American Modernity and the Narrative Arcs of Aging

This chapter surveys American modernity’s attention on the charting of age categories within families, where norms suffusing age are used as a means of creating the foundations of social inclusion. In their depiction of characters who age in anomalous fashion, modern American fictions interrogate constructions of age as sites of conflict and as a means of “othering” the non-conforming body. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s tale “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (1922) and William Faulkner’s short story “The Fire and the Hearth” (1942), the case studies discussed here, reveal the unusual and therefore socially unassimilable aging process of main characters. Fitzgerald’s representation of an inverted aging process disrupts familial understandings of age, while Faulkner’s depiction of a family member whose combined age and race place him outside recognizable identity categories in the deep South. When normative expectations about aging are confounded, the place-holding effects of familial time are revealed, alongside the opportunities and limitations attached to them. Such fictions raise the possibility that collective understandings of time and age function as constructions that fail those individuals who resist norms and who consequently appear as communal disruptors.