Trauma and Aging

This dissertation examines the aging woman trope and the idea of the "trauma and aging" in theatre and performance. I argue that the pervasiveness of negative imagery associated with aging women as well as decline narratives of age contribute to individual as well as cultural trauma that necessitates active resistance and creative responses to the violence enacted upon the aging. I maintain that trauma and aging is not solely an individual phenomenological experience resulting from a singular moment of violence or traumatic event, but can be the result of insidious or everyday trauma. I argue that identifying negative images helps to identify stereotype threats and decline narratives to distinguish them from individualized stories of aging and fuller, more expansive narratives/experiences. The project engages literary theory, theatre studies, and age studies as well as theories of violence and trauma to examine the aging female trope as a popular literary and theatrical trope within Anglo-American media. I analyze the dramatic text or script, the text or script in performance, and the relationship of the text or performance to its social, political, and cultural context as well as how the objects (images of aging women) might offer counter-examples to the decline narrative of age. The primary goal of the project is to provide tools with which to unpack and analyze other objects regarding ageism and potentially identify ways that views of aging women are circulated in society to a similar effect. The analysis follows a chronology of representations beginning with Albee's "Three Tall Women" and continues with textual and performance analysis of Paula Vogel's "The Oldest Profession" and Caryl Churchill's "Escaped Alone." Each chapter in this dissertation presents its own research question(s) and case study analysis that advances my argument with regard to 1) the so-called experience of "trauma and aging," 2) how images in theatre and performance have supported negative stereotypes of aging, and 3) how counter-examples from theatre and performance might broaden the conversation, perception, and awareness about the experience of aging, particularly for women. The goal of the project is to go beyond simply identifying plays and performances where stereotypes and tropes reinforce, as Ann David Basting points out, the "stubbornly persistent" decline narrative of age. The project seeks to complicate the discussion about aged figures in theatre and performance expand the conversation to offer counter-examples that contribute to an archive of aging narratives that offer fuller, more expansive views aging. These conversations are crucial to the humanities not only because theatre scholars have largely ignored the discussion of aging, but also particularly in this social-cultural moment when ageism, particularly against older women, remains a pervasive and dangerous human rights violation.