The Other within Me: The Existential Ambiguity of Old Age in Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor and Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey

Abstract

This article seeks to analyse Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) by Elizabeth Taylor and the award-winning Elizabeth Is Missing (2014) by Emma Healey with reference to the existential-phenomenological accounts of old age and aging elaborated by Simone de Beauvoir in The Coming of Age and Jean Améry in On Aging: Revolt and Resignation. It is argued that both novels bring to prominence what may be described in Beauvoir’s terms as the lived experience of existential ambiguity, which haunts the elderly female protagonists as their inner sense of self comes increasingly into conflict with both their physical changes and the identity thrust upon them by others. Taylor’s Mrs Palfrey, along with the other elderly residents of the Claremont Hotel in London, and Healey’s dementia-ridden Maud are caught in a struggle to resist the social stigma of old age, which puts constraints on their freedom of self-determination, while simultaneously growing estranged from themselves and external reality. In examining this ambiguity, the article accords particular attention to its manifestations in the characters’ interpersonal relationships, altered way of being-in-the-world and experience of the body.

Keywords

• old age
• existential
• ambiguity
• taylor
• healey
• beauvoir
• améry