This paper attempts to study how the trope of loneliness, especially when it is gendered, can be associated with the problematics of “languageing”. Drawing on Adriana Cavarero’s theorization of narratives, the essay explores how the circularity between the “narratable” self and the “necessary other” always throws us back into the matrix of language, while we try to transcend language altogether and dream of attaining a mystic union with nonhuman Others. It is the friction between the possibilities of extralinguistic communion with nonhuman Others (e.g., God, Nature) in “solitude” and the inescapable urge for narration and languageing that throws us back into the desire for human togetherness which the essay foregrounds with reference to
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Nor is it age-neutral. Ageing women’s loneliness can be different from ageing men’s. Rather than engaging in a futile debate on whether aged/ageing women are lonelier than their male counterparts or not, we should satisfy ourselves only with the realization that loneliness comes differently to different people, and though we can never essentialize aged people’s loneliness along the gender axis, there are different experiences of ageing which the people of different genders go through, due to their different existential, economic, political or cultural positions. Within patriarchy, which is often coupled with gerontocracy, aged men may enjoy a power aged or ageing women are deprived of. While Simone de Beauvoir argues that men often lose more power than women do in old age, as they hold more power than women do in their working lives (Tidd 143-144), this observation needs to be rethought. Within gerontocratic patriarchal systems women, in old age, will not be more powerful than their male counterparts. And hence, it’s actually not correct to think, as de Beauvoir does, that women’s situation as the Other(s) of men can be compared with old people’s situation as the Other(s) of the non-aged (Tidd 143). Because, gender is not dissolved in old age. And hence, old age cannot be seen as a homogeneous experiential circle marked off as the domain of exclusion and marginalization from the rest of the dimensions of social existence – economic, cultural, political, sexual, etc. It would be good to take up Koula, a modern Greek novel by Menis Koumandareas, for detailed analysis here, as some of de Beauvoir’s insights into women’s ageing experience may be useful and (critically) applicable here. De Beauvoir argues that, while in the capitalist patriarchies aged women cease to remain attractive in the eyes of younger men, older men do not lose their attractiveness in the eyes of younger women (Tidd 144). Here my point gets
Nor is it age-neutral. Ageing women’s loneliness can be different from ageing men’s. Rather than engaging in a futile debate on whether aged/ageing women are lonelier than their male counterparts or not, we should satisfy ourselves only with the realization that loneliness comes differently to different people, and though we can never essentialize aged people’s loneliness along the gender axis, there are different experiences of ageing which the people of different genders go through, due to their different existential, economic, political or cultural positions. Within patriarchy, which is often coupled with gerontocracy, aged men may enjoy a power aged or ageing women are deprived of. While Simone de Beauvoir argues that men often lose more power than women do in old age, as they hold more power than women do in their working lives (Tidd 143-144), this observation needs to be rethought. Within gerontocratic patriarchal systems women, in old age, will not be more powerful than their male counterparts. And hence, it’s actually not correct to think, as de Beauvoir does, that women’s situation as the Other(s) of men can be compared with old people’s situation as the Other(s) of the non-aged (Tidd 143). Because, gender is not dissolved in old age. And hence, old age cannot be seen as a homogeneous experiential circle marked off as the domain of exclusion and marginalization from the rest of the dimensions of social existence – economic, cultural, political, sexual, etc. It would be good to take up Koula, a modern Greek novel by Menis Koumandareas, for detailed analysis here, as some of de Beauvoir’s insights into women’s ageing experience may be useful and (critically) applicable here. De Beauvoir argues that, while in the capitalist patriarchies aged women cease to remain attractive in the eyes of younger men, older men do not lose their attractiveness in the eyes of younger women (Tidd 144). Here my point gets