Abstract
In this chapter, Hess considers Suzette Mayr’s postmodern Canadian novel The Widows as a significant exception to the “hypervisibility” of young, chic, lesbian women during the 1990s. The author explores the novel’s revisionist approach to history via the trope of the “ghosted lesbian,” which she engages to highlight the narrative’s exposure of the label “widow” as one that has historically overwritten and obscured women’s non-normative life courses. Hess argues that The Widows redresses older women’s historical invisibility by centering its narrative on three septuagenarian and octogenarian women who come to insist on their personal agency, sexual desire, and visibility, and by envisioning a lesbian feminist legacy that stands in opposition to heteronormative forms of inheritance and generativity.
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Notes
- 1.
The proliferation and successful marketing of this image was reminiscent of the success of lesbian pulp novels in the 1950s, also in that it appealed to straight men as much as lesbian women.
- 2.
For an insightful discussion of national identity and ethnicity in The Widows, see Doris Wolf’s article “A Past Which Refuses to Become History: Nazism, Niagara Falls, and a New National Identity in Suzette Mayr’s The Widows” (2002).
- 3.
For further information on queer heterosexuality see for example Calvin Thomas’s Foreword in Straight Writ Queer: Non-Normative Expressions of Heterosexuality in Literature (2006).
- 4.
Original German: “Frauen, die sich in der Mitte ihres Lebens der Tatsache bewusst werden, dass ihnen ihr gesellschaftlicher Rahmen nur wenig bis keinen Raum gelassen hat, ihre Identität zu bestimmen, und die sich nun auf die Suche nach ihrem Selbst machen und einen Neubeginn initiieren” (155). Although Maierhofer focuses on middle-aged women (in their 40s and 50s), her concept can productively be applied to the older protagonists of The Widows.
- 5.
As Maierhofer herself points out, this stance has been criticized by Kathleen Woodward, who calls it an “archaic biological essentialism” (1999, xiv).
- 6.
It also finally resolves the long process of coming to terms with her German heritage and with her passive complicity with Nazism when she was a young woman during the Third Reich (see Wolf 2002).
- 7.
Also known as Bigfoot (mainly in the United States), Sasquatch is the name given to a legendary apelike, humanoid figure presumably living in the snowy wilderness of the Pacific Northwest.
- 8.
The themes of survival and lack of recognition are reminiscent also of the AIDS crisis and gay fiction of the 1990s. The characters’ aging is framed by their survival of catastrophes earlier in their lives, and moreover they are presented collectively as a generation. While the women in The Widows do not experience survivor’s guilt, as does Lark in Andrew Holleran’s The Beauty of Men (1996, see Chapter 6), the narrative of The Widows, like that of The Beauty of Men, illustrates society’s depreciation and willful obliviousness of aging persons’ histories.
- 9.
One could even read Hannelore and Clotilde themselves as a skewed parodic version of the sisters Catherine Trail Parr and Susanna Moodie, who moved to the Canadian wilderness in the nineteenth century and became famous as authors who chronicled settler life in Canada.
- 10.
- 11.
The German title Fräulein, now out of use, indicates an unmarried status. It is the diminutive form of Frau, formerly the title of a married woman.
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Hess, L.M. (2019). Visible Old Lesbians: Suzette Mayr’s The Widows (1998). In: Queer Aging in North American Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03466-5_7
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