Arts & Sciences Events
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Arts & Sciences
[PAST EVENT] GSWS Brownbag with Melanie Dawson
September 23, 2015
12pm - 1pm
Please join us for Professor Melanie Dawson's talk titled, "Women and the Revision Age: Longevity and It's Representation in the 1920s."
What does it mean to grow older during the "age of youth," as the 1920s was often called? At what age was one old (or at least, older)? What did aging look like, in the eyes of writers and illustrators? How did gender affect perceptions of aging and interventions into it? This talk examines desires and questions about aging from the early twentieth century, interrogating textual examples from the 1920s and from Edith Wharton's oeuvre in particular. How Wharton and her contemporaries imagined older age (as well as the innovations and controversies surrounding it) sheds light on early twentieth-century constructions of womanhood. From examples found in fiction, advertising, and film, I explore visions of aging that depict age's cultural instability, its availability for manipulation, and a modern unsettling of existing age-bound categories.
What does it mean to grow older during the "age of youth," as the 1920s was often called? At what age was one old (or at least, older)? What did aging look like, in the eyes of writers and illustrators? How did gender affect perceptions of aging and interventions into it? This talk examines desires and questions about aging from the early twentieth century, interrogating textual examples from the 1920s and from Edith Wharton's oeuvre in particular. How Wharton and her contemporaries imagined older age (as well as the innovations and controversies surrounding it) sheds light on early twentieth-century constructions of womanhood. From examples found in fiction, advertising, and film, I explore visions of aging that depict age's cultural instability, its availability for manipulation, and a modern unsettling of existing age-bound categories.