"The Tyranny of Age": Godwin's St. Leon and the Nineteenth-Century Longevity Narrative

Abstract

This essay reads William Godwin's novel St. Leon (1799) in relation to contemporaneous medicalizing discourses concerned with the elimination of old age. I argue that in St. Leon, a speculative case study of a disastrously unbounded life, Godwin recants his earlier paean to immortality in Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793-98) by undermining the solitary subject for whom senescence is a symptom of political tyranny. St. Leon therefore signals an acute transitional moment between late eighteenth-century thought and incipient Romanticism, and marks the first example of the nineteenth-century longevity narrative, wherein the finitude of individual lifespan exists in strained reciprocity with the perpetual succession of species.

Retirement in Utopia: William Morris's Senescent Socialism

“…In addition to Old Hammond, the Grumbler, and the prematurely aged worker, the narrator identifies himself as "hard on fifty-six"-not elderly by Victorian standards, but surprising to the inhabitants of Nowhere, who bluntly state that "you look rather old for your age" (56). The number of old men who occupy positions of central importance in News from Nowhere-from the protagonist to his primary interlocutor-goes against the grain of Victorian narratives that privilege youth, such as the bildungsroman and the marriage plot.…”

“…Andrea Charise provides a different reading in "The Tyranny of Age," where she coins the term "longevity narrative" to identify a pattern in texts that represent old age as "a state into which one may enter, languish, exist, or reverse regardless of chronological age." 56 By doing so, "nineteenth-century representations of senescence were more likely than their predecessors to regard old age as a comparably open and even nomadic condition of being, one more susceptible to the influence of medicine, philosophy, and economics." 57 Charise's account of the mutability of old age provides a way of revising Jameson's claim about longevity and the class struggle: for if living longer entails an opening rather than closing of possibility, longevity also provides a powerful symbol for the reorganization of naturalized social hierarchies.…”