|
01 November 2011
Posted in
GPSS Blog -
Graduate Life
Photo by Kate Beatong - harkavagrant.com
If you’re a graduate student, there’s a chance you’ll celebrate your 29th birthday just as you’re starting (or finishing) your dissertation. Keep calm. The world is still your oyster, and— according to the latest scientific data on the brain—you’re still in “shipshape” form intellectually.
But if you’re a female character in a late 19th or early 20th century novel, you should panic. Your chances of happiness are slim and you could be destined for death or spinsterhood. The latter is preferable, of course, but the choice is hardly yours to make.
Two examples spring to mind:
“Her vivid head, relieved against the dull tints of the crowd, made her more conspicuous than in a ball-room, and under her dark hat and veil she regained the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing. Was it really eleven years, Selden found himself wondering, and had she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her rivals credited her?”
--A description of Lily Bart from Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth.
“It sometimes happens, that a woman is handsomer at twenty-nine than she was ten years before; and, generally speaking, if there has been neither ill health nor anxiety, it is a time of life at which scarcely any charm is lost. It was so with Elizabeth...”
--A description of Elizabeth Eliot from Jane Austen’s Persuasion.
One novel is a tragedy, the other a comedy. In both, the unmarried 29-year-old woman is cast as a living fossil. Worse, she’s a drain on her relations’ resources. But those were the Bad Old Days, and life is different now. Except, that’s not really true, at least, not for millions of women around the world.
Grad school and freedom. I’m always confusing the two.
Written by Penelope Geng.
You can write for GPSS Blog too and get paid!
