Are you having a midlife crisis?
Matthew Redmond, Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Lille, explores how humans have dealt with this throughout history.
Matthew Redmond is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Lille. His research explores how the existential condition of being shapes literary form. He has published in English Literary History, Nineteenth-Century Literature, and ESQ, among other journals.
The Making of Midlife
What does it mean to be middle-aged? You may think the answer is obvious; probably your grandparents’ grandparents did as well. But all that certainty belies how many possible answers there are, and how much the consensus has changed over hundreds, even thousands, of years. Like childhood and other life stages, middle age is something that we continually define and redefine, partly by telling ourselves stories about the way that life can or should unfold.
It’s hard not to be struck by the range of these stories. Once upon a time, midlife was a thing to be embraced—or at least nodded at with an indulgent smile. For Homer, it was the prime of life, our maximum concentration of prowess and purpose. For Shakespeare, at least in As You Like It, it was a period reserved for sagely stroking one’s beard and reciting familiar saws over a pint of ale.
Then crisis struck. The industrial revolution bestowed new opportunities and powers of self-fashioning on young people across Europe and abroad. Youth became everything, and middle age seemed stale and stagnant by comparison. While the term “midlife crisis” would not be born until 1965, its long gestation can be traced back through the rise of the middle class. Victorian literature, from Dickens’ Little Dorrit to Eliot’s Middlemarch, portrays midlife time and again as fraught with a cluster of anxieties about faded youth, misused opportunities, and the diminishing future that lay ahead.
And yet, no change to the definition of middle age ever occludes the prospect of it changing again. Since the mid-twentieth century, artists like Doris Lessing and Miranda July have reinvented midlife as a time of transformation and discovery. The crisis paradigm, though persuasive, seems to be passing away.
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