in a capitalist society where women are the most economically disadvantaged -although her use of nominal signifiers, here as elsewhere, fails to reflect this distinction (pp. 292, 297): 'la lutte des classes commande la manière dont un homme est saisi par sa vieillesse ' (p. 17). 17 The work recognizes that previous historical and literary accounts of old age typically occluded the experiences of the most socially marginalized, whether the working class or women, and partly endeavours to redress that imbalance through its discussion of social provision for the poor; this is resolutely not the case in its consideration of women. It is almost as if Beauvoir is seeking to redress the near invisibility of class in Le Deuxième Sexe ii in the later publication, but this time at the expense of gender. Analogous to many recent publications on ageing, La Vieillesse examines the inadequate, at times barbaric, care system in place in France at the time of publication, in which the working-class and lower-middle-class ageing population were left to die in hospices or mouroirs. As this article goes on to suggest, Beauvoir's sparse descriptions of the senescent female subject go beyond a Marxist socio-political reading that criticizes the expendability of the unproductive geriatric body in capitalist society, manifesting a quasi-visceral and oddly anachronistic antipathy towards the aesthetics of the ageing female body. Criticism to date of La Vieillesse has paid insufficient attention to the text's treatment of the specificities of the ageing woman: Beauvoir presents La Vieillesse as a clarion call that aims to normalize and humanize discussions of senescence, to move the topic of ageing from social margin to mainstream, yet she seems unable to adhere to her own radical agenda given the expediency and superficiality with which she treats the older female body in particular. It could be argued that such apparent neglect of the ageing woman's situation is simply Beauvoir's ironic imitation of patriarchal posturing, yet at no point in the work does she offer a counter-narrative to challenge or even nuance this view of the aesthetic and sexual currency of the older woman as bankrupt. Her determination to bring the 'secret honteux' of ageing into the public realm (p. 8), in contrast to the idealized American emphasis on an eternal jeunisme founded on mauvaise foi, translates into a gloomy picture of senescence.
Beauvoir sees her project as particularly pressing at the time of writing La Vieillesse: in 1970, France had the largest percentage of old people in the world -12% of the population was over sixty-five 18 -and French women, despite their 16 France too has adopted a variety of less pejorative-sounding terms with which to describe old age. 'Vieux' and 'vieillard' were replaced by 'personnes âgées' in the 'Arrêté du 13 mars 1985 relatif à l'enrichissement du vocabulaire relatif aux personnes âgées, à la retraite et au vieillissement'; Légifrance, <https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr>. 17 For example, Beauvoir contrasts those who can enjoy their retirement at leisure, who have enough money to support themselves in old age and to finance a range of pastimes as well as healthcare, with the manual labourer obliged to continue working despite his ailing body. 18 That figure now stands at 21.3% for 2023. See Statista, 'Distribution of the Population in France as of January 1, 2023, by Age Group', <https://www.statista.com/statistics/464032/distribution-population-age-group-france>. quasi-non-figuration in the text, lived on average seven years longer than French men (pp. 46, 271). If, as de Gaulle famously stated, quoting Chateaubriand, 'La vieillesse est un naufrage' (cited p. 364), Beauvoir views her study as constituting a literary life raft by providing her readers with much-needed information about the 'realities' of ageing from a variety of cultural and geographical perspectives. In a manner similar to her intersectional investigations into the changing anthropological, historical, and mythological positionings of women in Le Deuxième Sexe i, in the first part of La Vieillesse Beauvoir provides an 'external' overview of a panoply of geographically disparate models of ageing and examines historical and cultural representations of, and attitudes to, senescence through the centuries; in the second part of the work, she elucidates 'la manière dont l'homme âgé intériorise son rapport à son corps' (p. 17) supported by analyses of a selection of mainly male-authored works of literature. Unsurprisingly, 'la vieille hideuse' looms large in these cultural models (p. 184, citing Marot) -although, in a rare chink in her armour, Beauvoir allows the senescent female some expression of contentment as she navigates the perilous waters of ageing. In many of the literary examples she cites, from Erasmus to Clément Marot to Samuel Beckett, Beauvoir is obliged to recognize 'le contraste entre l'être hideux qu'est pour autrui la vieille femme et le plaisir qu'elle garde à vivre' (p. 184). And as Segal would argue, it is that pleasure that is surely worthy of our -and Beauvoir's -attention.

External reflections
Beauvoir begins La Vieillesse by looking at the physiological processes affecting, or rather afflicting, the human body during the ageing process: the text is littered with proclamations highlighting changes to male physiology in senescence (p. 33) or references to 'l'organisme de l'homme âgé' (p. 15), with only very occasional mention of female-specific changes, which are portrayed in a characteristically unflattering manner: 'les poils blanchissent aussi cependant qu'en certains endroits -par exemple au menton des vieilles femmes -ils se mettent à proliférer' (p. 34). 19 Beauvoir presents the 'sudden' onset of the menopause (p. 36) as a crossing of the evolutionary Rubicon, marking the point of no return between the sexually reproductive younger and post-menopausal older woman, a description which, while inaccurate in that natural menopause typically evolves over many months and years, is in keeping with her perception in Le Deuxième Sexe ii of all female physiological changes as brutal and traumatic 20 -and, above all, as seen through the lens of a masculinist reproductive linearity. 21 Elsewhere in 19 Even in her closing section on mental illness in Chapter 7, in which Beauvoir's repeated affirmations that women are the greatest sufferers of senescent-related neuroses and mental disability become almost absurd in their cyclical recurrences (pp. 602, 607; see also pp. 601, 606, 610), the discussion is overwhelmingly androcentric. 20 See, for example, 'De la maturité à la vieillesse', p. 456. 21 Women's maturation follows a series of often visible physiological changes, whether in the form of puberty, menstruation, or pregnancy, therefore menopause and ageing can be viewed as part of an ongoing series of recurrent physical continuities and discontinuities. It may be that the term 'life cycle' is more suitable to describe female ageing than 'life course'. Mike Hepworth's Stories of Ageing (Buckingham: Open University Press, 2000) discusses these terms from a non-gendered perspective (p. 2).
La Vieillesse, Beauvoir does endeavour to view the menopause more positively, albeit in a desexualized manner, as in her description of the advantageous position occupied by the post-menopausal woman in 'primitive' societies: 'après la ménopause, la femme n'est plus sexuée; elle devient l'homologue de la fillette impubère' (p. 105). 22 This is an odd use of the adjective 'sexué', which means 'qui a un sexe', and is therefore a factual statement, whereas Beauvoir clearly attaches a subjective, socialized judgement to her use of it -in short, 'n'est plus sexy'; post-menopausal women are 'unbecoming' women in both senses of the term. If women are no longer able to conceive, it would appear inconceivable that they should be considered sexual beings -the feminist activist and philosopher fails to challenge the implicit, re(pro)ductive conflation of woman and mother or the inevitability of older women's regression to a desexualized, infantile state, which, as Beauvoir categorically affirms (p. 388), is not the case for men. The problematic nature of this declaration becomes even more apparent later in the work when Beauvoir, citing Freud's belief that a diminishment in genital arousal or capacity does not render the individual non-sexual, asserts that 'même l'eunuque et l'impuissant le [sexué] demeurent' (p. 387); in other words, being 'sexless' is clearly not related to the absence of physiological components or functions for men, as it is for women. And this is the crux of the problem with many potentially 'disfiguring' remarks in the work: Beauvoir presents as incontrovertible 'facts' her comments on the ageing woman's appearance; there is a linguistic slippage from objective definition to subjective judgement.
The first reference to women in the Introduction, amongst the plethora of male-specific experiences of the ageing process, is revelatory: 'On a le coeur serré quand à côté d'une belle jeune femme on aperçoit son reflet dans le miroir des années futures: sa mère' (pp. 11-12). This is also the first of several references to mirrors -whether metaphoric or real -that are found throughout the text, overwhelmingly in relation to women, including to Beauvoir herself (p. 361). The perspective here is one of masculine objectification; the 'on' who finds the sight of the ageing female so distressing is quintessentially male. As Beauvoir observes, emphasizing the 'unrealizability' of old age, we are not as old as we feel, we are as old as the Other makes the othered us feel: 'en nous c'est l'autre qui est vieux, que la révélation de notre âge vienne des autres ' (pp. 350-51). This implicit emphasis on the specular ties in with Beauvoir's general comments on female eroticism: the libido is alive and well in the ageing female; the problem is that the male no longer finds her 'corps abîmé' attractive (p. 393), often preferring his onanistic fantasies over sexual activity with his partner. Beauvoir argues that the female body is less compromised by old age physically and sexually than the male body, in that men's 22 This could be viewed as a rigidification of her description of the menopausal woman in Le Deuxième Sexe ii as 'asexué ' (p. 467). With reference to the earlier work, Diana Holmes similarly comments on Beauvoir's portrayal of the menopause as both liberation from the chains of maternity but imprisonment in a now sexless body ('Colette, Beauvoir and the Change of Life ', French Studies, 53 (1999), 430-43 (p. 441)). sexual pleasure is fundamentally located in tumescence; ageing women meanwhile retain all 'internal' erotic functions but are deemed 'externally' unattractive: if male sexual identity is located in the penis, for the femme-objet it is her body in its entirety (p. 392). As this article's title suggests, the male Other, and Beauvoir's text, can be seen to represent a distortive mirror for the ageing woman, casting back a macabre, atrophied image. 23 In Beauvoir's exegesis, the ageing woman is twice marginalized: not only is woman man's Other, but as an older person she also forms part of society's othered population.
It is one of the great ironies of La Vieillesse that Beauvoir acknowledges the key role played by situation, by ideology, and above all by literature, in helping to combat ageist conventions -with much of the book based on literary rather than living accounts of ageing -while her own work continues to reinforce many of them: 'on veut que les vieilles gens se conforment à l'image que la société se fait d'eux.
[…] C'est surtout dans le domaine sexuel que s'exerce la répression' (p. 268). Beauvoir, it would seem, is an integral member of that coercive 'on', obliging older people -and older women in particular -to fit a series of ready-made, socially approved (celibate) moulds; the text's efforts to rail against the dictates of social conformism are diluted by her clear distaste for any manifestation of the ageing body, and of ageing female sexuality in particular, as evidenced by the categorical dismissal that 'Aux yeux de tous, une femme de 70 ans a cessé d'être un objet érotique' (p. 424). Unlike the ageing man, the ageing woman's specular -indeed, spectacular -unattractiveness is beyond the sexual proclivities of even the gerontophile (pp. 270, 424). Multiple studies have acknowledged significant disparities between (hetero)normative social perceptions of the extent of sexual activities among older people and their actual occurrence; 24 Beauvoir's positioning vis-à-vis the aesthetic attractiveness of embodied ageing resolutely concurs with the former. 25 The censoring, judgemental look of the Other is pivotal to Beauvoir's conception of the ageing process -what Woodward calls 'the youthful structure of the look -that is, the culturally 23 As Beauvoir comments elsewhere in the work, phonetically blurring the specular with the degenerative: 'c'est toute la société qui est pour les vieillards un grand "mouroir"' (p. 337). 24 It should be noted that Beauvoir does briefly acknowledge alternative means for the ageing body to achieve erotic satisfaction via a rather vague, cosmic communion with others (p. 388). On the same page, she vehemently rejects any conflation between sexuality in old age and childhood, this despite her earlier reference to the menopausal woman's status as homologous to that of a 'fillette impubère' (p. 105). 25 Texts such as Amours de vieillesse, ed. by Marick Fèvre and Nicolas Riguidel (Rennes: Presses de l'EHESP, 2014), or the film L'Art de vieillir (dir. by Jean-Luc Raynaud, 2006), emphasize the prevalence and benefits of senescent sexuality, the life-affirming importance of touch -and of society's discomfort in acknowledging it. As Gérard Ribes notes in 'L'Âge, l'intimité et l'institution' (in Sexualité, handicaps et vieillissement, ed. by Philippe Pitaud (Toulouse: Érès, 2011), pp. 133-42), for the carer, 'Le corps vieilli devient exclusivement un objet de soin, un corps transparent, un corps public. Il n'est plus ce corps plaisir, ce corps désir' (p. 138). According to Sue Westwood, lesbian, gay, and bisexual older people are even more sexually invisible, often part of the '"queer unwanted" […], marginalised by younger LGB people because of their age(s) and marginalised by older heterosexual people and heterosexuality-privileging older-age care provision because of their sexualities. Older LGB women find themselves particularly affected by a combination of ageism and sexism and heterosexism'; Sue Westwood, Introduction to Ageing, Gender and Sexuality: Equality in Later Life (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 1-26 (p. 1); original emphasis. induced tendency to degrade and reduce an older person to the prejudicial category of old age' 26 -a look that disproportionately targets women in the Beauvoirean universe and elsewhere. To return to the epigraph, Beauvoir's membership of that rare group of women authors 'qui s'expriment dans […] les livres' has done little to alter the work's ubiquitous focus on male senescence. The very language she uses in this opening quotation -'un objet de spéculation'highlights the primacy of the (male) gaze, of physical appearance/materiality in dictating her stance. The abjection associated with the weeping, seeping female body in Le Deuxième Sexe has its clear counterpart in La Vieillesse's unstable geriatric body that inhabits an existentially liminal zone, denied even the objectified 'pouvoir' of the aesthetically desirable.
A close analysis of the rhetoric employed in La Vieillesse often reveals it to be underpinned by traditional binaries: men are feminized existentially and intellectually by old age in their weakness, vulnerability, and otherness, yet, physically and sexually, men can be impotent and castrated yet remain sexual beings. 27 In contrast, the menopausal woman is (re)transformed into a prepubescent child. Beauvoir repeats this conception later, comparing ageing women to infants who enter a form of second childhood, describing their status in the public realm as that of 'éternelles mineures' in stark contrast to the evolutionary progression undergone by men (p. 111). It may be Beauvoir's emphasis on the 'different st/ages of man' that partly accounts for the effacement of women in La Vieillesse: as eternal children anyway, unlike men who are presented as enduring a pronounced loss of economic and social status, women do not struggle with the enforced regression to a dependant, infantile state that characterizes the ageing process for Beauvoir, since they have effectively never left it. The fact that woman's primary identity is not portrayed as located in her professional occupation, but, rather, in the domestic realm and family relations in that she is more emotionally involved with children and grandchildren, acts as an antidote to the ageing process by underscoring her personal sense of continuity. We come back to the potential usefulness of 'life cycle' as a term of reference: if we can extricate woman from the confines of Beauvoirean linear heteronormativity, it is surely this Janus-like characterization of her as embracing both past and future in a form of intergenerational exchange and experiential/intellectual accruement that holds the key to promoting the pleasures of ageing. 28 26 Kathleen Woodward, 'Performing Age, Performing Gender', NWSA Journal, 18 (2006), 162-89 (p. 164). 27 As Elaine Marks comments: 'Old bodies, in texts by Simone de Beauvoir, are always feminine or feminized bodies'; 'Transgressing the (In)cont(in)ent Boundaries: The Body in Decline', in Simone de Beauvoir: Witness to a Century, ed. by Hélène Vivienne Wenzel (= special issue, Yale French Studies, 72 (1986)), pp. 180-200 (p. 194). 28

Internal reflections
Beauvoir repeatedly emphasizes that she is going to give a 'wrinkles and all' portrayal of old age and, for her, 'honesty' equates with pessimism and negativity -old age, it would appear, has few redeeming features. Beauvoir may recognize conceptually the intersectional and experiential multiplicity of ageing -'impossible d'enfermer cette pluralité d'expériences dans un concept ou même dans une notion' (p. 343) -yet that plurality is overwhelmingly filtered through a monosexual and monochrome prism: La Vieillesse seems unable to countenance the possibility that ageing is not traumatic per se. Remarkably, given Beauvoir's own endorsement of the intellectual and of its particular importance for women whose physical value, she argues, experiences a rapid depreciation after the age of thirty-five, 29 La Vieillesse makes little mention of the potential benefits of old age, of the palimpsestic layering of experience and knowledge -indeed, of selves -that old age brings, as different psychic temporalities coincide; chronological ageing is linear, but experiential ageing involves the accretion of different strata that coexist synchronically as well as diachronically. 30 Beauvoir fails to dwell on the cerebral or emotional joys of a mature mind, despite her professed desire to portray, with reference to old people, 'ce qui […] se passe réellement dans leur tête et dans leur coeur' (p. 8; my emphasis). In the chapter 'Temps, activité, histoire', the most personal chapter in the work, this perception of a non-diffuse temporality is illustrated in Beauvoir's characterization of conscious memorial function as a collection of isolated, distorted images of what never was, as a desire to escape the present, rather than infuse or amplify it; she views the past as a petrified series of blurred snapshots -'figé' is the typical Beauvoirean qualifier of 'le passé' -, not as engaging in an ongoing, nurturing relationship with the present. 31 Beauvoir's existential, masculinist emphasis on linear, future-oriented, consciously assumed 'projets' is ubiquitous in the work and may lead her to underplay the cumulative and affective pleasures of ageing; Beauvoir seems to blur the process of ageing with the state of old age, which accounts for both her tendency to write off female middle age as a corporeal no-man's-land and her non-treatment of ageing as incremental and evolutionary. The physiological degeneration accompanying senescence is inevitable, the 'internal' fearful response to it surely not: 'Pour chaque individu la vieillesse entraîne une dégradation qu'il redoute' (p. 51). As Chris Gilleard contends, while 'denying the objective situation of one's ageing is bad faith', this need 29 Beauvoir, Le Deuxième Sexe, II,457. 30 Constance Rooke coins the term Vollendungsroman [the novel of completion] to complement the Bildungsroman in order to characterize novels that present ageing characters seeking 'some kind of affirmation in the face of loss' based on beliefs other than 'that only time matters and only actions count'; Constance Rooke, 'Old Age in Contemporary Fiction: A New Paradigm of Hope', in Handbook of the Humanities and Aging, ed. by Thomas R. Cole, David D. Van Tassel, and Robert Kastenbaum (New York: Springer, 1992), pp. 241-57 (pp. 248, 250). The term 'Voll' thus has not just a meaning of completion or winding up/down, but also intimates a form of fulfilment, of experiential abundance stripped of the trappings of power and status. 31 It is when discussing habit that Beauvoir acknowledges the potential coexistence of different chronological planes. Habit's very repetitiveness links it to the past, anchors it in its present performance, and guarantees its reproduction in the future, thus conforming to the Beauvoirean existentialist valorization of 'projet' (pp. 569-70). not stand in contradistinction to 'avoiding or refusing to be characterised by age -to be objectified by one's oldness'. 32 La Vieillesse maintains not simply that there is a disparity between, on the one hand, our psychic, memorial, imaginary internal self and, on the other, our visible, physiological, external self, but that the 'noyau' of most older people is experienced as relatively static and fixed. Beauvoir refers to our inner 'permanence' (p. 354) that is enclosed within a degenerating shell, yet, as we have seen, even that internal coincidence of selves seems to deny the benefits of emotional, experiential, and intellectual sedimentation: she represents our inner 'moi' as a type of ageless 'immuable essence' (p. 442), or one that we strongly identify with a specific earlier period in our life. It is thus the physical perception of the declining external othered self by the external Other that most strongly reminds us of our age according to Beauvoir -and our reflection in the mirror provides that same refracted perception -which is why the social framework or context that accommodates older people is of such interest to her, as in her discussion on social care and hospices, or in her representation of ageing female sexuality. 33 While an existential divide between the pour soi and pour autrui is inevitable, the publication of more representative and optimistic 'internal' counternarratives of senescence would surely help bridge any 'unrealizability' or non-coincidence that the aged individual experiences between their sense of self and others' external impression of them.
In the second section of the work, in which Beauvoir cites from various privileged male authors, who, she contends, cope better with old age than other demographic groups (p. 472), we encounter a selection of solipsistic, elegiac accounts on the ageing process from writers ranging from Victor Hugo to Marcel Jouhandeau. One of the rare women authors quoted, Mme de Sévigné, predictably perceives ageing in terms of diminished beauty as the mirror makes another appearance in relation to women: 'qu'on nous fît voir dans un miroir le visage que nous aurons ou que nous avons à soixante ans, en le comparant à celui de vingt, nous tomberions à la renverse et nous aurions peur de cette figure' (p. 349). For women, the self, viewed via the mirror, is the internalized viewpoint of the condemnatory masculine Other. Beauvoir too is horrified when looking at earlier images of ageing female film stars in their youth -almost as if confronted with the uncanny, or an inverted version of The Picture of Dorian Gray: 'je tressaille en retrouvant dans les films ou les journaux d'autrefois leur fraîcheur oubliée' (p. 354). 34 She definitively 32 Chris Gilleard, 'On Age, Authenticity and the Ageing Subject', International Journal of Ageing and Later Life, 16 (2022), 73-96 (p. 89). 33 Yet we can all of us see and feel the incremental bodily changes ageing brings, with or without a mirror. In his chapter 'Quel âge avez-vous?' (in Une ethnologie de soi: le temps sans âge (Paris: Seuil, 2014), pp. 37-47), Marc Augé comments on the existentially significant semantic variations between English and French in expressing age, the latter providing evidence of the Beauvoirean écart separating 'être' from 'avoir'/'paraître ' (p. 37). 34 One is reminded of Susan Sontag's observation in 'Melancholy Objects', pp. 39-64, in On Photography (London: Penguin, 1979): 'Photography is the inventory of mortality.
[…] Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people ' (pp. 54-55). shackles the ageing woman to a future of abject -in both senses of the termwretchedness, employing her favourite specular verb: 'Ni dans la littérature ni dans la vie, je n'ai rencontré aucune femme qui considérât la vieillesse avec complaisance ' (p. 362; my emphasis). This interrelation of life and literature points up Beauvoir's assimilation of the two in terms of reciprocal influences, an assimilation illustrated by the binary structure of the book, which looks first at examples of ageing in life from an external, socio-political perspective, then in literature, from a more internal, philosophical angle. This reciprocal influence makes her own work's lack of contestatory -or at times simply accurate -content appear all the more a missed opportunity: if, in the rare representations of ageing we encounter, we are only presented with literary narratives of decline that are firmly anchored in a promotion of corporeal youthfulness and the social censorship surrounding the expression of senescent sexuality, our own life narratives risk comprising the same predictably anticlimactic dénouement. In Vie, vieillesse et mort d'une femme du peuple, Didier Eribon recognizes the key role literature can play in facilitating a sense of social embeddedness and connection among marginalized (and, in our case, older) readers: 'Toute catégorie dominée, stigmatisée […] s'adresse aux livres, aux bibliothèques, aux images et aux représentations disponibles.' 35 In Le Deuxième Sexe ii, Beauvoir had been surprisingly conventional in her assessment of the components of Great Literature, suggesting in 1949 that a woman writer could never write with the same degree of existentialist angst as, for example, Franz Kafka, having never been fully participant in the human condition. 36 That apparent refutation of a specifically female life experience as existentially engaged and representative finds echoes in La Vieillesse twenty years later, in that Beauvoir overwhelmingly refers to male writers when discussing the ageing process, and presumably locates herself among them, since she appears reluctant to differentiate her own experiences from a gendered perspective in the work -even if the text's very existence testifies to the ongoing socio-political activity/activism of the older woman. It is also important to remember that this is a polemical work, demanding profound social changes to France's treatment of its ageing population and could thus be seen to forego individual diversity in favour of generational advocacy. Beauvoir does not think of herself as conventionally feminine -we remember her pride in her father's comment in Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée, a father with whom she identifies completely at this point in the text: 'Papa disait volontiers: "Simone a un cerveau d'homme. Simone est un homme."' 37 And it was Sartre who raised the possibility that Beauvoir's gender constituted an influential factor in her upbringing and life opportunities, an observation that had not occurred to her 35  previously and that spurred her to write Le Deuxième Sexe. 38 As Beauvoir claims in Tout compte fait, La Vieillesse too is anchored in the autobiographical: 'Femme, j'ai voulu élucider ce qu'est la condition féminine; aux approches de la vieillesse, j'ai eu envie de savoir comment se définit la condition des vieillards.' 39 The expression here is revealing: while Beauvoir cannot deny her womanhood or her drive to dissect the patriarchal conditions in which it evolves -however unrepresentative she may be 40 -she is much more distanced and tentative about acknowledging her relationship to old age, echoing her implicit self-designation in the Ahrne film's title as a tourist exploring the uncharted terrain of old age or as a Sunday stroller visiting a region unfamiliar to her.
While the text is strangely impersonal in its paucity of autobiographical references, it may be in its overwhelmingly negative representation of female ageing that it is at its most personal, at its most implicitly revelatory. The reader cannot but perceive an anguished displacement in her condemnation of the ageing woman to a celibate non-personhood. Beauvoir's own existentialist valorization of future-oriented projects, and her sexual prejudices about the possibility for ageing women to be attractive and to have a fulfilling sex life -and we know from both her fiction and autobiographical writing that this was a leitmotif of her work 41 -, imbue this putatively representative account of ageing with its own disfiguring filter. Beauvoir's self-identification with the masculine and the intellectual means that her 'internal', asynchronous core self, is not made textually available to other women. A more pedestrian interpretation may simply be that, even if, as an older woman at the time of writing, Beauvoir presents herself as conforming to the stereotype of the senescent visionary or 'Sage auréolé[e]' (p. 10), highlighting her epistemological authority on all things ageing (p. 598), she is blinded to her fundamental conservatism vis-à-vis certain topics, proving her own adherence to the pronouncement that 'les vieillards sont amenés à se ranger du côté des conservateurs' (p. 509). 42 While it is important to emphasize the innovativeness of this ambitious study, in which Beauvoir shines the spotlight on the shameful social neglect of older people in France some years before age studies became a politically significant discipline, its sexual and class partisanship means that it fails to challenge numerous stereotypes that feed into our preconceptions of ageing. 42 La Vieillesse reads as if it were written in the same decade as Le Deuxième Sexe, not over twenty years later during a feminist revolution in France. The social objectives are radical; the representation of ageing is not. Interestingly, in the later publication Tout compte fait, Beauvoir admits that her actual lived experience of old age has brought very few changes to her existence (p. 47), whether thanks to friendships with younger people such as Sylvie Le Bon or her full and fulfilling life, proving the aptness of her thesis that 'en nous c'est l'autre qui est vieux' and the more optimistic perception of senescence subtending my article.
Beauvoir rails against 'la culture bourgeoise' and 'la pensée bourgeoise', affirming that old age 'n'est pas seulement un fait biologique, mais un fait culturel ' (pp. 8, 10, 20). In other words, her scarcely veiled antipathy towards the ageing female body validates her own thesis: she is a product of that same social class (pp. 455, 535) and manifests the same distaste and representative effacement towards ageing women in general as the coterie of middle-class male writers with whom she so clearly identifies.
Published during a period of radical feminist expression, La Vieillesse makes for a depressingly conventional read from the perspective of women's emancipation, and begs the question: Why do we seem only able to think of ageing in terms of politically infused binaries -young/old, active/passive, productive/unproductive, mobile/inert, attractive/repugnant, progressing/declining -, thereby repressing any poetic otherness in favour of a circumscribed and distorted actuality? 43 Why not acknowledge, as Huston does, that woman has within her multiple generations, that the intergenerational networks, to which Beauvoir sees the ageing woman as central, may be viewed as giving physical form to some of the psychic layers of self-continuity and self-connectedness mentioned earlier? Beauvoir seems unwilling to take her own advice despite her acknowledgement of the damage inflicted on older people by their socially willed desexualization (p. 386) and resultant confinement to a continent gris, to paraphrase Woodward. 44 Relatedly, it may be that French and francophone women's writing too needs to come of/to age. If ageing is a natural process, it is also profoundly cultural, not simply in the sense that our experience of it is influenced by environmental factors related to poverty, employment, diet, and so forth, but that the grand narratives we read about senescence contribute to our own internalized vision of normative ageing paradigms, paradigms that centre around decline, distaste, and degeneration. Simone de Beauvoir is acutely aware of the formative role played by our situation in influencing how we -as women in particular -respond to and internalize discourses of ageing. And in this way, Beauvoir's work on ageing is avant-garde in that it values the life lessons literature can teach us, a valorization also reflected in the multidisciplinary epistemologies that now form part of gerontology's scope. Yet if La Vieillesse figures class in the living and literary accounts of the end-of-life ageing it relates, and how it plays out in each individual's experience of age -be that in the misery of the hospice residents of La Salpêtrière, or Jouhandeau's account of his mystical embrace of senescence from the comfort and independence of his own home -, it profoundly disfigures the significance of gender. 43 In 'Instant Repulsion: Decrepitude, the Mirror Stage, and the Literary Imagination' (The Kenyon Review, n.s. 5 (1983), 43-66), Kathleen Woodward unquestioningly accepts that we all find the ageing body repulsive and adopts a dichotomized approach to this 'double bind': 'For, if to embrace our mirror image in decrepitude is to embrace death, we deny our life. Is it not healthier (that is life-sustaining) to reject that image? I would argue it might very well be' (p. 60). 44 Kathleen Woodward, Ageing and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 193.