Centre for Policy on Ageing



Desperately seeking the self — gender, age, and identity in Tillie Olsen's "Tell me a riddle" and Michelle Herman's "Missing"
Author(s)	Roberta Maierhofer
Journal title	Educational Gerontology, vol 25, no 2, March 1999
Pages	pp 129-142
Keywords	Fiction ; Older women ; Attitudes to the old of general public.
Annotation	Using the feminist concept of the "resisting reader", this article attempts to show how literary gerontology can profit from the understanding that personal identity - both in literature and society - is culturally constructed and tied to race, class, gender and age. Both Tillie Olsen's "Tell me a riddle" and Michelle Herman's "Missing" show the necessary quest for defining one's self in old age. Both texts also show that a repudiation of stereotypical notions of women's role in society as mothers and grandmothers questions the use of chronological age as a basis for identity. (RH).
Accession Number	CPA-990518223 A
Classmark	HKF: BD: TOB
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...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.