In this reading, I was particularly struck by Janna’s cognitive dissonance around caring for Mrs. Fowler. She consistently describes feeling both put off by Mrs. Fowler and being fascinated with her. I think this is a consistent conflict in how we talk about people who are aging–we claim to admire them for their wisdom, but also feel disgust around their physical states.
This disgust is attached to smell in particular; Janna describes over and over again her aversion to the smells of Mrs. Fowler’s apartment. She notes the way the smell sticks to her: “I could feel the smelly air of Mrs. Fowler’s place on my skin and hair,” and then details the process of washing that smell off, in the luxury of her bathroom(21). There’s some clear guilt around the juxtaposition of her perfectly-designed, well-kempt bathroom and Mrs. Fowler’s dingy, dirty, damp flat: “I came out of the bath and stood in the doorway wrapped in my bath sheet and looked at the bathroom and thought about Mrs. Fowler. She has never had hot water. Has lived in that filthy hole, with cold water, since before the First World War”(22). Even in Janna’s attempts to wash herself clean of Mrs. Fowler’s aftereffects, she finds herself stuck thinking about her new companion. This train of thought continues, as Janna grapples with her simultaneous desires to leave Mrs. Fowler and to continue to care for her. She thinks, “I wish I had not responded to her, and I was wondering all evening how to escape. In the morning I woke up and it was as if I was facing some terrible fate. Because I knew I was going to look after Mrs. Fowler. To an extent, anyway”(22). After having come to this conclusion, Janna’s attitude towards the smell of Mrs. Fowler’s flat changes, too. She once again articulates her disgust at the smell, but then notes “a sharp sweet smell which [she] didn’t know”(23). I would argue that her initial revulsion is less so an honest reflection of how Janna feels about Mrs. Fowler, but an ingrained societal response to older people. Janna is supposed to be disgusted, so she is, but as she allows herself to actually see Mrs. Fowler in her entirety, beyond being an “infirm” older body(20) (as opposed to Janna’s own “solid firm” body(22)), some feeling of adoration creeps in. Like that “sharp sweet smell,” Janna struggles to name the adoration, but its presence is clear(23). We first see Janna’s shame around her affection for Mrs. Fowler in her thought process while at a dinner with Joyce, after having first met Mrs. Fowler: “I was full of revulsion. The sour, dirty smell was in my clothes and hair…We had a good dinner at Alfredo’s and talked. I said nothing about Mrs. Fowler, of course, yet I was thinking of her all the time”(13). Janna knows that her world is structured so as to maintain the invisibility of older women, and so “of course” she would not make Mrs. Fowler, or her interest in Mrs. Fowler, visible to Joyce. I imagine there’s fear here–that if Janna is visibly attached to someone invisible, that she will also become invisible, or conversely, that if Mrs. Fowler is brought to visibility through her connection to Janna, Janna will be associated with the disgust that motivates us to hide older people. When she prompts Joyce to include older women in their Female Images issue of Lilith, Joyce’s reaction confirms Janna’s assumption that to bring Mrs. Fowler and other older women into visibility would bring judgment: “I said this to Joyce, and I watched a series of reactions in her: first, surprise. Then shock, small movements of head and eyes said she was alerting herself to danger. Then she, as it were, switched herself off, became vague, and her eyes turned away from me”(18-19). Joyce’s reaction shows that to bring older people into visibility is so taboo that it’s visceral–Joyce does not immediately jump to logic or to rationale to defend her point, but expresses a physical fear first. Janna, then, is suspended in between this visceral fear and avoidance of aging, reinforced by her interactions with people her age and younger, and her own visceral fascination with Mrs. Fowler, reinforced further by each of their interactions.
Coming to Age 