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You only begin to discover the difference between what you really are, your real self, and your appearance, when you get a bit older . . . . A whole dimension of life suddenly slides away and you realize that what in fact you've been using to get attention has been what you look like . . . . It's totally and absolutely impersonal. It really is a most salutary and fascinating experience to go through, shedding it all. Growing old is really extraordinarily interesting.
-Doris Lessing, Interview with Josephine Hendin (85)
How much are we aged by biology, and how muchby culture? The field of "ageism," first articulated in 1968 by sociologist Robert Butler, asks this question. Butler defines ageism as "a process of systematic stereotyping or discrimination against people because they are old, just as racism and sexism accomplish with skin color and gender. Ageism allows the younger generations to see older people as different from themselves; thus they subtly cease to identify with their elders as human beings" (480). While feminists began to develop a politics of "age identity" in the 1980s, Doris Lessing began interrogating the intersection of gendered and aged identity much earlier in her novel The Summer Before the Dark (1973).1 Besides challenging existing power structures in relation to gender issues, providing an ideological framework supporting the self-conscious affirmation of gender identity, and placing women's feelings of unfulfillment at the door of culture, The Summer Before the Dark offers a positive paradigm for aging. It shows that accepting the aging process without denying its physical changes can negate and challenge sociopolitical stereotypes that associate aging with contempt and decline. Therefore, Doris Lessing is one of the early writers who represents a gendered process of aging on top of other determinants in her character's self-quest.
Throughout The Summer Before the Dark, Kate Brown considers every aspect of her life in terms of the selfperpetuating sociocultural determinants of class, gender, and age. The forces of middle-class ideology, acceptable behavior for a woman as wife and mother, and the crisis of aging are all cultural roles from which she cannot escape. Rather, she learns that these roles form her "self." Critics who have read this novel as an archetypal journey of an...