Mid-Life Conversations by wcceh

Mid-Life Conversations

Compiled & edited by Mark Jackson and Fred Cooper Produced by Lucy Hodges

Midlife Conversations

Compiled and edited by Mark Jackson and Fred Cooper Produced by Lucy Hodges

Contents

__________________________________________________ Introduction by Mark Jackson

Discussing Middle Age with my Cat, by Joe Ollmann

The Five Stages of Middle Age, by Ben Hutchinson

Midlife in Historical Perspective, by Steven Mintz

Unemployment and Everyday Life: An Edwardian Midlife Crisis?, by JulieMarie Strange

Facing the Music: Midlife Perspectives in European, American, and Chinese Films, by Michael Clark

Footnotes to Midlife, by Mark Jackson

The Concealment of Mid-life: From Physical Jerks to Testicular Implants, by James F. Stark

A Manufactured Crisis, by Louise Foxcroft

Dangerous Years? Historicizing the Male Climacterium, by Hans-Georg Hofer

The Birthday Party, by Lucy Hodges

Midlife Provocations, by Hugh McCann

The Midlife Happiness Curve? More Like a Line, by Susan Krauss Whitbourne

101

Are Midlife Transitions Always Crises? A Couple Therapist's View, by Daphne de Marneffe

107

Life Transitions, by Kazuki Yamada

115

(Not) the final word, by Fred Cooper

119

Introduction Mark Jackson __________________________________________________

According to the Canadian anthropologist, Margaret Lock, middle age was the last stage of the life course to be discovered. Certainly, the features and boundaries of childhood and old age were studied and mapped out well before careful scientific, medical, or political attention was paid to

Mark Jackson doesn’t like cricket, he loves it; but not as much as he loves Siobhán, Ciara, Riordan, and Conall, who have carried him safely through middle age. Now entering the autumn – perhaps even winter - of his life, he realises, not for the first time, how futile the midlife pursuit of career, or wealth, or selfindulgence can be.

the middle-aged, at least in Western cultures. In some ways, a lack of interest in adulthood reflected a demographic reality. Prior to the early 1900s, people rarely lived long enough to have a discrete midlife, one that was clearly separable from other life stages. As life expectancy increased amongst affluent Westerners, an extended period of adulthood became possible, one that began to equal childhood and old age for its significance within the modern life cycle. It was only from the early twentieth century that middle age and midlife became meaningful and popular terms. Limited attention to the middle years – at least until the decades after the Second World War - also reflected the fact that middle age persistently defied straightforward definition. While the start of childhood is marked by birth and the end of old age by the biological certainty of death, the frontiers of middle age have always been more fluid. In an attempt to clarify – or standardize - the boundaries of mature adulthood, some mid-twentieth-century writers claimed that middle age constituted what the Canadian physician William Osler had earlier referred to as a

‘fixed period’ between the ages of 40 and 60. Measuring middle age in this way was reinforced by rigid, chronological accounts of the life course, evident in birthday cards marking the years and decades lived – and implicitly those yet to live. For others, middle age signified not a precise period of time, but a state of mind or set of life-course experiences related to balancing work, family, and leisure. In both cases, further increases in life expectancy, changing family structures, and altered working practices shifted the boundaries and meanings of middle age. By the end of the twentieth century, the prime of life – and perhaps the onset of middle age – was commonly taken to be 50, rather than 40. The manifestations of middle age have varied significantly according to historical conditions. Wearied by physical occupation and the uncertainties of the labour market, working-class men in the middle years of the twentieth century were regarded as already old by their forties – that is, before the onset of middle age amongst the Western middle classes. Accounts of midlife have also been shaped by gender. Women’s middle years have been persistently reckoned by the rhythms of a biological clock; and their later years are thought to be dominated by the hormonal imbalances, physical changes, and emotional unsteadiness associated with menopause or `the change of life’. While men have also been plagued by a male menopause or climacteric, typified by declining virility and a range of health-related challenges, the more muted character of the change of life in men has generally rendered it a less obvious attribute of midlife. Focusing merely on biology can be misleading. Experiences of biological transitions across the life course have been mediated by gendered notions of domestic duties, educational aspirations, and occupational accomplishments. In women, middle age has been traditionally defined not merely by menstrual changes, but also by the departure of children from home, in some cultures by the transition from mother to

grandmother, and only more recently by retirement from the workplace. Men’s experiences have undoubtedly been transformed by expectations of greater domestic responsibilities, at least within the heteronormative framework of marriage. But middle age in men continues to be understood largely in terms of the patterns and rhythms of work beyond the home - rhythms that are shaped by economic and bureaucratic conventions related to starting paid employment, taxation, the age of retirement, and pension rights. For both men and women, the contours of middle age have always been fixed by factors beyond their immediate control. Although sometimes framed in terms of incipient decline, middle age has often been regarded as the most stable – or least remarkable - phase of the life course. While childhood and adolescence have been characterised as periods of evolution and growth, old age is regarded primarily in terms of involution and infirmity, of failing senses and cognitive deterioration. By contrast, for much of the twentieth century nothing much was thought to happen – physically, psychologically, or emotionally during what some writers referred to as `middlescence’. Yet, it became apparent to many Western psychologists and clinicians during the years after the Second World War that middle age could be a period of considerable change - and often crisis. Midlife was a point at which physical and mental health were compromised by work stress, financial constraints, marital tensions, the pressures of parenting adolescent children and caring for ageing parents, and the challenges of coping with the visible changes – balding, greying, and spreading – associated with middle age. According to marriage guidance counsellors and psychotherapists on both sides of the Atlantic, a consequent sense of disillusionment – as well as a coincident fear of impending death – led to midlife crises, to forms of behaviour that threatened to destabilize the fragile ties that bound families, as well as individuals, together through their middle years.

According to feminist writers in the 1970s and 1980s, the `predictable passages’ of life - as American author Gail Sheehy put it in 1976 – did not lead inevitably to crises of identity and feelings of despair. On the contrary, transitions and tipping points in the life cycle could trigger personal growth and self-fulfillment, creativity and transformation, freedom and contentment. Nevertheless, it was the crisis model that largely dominated late twentieth-century formulations of midlife, evident in literary and cinematic and explorations of adult life. Post-war novels by Sloan Wilson (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit), David Ely (Seconds), Joseph Heller (Something Happened and Good as Gold), and David Nobbs (The Death of Reginald Perrin) caricatured the perils of the professional man struggling to escape from the stultifying conformity of the corporate rat race through duplicity and infidelity. By contrast, Marilyn French (The Women’s Room), Simone de Beauvoir (The Woman Destroyed), and Doris Lessing (The Summer before the Dark and To Room Nineteen) highlighted the ways in which women were trapped within – but might yet escape from – the patriarchal structuring of work and home. Films directed by Akira Kurosawa (Ikiru), Roberto Rossellini, (Journey to Italy), Billy Wilder (The Seven Year Itch), and Ingmar Bergman (Scenes from a Marriage) similarly traced the contours of midlife discontent, often dwelling on the relational, rather than individual, drivers and manifestations of ageing awkwardly through the middle years. First presented at an informal event hosted by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter, the following contributions require no detailed introduction. Indeed, to introduce them in any depth would be to undermine their autonomy and authority. Personal and professional, engaged and conversational, conventional and creative, graphic and textual, the articulations of middle age collected here stress that there has never been a singular narrative of

midlife. Instead, they reveal not only the diverse middle ages experienced by men and women across time, but also the richness of creative scholarship in this area.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to the Wellcome Trust for funding the event that led to this collection: Mark Jackson, Senior Investigator Award, `Lifestyle, health and disease: changing concepts of balance in modern medicineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, Grant No. 100601/Z/12Z; Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Grant No. 203109/Z/16/Z.

Discussing Middle Age with my Cat Joe Ollmann ________________________________________________________________

The Five Stages of Middle Age Ben Hutchinson In 1969, in a book enticingly entitled On

Ben Hutchinson is doing his best to come to terms with middle age by writing about it, but he is not sure that it is working. Readers can judge for themselves by consulting The Midlife Mind: Literature and the Art of Ageing (Reaktion, 2020).

Death and Dying, the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross established what have been known ever since as the five stages of grief. 1 Abbreviated collectively to the acronym DABDA, the five stages described what Kübler-Ross took to be

the standard phases through which dying patients necessarily passed: denial (and isolation), anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Whilst neither clear-cut nor rigorously successive – at any given time, the patient may move backwards and forwards between the various stages – they nevertheless offered a powerful model for one of the most overwhelming of all emotions, rapidly gaining traction in popular, if not always in professional, discourse. Perhaps the most important reason for the success of this model was that it implicitly viewed death as a process, since in doing so it implied that one may yet come to terms with it, that life, in due course, may yet continue. Time may not heal everything, but – crucially – it does offer serenity. Can the same be said of middle age? If grief, in Kübler-Ross’s model, mourns the mortality of the body, middle age mourns the mortality of the self. It represents a kind of incipient form of death, bringing with it the first unmistakeable intimations of mortality as the brute finitude of life – long observed in others, but only now integrated into the self – slowly dawns. Physically speaking, time precisely does not offer hope in the case of middle age: things can only get worse, not better. Psychologically, however, the standard experience seems to be that as we get older we

learn to live with ageing more readily, as the memory of youth recedes ever more fuzzily into the distance. As with grief, then, acceptance – the final letter of the acronym – is the endgame of middle age.

Denial One of my most vivid memories as a child is of my father’s fortieth birthday party. I must have been ten years old – I have strikingly few memories of my childhood before then, so this one really stands out – and I had never consciously observed someone reaching this milestone before, my mother being three years younger. I remember how happy my father was, with his long, leonine hair swept back over his ears and his freckles catching the light as he beamed at the assembled well-wishers. The thing that bothered me, though – and the reason, no doubt, that it has stuck in my memory – was that everyone kept telling him that ‘life begins at forty’.2 I can still recall the feeling of bafflement that this produced in me: how could life ‘begin’ halfway through? Why now and not earlier? What had my father been doing for the last forty years? Now that I have reached that age myself, I can only smile at the literal-minded child I once was. If children don’t do irony, nor do they understand the ways we gently attempt to console each other for the inevitability of the human condition. The clichés of consolation are the disclaimers of denial: we tell each other that life is only just beginning precisely because it is not, precisely because it has now, undeniably, reached its middle phase. Forty-one and a half as I type these lines, I am exactly halfway through the life expectancy of the average English male. But to say that life merely continues at forty is hardly the stuff of inspiring birthday card sentiment. Denial, then, is the inevitable first phase of middle age. As the first hairs turn grey and fall out, as the first wrinkles creep across our faces like cracks in a mirror,

we do everything we can to avoid noticing. Vanity in the banal sense becomes vanitas in the baroque sense: like slaves at an imperial procession, our grey hairs whisper to us memento mori. We have surely all had the experience, as we look into the mirror, of seeing the skull beneath the skin – and we have all had the experience of trying to hide this from ourselves. Middle age, in this sense, functions as the very essence of human mortality: in order to experience it fully, we must deny it.

Anger When I myself turned forty, I did not, surprisingly, receive any cards telling me that life was now beginning. Perhaps this kind of gentle irony about middle age, as with so many other approaches to the topic, has gone out of fashion. Having married into a French family, however, what I did receive was a range of knowing comments about la crise de la quarantaine. Forty, then, is not only the age at which life begins; it is also the age of the midlife crisis. Why should this be? If thirty-five marks the middle of the biblical three score years and ten, there is an equally well-established tendency to locate the true turning point five years later. The staging post seems to be almost universal, emerging as it does beyond modernity, beyond the Judaeo-Christian culture of the West. Writing in fourteenth-century North Africa, for instance, the Arabic scholar Ibn Khaldûn stakes the claim in his classic history of the Islamic world, the Muqaddimah (1377): Reason and tradition make it clear that forty years mean the end of the increase of an individual’s powers and growth. When a man has reached the age of forty, nature stops growing for a while, then starts to decline. 3 The round number ‘forty’, however, is as much a psychological as a physiological staging post. When that bland little letter from the National Health Service drops,

unsolicited, into the morning letterbox – announcing that now you have reached your fifth decade you should have a check-up once a year – it is as though middle age itself has arrived, unsolicited, through the front door. In the terms of Roland Barthes, one could say that such an event constitutes the ‘caesura’ marking the beginning of the middle of life. Without such a moment, Barthes argues – he cites the much more dramatic example of the founder of the Trappist order of monks, Abbot Rancé, who according to legend at the age of 37 discovered the decapitated body of his mistress and immediately withdrew from society – we will of course physically still slide into middle age, but psychologically we will not be conscious of the transition. For Barthes, in other words, middle age is as much a state of mind as of body. 4 That such a state leads to anger as well as to denial is hardly a surprise. To be middle-aged is to be at the bottom bend of life’s U-shaped cultural cachet, neither nimbly young nor nobly old. The famous U-bend of the ‘happiness quotient’ of a Western life-span (see Figure 1) tells us that we are at our least happy, according to the statistics, between the ages of forty to fifty-five – which is to say, during the onset of middle age.

Figure 1: Happiness is a warm U 5

If such unhappiness is intuitively understandable - how can we not resent getting older? – it is also constitutive of the productive, positive side of middle age. Provoked by anger, we undertake new projects; prodded by pride, we find new energy, new ways of attempting to stay ‘young’. The clichés of the midlife crisis – the flashy new car, the trashy new partner – represent vulgar versions of this, overcompensations of the ageing libido. Channelled creatively, however, such energies result in some of the finest works of Western art. The anger of the midlife crisis can also, in short, be the precursor to midlife maturity.

Bargaining Whether we can take this step depends on our attitude towards ageing – an attitude that is itself, of course, always ageing. When young, we don’t feel the same way about the abstract notion of getting old as we do when it actually starts happening. Accepting the ageing process is itself a process, and one that involves constant

recalibration, constant reassessment of how we see ourselves. If middle age is defined, in contrast to youth and old age, by its incremental nature, then bargaining is an inevitable part of its psychology. Mathematically speaking, the very notion of being in the ‘middle’ of life can only ever be hypothetical, since of course we don’t know at what age we will die. As Barthes notes, the ‘middle of our life is obviously not an arithmetical point: how, at the moment of writing, could I know my life’s total duration at the moment of writing so precisely that I could divide it into two equal parts?’ 6 The shifting nature of this mid-point means that, for a time at least, renegotiation is always possible: am I still in the first half or have I now begun the second half of my life? Am I still ‘young’ or have I become ‘old’? If we are defined by the stories we tell ourselves, selfidentification on the spectrum of age is surely one of the most fundamental of our fictions. We can all recall wishing to be older when we were younger. At what point do we start wishing we were younger? The constant bargaining with the self that middle age occasions – I may be getting wrinkles but at least I now have children, I may have children but at least I now have greater status – amounts to a kind of Relativity Theory of ageing: time passes faster or slower depending on our (always shifting) perspective. Our place within the generations has a particularly strong influence in this regard: losing a parent makes us feel like we have shuffled up the mortal queue, but so, in a different way, does becoming one, if only because time now takes very visible form in the shape of our rapidly changing children. Ageing, in short, is anything but absolute. From the creative point of view, an increasing awareness of time passing can bring the sense of urgency necessary to undertake previously deferred projects, or indeed to begin new ones. Whether explicitly written about middle age or implicitly

inspired by middle age, examples of what one might term the ‘middle as muse’ punctuate the history of Western art and literature. For creativity is one of the central ways that humans combat mortality. We may be finite, but at least we can write a novel, or have children, or build a house; we may be mortal, but at least we can leave something behind. Yet this awareness of time passing can equally be perceived as paralysing, throwing a ruthless searchlight on everything that we have left undone, or done badly. Middle age can also, in other words, be a time of stasis.

Depression That such stasis can lead, if untreated, to an extended period of depression is one of the recurring experiences of middle age. The much-mythologized ‘crisis’ constitutes an attempt to shake oneself out of this stasis, but many of us don’t have the courage (or foolhardiness) to pursue it. As the initial energy of youth burns away, as relationships, career, and children settle in for the long haul, the danger of drifting into apathy and repetition – into existential ennui – is all too real. Lacking the jouissance of youth, middle age can tend to the tedious. No wonder we feel blocked at the bottom of life’s U-bend. Alongside this default position of taedium vitae, the principal mode of middleaged depression is disillusion. It is the privilege of youth to harbour that great cliché, ‘hopes and dreams’; the future-oriented impetus of youth – the Austrian author and Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry wrote of the ‘credit’ accorded to the young and withdrawn from the old – is unthinkable without them. 7 With the passing of time, however, comes the dawning realisation that even in the best-case scenario, only a fraction of these aspirations will be fulfilled – and even if they are, new ones will simply take their place. Experience, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde, is the name men give to their middle age.

Illusions are of course indispensable to psychic health, so it is no wonder that the middle years of life are so awkward to negotiate. It would be emotionally intolerable to confront the truth about mortality and finitude on a daily basis – which is why we busy ourselves with projects of one sort or another. ‘Looking forward’ to life is more than a mere idiom; it is an existential necessity. The burnt-out middleaged man – the typical hero of a Graham Greene novel, for instance – is defined by his inability to do this. But even the most inextinguishable among us will only write so many books or travel to so many places; even the busiest of lives leaves so much undone. As we get older, the future slowly shrivels, leaving fewer and fewer corners to hide in. We either do things now or we will, in all probability, never do them. As we ‘grieve’ for our youth, then, depression of some sort is an obvious danger. The sheer irreversibility of time can be overwhelming, particularly if we feel that life has not (yet) kept its promises with respect to all the things we are constantly told we should want: love, success, self-esteem. And even achieving these things is no guarantee against dissatisfaction: the very fact of feeling fulfilled can produce a burning desire to throw it all up in the air, to start again. Satiety, in this regard, is as dangerous as hunger. If desire is the human condition, its fulfilment is among the most insidious of punishments. When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers. For the sake of our sanity, then, we have to keep wanting. As anthropologists have long noted, we are defined – linguistically, psychologically, culturally – by the future tense. The past is a foreign country, and we only have visiting rights; the present is ever ephemeral. Future-oriented projects of some kind are thus indispensable. But so is the final stage of Kübler-Ross’s acronym, since it is only by acknowledging our exile from the past – and our ever-dwindling call on the future –

that we will feel in step with our biology. As with grief, so with middle age: acceptance is the consummation devoutly to be wished for.

Acceptance What form might this acceptance of middle age take? In one sense, it is in fact startlingly easy to depict the middle of life in positive terms. Substitute ‘maturity’ for middle age and suddenly the U-bend becomes a bell curve, with the middle years representing the top, not the bottom of life’s way. Certainly this is the implication of Shakespeare’s celebrated comparison of life to a play: the fourth and fifth of Jacques’ ‘seven ages of man’ are the clear highpoint of our development, the courageous soldier and wise judge representing his culmination as a social and ethical being. Maturity, it is implied, is tantamount to morality. Yet the problem remains, of course, that behind the soldier and judge lurk the ‘slippered pantaloon’ and ‘second childishness’. Accepting maturity with all its advantages – the power and judgement represented by Shakespeare’s fourth and fifth stages – also means accepting middle age with all its disadvantages. Above all, it means abrogating the fantasy that we can control everything – starting, most obviously, with our own mortality. It hardly needs saying that this is an almost impossibly difficult thing to do. So what we do instead – the most supremely creative among us the most compellingly – is try to control what we can: the project of our lives. Clearly there is no correct answer, then, to the question of how to accept middle age. We all have to work it out for ourselves. My own response, for what it is worth, is to pursue perpetual incipience: to begin again, and again and again. Every project, every essay and book, sets the clock back to zero, making creative virtue out of chronological necessity. But then perhaps this merely takes us back to the start of

the cycle, only more insidiously; perhaps acceptance is merely a version of denial. However we answer the question, one thing is socratically sure: the unexamined midlife is not worth living.

Notes 1

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death & Dying (New York: Scribner, 1969).

The original claim, ironically, was that ‘a woman’s life begins at forty’, as made by a certain

Mrs Theodore Parsons (in an interview of 1917 with the Pittsburgh Press). I am grateful to Mark Jackson for bringing this to my attention. 3

Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah tr. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 2015), p. 285. 4

Roland Barthes, ‘Chateaubriand: Life of Rancé’, in New Critical Essays, tr. Richard Howard

(Northwestern University Press, 2009), pp. 41-54. 5

Cited from Cari Romm, ‘Where Age Equals Happiness’, The Atlantic, 6 November 2014.

As this article shows, the data varies considerably from continent to continent. 6

Roland Barthes, ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’, in Roland Barthes: The

Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1989), pp. 277–90, at p. 284. 7

Jean Améry, Über das Altern: Revolte und Resignation (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1968).

Midlife in Historical Perspective Steven Mintz __________________________________________________

Adulthood has lost its allure. No one

Steven Mintz, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, is a leading authority on the history of families and the life course. He is the author and editor of 15 books, which examine shifts, over the past four centuries, in the ways childhood has been understood and experienced; the tangled transition to adulthood; the nature and experience of midlife; and the family's roles, functions, composition, dynamics and power relationships.

says `life begins at forty’ without irony. Rather than something aspired to, adulthood is now regarded as life’s anticlimax. In recent years, middle age has come to connote graying hair, sagging skin, a pot belly, wrinkles, receding gums, and varicose veins. It’s a time of headaches, stress, and soul-sapping responsibilities, a time of stagnation, discontent,

restlessness, depression, and incipient decline. It’s associated with midlife crises, memory loss, and middle-age spread. The middle aged, we hear, are `caught in a rut’ or `over the hill’. In fact, middle age is life's prime, truly. At life’s midpoint, most adults are wealthier and more economically secure than at any other time. Most have achieved a secure, fully defined identity. It’s time to reassert the value of middle age: of a craft that adults have honed, of challenges faced and overcome, of responsibilities wellhandled. At its best, childhood is a period of playfulness, and adolescence and the twenties are a time of self-discovery and experimentation. These stages of life are developmental; adulthood, in contrast, is consequential. For all their joys, childhood and

adolescence lack the gravity, seriousness, and value of middle age. In today’s youthoriented societies, it is essential to reclaim the value of adulthood – its sophistication, worldliness, urbanity, maturity, and experience – which truly is the prime of life.

Adulthood is a modern invention, a counterpoint to childhood and adolescence. While childhood connoted immaturity, inexperience and naiveté, and adolescence recklessness and irresponsibility, adulthood was their mirror opposite. Adults were steady, responsible, and mature. From the mid-nineteenth century through the midtwentieth century, the transition to adulthood took place abruptly - an all-at-once and once-and-for-all phenomenon. Adulthood was signified by marriage, dress, demeanor, and the embrace of a distinctive adult culture. Viewed positively, adulthood marked liberation from the constraints of youth. But after World War II, adulthood began to be regarded negatively, as a time of stasis and incipient decline. Adulthood was a depressing downward slide, a prolonged period of stagnation, torpor, and loss: of youthful vitality and attractiveness, with hair thinning, bellies expanding, and energy declining. Adulthood was viewed as overly rigid, confining, and inflexible. A traditional adulthood - defined in terms of settling down - grew less attractive. Whereas adulthood once meant conforming to certain culturally prescribed roles, the social and economic convulsions of the past sixty years have transformed midlife fundamentally, tearing up shared scripts and leaving adults to fashion meaning and coherence in an increasingly individualistic culture.

In the middle of the twentieth century, most individuals moved in lock step through a series of well-timed, orderly transitions from one life stage to the next. Since then, that regularity has dissolved and the life course has become more individualized. No longer is the life course divided into three distinct parts: a stage of education, one of work, and one of retirement. The rulebook has broken down. Lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s script has been radically rewritten. Age has become a poorer predictor of life events. The transition to adulthood has become more prolonged and less orderly and linear. Adulthood, in turn, has become a time of flux and transition. Employment has become more discontinuous as adults shift careers with some frequency. Midlife divorces and break-ups occur frequently. Adults spend more time without a spouse or in active childrearing. Larger numbers of adults are permanently single and childless. At the same time, the timing of retirement has grown less certain. Today, there is no longer a standard life cycle. The predictable milestones of development have given way to a much more tangled journey, full of setbacks, reversals, fresh starts, and new beginnings. This revolution has carried particularly momentous consequences for women, as expectations of early marriage, early childbearing, and full-time motherhood broke down. This has resulted in greater freedom and flexibility, but it has come at a cost. Unpredictability is now the norm, in relationships and employment. Expectations of a lifelong marriage or career have crumbled. Aging has become scarier since few can count on the existence of a support network that will be there through lifeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s vicissitudes. At the same time, disparities related to social class and race are growing. In the United States we witness hundreds of thousands of midlife `deaths of despairâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; by suicide, drugs, or alcohol. The causes are straightforward: a lack of steady, well-

paying jobs for whites without college degrees has caused pain, distress, and social dysfunction to build up over time. These people are less able to form stable marriages, and this, in turn, has effects on the kind of economic and social supports that people need in order to thrive. Disparities in wealth, income, health, and access to higher education and stable, wellpaying jobs are greatest for women and men of colour. The current health crisis has laid bare and intensified systemic, structural, and institutional inequalities: in employment in service warehousing, transportation, and manufacturing jobs that cannot be performed remotely; in over-crowded living conditions; and in the higher prevalence of underlying health conditions such as hypertension and cardiovascular disease, lung diseases, and diabetes, which are, in turn, related to poverty, chronic stress, environmental disparities, and a lack of access to health care and healthy food options. In addition, low-income middle-aged individuals of all races and ethnicities are likely to experience unstable living and family arrangements. The decline in the availability of secure, well-paid semi-skilled jobs has had a far-reaching impact on the economically disadvantaged. Not only are they less likely than their more affluent counterparts to be married or to live in a nuclear family household, but are vulnerable to eviction and homelessness and shift residences frequently â&#x20AC;&#x201C; relying on parents, extended kin (and fictive kin), friends, partners, and unrelated roommates -as they struggle with housing costs.

Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s look briefly at the history of the crucial tasks of adulthood: forging intimacy; raising the next generation; and finding meaning and fulfillment in work.

Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s begin with adult friendship. Friendship today is revered more than any other social relationship. Our romantic partner is supposed to be our best friend. Parents are to befriend their children and even siblings are expected to be friends. There are good reasons for the value attached to friendship. More people die from social isolation and disconnection than from cancer. Friendship is a source of mental and physical health and well-being. The quality of our social network contributes to our physical and mental well-being and workplace productivity. Support networks are especially valuable in times of transition or disruption. Friendship networks are also a valuable source of social capital But a certain kind of friendship, lifelong friendships based on physical proximity and daily interaction, have certainly declined. The need for friendship has increased, but for the most part friendships today tend to be transitory or virtual. So how has friendship evolved over time? Friendship is now viewed as essentially a private relationship. Friends are less likely than in the past to provide material support. There has also been a decline in the notion of civic friendship as the glue that holds society together. Meanwhile, lifelong friendships based on geographical proximity have declined, while Platonic friendships are more common than at any time in the past. Among the most striking developments is that female friendships have become the gold standard of friendship. Earlier in time, female friendships were dismissed by men as shallow, competitive, catty, untrustworthy, gossip, and as a mere way station toward marriage. In recent years, a feminine definition of friendship - emphasizing verbal self-disclosure, emotional expressiveness, support, caring, and connection has supplanted a masculine, instrumental definition stressing practical help and shared physical activities.

Friendship is now regarded as primarily a matter of emotions: of emotional intimacy, emotional expressiveness, emotional connection, and emotional support. Like many other aspects of our lives, friendship is being reshaped by new technologies, which have expanded friendship networks and made it easier to sustain friendships over time and space. But whether technologically-mediated friendships can truly meet adultsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; needs for connection remains uncertain. As marriage is delayed and has grown less stable, friendships have become an increasingly important source of emotional support. But whether they can provide ongoing care is uncertain. Has a hyper-individualistic, highly mobile society undermined our capacity for sustained intimacy and close, enduring personal bonds?

Letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s turn next to marriage. Marriage is in retreat worldwide. Increasing numbers of women and men are not simply postponing marriage, but forgoing it altogether. For the first time in U.S. history, a majority of adults now live outside of marriage, as single parents, as partners in a cohabiting relationship, or as singles. Nor is marriage the only socially sanctioned way for adults to organize sexuality and childrearing. What lies behind the retreat from marriage? Is it a `meâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; ethic, a yearning for freedom, self-actualization and self-sufficiency and an aversion to sacrifice? Or are other forces at play? New economic realities no longer require women to marry for financial reasons. Higher expectations about the level of intimacy, companionship, communication, and sexual fulfillment that marriage is expected to offer also make marriages more problematic.

Then there is a sense that marriage is a relic of patriarchy, an outmoded institution that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t allow individuals the freedom to grow and inflicts disproportionate burdens on women. Let me point to two underlying problems. First, many couples are increasingly ships passing in the night. Their day-to-day lives are radically disconnected as both partners work sometimes at great a distance from home. Secondly, with the breakdown of earlier norms and expectations, marriage is subject to constant negotiation. Couples must repeatedly negotiate issues of power, authority, and decision-making. Such negotiations are invariably tense. Marriage is a legal relationship, an instrumental relationship, an affective relationship, a power relationship, and, for many, a societal expectation, and a cultural ideal enshrouded in romantic fantasies. But a stable marriage is also becoming a class privilege. My friend Stephanie Coontz has argued that the history of marriage involves a shift from a practical, prudential relationship based on pragmatic considerations to a relationship based upon romantic love. To this, I say, `nonsenseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;. In Europe and America, motives for marriage, except among certain elites, have always involved a complex mixture of considerations related to economics, status, and, yes, love and companionship. But I am far less interested in motivation than in marriage as a relationship involving power and conflict over roles and responsibilities. For most adults, marriage is the most sustained intimate relationship that they will ever have and the most problematic. Like friendship and marriage, parenting, too, has become extremely challenging, especially in the United States. The United States is unique in its preoccupation with

the proper way to raise children. Anxiety is the hallmark of contemporary American childrearing. This anxiety is an outgrowth of several assumptions that arose during the twentieth century: that peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experience in infancy and early childhood determines their subsequent development, molds their personality, and determines their emotional well-being; that childhood is a special state, with its own distinctive psychology, that deserves all the attention that parents can give it; and that any dysfunction in the parent-child relationship will result in lifelong psychological maladjustments. Childrearing advice is never simply about the best ways to promote childrenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s health, happiness, or psychological well-being. It invariably reflects parentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; fears and their sense of the kind of future that children need to be prepared for. Middle-class parents, in particular, are beset by fears: of stranger abductions, physical and sexual abuse, and the pernicious influence of media. Also, parents are anxious about the possibility of downward economic mobility for their children. Without a doubt, parent-child relationships are in many respects closer than in the past. But this is a mixed blessing. Children, in the eyes of many parents, should never be bored or unhappy. But kids have fewer opportunities to assert independence, roam freely, and experiment free from adult supervision. The consequence is that it has become more difficult to establish an autonomous identity.

Let me next turn to work. A revolution has transformed the workplace over the past half century. In the span of forty years, an older economy dominated by manufacturing and large corporate bureaucracies gave way to a service, knowledge,

and information economy, with profound consequences for gender roles, the distribution of income and wealth, and access to upward mobility. Driving the transformation of work were mounting foreign competition and the growth of information technology, which radically disrupted journalism, publishing, retailing, and the music industry. Administrative hierarchies flattened, eliminating many of the middle management positions that employed many middle-class white collar employees, and there was a shift toward more `flexibleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; employment arrangements, evident in the increasing reliance on freelancers, independent contractors, and part-time employees. Meanwhile, in todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s 24/7 economy, email and cellphones undercut the divide between worktime and leisure time. Not surprisingly, talk about job-related stress, work-family tensions, and insecurity about layoffs mounted. Yet despite all these developments, work has become ever more central in defining adult identities. Work now lies at the core of adult identity, for women as well as men. Twenty-somethings might think of a job as a gig, but those who are old define themselves less through their class status, religion, ethnicity, or neighbourhood, but through their job title, workplace role, or employer. Careerism, the rat race, and the grind - widely derided during the boom years of the 1960s - gave way to a heightened dedication to work. For all the complaints about work-life balance, many Americans engage in work even when they are nominally off-duty, including on evenings and weekends. Many fail to take sick days or family leave, even when this is available. Many older workers cling to their jobs until the age of 70 or beyond. A growing number of workers not only look to jobs for a wage, but for structure, sociability, and a sense of accomplishment and purpose. Even as jobs have become

more precarious, and even as large numbers of adults provide personal services or perform repetitive tasks, adults crave work that is meaningful and rewarding. Americans are distinctive in their devotion to work. Compared to Europeans, Americans work longer hours and take shorter vacations. In a society that attaches so much significance to work, it is not surprising that the unemployed and the retired often suffer from depression, loneliness, and a loss of self-esteem. Adults value work even though only a minority hold jobs that are intrinsically dignified and well-paying and that offer a great deal of autonomy or opportunities for self-expression. Indeed, the world of work has become increasingly stratified. It is stratified not only by earnings, but by scheduling, hours, autonomy, and responsibility. Curiously, most adults now speak of having a career, though the word means something very different than it did a generation ago. No longer is a career a craft honed over many years or a decades-long climb up the ladder of a single employer. Instead, a career now refers to a succession of jobs through which individuals grow and raise their standard of living. Today, virtually all employees must worry about job stability. In a high risk economic environment, entrepreneurship and adaptability - not persistence, tenacity, loyalty, and teamwork - are the traits that are most valuable. So, too, is salesmanship. In recent years, the line separating sales and marketing from other jobs has faded. Even white-collar employees must be sales people, whether interacting with clients or customers or championing initiatives. As such, they must embrace the attributes of effective salesmanship: the ability to charm, sweet talk, anticipate needs, and provide service with a smile. Both Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud considered work an essential component of a meaningful life. But too often work fails to meet the need for a fulfilling purpose and

a sense of accomplishment. Ours is a society that cultivates big dreams and sends out the message that great wealth is well within people’s reach. But such ambitions are rarely realized, and such a society is sure to produce great disappointment.

It is easy to caricature post-World War II adult culture. There was a sharp gender divide in the day-to-day experience of women and men, which extended to hobbies for middle-class men and card games for middle-class women. There was the appeal of middle-brow culture, such as easy listening music and Broadway show tunes, and a literary culture mediated by the Book of the Month Club, now dismissed as mere schlock. Cocktails, dinner parties, and night clubs - these too were part of adult culture, as were a particular kind of adult films that have largely disappeared, dealing with the 3 A’s: addiction, alcoholism, and adultery. But there were aspects of that adult culture that deserve respect. In stark contrast to today’s youth-oriented culture, adult culture, especially in the movies, attached special value to sophistication, experience, classiness, and worldly wisdom. The erosion of this conception of adulthood - as a time of regrets and physical decline, to be sure, but also of pleasure in responsibilities and obligations fulfilled - represents a genuine loss. Today’s adults have more opportunities to define their lives however they wish. Yet life has also grown less predictable and more insecure and uncertain. It is now much harder to chart one’s own direction than to follow a prescribed path.

Further Reading Patricia Cohen, In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age (Scribner, 2015) Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage (Penguin, 2006) Kate Crawford, Adult Themes: Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood (Pan Macmillan Australia, 2006) Kay Heath, Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain (SUNY Press, 2010) Steven Mintz, The Prime of Life: A History of Modern Adulthood (Harvard, 2015) Katherine S. Newman, A Different Shade of Gray: Midlife and Beyond in the Inner City (New Press, 2006) Jennifer M. Silva, Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty (Oxford, 2015) William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (Vintage, 1997)

Unemployment and Everyday Life: An Edwardian Midlife Crisis? Julie-Marie Strange __________________________________________________

A leaking slop pail; a stale loaf of bread; and a pair of white lace curtains. Such are the everyday objects around which the stories of three unemployed midlife men in the English city of York in 1910 revolve. First, the slop bucket that might, in well-to-do homes, be a decorated ceramic chamber pot - although, by 1910, such

After a childhood spent knocking about churchyards and talking to dogs, it’s no surprise that JulieMarie Strange has spent her professional life writing about death, emotion and animals. Her midlife is marked by a move across Britain to start a new job, a new project (Love in the Time of Capitalism: Emotion and the Making of the Working Class, 18481914), and the accommodation of…more dogs.

items had already become quaint with the rise of indoor plumbing for those that could afford it. In a squalid street with little sanitation, the galvanised pail was a stopgap or as John Campbell, a forty-year-old engineer, put it – a ‘responsible commodity’ - to a shared ash pit. A leaking bucket was grim. For Campbell, who moved from Scotland to York with his employer of seventeen years standing, the leaky pail assumed uncommon significance. Unemployed for several months in 1910, he could not afford to replace the bucket and, with his wife and three children, had to tolerate the spills while the pail became increasingly corroded. Next, the consumptive’s piece of bread. This belonged to John Rafferty, described by his neighbours as a ‘quiet peaceable body’. Despite being only fortyone-years old, he was a ‘spent man’. Suffering from tuberculosis for the previous ten years, Rafferty had not worked for two years, relying instead on his wife’s catch

jobs in farm work and an eldest daughter’s four shillings a week from running errands for a confectioner. He spent his days sat in the doorway of his house, coughing blood, and watching over his lively children whom he had neither energy nor inclination to scold. His family lived mostly on bread and margarine but Rafferty himself ‘sits silent, eating next to nothing’. Finally, the white lace curtains. These textiles might, at first, seem incongruous with the story of a labouring man; associated, as they were, with feminine domesticity in artisan homes. For John Nevinson, in his late forties, they facilitated a fragile lie. Nevinson had not had steady work for years. The family relied on Mrs. Nevinson’s casual earnings as a cleaner and the eldest of five children’s meagre contributions from errands. This couple had started married life with optimism, work, and good furniture. Over the last twenty years, as work evaporated, the furniture was pawned. Incredibly, despite increasing penury and the deaths of multiple children, Nevinson retained some optimism - but the lace curtains hanging in the front room window at street level were getting shabby. Far from championing the family’s respectable status, they concealed the fact that the room was stripped bare of furnishings. These three objects symbolised much that was wrong with these men’s lives. Each one represented household poverty. Although inexpensive everyday items, they were costly to replace when male breadwinners were without work. The Campbells had been living off of oatmeal made with water for weeks and it agonised the father, who tramped for work on an empty stomach everyday, to see his children starving. A new bucket was beyond their means. Rafferty’s share of bread, which was tiny for an adult male, both reflected and contributed to his diminishing health and failure to be a ‘bread’ winner. The family had ‘done a flit’ several times to escape

debt and often ate nothing after breakfast on Sundays. The Nevinsons, whose curtains concealed the empty room within, were weeks behind with their rent. The poverty of these men was caused and compounded by fragile bodily health, most obviously for Rafferty whose consumption had worsened in the last two years. The tragedy here was that good food, warm atmosphere and proper treatment – all of which were beyond his means - would radically improve his health. Campbell struggled to find work because of his small stature and light build. When he was given heavier labour, it nearly broke him physically. Nevinson was plagued by sciatica and could never stick at work for long on account of excruciating pain. Individually, the men were ashamed of their position. Campbell kept a diary in which he recorded his horror at finding himself applying for charity, the rage of having to pay a landlord rent before feeding his children, and his frustration with clerks at labour agencies who were baffled by his desperation. The family progressively moved to cheaper and cheaper housing and were isolated on their street, partly because they were so fiercely private in their poverty and partly because they were socially alien to what some commentators termed the ‘rougher’ element that constituted their new neighbours. The leaking pail adopted importance beyond its purpose, as Campbell wrote about putting his intellect to good use in fathoming how to fix it without incurring cost. The unspoken wonder was that a skilled engineer should come to this – feeling useful in making a leaking slop pail less useless. But it was also one of several things – a smoking chimney and worn steaming pan were others – that constituted everyday experience, both reminding Campbell of the dire situation he and his family were in, and offering pragmatic tasks that he could fulfil in order to ameliorate his self-recrimination. For Rafferty, his failing health was the latest instalment in a series of hardships and his demeanour reflected the hopelessness of his life. He had started

work as a brick carrier aged fourteen, heavy work that broke his health by the time he became a man. He read slowly and imperfectly but, for all that, knew the meaning of toil. For the past few years, he’d worked at stone breaking. This was back-breaking, mean work and sometimes he’d almost crawled to work where he would make slow and painful progress. If there was any advantage to stonebreaking, it was that the casual and lowly status allowed him to retire when ill health demanded it before picking it up again with marginal improvements. Compared to his wife’s volubility, indoors and in the street, Rafferty was a silent man. Nevinson retained some hope; although, as his contemporaries marvelled, God only knew how. This man and his wife experienced the death of several children, their eldest daughter was diagnosed with consumption days before her marriage, one son was in a school for the blind, and the illiterate Nevinson had been without work for almost three years. A rumour that some grave digging was required in the parish church sent him shuffling off in hope of securing the job only to be disappointed. Despite his troublesome back and aching feet, he tramped the streets of York daily in search of work. He left most of the talking to his wife but was more forthcoming in an account of his experiences dictated to his adult son. For each of these men, the objects that represent their story – the pail, the bread, the curtains - were embedded in their decline too. The corroding slop pail presented actual hygiene and multi-sensory challenges to a family used to being ‘superior’. The bread was a reprimand if Rafferty ate when his children were so hungry and a step along the path of malnutrition if he didn’t. And, as they began to fray and the cotton that might fix them proved too expensive, the lace curtains threatened to expose a family desperate to conceal its penury. If the Rafferty’s bread was stale, the pail and the curtains were coming to the end of their useful life. Here, the objects may have had something in common with the men who possessed them.

Campbell, Rafferty, and Nevinson - all in their forties in 1910 - were pretty much on the scrapheap of labouring masculinity. It’s what made their stories so depressing and they knew it. ‘Midlife’ was less a transition than a frightful plunge of absolute and irreversible physiological, occupational, financial, and social decline. And while their health problems – from feebleness through poor nourishment to tuberculosis – might have been particular to them, popular opinion held that working men over forty were going to be unproductive in one way or another soon enough. Contemporary studies showed that men over forty got sick more often and were more likely to experience workplace accidents: at best, they took longer to recover; at worst, they were more susceptible to terminal illness, permanent injury, and death. Compared to hulking specimens of youthful masculinity, men over forty simply could not compete in a labour market that valued hard physical graft over experience. It cannot be surprising that the highest suicide rates in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain were among middle-aged men with families experiencing periods of financial anxiety. Given the lack of opportunities for labouring men to find more cerebral work and the high value that working-class culture invested in the male breadwinner (however flawed people knew the model was), the under- or unemployed husband and father cut a pathetic figure. He was a failure in the eyes of his male peers and wider society. Worst of all, men like Campbell, Rafferty and Nevinson all manifested anxiety that they were failures to their family. The stories of these men all referenced a sense of responsibility for the cries of hungry children and the mental torture of knowing paternal unemployment was causing them suffering. The shabbiness or staleness of household goods, and men’s relationship with them in domestic space, serve as a reminder of how everyday items made the burden of

responsibility inescapable. The decline of midlife was an emotional crisis as much as a financial and biological one. But if the precarity of midlife rested on health and well-being – the ability to perform physical labour – ‘mid’ life could begin startlingly early for those unfortunate enough to meet with debilitating accidents or disease. And here’s the catch; even if ‘mid’ life men retained the vitality of youth, the received wisdom that decline was imminent meant that employers were notorious for making older men redundant before their younger counterparts, overlooking their applications for work, and paying them below the going rates because they were bound to be desperate enough to take a pay cut. We might say, then, that midlife was a crisis of chronology – men were damned as they inched beyond their thirties whether or not they experienced robust health. We can also recognise that, for some, biology was a crisis that could accelerate the chronology of midlife and deepen the abyss into which midlife men (and their dependents) fell. But, thinking about these things through the lens of ‘midlife’ detracts from the bigger crisis facing such people: that of capitalism. It was, after all, profit that encouraged employers to discard older men or pay them less. It was the lack of healthcare, welfare, and a sense of collective responsibility that predisposed working-class men, women and children to poor nourishment, susceptibility to disease, limited educational opportunities, and insecurity in the event of disaster. Employer discrimination against the employment of women and reluctance to pay them fair wages for equal work meant that wives who would step in as breadwinners were either unable to find work or exploited. What Campbell, Rafferty, and Nevinson may not have appreciated is that, however responsible they felt for their children’s poverty, the children probably didn’t agree. The study that interviewed Campbell, Rafferty, and Nevinson in York

in 1910 found that only 15% of men they surveyed had personal flaws that may have contributed to their under or unemployment. Even then, some of those failings (such as ‘inefficiency’) were probably on account of innate intelligence while others (such as demotivation and hopelessness) might well have been caused by prolonged unemployment in the first place. Decrepit everyday objects, and men’s pathetic attempts to live with them better, telegraphed desperation to the York investigators who, unless met with evidence of long-term individual fecklessness, were far more likely to sympathise with the men’s predicament than hold them to account. More to the point, when the generation of these men’s children grew into adulthood and relayed the stories of their childhoods, either through memoir or in interviews, few blamed fathers for their poverty. Rather, they criticised the injustices of a capitalist society that denied fathers opportunities beyond manual labour; that wrote them off when their productivity risked dropping; that offered little in the way of access to healthcare; and that failed to support them when they hit troubled times. Midlife was not so much a condition with implications for family welfare but a crisis created by inequalities and social injustice.

Further Reading B. Seebohm Rowntree and Bruno Lasker, Unemployment: A Social Study (London, 1911). Victor Bailey, This Rash Act: Suicide across the Life Cycle in the Victorian City (Stanford, 1998). Julie-Marie Strange, Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865-1914 (Cambridge, 2015).

Facing the Music: Midlife Perspectives in European, American, and Chinese Films Michael Clark __________________________________________________ Introduction During the summer of 2018 - that is, immediately prior to the ‘Midlife Conversations’ conference - however hard you tried, it was difficult to escape the saturation publicity for Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again! According to Wikipedia, Mamma Mia 2 is `a jukebox musical romantic comedy film’, 1 which indeed it is, but, like its predecessor, Mamma Mia I, it may also be thought of as a midlife film: 7 out of the 9 principal characters (6 out of 8 in Mamma Mia 1) are, to all appearances, middle-aged or mature men and women who have known (or tried to forget) each other ever since

Having previously written on ageing and old age in both Englishlanguage and Chinese films when much younger, it was perhaps inevitable that Michael J. Clark (University College London) would turn his attention to midlife in films now that he is approaching retirement. In between, he has published on topics as varied as ‘Wounded Healers’ in film and television dramas, self-care, well-being and the art of living well in Chinese films, and rivalries between neurologists and psychiatrists in late-nineteenth-century London, while teaching postgraduate courses on Medicine in Film and Television and Chinese Film and the Body. He has also performed the Morecambe and Wise ‘Bring Me Sunshine’ song-and-dance routine on the Great Wall of China.

the late ‘70s or early ‘80s and whose unanticipated reunion on a sun-drenched Greek island sets off a chain of events and experiences which takes them back to their wild and reckless youths, while also compelling them to face up to at least some of the realities of advancing age. Mamma Mia 1 and 2 may not be to everyone’s taste, but they do highlight some of the difficulties involved in trying to think about fiction

films which depict apparently ‘middle-aged’ characters, experiences and conditions typically associated with midlife. Mamma Mia 1 and 2 are essentially feel-good movies tailor-made for the Summer holidays, and their portrait of midlife dwells more on the comic side of middle age (and its attempted denial) than on any of its more serious aspects. However, midlife in fiction films is commonly associated with a battery of mostly negative life-changing experiences, themes and challenges, including actual or impending loss of employment, redundancy or bankruptcy; relationship breakdown, infidelity and separation or divorce; serious, sometimes life-threatening, illness, either one’s own or that of some close family member, friend or partner; death of a close family member or loved one and consequent bereavement; mental breakdowns, often resulting in severe depression and even attempted suicide or parasuicide; regret for vanished youth, lost loves or missed opportunities; the loss or discrediting of youthful ideals; creative or professional blockage, exhaustion, or ‘burn-out’; and an increasingly desperate search for meaning and purpose in life in the face of widespread cynicism and disillusionment. This contrasts with the more positive view taken by some Jungian psychoanalysts, who have seen midlife as a crucial time for self-discovery, self-realisation and individuation. 2 There are some films which do portray midlife as a time of taking stock in a positive way, such as Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) - in which a struggling American small-town housebuilder’s guardian angel persuades him not to commit suicide by showing him how many lives he has unknowingly changed for the better - and the great Chinese opera film Woman, Demon, Human (1987), in which the cross-dressing Hebei opera star Quiyun concludes a ghostly dialogue with her theatrical alter ego the demon-slayer Zhong Kui by accepting that she is indeed a great actress, ‘married to the stage’, who no longer has any need for male ‘protectors’, human, ghostly or otherwise. However,

such films are relatively rare by comparison with those in which the protagonists go through dramatic experiences of uncertainty or crisis in which all, or many, of their most cherished illusions, values, possessions or psychological crutches are overturned, discredited or brutally taken away from them. Midlife crises are not universal experiences, and even when they do occur are not necessarily predominantly negative in character and consequences. 3 But crises offer far more dramatic cinematic possibilities for screen-writers and film directors than stories which result in the restoration of ‘balance’ or the establishment of stable new equilibria. Consequently, most fiction films about midlife do not exactly accentuate the positive.

Midlife films as a cinematic ‘genre’ There are so many movies which feature seemingly middle-aged characters in key roles, or highlight experiences, challenges and crises typically associated with midlife, and there is such a great variety of characters, plot-lines and settings amongst them, that it is almost impossible to speak in any meaningful way of a distinct cinematic ‘genre’ of mid-life movies that are comparable with other film genres, such as Westerns or teen movies for example. Here, I shall from time to time refer to films about midlife characters and experiences as if they did constitute a recognisable film genre, but more as a kind of shorthand than as an exact generic attribution or classification. While it is difficult to argue for the existence of a specific genre of mid-life movies, it is nevertheless possible to identify a number of distinct sub-groups within the broad general category of films about midlife characters, challenges, and crises.

1. Realist dramas or melodramas of midlife crisis. Probably the single largest group of fiction films about midlife, especially midlife crises, are realist dramas or melodramas, made in the naturalistic style usually deemed most suitable for serious subject-matter in almost every world cinematic culture or tradition, from Hollywood to Hong Kong. These films often feature serious, even tragic, themes, characters and events, including sudden death of a partner or close family member, suicide or attempted suicide, and mental breakdown, but seldom to the complete exclusion of comic or at any rate lighter elements. This group of films includes some of the bestknown, classic midlife films in many world cinematic cultures, such as David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1946); Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy (1954); Fu Mei’s Spring in a Small Town (1948); Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952); Robert Redford’s Ordinary People (1980), and Bruce Joel Rubin’s My Life (1993). More recent examples include Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (1999), Tom Ford’s A Single Man (2008), Alexander Payne’s The Descendants (2011), Nani Moretti’s The Son’s Room (2001), and, most recently perhaps, Zhang Wei’s Factory Boss (2014). This category also includes many of the films which feature most frequently in undergraduate modules in medical humanities, especially those intended primarily for medical students or other health professionals. These include Randa Haines’ The Doctor (1991), Bruce Joel Rubin’s My Life (1993), Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother (1999), Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland’s Still Alice (2014), and the madefor-TV dramas Wit (2001) and Mo (2010).

2. Comedies and tragi-comedies of midlife crisis. This is a very broad category and includes a wide variety of sub-groups, including screwball comedies like Almodovar’s Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), romantic comedies like Ingmar Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), crime capers like Charles

Crichton’s A Fish Called Wanda (1988), situation comedies and comedies of manners like Woody Allen’s Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), which is a homage to Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night as well as to Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Christopher Morahan’s Clockwise (1986). It also includes tragi-comedies such as Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979) and Stardust Memories (1980), Peter Cattaneo’s The Full Monty (1997), Richard Curtis’ Love Actually (2004) and Zhang Meng’s The Piano in a Factory (2011), as well as wry, character-driven pieces which conceal more serious content and intent behind gentle comic facades, such as Bill Forsyth’s Comfort and Joy (1984) and Nani Moretti’s Dear Diary (1993). Most dramas about midlife characters and crises belong to the dominant realist tradition in world cinemas and are correspondingly naturalistic in style. But some, like Almodovar’s Women on the Verge and Zhang Meng’s Piano in a Factory, are highly stylised, while others feature surreal or even quasi-magical visual elements and episodes within mainly naturalistic registers, as (for example) Charles Crichton’s A Fish Called Wanda and Nani Moretti’s Dear Diary.

3. Social or political satires featuring characters undergoing a midlife crisis. This too is a wide and diverse sub-group, including satirical comedies like Francis Veber’s The Closet (Le Placard) (2001), about a company accountant who pretends to be gay in order to keep his job in an environment where lip-service has to be paid to political correctness; Almodovar’s The Flower of My Secret (1995), about a very successful writer of Mills and Boon-type romances who wants to become a serious author of cutting-edge, feel-bad literary fiction; and Ning Ying’s flawed but delightfully wicked Perpetual Motion (2005), in which a 40-something wealthy Chinese woman sets a trap to discover which of her equally affluent girl-friends is sleeping with her husband, only to find herself the object of unforeseen same-sex

desire. Many such films could equally well be regarded as comedies of manners, while the sub-group of satirical comedies also includes films which feature broader and often more serious themes which are not necessarily age-specific, such as Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie (1982), which is at least as much about gender stereotypes, sexism, feminism and popular culture as it is about mid-life, or Veber’s The Closet (2001), which is as much about masculinity in crisis as it is about midlife, political correctness, or even homophobia. At the limits, some mid-life satirical comedies can turn very dark, as in the case of Warren Beatty’s Bulworth (1998), in which a burntout Democratic Senator facing re-election arranges for a professional hit-man to assassinate him, only to re-discover a new appetite for life, love and radical politics in the ghetto. However, most stop short of all-out black comedy even where they do feature more serious themes such as attempted suicide or psychiatric illness, as in the case of Veber’s The Closet or Almodovar’s Women on the Verge and The Flower of My Secret.

4. Films about midlife artistic burnout. Finally, there are a significant number of films about writers, artists, and even film-directors experiencing writers’ block or some kind of creative impasse, ‘burnout’ or failure of inspiration, which may or may not be resolved in the course of the film. These include, most memorably perhaps, Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941), about a successful light comedy film director who really wants to make a serious social documentary feature but ends up in jail, and Federico Fellini’s surreal black comedy 8½ (1963), about an Italian film director trying and failing to direct a sci-fi movie while struggling to overcome his sexual neuroses. More recent examples include Nani Moretti’s quasiautobiographical Dear Diary (1993), especially the first ‘chapter’, in which a film director tries to avoid thinking hard about his next feature by pretending to look for

suitable locations in and around Rome, and Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy (1999), about how the creative block affecting both members of the Gilbert and Sullivan comicoperatic partnership in 1885-86 following the relative lack of success of Princess Ida, is eventually resolved by the successful creation and first production of The Mikado. Further examples include Olivier Assayas’ Irma Vep (1996), which features a burntout French film director who tries, and fails, to remake the silent film classic Les Vampires (1915) with Hong Kong superstar Maggie Cheung in the leading role as a cat-suited cat burglar; and John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998), in which Will’s new love affair with a stage-struck young woman named Viola inspires him to escape from his inability to fulfil a commission to write Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter for the Globe Theatre and write Romeo and Juliet instead.

Midlife films and gender As this brief survey implies, most mid-life films are essentially about men, usually men facing serious challenges or crises alone, even if they do have families or potentially supportive social networks – thus one thinks of films as various as Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (1952), Bill Forsyth’s Comfort and Joy (1984), Nani Moretti’s The Son’s Room (2001), and Zhang Wei’s Factory Boss (2014). But there are also a significant number of films in which women are the principal characters experiencing mid-life crises, including several of Pedro Almodovar’s films from the late 1980s and 1990s, notably Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), The Flower of my Secret (1995) and All About My Mother (1999). However, there are differences. With the notable exception of films like The Full Monty (1997) which feature groups of unemployed working men experiencing crises of masculinity, most films about men going through crisis focus on single or lonely men. By

contrast, films about women in midlife crisis very often feature two or more such women in close company, as in one of the best-known and critically most acclaimed of all mid-life films, Ridley Scott’s Thelma and Louise (1991), but also in Hugh Wilson’s First Wives Club (1996) and Ning Ying’s Perpetual Motion (2005). Actually, there are many fiction films in which two or more of the principal characters experience midlife crises, and in many of these, the characters in crisis include both men and women. One thinks, for example, of David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1946) and Fei Mu’s Spring in a Small Town (1948); and, of course, Mamma Mia 1 and 2. Indeed, some of the most interesting midlife films are those which feature multiple crises involving both men and women, often of different ages. These include Topsy-Turvy, Love Actually, and the Taiwanese director Ang Lee’s historical martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), in all of which crises of young adulthood and of mid-life in both men and women are inextricably interwoven.

The chronology and duration of midlife in fiction films The precise onset and duration of midlife in fiction films vary considerably. Demographers and statisticians often define midlife quite narrowly, as the age-range from 40 to 55 or 60. But ‘midlife’ in cinema is more a shared state of mind or a particular kind of experience or set of challenges than a specific, identifiable span of an individual’s life. Thus in the first ‘chapter’ of Nani Moretti’s semiautobiographical film Dear Diary (1994), Moretti’s character describes himself as “a splendid forty-something” and contrasts his own apparently robust health and forthright critical attitude towards bad art and moral perversity with the self-pitying mentalities and decadent taste of his burnt-out artistic contemporaries. But in the second chapter, we see his own artistic and moral judgment wavering, and in the

third chapter, Moretti’s physical health is seriously compromised by life-changing illness. Similarly, most of Woody Allen’s films since the mid-1970s sound and feel like ‘midlife crisis’ films, and in a career spanning more than 50 years, most of the characters he plays seem to have experiences and emotional states usually associated with mid-life, whether they are supposed to be young adults, as in Annie Hall (1977), thirty- or forty-somethings, as in Manhattan (1979) or Hannah and her Sisters (1986), or in later life, as in Deconstructing Harry (1997) or Fading Gigolo (2013). Indeed, we have almost grown accustomed to think of Allen as someone born middle-aged and forever trapped in a kind of neurotic mid-life time-warp. In historical dramas set in periods when life expectancy was much lower, key features of midlife are commonly shown as occurring in characters still in their early or mid-30s, as for example in Shakespeare in Love (1998), while much the same is true in many older Chinese films such as Fei Mu’s classic family drama Spring in a Small Town (1948). Conversely, in films set in affluent, developed societies with much higher life expectancy, characters are often shown experiencing midlife crises in their mid-or late 40s or 50s, as for example in Sam Mendes’ American Beauty (1999). The onset of midlife is often shown as being determined by external factors largely beyond the control of the characters, such as de-industrialisation and redundancy as the result of globalisation or world financial crises, the sudden onset of serious or terminal illness, as in Bruce Joel Rubin’s My Life (1993), or of death in the family, as in Nani Moretti’s The Son’s Room (2001). Consequently, many of the characters affected combine attributes usually associated with middle age with others more ‘typical’ of early adulthood or even adolescence, as for example in The Full Monty (1997) and its bittersweet Chinese counterpart, Zhang Meng’s The Piano in a Factory (2011). The result is a simultaneous overlay and mixture of experiences and qualities typically associated with quite different stages of life. Gone is the simple

linear succession of Shakespeare’s ‘Seven Ages of Man’; instead, in the post-modern world, different ‘ages’ and their associated mental and emotional states overlap and interpenetrate in different combinations and degrees in different individuals and, to a significant extent, in different social groupings or sub-cultures.

Historical frames of reference of midlife movies Considered purely as cinematic productions, it is quite difficult to historicise films tagged as midlife movies, or even to identify any distinct historical development, whether of content or style, in midlife films over time. Admittedly, there are a number of well-known midlife films which include fairly obvious political or culturalhistorical points of reference, such as Bill Forsyth’s Comfort and Joy (1984), with its detailed referencing of the Glasgow ‘Ice-Cream Wars’ of the early 1980s; Almodovar’s The Flower of My Secret (1995), with its referencing of the social unrest and junior doctors’ street protests in Spain during Felipe Gonzalez’ second term of office as Spanish Prime Minister; Bulworth’s references to American and global politics in the 1990s; and Love Actually, with its fairy-tale reversal of the relations between the Bush and Blair administrations around the time of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Zhang Wei’s Factory Boss (2014) also specifically references the global financial crisis of 2008 and the knock-on effects of the crisis on traditional labourintensive manufacturing industries (in this case, toy-making) in southern China. Although some well-known midlife movies do not contain any specific historical references, it is nevertheless hard to imagine them being set at any other time or place, such as Roberto Rossellini’s Voyage in Italy (1954) or Ning Ying’s allfemale satirical comedy of infidelity and betrayal among the hautes bourgeoises of modern Beijing, Perpetual Motion (2005). Nevertheless, it would be true to say that, with the possible exception of films based on real-life people and events, like Richard

Attenborough’s Shadowlands (1993), which is a dramatized account of the tragically short-lived mid-life relationship and marriage between C.S. Lewis and the American poet Helen Joy Davidman during the 1950s, comparatively few midlife films have any strong historical frame of reference. It is in fact quite difficult to trace any definite historical pattern of development within the genre of midlife movies – except, perhaps, for the growing number of films featuring women in midlife crisis and the increasing tendency for fiction films to feature multiple crises in both men and women and in characters of different ages at different points in the life cycle.

Conclusion There is an important sense in which the whole concept of midlife in film may be regarded as historically generated. Although for much of the time we take it more or less for granted, ‘midlife’ is not a ‘natural’ category with clearly-defined parameters, any more than childhood or adolescence are. As we have seen, midlife in film covers a great variety of social settings, plot-lines, individual experiences and psychological reactions, and its precise onset and duration differ significantly from one place, time and culture to another and from one film-maker to another. Seen in a wider context, though, the concept of midlife and the significance ascribed to it may be regarded essentially as aspects of twentieth century modernity and its global characteristics of growing urbanisation and industrialisation, repeated socio-economic, political and cultural upheavals and consequent psycho-social insecurity, and the breakdown of traditional family structures combined with rapidly increasing life-expectancy. Film and its importance as a form of popular entertainment, and as a powerful medium for the formation and transmission of images, perceptions and preconceptions, are also almost entirely products and phenomena of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The growth of film, or more generally, of moving image technologies, and

the increasing popularity and influence of the concept of midlife thus occupy very similar historical time-frames. But this is not just a coincidence; many of the same social, economic and cultural factors which have favoured the rise and progressive development of moving image technologies have also played key roles in the emergence and increasingly widespread currency of the concept of midlife. For the purposes of this brief introductory survey, it is convenient and useful to speak of midlife and ‘midlife perspectives’ in film. But at a deeper level, it is perhaps more appropriate to regard both the growth of film and the increasing social and cultural currency of the concept of midlife as being, at least to a certain extent, coproductions or correlated phenomena of psycho-social and cultural modernity. Seen in this light, they are both aspects of the history of the ‘Self’, its technologies and progressive transformations, within the time-frame of the long twentieth century, and as such form integral parts of a much larger social and cultural history whose future direction and destination are as yet far from clear.

Notes 1

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamma_Mia!_Here_We_Go_Again. The same phrase is

used in Wikipedia to describe Mamma Mia 1 (2008): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mamma_Mia!_(film). For Mamma Mia 1, see also https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0795421/

See, for example, Murray Stein, In Midlife: A Jungian Perspective (Dallas, Texas; Spring

Publications, 1983) and James Hollis, The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (Toronto; Inner City Books, 1993). 3

See several of the other contributions to this collection.

Appendix – A Select Filmography of Midlife Films The following list of films in which midlife problems, issues and challenges feature more or less prominently is a purely personal selection, which makes no claim to be definitive. All film titles are given in alphabetical order of their common Englishlanguage titles, regardless of their country of origin. The original titles of foreignlanguage films (in italics or in Chinese characters and Pinyin) are given following their English-language titles. 8½ (Otto e Mezzo) (Italy, dir. Federico Fellini, 1963) All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre) (Spain, dir. Pedro Almodovar, 1999) American Beauty (U.S., dir. Sam Mendes, 1999) Annie Hall (U.S., dir. Woody Allen, 1977) Brief Encounter (U.K., dir. David Lean, 1946) Bulworth (U.S., dir. Warren Beatty, 1998) Clockwise (U.K., dir. Christopher Morahan, 1986) The Closet (Le Placard) (France, dir. Francis Veber, 2001) Comfort and Joy (U.K., dir. Bill Forsyth, 1984) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (卧虎藏龙; Wò hǔ cáng long) (Taiwan/P.R. China/U.S., 2000, dir. Ang Lee) Dear Diary (Caro diario) (Italy, dir. Nani Moretti, 1993)

Deconstructing Harry (U.S., dir. Woody Allen, 1997) The Descendants (U.S., dir. Alexander Payne, 2011) The Doctor (U.S., dir. Randa Haines, 1991) Factory Boss (打工老板; Da gong lao ban) (P.R. China, dir. Zhang Wei, 2014) Fading Gigolo (U.S., dir. Woody Allen, 2013) The First Wives’ Club (U.S., dir. Hugh Wilson, 1996) A Fish Called Wanda (U.K., dir. Charles Crichton, 1988) The Flower of My Secret (La flor de mi secreto) (Spain, dir. Pedro Almodovar, 1995) The Full Monty (U.K., dir. Peter Cattaneo, 1997) Hannah and her Sisters (U.S., dir. Woody Allen, 1986) Ikiru (Japan, dir. Akira Kurosawa, 1952) Irma Vep (France, dir. Olivier Assayas, 1996) It’s A Wonderful Life (U.S., dir. Frank Capra, 1946) Love Actually (U.K., dir. Richard Curtis, 2003) Mamma Mia! (U.S./U.K./Germany/Greece, dir. Phyllida Lloyd, 2008) Mamma Mia 2: Here We Go Again! (U.S./U.K../Croatia, dir. Ol Parker, 2018) Manhattan (U.S., dir. Woody Allen, 1979) A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (U.S., dir. Woody Allen, 1982) Mo (U.K., dir. Philip Martin, 2010) My Life (U.S., dir. Bruce Joel Rubin, 1993) Ordinary People (U.S., dir. Robert Redford, 1980) Perpetual Motion (无穷动; Wu qiong dong) (P.R. China, dir. Ning Ying, 2005) The Piano in a Factory (钢的琴; Gang de qin) (P.R. China, dir. Zhang Meng, 2011) Shadowlands (U.K., dir. Richard Attenborough, 1993)

Shakespeare in Love (U.K./U.S., dir. John Madden, 1998) A Single Man (U.S., dir. Tom Ford, 2009) Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens laende) (Sweden, dir. Ingmar Bergman, 1955) The Son’s Room (La stanza del figlio) (Italy, dir. Nani Moretti, 2001) Spring in a Small Town (小城之春; Xiaocheng zi chun) (Rep. of China, 1948, dir. Fu Mei) Stardust Memories (U.S., dir. Woody Allen, 1980) Still Alice (U.S., dir. Richard Glatzer & Wash Westmoreland, 2014) Sullivan’s Travels (U.S., dir. Preston Sturges, 1941) Thelma and Louise (U.S., dir. Ridley Scott, 1991) Tootsie (U.S., dir. Sydney Pollack, 1982) Topsy-Turvy (U.K., dir. Mike Leigh, 1999) Voyage in Italy (Viaggio in Italia) (Italy, dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1954) Wit (U.S., dir. Mike Nichols, 2001) Woman, Demon, Human (人·鬼·情; Ren gui qing) (P.R. China, dir. Huang Shuqin, 1987) Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios) (Spain, dir. Pedro Almodovar, 1988)

Footnotes to Midlife Mark Jackson __________________________________________________

Midlife crises1 According to Elliott Jaques, Canadian sociologist, psychoanalyst, And architect of works on trust and time, Now dead, The midlife crisis, Marked by vain attempts to forestall the downward curve of life, Constitutes a form of manic defence Against surfacing awareness of personal death, An interpretation that seems generous To those who devote their middle years to material gain and self-indulgence â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Fragments of the American Dream, Turned sour.

Elliott Jaques, `Death and the Mid-life Crisisâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 46 (1965).

Suburban myths 2 Balancing work and family â&#x20AC;&#x201C; like other suburban wives and mothers She argues. He spends too long at work, On commuting and caffeine, Not that he works too hard, as she does, Even at weekends When time reserved for mending broken dreams Is squandered on emails.

Scott Donaldson, The Suburban Myth, (New York, 1969).

Marital tensions3 Courtship, marriage, possibly parenthood Flow and ebb, Fuelled by hormones Shaped loosely for betrayal.

In time, his amygdala Oval organ of archaic emotions Responds.

She knows before he realises, Too late, Leaving a family, A woman destroyed by waning testosterone Or perfumed oestrogen Without a home.

Their case is closed By a solitary counsellor, One marriage â&#x20AC;&#x201C; perhaps two â&#x20AC;&#x201C; destroyed.

Henry V. Dicks, Marital Tensions: Clinical Studies towards a Psychological Theory of Interaction, (London, 1967).

A common sadness 4 Family portraits, Corroded by indiscretions, past or present, Remind those friends and relatives who still respond That breasts, once dressed in cabbage, Fed puckered lips and thumbs Searching elsewhere now for pleasure.

Empty nests are no longer nests Just empty Filled with a common sadness.

Marie Carmichael Stopes, `A common sadnessâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, in Marie Carmichael Stopes, Enduring Passion, (London, 1928).

The crack-up 5 The emotional storm That corrupts the minds of men and women Past the age of forty Should not be underestimated. Receding, greying, losing faith, No longer cherishing the picture windows Of a house that was once a home, Misunderstood - or understood too well By a partner also pleading for recognition, Cracked.

Hemispheres Spliced forever â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or put asunder.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, (New Directions, 1945).

Seconds 6 Life can begin â&#x20AC;&#x201C; or end - at forty, When doors are closed and opened, Not quite in unison, When dreams of distinction are shaded by decrepitude, Exposed by fatherhood and grief, Concealed only by artifice.

By midlife, Survival is expected, However bruised we feel.

Edging now towards later life, An old age that must be somehow salvaged before death, I am grateful for a second act, Sustained by a family, By a double helix of Irish fairy tales.

David Ely, Seconds, (Signet, 1964).

The Concealment of Mid-life: From Physical Jerks to Testicular Implants James F. Stark _________________________________________________________

In 2009, the Academy of Medical

James Stark is Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of Leeds, where he is also Director of the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute. Amongst his many interests outside work, passions for cooking, gardening, and walking are especially well-suited to the approach of whatever `mid-life’ might be, if anything (though he is not quite there yet).

Sciences warned that ‘promises of substantial increases in lifespan, reversing ageing or even immortality are unlikely to be fulfilled in the foreseeable future, if at all’. 1 Although in recent history the medical profession has tended to pour cold water on the idea that we can recapture our lost youth or

ever achieve immortality, the fight for consumer attention fuels outlandish and excessive claims about the potential for anti-ageing or rejuvenating products. We might sneer at whether such things can ever turn back the clock, but there are countless historical examples of attempts to revitalise the human body. Almost every conceivable substance and technique has at some point been claimed to have the power to slow, stop, or even reverse the ageing process. Many of these were framed specifically as means of combating the so-called ‘scourge’ of middle age, with its telltale signs: greying hair, loss of mental faculties, and ‘energy’: a less-than-subtle euphemism for virility and fertility. Although humans have tried to cheat ageing for centuries, the period immediately after World War One saw significant transformations in the methods used to

rejuvenate bodies and minds. These included the development of new surgical procedures, which aimed to manipulate sex hormones, and the reconfiguration of everyday beauty products like skin foods and moisturising creams. All of these seemed to promise wildly different results. In the case of male hormone treatments, a patient might expect to regain lost fertility as well as recapture the vigour and energy of youth. The more everyday domestic cosmetic products, marketed almost exclusively to women, promised to bestow a youthful appearance. These different claims were rooted strongly in gendered understandings of what kind of rejuvenation was appropriate for men and women. In men, the goal was invariably to achieve renewed sexual function and extend economic productivity. For women, the restoration of youthful appearance enabled a return to the time of life when women were deemed to be of most social (reproductive) value. Whilst prolonging life was a goal for at least some eugenicists and members of the medical profession, it was not a universal concern for all would-be rejuvenators, who concentrated instead largely on extending youthfulness. Electrical therapies which anyone could use in their homes also became increasingly popular. In the domestic arena, one of the most widely used electrotherapy devices of the early twentieth century was the Overbeck Rejuvenator, which claimed to restore lost vitality by restocking the body's supply of electrical energy. Depending on which ailment the user wanted to treat, electrodes were applied to the body on a daily basis. The inventor of the Rejuvenator was Otto Overbeck, an enterprising chemist who worked in the brewing industry; he claimed that his machine would have positive results in all conditions apart from infectious diseases and so-called deformities. The popularity of physical exercise for maintaining overall health had already grown through the nineteenth century. This involved both organised sport and individual, personal exercise regimes designed to be performed in the home, all heavily

gendered. In 1834, Donald Walker published a book entitled British Manly Exercises. 2 Walker included diagrams showing proper rowing technique, horseriding instructions and detailed guidance on how to lunge, vault and wrestle. The expansion of the British Empire also brought new kinds of exercise within reach. Walker recommended doing specific exercises with large, wooden clubs from India, which offered ‘the most effectual kinds of athletic training known anywhere’ according to a British officer stationed in the country. These ‘Indian clubs’ became a last-lasting feature of fitness regimes and were included at both the 1904 and 1932 Summer Olympics as part of the artistic gymnastics programme. Achieving physical fitness was a cornerstone of Victorian values. Cultural trends such as Muscular Christianity, which originated in England in the mid-nineteenth century, emphasised the importance of training the body. In Tom Brown at Oxford, the follow-up to the quintessential public school book Tom Brown’s School Days, author and social reformer Thomas Hughes claimed that strong Christian bodies could be ‘used for the protection of the weak, the advancement of all righteous causes, and the subduing of the earth which God has given to the children of men.’ 3 As well as established upper-class pursuits like riding and golf, at-home exercises became increasingly popular. In his best-selling 1861 book of home exercises, The Portable Gymnasium, Gustav Ernst noted that ‘the beneficial effects resulting from the employment of Gymnastic Exercises … are so generally known and appreciated that an advocacy of the system is here quite needless.’ 4 Just four years later, in 1865, a huge outdoor gym – the Royal Patent Gymnasium – was opened in Edinburgh, regularly attracting thousands of fitness fanatics each day. It featured The Serpent, a giant circular rowing machine which could reportedly seat 600 people at a time. Later in the nineteenth century, James Cantlie (1851-1926) was just one of many who developed ‘new’ exercise regimes suitable for the home. He was a Scottish

medical practitioner who promoted first aid and developed particular expertise in tropical medicine. However, in 1889 he founded the British Institute of Physical Training, where men and women, young and old, could attend exercise classes where they would perform elaborate series of stretches, termed “physical jerks”. People who came to the classes were encouraged to practise these exercises at home on a daily basis, but warned to return regularly so that they could learn new ones and make sure that they were using the correct technique. Cantlie also made other lifestyle recommendations, insisting amongst other things that wearing kilts promoted ‘the health and strength of lads’ as they did not restrict the natural movements of the body. 5 Although Cantlie’s system of exercise was just one trend in a period of numerous competing exercise regimes, when he came to write 1984 well over fifty years later, George Orwell chose to take inspiration not from Joseph Pilates’s famous system, but from Cantlie: members of the Outer Party were required to carry out daily exercise, monitored by telescreens. Early in the book the main protagonist, Winston Smith, ‘mechanically shot his arms back and forth, wearing on his face the look of grim enjoyment which was considered proper during the Physical Jerks.’ 6 The Victorian age also saw the rise of the celebrity fitness guru. Arguably the most famous was Eugen Sandow. Born in Germany in 1867, Sandow staged elaborate strongman shows throughout Europe and America, and built up a global publishing empire through his magazine Physical Culture. He credited his system of exercise with transforming his physique, and self-consciously recreated poses from classical Roman and Greek sculpture to showcase his athletic prowess. Significantly, this was all set against Sandow’s own life story, involving a sick childhood overcome through physical exercise, which also warded off the early onset of the signs of ‘deterioration’ in middle age. Sandow was a trailblazer who inspired others, including the American

bodybuilder Bernarr Macfadden. Just a year younger than Sandow, Macfadden had also been weak and sickly as a child. He claimed that anyone could overcome illhealth through lifestyle management — including a vegetarian diet and regular weightlifting — and encouraged followers of his system to avoid turning to mainstream medicine in their pursuit of good health. By the end of the Victorian period new anxieties about the degeneration of the race raised the importance of physical fitness still further. After a series of military setbacks Britain in particular was gripped by a sense of anxiety about its place in the world. A common feature of this was the worry that the industrialisation which had driven the expansion of the British Empire had made bodies weak: trapped in factories and offices, and made slovenly by technological change. The early twentieth century saw worries about national fitness persist, and the craze for exercise continue, increasingly linked to particular stages of the lifecourse, especially mid-life. The emergence of endocrinology as a major scientific specialism in the first decade of the twentieth century also opened up new possibilities for understanding and modifying human physiology. After the identification of the first hormone, secretin, by William Bayliss and Ernest Starling in 1902, it was clear that even very tiny quantities of these blood-borne chemical messengers could exert far-reaching effects throughout the body. One of the key features of the bodily hormonal landscape appeared to be its relationship with sex and sexuality. In 1912, the Austrian physiologist Eugen Steinach devised a series of experiments designed to manipulate the levels of what he termed ‘sex hormone’ (testosterone) in guinea pigs. Steinach was based at The Vivarium, a prestigious research institute in Vienna, and he scaled up his work through a range of increasingly large animals, focusing particularly on cows. After concluding that the secretions of the testes were responsible for governing sexuality and sexual activity and behaviour across the animal kingdom,

Steinach began overseeing partial vasectomies in an effort to increase the production of testosterone and so rejuvenate and reinvigorate his male patients. In 1923, The Lancet published an article expressing scepticism about his work, which had â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;an apparently irresistible appeal to elderly persons whose waning virility renders them disconsolate and fretful.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; 7 Despite this dismissal, Steinach generated great public interest in his work and even inspired a small but fiercely loyal group of supporters within the medical profession; he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology on several separate occasions between 1921 and 1938. Public audiences meanwhile were fascinated by press reports of successful rejuvenations using his procedure. But he was also subject to fierce accusations of quackery and deception. Ultimately Steinachâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s research into the action of hormones proved to be important foundational work in the emerging field of endocrinology. The so-called Steinach operation was a fairly expensive, exclusive treatment, and it became fashionable among the higher levels of society as well as with many artists. These included the Irish poet W. B. Yeats, who claimed that the procedure inspired him to new artistic heights. At almost the same time as Steinach was making claims about the rejuvenating possibilities of his procedure, the Russian-born surgeon Serge Voronoff was developing an even more dramatic potential solution to the ailments of mid-life and old age. Working from a hotel in Paris, where he and his entourage reportedly occupied an entire floor and operated in relative secrecy, Voronoff argued that grafting tissue taken from monkey testicles into older men could produce a remarkable and rapid rejuvenation. For those without the finances or social capital to aspire to personal treatment by Steinach or Voronoff, a huge range of rejuvenating options were gradually becoming available. As well as new electrical devices, exercise regimes, and skin care products,

numerous diets were also hailed as capable of inducing bodily regeneration. Many of these systems of eating relied on the importance of observing a vegetarian diet or consuming large quantities of raw foods. Others responded to the regular discovery of new vitamins through the early twentieth century by ascribing to them extraordinary powers of rejuvenation. The proliferation of so many methods highlights just how powerful were the cultural anxieties about ageing. The desire for rejuvenation was a factor which motivated men and women at all stages of their life, but there was a particular anxiety associated with the onset of mid-life. Many of these strategies for preserving youthfulness were advertised as indispensable parts of a healthy life, as well as promoters of longevity and a youthful appearance. In his 1923 book Rejuvenation, for example, the self-styled anti-ageing specialist Jean Frumusan identified a series of domestic habits designed for ‘attaining old age’. These included instructions to ‘drink a large glass of water’ on waking and ‘jump out of bed immediately’, ‘eat slowly and moderately’, and be ‘carnivorous at one meal and vegetarian at the next’. Frumusan also advocated periodic fasting ‘for twenty-four or forty-eight hours’ to restore the vitality of the body. 8 The methods of rejuvenation popular in the early twentieth century were remarkably different from one another and show the rich range of ideas associated with ageing. These ranged from dubious, fringe rejuvenating procedures to pioneering experimental biology. The social and cultural context of the interwar period — a time of heightened fascination with anti-ageing—was crucial in shaping public perceptions of and attitudes towards rejuvenation. We are still living with the legacy of these earlier attempts to avoid the onset of physical and mental decline which was perceived by many to be a hallmark of the mid-life period. Many contemporary diets, exercise regimes, and even hormone treatments owe much to the rejuvenation pioneers of the early twentieth century, who helped to affirm the attractive — if

misleading — claim that the undesirable features of old age could be successfully counteracted.

Further Reading Ted Anton, The Longevity Seekers: Science, Business, and the Fountain of Youth. Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Lucian Boia, Forever Young: A Cultural History of Longevity. London: Reaktion, 2003. Patricia Cohen, In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age. New York; London: Scribner, 2012. Charlotte Greenhalgh, Aging in Twentieth Century Britain. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. James F. Stark, The Cult of Youth: Anti-Ageing in Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Notes 1

Academy of Medical Sciences, “Rejuvenating Ageing Research”, September 2009:

https://acmedsci.ac.uk/file-download/35180-ageingwe.pdf.

Donald Walker, British Manly Exercises: Containing Rowing and Sailing, Riding &

Driving. T. Wardle: Philadelphia, 1837. 3

Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown at Oxford. Cambridge; London: Macmillan, 1861.

Gustav Ernst, The Portable Gymnasium. London, 1861.

‘Scrap-book containing newspaper and journal cuttings, lecture leaflects, invitations to

functions and meetings, programmes and greeting cards’, James Cantlie Papers, MS1456/7920/7923, Wellcome Library, London. 6

George Orwell, 1984. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949.

‘Steinach’s Operation’, The Lancet, 24 February 1923, p. 393.

Jean Frumusan, Rejuvenation: The Duty, the Means, and the Possibility of Regaining Youth.

London: John Bale, Sons, & Danielsson, 1923.

A Manufactured Crisis Louise Foxcroft __________________________________________________ `The “crises” of a woman’s life have been much descanted upon by men medical writers. . . Of all woman’s “crises” perhaps the most artificially created has been her “change” or climacteric.’ Marie Carmichael Stopes, Change of Life in Men and Women (London, 1936)

Read any popular women’s magazine article or newspaper piece on menopause and you’ll find a crisis. A friend of mine, standing in a supermarket queue and idly scanning the magazine headlines, read this: ‘What You MUST Know About The Menopause NOW’. The absurd urgency struck her: ‘Now, as in before your uterus drops out in the queue, no doubt’, she

Louise Foxcroft is a historian writing on medico-cultural perceptions of the human body the assumptions, anxieties, prejudices and myths that we’re constantly falling for. She likes Flannery O’Connor, Vivienne Westwood frocks, lazing and candour. She is a post-menopausal grandmother of four, a tutor at ice.cam.ac.uk, and company director at villageunderground.co.uk. louisefoxcroft.com

said. It’s billed as the imminent end of sex, beauty, desire, desirability, fertility, worth, you name it, and it’s enough to scare the pants off you. Designed to, in fact. But why, and how did we get here? For centuries menopause has been seen by physicians as the ‘gateway to death’, and if that doesn’t sound like a crisis, I’m not sure what does. So it’s hardly surprising that if women know nothing else about menopause, they know that it’s bad - they have been taught to dread it. And there’s nothing like a manufactured crisis to kick off anxieties and the chance for profit. We, women and men, have absorbed this anxiety. It is arguably the most harmful menopausal symptom and it is embedded in a history of cultural misogyny, medical

gynophobia, and the idea of crisis. Classical ideas informed the beginning of modern western medicine from the eighteenth-century ‘rise of science’, and Greek and Roman physicians believed that women were inferior creatures, different, weak, whorish, irrational, prone to sickness and in constant need of supervision. Women were inherently pathological, condemned by medicine at its very outset, and only of any real interest because of their reproductive system. Hippocrates argued that menopause signalled the reassimilation of the female body to the more knowable, orderly, male body. Galen thought women were imperfect, mutilated examples of the ideal (male) form but, luckily, they became less feminine and more ‘manly-hearted’ at menopause. These ideas provided the basis for all of the prejudices, cruelties, experiments, misapprehensions, and treatments that crowded medical texts and practice for centuries to come. In the classical system, though, the body was subject to climacteric periods of change every seven years - the term comes from the Greek, meaning a step or rung of a ladder. The idea of a single, dangerous crisis in mid-life is a modern construction. Western medieval records suggest a quarter of the population reached menopausal age, so associating the fear of disease and death specifically with menopause is historically a non-starter, but it became all the rage. Average life expectancies were lower but skewed by infant mortality, so if you made it past puberty and childbirth you stood a very good chance of reaching old age. Menopause was a common experience. Today, more and more women spend longer in the postmenopausal period than ever before: there are approximately 12 million women in the UK aged 45 and over, and there are going to be a lot more in the future. It is a job to find references to the menopause before the eighteenth century, as the literature is sparse. Little wonder: it barely existed on the medical radar. Nor was it much mentioned in women’s common-place books from this period, where everyday

remedies and potions were routinely recorded. When the menopause made its debut as an official medical entity it wasn’t deemed a disease in itself; rather, the emphasis was on continued management and reassurance. Over two hundred years ago, the physician John Fothergill described menopause as a transition, which required - in some cases - management, noting that ‘there is a period in the life of females to which, for the most part, they are taught to look with some degree of anxiety’. But his was a lonely voice, and a crisis has greater potential for drumming up business than a benign-sounding period of transition. But the transition was pathologized as it was illuminated, and any number of ghastly and sometimes fatal complaints were ascribed to it. (See Text Box 1) Menstrual blood was thought to be corrupt or poisonous and could kill plants, caterpillars and insects, turn mirrors blind, cause infertility, miscarriage, rabies, melancholy and madness. Imagine then, if the blood ceased to flow and remained inside the body, then a woman might really have reason to suffer. Cancer, epilepsy, consumption and other terrible diseases were blamed on the menopause. Women who had reached a certain age, wrote a physician in 1563, were ‘always infirm and most of all in those parts of the body which are connected to the uterus’. They might even ‘desire the male more than ever’ as their disorderly uterus began to rise or descend. Endless bizarre symptoms and behaviours might manifest themselves or, as Daniel Duncan suggested in 1687, it was ‘like the Dead Sea, with no flux and reflux’, where tempests were superseded by the calm observed in those close to death. Rare was the doctor with a good prognosis for the middle-aged woman.

Text Box 1 The all-inclusive lists of physical and psychological symptoms associated with menopause today may or may not include hot flushes, cold sweats, night sweats, weight gain, backache, tingling, fatigue, headache, palpitations, arthralgia, dizzy spells, irritability, nervousness, anxiety, apathy, depression, early wakening, emotional instability, fears, feelings of suffocation, forgetfulness, insomnia, lack of concentration, light-headedness, loss of interest, loss of self-worth, loss of libido, heightened arousal, nervousness, feelings of panic, sadness, tenseness, osteoporosis, depression, dysuria, dyspareunia, paraesthesia, chest pains, breast pains, constipation, diarrhoea, facial hair, vaginal dryness, changes in skin and hair, and unsurprisingly in light of these lists, worry about the body. These myriad symptoms take in every bodily system: vasomotor; cardiovascular; metabolic; sensory; digestive; skeletal; glandular; and the central nervous system, yet the only universally agreed symptom is vasomotor, the hot flush, and even that is still argued about. All these symptoms can have any number of other causes. This is not a crisis unless it’s a crisis of ignorance.

At the same time as midlife women were becoming patients, they were being squeezed out of the healing role. The male-dominated profession began publishing works on the menopause from its point of view, which concentrated, unsurprisingly, on its negative, treatable aspects. The French physician Charles Pierre Louis de Gardanne coined the term ménèspausie in the early nineteenth century and a torrent of medical opinion, aetiology, treatment, prejudice, and humiliating disgust followed. It fast became the worst of all the ‘calamities’ to beset ‘a sex that seems destined to support the largest share of human misery’. A gynophobic ‘doctrine of crisis’ developed during this febrile nineteenth-century drive towards professional status for physicians. This process inevitably included the designation and categorisation of diseases, and growing specialisation led to distinct branches of medicine, including gynaecology, which began in 1816. Victorian physicians [almost all male, of course] agreed that the ‘catamenial crisis … disturbed organic and physical functions’ and accounted for the deviance and irrationality of

women; that is, any behaviour that didn’t follow what society thought women should be or do. In 1857, the Victorian man of menopause, Edward Tilt, published The Change of Life in Health and Disease: A Practical Treatise on the Nervous and Other Affections Incidental to Women at the Decline of Life, a medical manual for the practising physician which included the now usual plethora of symptoms, including diseases of the brain, the reproductive organs, the skin, heart, and others of ‘rare occurrence’. He believed that not enough attention had been paid to the dangers of the ‘crisis’, and thought it could be brought on by a shock, a fall, a fright, or a severe frost. Tilt was attempting to establish a scientific, quantitative base for explaining this ‘critical time’ while suggesting the physician was omnipotent, ‘at once a divine, a moralist, and a philosopher’. His view was that medicine had been negligent in its treatment of the menopause, that it should buck up its ideas and give it due regard, and he was the man to do it. He challenged those who denied that the change of life was `a critical period’ and so was instrumental in the manufacture of menopause as a crisis, with all the symptoms, treatments, and attendant dread that could bring. He would ‘forcibly show the evil effects of the c. of life’ through experience and observation within his burgeoning Bayswater practice, revealing that it was well-to-do women who provided information rather than the majority who had their menopause without complaint or, at least, without seeing a physician. Endocrinology became big news in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and by 1936 had become an acceptable field of scientific study. Sex hormones were ‘called into existence’, isolated and synthesised, and HRT became not only legitimate but almost obligatory. The underlying message was that menopausal women would be mad or irresponsible not to seek medical attention to correct themselves. Writing in the 1930s, Dr Victor Pauchet described menopause as ‘a veritable psychological

crisis’ when a woman’s ‘physiognomy, external appearance, voice, and even character’ altered, rendering her ‘cantankerous’ and physically too manly for his liking, as ‘virile cells take on such importance that the face acquires a masculine aspect: the nose lengthens, the hair of the cheeks, upper lip, and chin become a beard’. He was basing his derogatory opinions on twenty years of glandular research, and was in favour of hormone treatment to restore a menopausal woman’s femininity - for which read the required cultural norm of meek biddability and delicacy. It would surely be a crisis for men if this were up-ended. Marie Stopes was a rare, rational female voice on menopause in this decade and many to come. In 1936 her best-selling book, Change of Life in Men and Women (note she includes men) argued that ‘fear of the event … not only clouds natural happiness in the present in anticipation of a dreaded future, it has the power to create the very thing its victim dreads’. Women, she wrote, had been ‘bullied into miserable ill-health by the primitive, dominating male, whose open contempt for women’s whole existence save as a female breeding animal, colours his thoughts and even his medical writings’. Doctors had artificially created the crisis by writing about menopausal ‘disabilities’ and emphasising ‘a revolting, frightening, misleading and injurious state with a succession of the most lurid pictures of all the inevitable miseries which women should expect’. A Sister at a major London hospital told Stopes that nearly every case of menopausal difficulty she saw admitted was induced by the ghastly things they had read and been told about what was going to happen. Had these women not ‘met with such incitements to illness’ they would probably have passed through the change with little or no difficulty. It was all ‘falsity and hoodoo’, their health and happiness were over-cast and unnecessary fears generated. Stopes accused doctors, gynaecologists in particular, of being incapable of imagining real women: they were either all fat and ugly or thin and dried-up, and there was no

mention of the ‘ripening of the healthy, happy woman’. Stopes debunked the notion of crisis and insisted that women need ‘not anticipate any trouble at all at this time’. Yet, over thirty years later, Dr David R Reuben, the Californian psychiatrist and sex ‘expert’ who, in 1969, published the infamous Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid To Ask), was still peddling regressive, binary ideas to a new generation. ‘As estrogen is shut off’, he wrote, ‘a woman becomes as close as she can to being a man’, and ‘having outlived their ovaries [women] have outlived their usefulness as human beings’. Reuben regarded women, as in Classical medicine, as being their ovaries, their essential purpose and femininity - that cultural construct - residing there. The American gynaecologist Robert Wilson agreed, claiming in his best-seller, Feminine Forever (1966), that menopause is a ‘living decay … borne bravely by women, but is hardly endurable’. It renders women redundant and obsolete, their bodies a ‘galloping catastrophe’ which only estrogen can repair and, importantly for their husbands, make them ‘much more pleasant to live with . . . not dull and unattractive’. He argued for menopause as a disease, recommending treatment with long-term oestrogen therapy, ‘to the grave’. Inconveniently, though, it turned out that Wilson was funded by the pharmaceutical firm Wyeth, which has claimed not to know if Wilson ever worked for them but whose profits from HRT took off over the next thirty years. Wyeth placed patronising and misogynistic adverts in medical journals claiming that, ‘almost any tranquillizer might calm her down but at her age estrogen might be what she really needs’. These books and the plethora of adverts for hormone products that appeared in mainstream papers and magazines provided a powerful push to the medico-cultural idea of menopause as a crisis and, moreover, one with a‘cure’.

The menopause, then, is a natural phenomenon historically hijacked by medicine, colonised by commercial interests, and turned into a manufactured crisis. A transitional change at midlife is inevitable, but a crisis is not.

Further Reading Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Penguin Classics, 2019). Louise Foxcroft, Hot Flushes, Cold Science: A History of the Modern Menopause, (Granta, 2009). Judith Houck, Hot and Bothered: Women, Medicine, and Menopause in the United States,

(Harvard University Press, 2006).

Nora Ephron, I Feel Bad About My Neck, (Doubleday, 2020). Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men,

(Penguin, 2019)

Patti Smith, Year of the Monkey, (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Dangerous Years? Historicizing the Male Climacterium Hans-Georg Hofer __________________________________________________

When does middle age turn into old age? Is it a phase of quiet, barely noticeable transition or one of abrupt change? How can changes, if present at all, be recognized and interpreted, and what are the consequences? Are there certain caesuras we need to be aware of? Symptoms we’d better notice – or ignore? Does change necessarily mean crisis? Questions like these may sound far-fetched to some of us, familiar to others. Accordingly, answers

Hans-Georg Hofer is a historian of medicine at the University of Münster, Germany. He has published widely on issues of psychiatry and internal medicine in the twentieth-century. Since his PhD thesis on the history of neurasthenia, he has also undertaken research on medicine and male ageing bodies. He still likes the idea that the production of medical knowledge about the FeMale Climacterium is inevitably embedded in a cultural universe constituted by narratives, symbols and metaphors.

vary widely – and even more in a historical perspective. In the following, I will touch upon debates that assumed an abrupt change between middle age and old age in the sense of an inevitable turning point in the course of human development, noticeable and irreversible in certain respects, a (sort of) biographical watershed. With that in mind, I will trace the history of the idea of climacteric change, which is an old one and has been popular since ancient times. We will see that the idea also has a couple of surprises in store. For centuries, the dangers of the climacteric have been self-evident to a certain degree – an unpleasant though inescapable fact for men described and discussed by those in socially privileged positions. I would like to trace

these lines of discussion and draw attention to the remarkable changes of meaning associated with the term ‘climacteric’. On a more specific level, I argue for a perception of the historical diversity of knowledge about the change of life, and also for a more conscious use of terms like ‘male climacterium’, ‘menopause’, ‘andropause’, or – to quote one of the most beautiful acronyms of modern medicine – ‘PADAM, Partial Androgen Deficiency of the Ageing Male’. This is both a story about old terms facing remarkable semantic changes, and newly coined concepts and labels with which medicine has attempted to define the health problems of midlife men more precisely.

Dangerous years The idea that middle-aged and older men go through a life phase of accelerated physiological changes dates back a long time. In ancient times, Greek and Roman philosophers, historians and medical authors discussed a hebdomadic division of life, sharing the opinion that the number ‘7’ played an important part in human development. The term climacterium (from Greek: klimax, ladder, step, or climactis, ladder rung) symbolized the idea of a step-like path through life subjected to profound changes that occurred every seven years, thus dividing embryogenesis from birth, childhood from maturity and adulthood, middle age from old age and death. In the early period of life, climacteric years stood for accelerated phases of growth and maturation which went along with (directly) observable physical changes: at the age of 7, children lost their milk teeth and got their permanent teeth; at the age of 14, they reached puberty (girls started menstruating and boys developed their fertility). By the age of 21, puberty had ended and paved the way for adulthood – boys turned to men, as indicated by the growth of beard, for instance. By the age of 28, men had reached the peak of their physical strength. Accordingly, early middle age was

regarded as a period of power and good health characterised by its relative stability and mere absence of diseases. However, this stability was deceptive, since the forties could be a dangerous decade. The ages 49 (seven times seven) and 63 (nine times seven) were regarded as especially dangerous in a man’s life as they could trigger accelerated decline or an abrupt loss of strength and increased number of threats to body and mind. Those years were called anni climacterici and meant years of sudden onset of disease and extraordinary change in the life and health of men. In early modern Europe, these ideas were still widespread. Middle age was perceived as a stage when youth had ended and old age had not yet begun, a period in life which did not show any striking physiological transition. In the later middle age (years 42 onwards), however, people began to realize that the ‘dangerous years’ had finally come, inescapably, and that life had been written subject to the laws of time once more. Of course, early modern writers were strongly aware that ageing varied among individuals. Nevertheless, the idea of a climacteric remained a popular one. `Men are in constant danger’, argued Levinus Lemnius in the seventeenth century. He continued: `There are two years, the seventh and the ninth, which generally bring great changes to a man’s life, and great dangers.’ Much to the relief of middle-aged men, Lemnius insisted that a climacteric year would not end with death in every case. Yet he still regarded the climacteric period as the most perilous phase of the life cycle as `the bodies of men suffer manifest changes and in this year, a person is most likely to either suffer from the loss of goods and health, fall ill or die.’ How and in what way did these ideas find their way into the broader, popular knowledge of their time? Historians of medicine have recently opened up a new corpus of sources, namely published birthday letters and congratulation brochures devoted to princes, aristocrats, and noblemen. They were written by doctors, scholars, and historians who had access to a rich diversity of books on medical

astrology. These brochures included long lists of famous men who had died during the ‘dangerous years’ or – even more remarkably – had survived the climacteric. Many men perceived the `Great Climacterical Year’ as a genuine, frightening event. Correspondence shows that men were trembling at the thought of reaching the climacteric – and congratulated each other when they had survived it unharmed. Some argued that autobiographies should be written before the climacteric cliffs of the year 49. The nineteenth century introduced new concepts, on the one hand, and a blending of traditional and modern ideas, on the other. Proponents of medical sciences began to reject the idea of climacteric years when analysing mortality rates and finding no increase about the critical period. Hence they argued that there was no statistical evidence for anyone to fall victim to one's climacteric. To these authors, the notion of a dangerous transition from middle to old age was to be counted among medical superstition. Others, however, would not give up their fascination with thinking in terms of numbers. British physician Thomas Laycock stated in the early 1840s: `the doctrine of septenniads and septenaries is extensively adopted by modern physicians . . . by the observation of these [climacteric] changes, the ancients professed to a subdivision of the whole lifespan; and this plan, indeed, is the only safe plan for the modern scientific inquirer.’ Combining numerical, physiological and teleological concepts, Laycock argued for a `Proleptical Science’ in order `to foretell individual and social suffering’. Decades later, the research of Viennese psychologist Hermann Swoboda, who published a voluminous study on The Seven Years in 1917, followed a similar line of thought. In fact, this way of thinking persisted deep into the twentieth century, its various manifestations continuously entangling science with magic.

Climacterium and (male) menopause

A tendency to blur science and magic can also be identified when taking a closer look at the term ‘climacterium’ itself: since the early nineteenth century, its scope of meaning had undergone some transformation. In 1812, the French physician Charles de Gardanne coined the term ménèspausie to designate the cessation of monthly periods. He later changed it to ménopause (1821). This term gradually gained acceptance in European medical circles. In the Medical Lexicon: A Dictionary of Medical Science published in 1846, the topic ran as follows: `At present the word Climacteric is chiefly applied to certain periods of life at which great changes occur, independently of any numerical estimate of years. Such are the period of puberty, in both sexes, and that of the cessation of menses in women.’ This quotation suggests that from the mid-nineteenth century onwards the previously distinct meanings of menopause and climacterium became entwined. Although they have different histories, they were – and still are – often taken to be synonymous. In 1813, the President of the Royal College of Physicians, Sir Henry Halford, published an article arguing that there were certain symptoms in elderly men which could be considered a disorder, if not a distinct disease. Halford identified tiredness, loss of weight and insomnia as the key symptoms of what he called “climacteric disease”. Interestingly, Halford’s concept established neither a connection with sexual spheres nor (clearly) described an analogous disease in women. Thus, the climacteric disease has to be seen in the traditional context of the old ideas of dangerous years and climacteric stages in elderly men. Almost a century later, in 1895, the topic became controversial again when the young Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud postulated in his study of the sexual pathological aspects of neurasthenia: `There are men who, like women, show a menopause and develop anxiety neurosis at the time of their decreasing potency and increasing libido.’ Freud assumed a strong increase in the sexual excitability of

women and men throughout the menopause. It stood not only in contrast to a decreasing potency but also resulted in an overtaxed psyche. Years later in his American lectures `On Psychoanalysis’ (1909), Freud repeated his view, this time using the other term: `There is also a ‘climacteric’ in men with the following dispositions to disease.’ Debates were brought to a climax in 1910. Danish author Karin Michaelis published Den farlige Alder (The Dangerous Age), which focused on women in their forties and became one of the best-selling books at that time, provoking numerous responses in medical and public theatres. Around the same time, Berlin neurologist Kurt Mendel published an essay demanding the recognition of the male climacterium as a disease category. Mendel carefully described a couple of cases of middle-class patients who reported complaints resembling those of women in menopause: `In every single case of mine’, Mendel wrote, `there were complaints of cephalic blood flushes, anxiety along with sudden outbreaks of sweating, palpitations, chest constriction, a general feeling of faintness and insomnia. Moreover, these patients suffered from nervous and psychological symptoms such as emotional instability, weak memory, capriciousness and melancholic moods.’ According to Mendel, the male climacterium developed between the mid-40s and mid-50s and was to be understood as an episodic condition lasting only two or three years. His climacterium virile was a disturbing event, but not a dangerous one. Mendel’s way of thinking was influenced by the concept of neurasthenia, which had become the dominant explanatory pattern for men's psychological and emotional suffering by the early twentieth century. Accordingly, the climacterium was regarded as a nervous disease. Mendel’s colleague Bernard Hollander wrote in 1910 that ‘the driving force of a man's energy remains his nervous system . . . in order to cure a man's climacteric, we must treat his nervous system’. Hollander added a wide range

of electrotherapeutic, balneological and psychotherapeutic practices for his climacteric patients.

Keeping men middle-aged: rejuvenation and hormones The years after the First World War and the â&#x20AC;&#x153;rejuvenation decadeâ&#x20AC;? of the 1920s brought yet another shift. `A man is as old as his gonadsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, famously claimed the Viennese rejuvenation researcher Eugen Steinach. As James Stark has pointed out in The Cult of Youth, Steinach and the rejuvenators believed that ageing bodies could, within limits, revitalize men if they could resexualize them. The main point is that for the first time, rejuvenators had explicitly linked glands, endocrine secretions, sex, and ageing in one causal chain. To have healthy and normal sex glands meant to be youthful, or at least vigorous. To be sexless, in the sense of lost gonadal function, was to be old. Subsequent debates on climacteric change in men, which has been known since the 1960s as `andropause, were strongly influenced by this idea. Over the past decades, the topic has seen new surges of interest. This is due to a couple of reasons and contributing factors, among them the scientific and professional interests of andrology and anti-ageing medicine, a general and sharp rise in gender-specific health issues (including the men's health movement), and the strategic interests of the pharmaceutical industry, which has discovered men between the ages of 45 and 60 as privileged health consumers. Perhaps the new male climacterium is best characterized as a consumer item or commodity, the status and contours of which alternate between disease-mongering and the individual health decisions of ageing men. When diagnosing an ageing-male boom, we should keep in mind that the ways in which the existence, status and significance of the andropause are interpreted differ considerably. It is still unclear how a `normal range of testosterone levels in ageing

men should be defined and which parameters should be used. A proven androgen deficiency does not necessarily lead to the development of clinical symptoms. On the other hand, ageing men with above-average testosterone levels can develop a number of symptoms; in these cases, hormone replacement therapy might be contraindicated. In view of these uncertainties, tracing everything back to hormones has proved to be overly mechanistic and falls short of a mono-causal explanation for male age-related complaints. It is the contested and changing character of the idea of a male climacterium that makes it such an engaging topic for historical investigation. Like the female climacterium or menopause, the male climacterium or andropause cannot be considered an event imposed by nature on menâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ageing bodies; nor is it some previously hidden aspect of human nature that clinicians have only recently discovered. Instead, we can understand the male climacterium as a culturally and historically shaped idea whose latest chapter is just about to be written.

Further reading Hans-Georg Hofer, `Medizin, Altern, Männlichkeit: Zur Kulturgeschichte des männlichen Klimakteriums‘, Medizinhistorisches Journal 42 (2007), pp. 210-245. Antje Kampf, Barbara Marshall and Alan Peterson (eds.), Aging Men, Masculinities and Modern Medicine, (Routledge, 2013). James F. Stark, The Cult of Youth: Anti-Ageing in Modern Britain, (Cambridge, 2020). Michael Stolberg, `From the “climacteric disease” to the “male climacteric”. The historical origins of a modern concept’, Maturitas 58 (2007), pp. 111-116. Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, `The Medicalisation of Male Menopause in America’, Social History of Medicine 20 (2007), pp. 369-388.

The Birthday Party Lucy Hodges __________________________________________________

It is hard to surprise my father for his birthday. He spends a good portion of the year just buying himself the things he wants, and then spends the two months before his birthday (which also falls near Father’s Day) hissing angrily that he doesn’t want anything if anyone even

Lucy Hodges fancies herself a wordsmith in the form of short ‘faction’ prose, and narrates her life’s experiences on her blog, Loops & Flicks. Her other talents lie in organising, planning, and supporting academic research, at which she excels, and so it is in this arena that she makes a living. She is delighted to combine the two in Midlife Conversations.

mentions his age, birthday, or status as a parent. And then, of course, it gets to his birthday, and he is either grumpy and annoyed that we all took him at face value and didn’t purchase him a lavish gift, or he is grumpy and annoyed that we ignored him and bought him gifts “with his OWN MONEY!” (It hasn’t been his own money for years, since we were all impoverished students, but apparently, the fact he once lent a tenner to my brother, who used it to buy Dad’s birthday card has had a deeply scarring effect on him.) For the entirety of my life, I have yearly faced the question of whether to incur wrath and irritation through gift-giving or gift-forgetting. In the end, I usually opt for gift-giving and hope the thrill of opening something handmade will allay my father’s exasperation or fear that his own money has been spent on things he doesn’t want or need. I have also found that offering to do the washing up similarly smooths over his mood, but I’ve yet to share that secret with my mother and siblings. A woman must have her tricks, after all.

The year in which we managed to both allay the gloomy mood and get the gift exactly right was the year of my father’s fiftieth birthday. In April, as usual, Mum and I sat down in the lounge with him and tentatively broached the subject of his fiftieth birthday. “Dad, Mum and I have been talking. About your birthday. In June. When you’ll be fifty.” No response. “I know you’re not terribly keen on birthdays, but, well, it’s an important one.” Still no response. “Should we, perhaps, think about doing something to celebrate?” When no response was yet forthcoming, I poked him and discovered he was, in fact, asleep in his chair. With a sigh, I rose from the sofa and went to make a cup of tea for us all. The smell of brewing black tea leaves roused him from his mid-afternoon nap, and serving it alongside a digestive biscuit put him in a good enough mood to try again. “So, Dad, your birthday.” Eyebrows furrowed. Eyes narrowed. Nostrils flared. “What about it?” “Well, you’re going to be fifty.” “There’s no need to go on about it!” “I didn’t! I just mentioned it!” A noise best described as a ‘harrumph’ echoed from his nose. “You mentioned it the other day.” “When?” “The other day. When the family were here.” The last time the wider family had been at my parents’ house was two days after Christmas – a full three months earlier.

“Yes, well, it feels like it was just the other day.” “OK, Dad.” The fortifying tea was slurped and an attempt to scale the age mountain was renewed. “So, your birthday. It’s a big one. Is there anything you’d like to do?” “No.” “Nothing? You wouldn’t like to go for a meal? Or on a holiday?” “With my OWN MONEY?” “OK then, nothing it is.” And Mum and I retreated to the kitchen, where we shook our heads over his stubbornness and muttered under our breath about annoying men. I was back at university before the subject arose again, in a phone call with my mother, who was determined to do something for my father’s birthday and had decided to enlist me as a human shield in her quest. “Lu, I really do think we should do something for Dad’s birthday.” “Of course we should. He’s turning fifty. The only real question is whether we need to go abroad or whether we can stay in England to avoid his bad mood.” “I think we ought to be around for him, actually. I thought we could organise a surprise party.” It was an unexpectedly good idea – we could pretend to be doing nothing for his birthday, lulling him into a false sense of security, before enduring the grumping about being appalling family members, and then cheering him up with a collection of his nearest and dearest. And thus the Great Surprise Party Planning began. On my return home at Easter, Mum and I schemed in corners and plotted in corridors, until we had a plan for a party. The local pub did an excellent buffet spread, had rooms for those travelling from further afield and was one of my father’s

preferred places to spend a Sunday afternoon (the others being in a boat on the sea or on the back nine at the local golf club.) We issued invitations marked Top Secret, instructing those attending to RSVP to me, met the pub landlord under cover of daylight to plan the menu and swore both bigmouthed brothers of mine to utter silence, to keep the party’s existence under wraps. We managed it, too. We’d even succeeded in purchasing him a personalised number plate for his car – something for which he had longed for some time. A few days before his birthday, Dad started grumping about, asking what we’d planned for his birthday, and what we’d bought him. Our cheery responses of “Nothing!” to both questions were met with slightly stunned silence and a worsening of his mood. Yet nothing could kill our optimism. On the day of his birthday, upon his return from work, he stomped into the kitchen and snarled, “Well? What are we doing for my birthday, then?” He was only half in jest. Dressed in our finery, we piled into the car and drove down the road to the local pub. “Gosh,” he said, his voice filled with genuine surprise. “The pub’s busy tonight, isn’t it?” The car park had more than the usual two cars in it. As we pulled into the car park, he could not conceal his disappointment as he said, “Oh, are we going here, then?” “Well,” said my mother, in possibly the greatest comeback of her marital career, “you don’t like a fuss.” Alas, my father is a clever man, and he soon recognised that the additional three cars in the car park were those of his closest friends…and as we approached the pub, a loud voice hissed, “Shush! He’s coming!” It turns out subtlety is not the strong point of my dad’s friend Andy, who had appointed himself lookout.

Dad entered the pub to find eighty people waiting to celebrate his fiftieth birthday with him, all smiles and cheers – as was he. All gripes, all disappointments forgotten, his jaw dropped as he saw his best friend Gary, who had rung about half an hour earlier ‘from Derbyshire’, to confirm their plans for a few weeks’ time. The party, the evening, the birthday, was a success. More importantly, the ruse was a success, and now Mum and I are not allowed to be alone together for more than seven minutes at a time without Dad interrupting. Eighteen months later, on the occasion of my mother’s fiftieth birthday, I repeated the same scenario but in reverse – organising a surprise party with my father to celebrate her semi-centenary. It was equally as successful, although different to Dad’s extravaganza – my brother and I snuck back from university to surprise her with a small dinner with family and close friends, despite having told her we had too much work to do and wouldn’t be able to come home until Christmas. So I suppose you might think that for me, middle age means surprise birthday parties to mark the halfway point to death. (Cheerful thought.) Being able to gather a significant number of people in one location, to look at the collection of love and friendship that life so far has enabled you to amass, to view it, with grateful eyes, and be surprised by the care and attention your loved ones can lavish on you is indeed a remarkable emblem of middle age. And the achievement of this moment cannot be underestimated – to gather so many people in one place to celebrate my parents’ birthdays were testaments to the lives they had lived, the friends they had gathered and the people they had affected. But it is not my mother’s or father’s middle age that was marked so significantly by these milestone birthdays. They mark the beginning of my own middle age. Looking back, ten years later, it seems a little premature to mark my middle age’s advent whilst still so youthful, but it was the moment I left adolescence behind,

taking responsibility for another adult’s happiness, in understanding that this milestone, this moment, was transitory and needed celebrating, for no other reason than the fact that it was passing time until the next one. Minutes had turned into days and into years, and my parents had grown older whilst I had grown up. And so my middle age started on that day when my mother phoned me up and told me we ought to do “something” to mark my father’s own mid-century point.

Midlife Provocations Hugh McCann __________________________________________________

According to the British sculptor Anthony Gormley, `sculpture is a direct way of allowing mind to dwell in matter. It is a means of becoming aware of the connections between matter, space and time in a way that complements (but is

Hugh McCann is a Southwest-based artist, with an interest in well-being, public space, technology, and participation. He is a co-founding director of Alright Mate? CIC, which uses participatory arts projects to normalise conversations around male mental health. hugh-mccann.com; alrightmateproject.com.

completely different from) the connections that science has demonstrated.’ First published as an artist's statement in a catalogue, Still Moving: Works 1975 – 1996, published by the Japan Association of Art Museums in 1996, this idea really intrigues me. What are the benefits of letting the mind ‘dwell’ in different places when trying to communicate across different perspectives? How can we use other forms of expression to build islands between us? My job for the conference on `Midlife Conversations’ was to create a creative project that stimulated conversation around midlife across different disciplinary perspectives. The notes below illustrate my thought processes. My initial thought was that the transdisciplinary conversations at the heart of the conference would be crossing ‘language barriers’ of some kind. What could help facilitate those conversations? Some kind of ‘intermediary language’ could prove productive; a shared language with no obvious value systems, a means to start conversations from a shared unknown.

What will this language be? Not sure yet. What will this language not be? Verbal. This is the language of regular conversation. Any ‘intermediary’ language needs to be something that sits outside regular conversation, something that ideas can be translated into and from. How will this non-verbal language inhabit space and/or time? Something non-verbal and impermanent like a performance would be too logistically inflexible, requiring an audience at a designated time and place. The aim is for conversations to ebb and flow throughout the conference, and the ‘intermediary language’ will need to be a more ambient presence. So, this ‘language’ will need to be non-verbal, have a permanence in space and time and be accessible throughout the conference, ideally even during talks. Like what? The two obvious contenders were 2D media like paints, pencils, collage, photography; or 3D media such as Lego, clay, or paper folding. Clay! It should be clay! Why? Clay is something people are generally unfamiliar with using and therefore less likely to impress any existing languages upon it. With 2D media, we have instincts towards words, faces, habitual doodles, and descriptive images that convey our ideas very literally. So how will people use the clay? Throughout the conference, people can take pieces of clay to sculpt. The pieces will act like notepads, and people can spend as much time as they like making forms from them. People can sculpt whilst listening to talks without fracturing their attention; the mind can process the information whilst the hands do too. The pieces should be of equal size and start in equal shape. This way the sculptures will all share an initial form and the differences will be solely located in people’s expressive responses. And what happens with the sculptures?

They will accumulate in a display cabinet in a prominent space over the course of the conference. They become a `watercooler’. `Why is this one spiky?’ `That reminds me of a kitten’. `This one looks pretty X-rated’. The only stipulation when people take their balls of clay is that they make this ball of clay `middle aged’; the overarching question when looking at one of the sculptures will always be `how does this relate to midlife?’ As I learnt at the conference, the definition of `midlife’ is extremely elusive and it felt apt that the clay didn’t care for hard definitions, only equally ambiguous contours, textures, imprints, and extrusions. Having had the opportunity to test this idea at a conference filled with so many great people from many academic and non-academic backgrounds, I would change aspects of the process to allow for different ways of experiencing the sculptures, such as: having them fired and glazed so people can touch them; having magnifying glasses for people to inspect them; and having them 3D scanned so people can explore them digitally. They could even be 3D scanned and 3D printed to different scales! Some questions around midlife the conference left me with: •

How do we imagine our position in life’s journey when we are always sat between memory and speculation?

•

When do we stop looking at people and ourselves as their/our potential (or lack thereof) and start seeing them as their achievements (or lack thereof)?

•

Do we look at people’s age in relation to its proximity to birth or death, or whichever one we assume to be closest?

•

As a 25-year-old, am I asking these more morbid questions because for me `midlife’ signals the end of youth. How will my perception of it change as I age? Will it feel more like something else is beginning? Why is it difficult to

see the potential of later life as a younger person? How does this difficulty filter into my beliefs and politics?

Illustration 1: Mind map for midlife provocations

Starting balls of clay

Sculpture 1

Sculpture 2

Sculpture 2 (alternate view)

Sculpture 4

Sculpture 5

Sculpture 6

Wellcome Centre display

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The Midlife Happiness Curve? More Like a Line Susan Krauss Whitbourne ____________________________________________________

You’ve undoubtedly heard of the midlife crisis - as well as its counterpart, the U-shaped curve of happiness - revealed in large crossnational studies of happiness and health across the years of adulthood. Psychologists who study personality in middle and later adulthood draw different conclusions than economists about the so-called U-shaped curve, in which happiness appears to drop and unhappiness peak in the middle period of life. In much of this debate, proponents of each position are essentially comparing apples with oranges: while economists are looking at the `apple’ of single-item

Susan Krauss Whitbourne received her Ph.D. in Psychology in 1974 from Columbia University. Until 2017, she was a Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is now a Faculty Fellow at the Institute of Gerontology at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her research focuses on personality development throughout adulthood, having led the Rochester Adult Longitudinal Study, a 50-year follow-up from college through later life. With personal interests in crafts, music, and theatre, she enjoys spending time with her two daughters and their families. A contributor to Psychology Today’s website, her blogs are on `Fulfillment at Any Age’, covering a range of topics related to happiness, well-being, relationships, and personality.

happiness ratings, psychologists have developed more in-depth measures of adaptation and personality. In both cases, studies are attempting to determine whether, as the midlife crisis theory proposes, the bottom falls out of well-being when adults suddenly reach the magic age of 40 (or 45, or 50, depending on the study). Other writers, such as Jonathan Rauch (2018), have examined their own feelings: Rauch admits that discovery of the existence of a crisis helped him `find an explanation for his gloom.’ Although it

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must have been reassuring for him to prove that his unhappiness was a `thing’, not just something unique to his own life, Rauch’s approach does not necessarily make the notion of a midlife crisis scientifically acceptable. Without rehashing the debates, which have been covered elsewhere, it’s time to examine theories of well-being in adulthood to see what recent scientific studies have to offer. In 2016, Seppo Laaksonen (2016) presented a blistering critique of the U-shape curve concept, noting its empirical flaws. Through a series of analyses, Laaksonen revealed the problems that arise when certain factors, such as health, marital status and income, are built into the analysis. The Finnish researcher examined large-scale surveys carried out in the US and UK with statistical tests that either included or did not include these factors that could influence the age-happiness relationship. There is good reason to argue that studies should not control for such factors in examining the age-happiness relationship. By incorporating controls into their studies, researchers run the risk of suppressing the real effect that certain conditions can have on the lived experiences of older adults. Taking away health or marital status as factors influencing happiness doesn’t change the fact that being over 65 and having poor health or living without a spouse or partner can put a damper on your happiness. Similarly, controlling for income means that you’re ignoring the fact that older people who have less money for paying the bills will be, if not unhappier, more stressed than those with money. Laakenen concluded from his study that there may be a curve descending downward from age 10 and then hanging steady till the 50s or so, but with two provisos: (1) that studies controlled for the personal circumstances and structural factors that would reduce happiness; and (2) that the age of the `dip’ could vary from below 40 to

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well above 50. This is hardly the type of precision we would want to see in a scientifically-based theory. For some reason, despite the evidence from Laakenen and a number of others who have challenged the happiness curve, the idea still persists and in fact is almost taken for granted. A quick Google search of the `happiness curve’ leads to a plethora of midlife crisis-based cartoons and advertisements for products aimed at supposedly miserable midlifers. There are check lists for a midlife crises with such items as àre you thinking of doing a bungee jump?’ and àre you seriously thinking of getting a tattoo?’ Another image is a take on the `Keep Calm’ theme, and suggests the need to `Keep Calm, It’s Only a Midlife Crisis’. There is the cookbook for the midlife kitchen and a blog devoted to surviving a `Beer Midlife Crisis’. The list is extensive and, since it’s impossible to include them all here, it might be an amusing enterprise for you to try to compile a list on your own. Older studies than Laakenen’s have also highlighted problems with the U-shape curve. One study, in fact, was sent to me by one of the Ù-shaped curve’ authors, David Blanchflower, who provided data from an unpublished manuscript asking the question `Do Modern Humans Suffer a Psychological Low in Midlife?’ This is one in a series of large-scale survey analyses based on the answers that people give to the question: òverall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?, scored from 0 to 10. The curve indeed shows a dip, but here’s the catch: the scale represents a truncated section of the entire range. The `dip’ involves a difference only between 7.2 and 7.8. If you redraw the graph across the whole range from 0 to 10, which I was able to do from the format in which I received it, the `curve’ becomes into a wobbly line in which a dip is just barely discernible. (Figure 1)

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Other critiques that look at cross-national data shed further doubt on the universality of the U-shaped phenomenon. A 2015 Lancet article by Andrew Steptoe and colleagues at University College London examined the overall happiness ratings by age in several different regions of the world. The U-shaped curve, such as it was, could only be observed in high-income English speaking countries. This supports the idea, long held among midlife crisis critics, that only the wealthy can afford to indulge themselves in midlife malaise. However, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s also possible that this midlife dip holds in high-income countries because income disparities lead the stressed-out and struggling lower wage earners to make negative comparisons between themselves and the very wealthy. Also, as a previous longitudinal study (Harvey et al., 2018) has shown, people with low job control and high job strain are the ones most likely to suffer ill-effects at midlife. One final point to consider relates to attrition effects and who has survived to later life to be able to provide happiness ratings. Clearly, not those who are no longer alive or who are in life situations where they cannot answer questions. Data analysis based only on

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survivors will produce a completely different picture than might be otherwise the case during peoples’ forties and fifties. Instead of a dip, you would see a straight line or even an increase. This point is almost never considered in the world of happiness researchers who tend to come from a different tradition than lifespan researchers, who are taking into account this problem of bias in the data caused by selective attrition of research participants. To sum up, there’s a very small chance that the critics of the midlife crisis, or even the U-shaped curve, will have their way and these concepts will fade. If we must accept this myth as a fact, it might be wise to move on to help individuals who are struggling with the stressful conditions and demands placed on them by their multiple roles. It might also make sense to take that self-fulfilling prophecy angle away from the media. Once the U-shape curve becomes normalized, people will admit to having a crisis or dip in order to conform with social expectations. N’s of one million, as is true in some of the large-scale studies, are impressive, but it’s the N of one, yourself, whom you need to focus on to achieve fulfillment as you traverse the decades of your life.

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Further reading Harvey, S. B., Sellahewa, D. A., Wang, M., Milligan-Saville, J., Bryan, B. T., Henderson, M., & Mykletun, A. (2018). The role of job strain in understanding midlife common mental disorder: A national birth cohort study. Lancet Psychiatry, 5(6), 498-506. doi: 10.1016/S2215-0366(18)30137-8. Laaksonen, S. (2016). A research note: happiness by age is more complex than ushaped. Journal of Happiness Studies, doi: 10.1007/s10902-016-9830-1. Rauch. J. (2018). The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better after 50. New York: Picador. Steptoe, A., Deaton, A., & Stone, A. A. (2015). Subjective wellbeing, health, and ageing. The Lancet, 385(9968), 640-648. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(13)61489-0. Whitbourne, S.K. (2018). The Search for Fulfillment: Revolutionary New Research that Reveals the Secret to Long-term happiness. New York: Ballantine.

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Are Midlife Transitions Therapist's View

Always

Crises?

Couple

Daphne de Marneffe ____________________________________________________

Today, scholars of adult development collectively scratch their heads at the stubborn durability of the `midlife crisis’ as an idea, since their research turns up little actual evidence for it. I think the midlife crisis doesn’t show up in their research because the issues it targets have migrated out of our cultural discussion of life phases and into our

Daphne de Marneffe, PhD, is a couple and individual therapist practicing in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together and Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life, as well as a contributing editor of Parents magazine. She is married and the mother of three grown children. You can find out more about her work at www.daphnedemarneffe.com.

discussion of marriage. By marriage I mean an intimate partnership between two adults of any gender or sex who aspire to build a life together and to endure as a couple. For many, the union includes children. In the 2020s, the idea that the difficulties that arise in a marriage may well interfere with personal happiness—and may need to be terminated for that reason—is an accepted one. In his book The MarriageGo-Round, the sociologist Andrew Cherlin argues that since the 1960s, `marriage’ and `individual satisfaction’ have been treated as both separable and often in opposition. He writes: `As a twenty-first-century individual, you must choose your style of personal life. You are allowed to—in fact, you [are] almost required

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to—continually monitor your sense of self to look inward to see how well your inner life fits with your married (or cohabiting) life. If the fit deteriorates, you are almost required to leave. For according to the cultural model of individualism, a relationship that no longer fits your needs is inauthentic and hollow. It limits the personal rewards that you, and perhaps your partner, can achieve. In this event, a breakup is unfortunate, but you will, and must, move on.’ Cherlin’s dry pronouncement gestures toward the vein of narcissism that has run through the cultural ideal of individualism, where an individual problem (Ì’m unhappy with my wife’) gave rise to an individualistic solution (Ì need a divorce’). The social upheaval and sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s spawned writings about the "midlife crisis" that admittedly carried a whiff of self-absorption. But these writings also recognized a valid and widespread impulse people felt toward living more authentic and satisfying emotional and sexual lives. Even today, when midlife married people pour out their hearts to me in therapy about how stuck, sad, or lost they feel in their relationships, they negatively reference the 'cliché' of the midlife crisis. When I spoke with Lisa, a professional, she had just turned forty-seven and struggled with the sound of it. Ì never felt middle-aged. Then I turned forty-seven. It’s a number that sticks in my mind. Forty-seven is a big deal. Fifty is a big deal. I feel like I should have figured it out by fifty’. Lisa hadn’t figured it out; she felt more confused than ever. Feeling exhausted from work, parenthood and family life, and alienated from her husband of fifteen years, she found herself acting entirely against her values, embarking on an affair with a younger man. Ì was shocked to be with someone I was excited about—texting and calling someone I can communicate with, without the

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burden of all the family stuff. My physical relationship with my husband is dismal, and I sort of chalked it up to the inevitable effect of aging. What’s funny is this guy reminds me of my husband—smart, professional—but ten years younger. Now I’ve really become a middle-aged cliché: almost fifty, in a rut in my marriage, finding someone young and exciting.’ Lisa implicitly subscribes to the view that as an adult, she should have grown out of her emotional conflicts and desires. She judges her own confusion. Many imagine, from the perspective of youth, that adult life is in some sense "resolved" by the choice of a life partner. The truth is more complicated; adult development keeps on going. We should acknowledge and accept our complexity as persons regardless of marital status, age, or developmental stage. We don’t call it a cliché when a two-year-old starts saying no or when a teenager starts experimenting with sex; we consider these to be common expressions of what it means to be a two-year-old or a teenager. Both the toddler and the teenager are trying to grow, to become more complex and whole - the toddler’s task is striving for autonomy, the teenager’s is figuring out how to be a sexual person. Though the tasks are different, the challenges presented by midlife marital crises are in some sense the same. Like the toddler and the teenager, people are looking to discover and fully express who they are, while staying connected to others. They want to take risks and feel secure. They want autonomy and connectedness in optimal balance. These are completely valid goals at any age. People have every right, and even a responsibility, to pursue them. Midlife relationship malaise calls for people to struggle with their emotions on a whole new level of awareness, and to figure out what they mean for their relationships. This is a profound personal and relational journey. Why do some people suffer so acutely in

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this pursuit, while some sail through? Why are some people prone to a midlife relationship crisis, and others not? As a therapist who treats individuals and couples, I think that people who suffer a "midlife crisis" in their intimate partnerships have two interrelated problems: unfinished emotional business from childhood and unsatisfying emotional communication in their marriages. Our emotions form the core of our sense of meaning. They define and create our central love relationships. From the last three decades of psychological research, we know that our minds are formed in relationships. This means not simply that our minds are concerned with relationships (which they are), but that relationships shape the ways we process and experience reality. Psychology has made huge strides in mapping the connections between early attachment, emotional development, and adult intimate relationships. Throughout life, our emotions signal what’s important; and what’s important—at any age—is satisfying relationships. In a real sense, then, marriage picks up where childhood left off. As a close relationship that engages body, heart, and mind, marriage offers a powerful lifelong vehicle for knowing another, being known, and developing one's deep emotional life. What most people want from intimate partnerships is affection, trust, safety, fun, encouragement, excitement, and comfort. They want to have companionship and be left alone in all the right ways, neither intruded upon nor abandoned. They want to be seen, accepted, valued, and understood for who they are. All this stands or falls on the quality of emotional sharing and communication. Overall, research finds that the most important factors in whether our relationships are satisfying all have to do with emotions: how we tune into our emotions, experience them, manage them,

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communicate about them, calm them enough to respond to others, and align them with our behavior and goals. Being able to understand, manage, and communicate our emotions is immeasurably aided by growing up with parents who responded sensitively to our thoughts and feelings. It's the single best predictor of whether we do the same with our intimate partner. The key capacities of healthy emotional relating are curiosity, compassion, and control. When we’re curious, we are open to trying to understand our own and the other’s truth. When we’re compassionate, we feel empathy for our own and the other’s struggles. When we exert self-control, we contain and communicate our emotional responses to others in ways that are accurate, sensitive, and likely to get heard. This triad of curiosity, compassion, and (self-)control takes us toward a sense of personal agency, and away from holding our partner responsible for our own feelings. Finding a way to be happy in marriage depends on our ability to exercise emotional skill, flexibility, and resilience. But it also depends on something else: our ability to value both the needs of the individual partners and the needs of the marriage. Breakdown often occurs when people lose track of one side or the other. Sometimes, they’ve conceptualized marriage as demanding a suppression of individuality, and they reach a point when that solution is no longer sustainable. Or, they find themselves only able to advocate for their own needs, in a sort of zero-sum survival strategy, without being able to hold on to a vision of the marriage as a resource for comfort and excitement, stability and growth. Throughout life, we continually learn about ourselves through pressing up against the personalities of others. Ideally, we don’t simply react, but use our interactions with others to increase our self-awareness. The result is greater selfdefinition, which leads to the possibility of more authentic connection. This recurrent

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back-and-forth of relating to self and other is the engine of adult development, as well as the engine of growth in marriage. If emotional interactions are basically healthy, we gradually become more self-realized as individuals and more deeply relational as partners. Yet marriage itself, not to mention the romantic ideology that surrounds it, so easily tends to produce misunderstanding about who is responsible for whose emotions. It’s almost as if the ideal of passionate fusion that we welcomed so blissfully at the outset returns, like a swamp monster, in the form of chronic confusion about who’s doing what to whom. As time goes on, if people don’t step up to the challenge of communicating in an emotionally healthy way, they fall into the trap of thinking that individual and couple needs are doomed to conflict. They now imagine there’s no way around the unshakable reality of competing agendas. In both cases, people overlook that their way of handling their own emotions powerfully influences the very ways they conceive of, and participate in, marriage. Since marriage presents one challenge after another, people need to bring their best resources, as individuals and as a couple, to solve them. When I help patients in the midst of midlife relationship crises, I ask them to focus on three questions: Who do I want to be as an individual? Who do I want to be as a partner? And how do the two fit together? In my view, there are five interrelated goals involved in answering these questions well. They are: •

Expressing emotion skillfully rather than simply emoting. Marriage offers

a ready-made dumping ground for our bad moods and tendency to blame and judge.

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•

Taking responsibility for how you express yourself, and repairing yourself

after negative interactions, paves the way for closeness. •

Becoming a more loving person, by engaging full heartedly in becoming

kinder and more compassionate, toward others and yourself. •

Seeing your partner’s perspectives and experience as equal in importance

to your own. Relating to others as genuine people, rather than need satisfiers or projections of your own psyche, is a lifelong effort, never complete. •

Developing a nuanced relationship to your fantasy life. That means

cultivating awareness that actions and thoughts aren’t the same thing, building confidence in the difference between them, and using your imagination and fantasy life as a source of creativity rather than for numbing out and escapism. •

Discovering the need for committed living, where a value higher than your

own emotional weather prevails. In adulthood, a sense of purpose and meaning derives from the dual psychological movement toward deepening inward and expanding outward. In midlife, we need to use the fuel of waning youth and the whisper of mortality to vitalize and intensify our self-awareness, love for others, and our engagement with the world. One hallmark of the midlife marital crisis is that people so often feel their situation to be both impossibly complicated and insufferably clichéd. As a therapist I try to help them understand more about the meaning of their crises as a clue to what's unresolved in their emotional lives. By honoring what they are going through, I try to help them apply more compassion and less judgment toward themselves and others, and to exercise more patience and wisdom in discerning their individual paths. I don't believe in

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keeping fatally flawed marriages together. Certain marriages should end. Rather, I am interested in the states of mind that beset people in midlife intimate relationships, and what they can teach them about living the rest of their lives with verve, creativity, and commitment. For all its pain and bewilderment, midlife marital crises present people with an opportunityâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;to know themselves, to expand their scope, to grow, and to grow up.

Further Reading Andrew Cherlin, The Marriage-Go-Round, (New York: Vintage, 2009). Daphne de Marneffe, The Rough Patch: Marriage and the Art of Living Together, (London: Vintage, 2019). Jeremy Holmes and Arietta Slade, Attachment in Therapeutic Practice, (London: Sage, 2018).

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Life Transitions Kazuki Yamada

I. I am afraid of ageing. Yes, I said it. Nothing but sickness, wheelchairs, and hospital beds; the greying of hair, the lines on faces are signs of the body, betraying. Cracking skin endure the happy smiles of aunts and uncles pretending to ignore their creaking joints, until smiles lose reason and reason is lost. I love youth for the future is young. The ageing and old are squeezed by a death that drop hints it has never left. Partners sit unsure if after forty years, their arms and caressing fingers can still love and be warm. No, the old are cold. I can never hold on. Waiting for time to creep up like a mould waiting to swallow up my world of goldâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;waiting is heresy, I would rather pause. So, pause; rewind. The fortunate do not journey. Instead, I would like to freeze in the searing snow of the now. Fire can only be frozen if you believe.

Kazuki Yamada is a PhD Candidate at the QUEX Institute for Global Sustainability and Wellbeing (University of Exeter & University of Queensland). He is researching the history of sexual temporalities in ageing, and is interested in how time that appears to move forward might in fact go in all sorts of different directions.

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II. I am afraid of ageing. Yes, I said it. Nothing but sickness, wheelchairs, and hospital beds; the greying of hair, the lines on faces are signs of the body, betraying. Cracking skin endure the happy smiles of aunts and uncles pretending to ignore their creaking joints, until smiles lose reason and reason is lost. I love youth for the future is young. The ageing and old are squeezed by a death that drop hints it has never left. Partners sit unsure if after forty years, their arms and caressing fingers can still love and be warm. No, the old are cold. I can never hold on. Waiting for time to creep up like a mould waiting to swallow up my world of goldâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;waiting is heresy, I would rather pause. So, pause; rewind. The fortunate do not journey. Instead, I would like to freeze in the searing snow of the now. Fire can only be frozen if you believe.

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III. I am afraid of ageing. Yes, I said it. Nothing but sickness, wheelchairs, and hospital beds; the greying of hair, the lines on faces are signs of the body, betraying. Cracking skin endure the happy smiles of aunts and uncles pretending to ignore their creaking joints, until smiles lose reason and reason is lost. I love youth for the future is young. The ageing and old are squeezed by a death that drop hints it has never left. Partners sit unsure if after forty years, their arms and caressing fingers can still love and be warm. No, the old are cold. I can never hold on. Waiting for time to creep up like a mould waiting to swallow up my world of goldâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;waiting is heresy, I would rather pause. So, pause; rewind. The fortunate do not journey. Instead, I would like to freeze in the searing snow of the now. Fire can only be frozen if you believe..

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IV. I am afraid of ageing. Yes, I said it. Nothing but sickness, wheelchairs, and hospital beds; the greying of hair, the lines on faces are signs of the body, betraying. Cracking skin endure the happy smiles of aunts and uncles pretending to ignore their creaking joints, until smiles lose reason and reason is lost. I love youth for the future is young. The ageing and old are squeezed by a death that drop hints it has never left. Partners sit unsure if after forty years, their arms and caressing fingers can still love and be warm. No, the old are cold. I can never hold on. Waiting for time to creep up like a mould waiting to swallow up my world of goldâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;waiting is heresy, I would rather pause. So, pause; rewind. The fortunate do not journey. Instead, I would like to freeze in the searing snow of the now. Fire can only be frozen if you believe..

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Mid-life Conversations: (not) the final word Fred Cooper __________________________________________________________

When we think and talk about mid-life, exactly who or what are we describing? In critiquing biological assumptions about decline and change, or at least in situating them in their cultural, social, political, and historical contexts, this collection moves the dial away from easy, misleading, and stigmatising caricatures. Without deterministic imaginings that mid-life will

With more or less everything usually taken to characterise maturity still to live for, Fred Cooper has found that thinking too deeply about the potentially treacherous terrain of mid-life has instilled a new tendency to worry about the future. On the upside, he is fairly sure that he can discern the right formula from these pages, and that everything, with meticulous orchestration and planning, will turn out to be Absolutely Fine.

inevitably work, act or feel a certain way, there is far more room for constructive play in thinking critically about relationships, environments, ageing, bodies, sexuality, experiences, and emotions. But what territories are we laying claim to; which legacies are we troubling, and which are we leaving in place? Louise Foxcroft makes the compelling point that these questions are neither trivial nor restricted to academic abstractions, if such things exist. Women’s experiences of menopause, she argues, are directly inflected by their consumption – or rejection – of popular myths and medical anxieties. As Mark Jackson makes clear in the introduction to this collection, there has never been a singular narrative of mid-life. The pieces assembled here interrogate, describe, critique, and push back against medicalised claims to knowledge, interventions, and forms of governance; these themselves have never been monolithic. Michael Clark’s rich filmography of mid-life, nevertheless, cautions us to keep a weather eye for

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recurring tropes. We can contest sloppy intimations of ‘crisis’ in mid-life, which inevitably frame how middle age is lived and navigated, or remind one another of the complicated and often forgotten meaning of the word, more akin to a crossroads than a disaster. However, I suspect that we are still imagining lives which follow particular conventions and formulas, not a world away from the universalised – and sanitised – subjects of medical texts, pop psychology, and self-help books. Mid-life is a deeply complex temporality for humans to inhabit, but even when we think of it as transformative rather than inevitably laden with risk or harm, this raises the crucial question: what kind of lives, what kind of histories, are being transfigured? Not necessarily privileged, happy or healthy ones, although the implication can be that submerged or buried discontents might bubble messily – and maybe creatively or cathartically – to the surface, as distant apprehensions of death illuminate the fissures and fractures in previously unexamined lives. But neither do discourses on mid-life always feel as though they have been shaped for people who routinely confront or experience hardship, suffering and pain, where any specific challenges of middle age might be drowned out, hard to separate, or altered so significantly that they bear no meaningful consistency even to our most nuanced and revised summation of what a mid-life ‘crisis’ entails. In her essay on middle age and masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century, Julie-Marie Strange writes about unemployed labouring men whose poverty and poor physical condition explicitly excluded them from middle-aged ruminations and anxieties which, under this lens, begin to seem rarefied. Decline and catastrophe were not a problematic cultural assumption or a facet of the medical shaming of ageing bodies, but a visceral product of their exploitation and abuse. In 2021 they might previously have been ageing gig economy cyclists on zero-hour food distribution contracts, trying to work through

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pain or debility from pulled muscles through to cancer, who had watched in increasing desperation as their delivery rates, pay packets, and choices shrank. I want to know about mid-lives with chronic or life-limiting illnesses, transgender mid-lives, infertile mid-lives, disabled mid-lives, mad mid-lives, migrant mid-lives, queer mid-lives, lonely mid-lives, mid-lives for life-long carers. If mid-life is a time where long-held certainties around work, family, relationships and sex become unstuck, for good or ill, how many of the real and imagined challenges of middle age are, at heart, cracks in the faĂ§ade of capitalist heteronormativity; trouble with (re)productivity, trouble with status, trouble with marriage, trouble with desire, trouble with money, trouble with gender. In my own research, I spend a lot of time thinking about the fear of loneliness; how loneliness as an object of cultural and, medical anxiety shapes the ways that people live, with one another and with themselves. Although loneliness is always political, our relationships and responsibilities to one another are structured in ways that make it feel personal and private; much like the challenges of middle age. Our preventative solutions, then, tend to be individual rather than communal. If a wellconnected and supported old age was expected as a basic right, whatever our individual circumstances, how many of us would still get (and stay) married, or have children? Perhaps the same amount, but perhaps not. As mid-life is bordered by our apprehensions of death and passing time, it can also be bordered by the specific and deep-rooted apprehension of dying alone. I mention loneliness because I see it as a vital part of mid-life, either through experience, anticipation, or knowing absence. I also think that speculative thinking on middle age could take a strikingly similar form, embracing what the Care Manifesto has recently described as a more 'promiscuous careâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, a re-imagination and expansion of how we think about kinship and our responsibilities to each other. Mid-

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lives which are framed by a structural lack of care, and which are lived largely outside or against normative assumptions or paths, deserve attention on their own terms; but they also have the potential to subvert and unsettle preconceptions over what middle age can and might look like for everyone. We are moving beyond mid-life as harbinger of crisis or decline, and the superficially empowering – but fundamentally hollow – inverse, ‘life begins at 40.’ This collection, now, poses two interlocking questions: what histories and experiences of middle age are still invisible, and what future mid-lives might be possible?

Further reading The Care Collective, The Care Manifesto: the Politics of Interdependence (London, 2020). Mark Jackson, Broken Dreams: An Intimate History of the Midlife Crisis (London, 2021). Carrie A. Karvonen-Gutierrez and Elsa S. Strotmeyer, ‘The urgent need for disability studies among midlife adults’, Women's Midlife Health 6: 8 (2020), https://doi.org/10.1186/s40695-020-00057-w. Vanessa D. Fabbre, ‘Gender Transitions in Later Life: The Significance of Time in Queer Aging’, Journal of Gerontological Social Work 57:0 (2014), 161–75.

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