Affirmations of Aging Masculinity in Victorian Fiction: Older Men at the Margins

In Great Expectations (1861) and The Warden (1855), Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, respectively, interrogate the impact of later life on their male protagonists. While the life course beyond middle age in the nineteenth century was often articulated through narratives of decline, men’s specific dramatic downward shift in status and reduction in cultural power (especially after a life of privileged status) could be painfully emasculating. Although both authors engage with the social stigmas with which Victorian older age was associated, they also effectively re-energize aging masculinity when vigor, virility, and status were perceived to wane. The alienation and physical frailty typically assumed to belong to midlife and older age are renegotiated into potentially pleasurable facets of later life. Trollope and Dickens celebrate instances of eccentricity and deviation from dominant masculine ideals, resulting in a type of masculinity largely specific to older age. These novelists identify pleasure in the very qualities that might be perceived as the afflictions of older age. Thus, in Great Expectations, the “Aged Parent’s” cheerful dependency emerges as a point of mutual satisfaction and affectionate exchange, and in Trollope’s Warden, the gentle timidity and sensitivity of Mr. Harding become an index of his care for others and emotional depth. For both older male protagonists, being out of step with idealized, dominant masculinity is constructed as a productive experience.