We begin with King Lear, a play about diverging responses toward two aging, self-centered fathers, both of whom show signs of cognitive decline. Two daughters misrepresent themselves to their father and take control of his kingdom, and an illegitimate son abuses his father; conversely, Cordelia speaks honestly and loses her inheritance, while the legitimate Edgar saves his blind father’s life and soul by tricking him. Chris Gabbard asks: Would care ethicists, using a relational and context-bound approach toward morality and decision making, consider Cordelia’s “truth to power” approach advisable, given that her parent does not want to—and is not capable of—hearing the daughter’s “truth”? Would Edgar’s handling of his father, involving masquerade and deception facilitated by the father’s sightlessness, be considered ethical or a violation of Gloucester’s dignity? Exploring these child-parent dynamics in light of the writings of Amy Mullen, Anne Liveng, Sarah Clark Miller, and other care ethicists, Gabbard illuminates the difficult decisions often navigated in the course of caring for those whose abilities are impaired in later life.
Turning to twentieth-century France, Sophia Millman offers new readings of Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974) and Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1978), two experimental novels that raise crucial questions about the intersection of ageism and ableism. Published as nursing homes were developing rapidly in France and care was becoming increasingly commercialized, these works explore cultural anxieties about care, control, and dependency through the thematics of blindness/vision and deafness/hearing. Both of these novels, Millman contends, reinforce one of the central tenets of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age (1970), urging readers to rethink how we see and listen to older people. At the same time, Perec’s blind character Percival Bartlebooth and Carrington’s deaf nonagenarian heroine Marian Leatherby challenge Beauvoir’s surprisingly reductive claim that an old person generally does not make “a good hero for a novel” (210). In fact, Millman demonstrates, some of the most stylistically innovative French novels of the twentieth century grow out of their authors’ commitment to portraying with nuance the diverse sensory experiences of old and disabled characters.
Finally, Crystal Lie investigates how contemporary genre fiction might be well equipped to challenge ageist and ableist assumptions and narratives. Lie examines Emma Healey’s Elizabeth is Missing (2014) and Jo Walton’s My Real Children (2014), two popular novels that deploy dementia as essential to their narrative forms. These works take up the temporal tropes of dementia’s “alternative realities” to narrate histories of gendered postwar violence and aging differently. Drawing on Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s concept of the “misfit,” Lie explores how Elizabeth is Missing reflects on the negative social responses to communicative barriers that people with dementia often experience. The novel’s deployment of dementia within the frame of the detective genre brings into relief how the protagonist’s dementia is imbricated in normative expectations of literacy and able-mindedness. My Real Children offers a way to think about the validity of dementia’s multiple realities through a speculative framework, while insisting on the importance of attending to the material needs accompanying the realities of aging. These texts reimagine life with dementia as a site of agency and opportunity for thinking about transformative approaches to care, community, and conceptions of human value.