In the acknowledgments of her 2024 novel All Fours, Miranda July explains that she was inspired by a series of interviews with several close women about “physical and emotional Inspired by the conversation "Years of Change".
“While there are few traces of these actual conversations in the book,” she adds, “they made the writing all the more necessary.”
The novel tells the story of a middle-aged mother who chooses to leave home and drive across the country to find herself. Sound a bit cliche? Maybe that's why she gave up after about 30 minutes, pulled into a dingy motel, and instead tried to make time to get back from her new home base, the appropriately chosen Room 321.
In this gentle environment, she experiences a physical and spiritual awakening - to the muzak of time. Whether transforming her motel room or battling a waning libido with a nearby Hertz employee (the subject of July), this employee often talks about breathing—I breathed out”—to finally bring herself to life again .
Along the way, Four Legs depicts middle age as something that must be felt and communicated anew, one intense, awkward, meticulously documented feeling at a time.
Easier said than done. Some clichés are like planets, their gravitational pull is too strong for all but the most driving creativity to function. Middle age is one of them. The changes that often occur in your 40s and 50s—grey hair, career slumps, the impending march of time's creaking chariot—seem as inevitable as aging itself.
Yet, as my research on the construction and representation of aging demonstrates, midlife is neither what it used to be nor what it will be.
Inventing middle age
The history of middle age goes back as far as our eyes can read.
In Western classical literature, middle age is described as a period of glorious life and death.
In the Greek epic, Odysseus and Ajax are both middle-aged men, and neither loses sleep worrying about their life choices or whether their skills are declining. Homer also doesn't worry too much about conveying how these people came to be who they are. Cunning Odysseus, you can only assume, has been cunning since his cradle.
Beowulf, the hero of early Anglo-Saxon poetry, similarly showed no signs of slowing down until old age, when he proved unable to slay a dragon without the help of a younger man. Awkward.
These works suggest that the middle years of life are when people are most themselves, possessing the richest set of skills and goals that life has to offer.
Even Shakespeare thought middle age was not worth worrying about. Among the "seven ages of man" described in "As You Like It", middle age is roughly equivalent to the "just" part. A man with a "white round belly" and a "wise saw" sounds a bit weird, maybe, but also There is content; only by the sixth year, with the onset of what Shakespeare called "the second childishness," does a major shift occur and the quality of life begins to decline.
The birth of crisis
Then everything changed. The Industrial Revolution gave rise to a new capitalist class that had time and money to burn when unaffected by the recent market collapse.
Unlike the aristocratic leisure greeted at birth, middle-class leisure requires a shift in gears, from full speed ahead in search of one's place in the world to relative stagnation once one has found one's place.
This whiplash is enough to create a midlife crisis: a deep-seated anxiety about the value of one's achievements, the meaning of one's existence, and the proximity of death.
Although the term "midlife crisis" wasn't coined until 1965, its gestation period spanned the 18th and 19th centuries, thanks to Elliot Jacques, a 48-year-old Canadian psychoanalyst. Romantic poets such as John Keats and Percy Shelley, who died aged 25 and 29 respectively, taught readers to long for the summer of life, or even a hint of it, with an intensity that borders on despair Any chill can be scary.
The Victorians, perhaps realizing that the British Empire could not remain young and dynamic forever, accepted this romantic fear and ran with it. In the 1853 novel Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens portrays 41-year-old Arthur Clennam as he gloomily contemplates what he has done to himself Everything, and what little good it did him:
"'From the unfortunate repression of my early childhood, to the consequent rigidity and lovelessness of my family, through my departure, my long exile, my return, my mother's welcome, my association with her, to "Poor Flora," said Arthur Clennan, "what have I discovered this afternoon!"
For Clennam, a jaded businessman who recently resigned from his position in the family business in search of greater purpose, looking at his life seems like a painful but necessary exercise. He also invested in another stock, a Ponzi scheme, which plunged him and much of London into a financial crisis that mirrored his own.
A generation later, in the United States, Theodore Dreiser's 1900 novel Sister Carrie tells the story of George Hurstwood, a successful businessman who, when His life begins to fall apart when he stops working long enough to question its true value.
Clennan and Hurstwood both end up in relationships with a woman in their 20s - one finds rebirth in the relationship, the other is left messy and dead.
At another time, the two might have splurged on a red Corvette.
future middle age
What about middle-aged women in the 19th century?
To some extent, no. In her 2019 book Coming of Age and Other Fictions, critic Sari Edelstein encourages readers to think of adulthood not as a biological fact but as something bestowed upon certain people in America A set of political rights and privileges for (usually white) people. Hiding from others, such as women and people of color.
While race, class, and marital status profoundly shape women's midlife experiences, one fact has remained constant for much of this century: There is no full legal status as an adult. Even when women mature, their status remains low.
They are also portrayed as such. Popular novels such as "The Lamplighter" and "The Wide World" trace again and again the accepted boundaries of a married woman's life, that is, life outside the home. Unmarried women and widows could own property and manage their own finances, but their views are rarely represented in the literature of the period. It was not until the advent of second-wave feminism, and works such as Doris Lessing's 1974 novel The Summer Before Dark, that middle-aged women became a topic that was explored more openly and creatively on paper.
Despite so much creative labor over the past century, the English-speaking world has largely embraced the idea of midlife as a terrifying, isolating crisis.
This may be due in part to the midlife crisis’s surprising resilience—its ability to adapt to changing cultural contexts and the rise of entirely new art forms. It seems that few other themes are so generous with their esoteric offerings and endearing genre delights on page and screen. (As far as I'm concerned, one of the best movies about a midlife crisis is Martin Scorsese's Casino.)
If midlife isn't a crisis, what else is it?
Perhaps a gateway to something universal.
Although the narrator of "Four Legs" suffers from pain and ennui, she never uses the word "crisis" without quoting something scary. She is clearly waiting for a different kind of middle age.
This faith is rewarded in the final chapter, when she attends a dance performance and feels a "warm, sacred feeling" from her hotel retreat that "plated the whole neighborhood, the whole city...the whole universe. A layer of gold? "Yes..."
She recalls: "If 321 was everywhere, then every day was Wednesday and I could always be who I am in the room. Imperfect, genderless, game, shameless. My pockets full of what I need Everything, a complete soul.”
As July's narrator's consciousness expands and contracts between the scale of the universe and the scale of her own pocket, she does more than just regenerate. Her ups and downs, part Saint Theresa, part Lady Macbeth, embrace the ecstasy and tragedy of life and gain strength twice over.
This is the perversion of middle age.
This article has been updated to remove the description of Achilles' middle age.