Sex, Love and the Aging Woman

Martha C. Nussbaum
THE STONE 
Elina Garanca, left, as Octavian and Renee Fleming as the Marschallin in a production of “Der Rosenkavalier” at the Metropolitan Opera in April. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Denigrating myths about women abound, but one of the most enduring is the myth that aging women must graciously renounce sexual love, leaving it to the young.
Let’s look at one work, Richard Strauss’s 1911 comic opera, “Der Rosenkavalier,” that peddles this lie to enduring popular acclaim, and then at a far superior work, Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” which undermines the stereotype and illuminates some special attributes, even advantages, of sexual love between the aging.
“Der Rosenkavalier,” or “The Knight of the Rose,” seems to be daring because few works deal extensively with the theme of love and sexuality in an aging woman. The opera’s erotic opening, which finds the Marschallin, a 32-year-old, unhappily married aristocrat, in bed with the teenage boy Octavian right after an episode of sexual pleasure boldly depicted by the orchestra during the overture, suggests that we will now have a serious exploration of the theme of female aging.
As the drama unfolds, and the Marschallin accepts the need for her to give up Octavian so that a woman his own age can have him, she ruminates in a bittersweet monologue on the need to yield to the inevitable march of time, forgoing bodily passion. Among commentators, these ruminations have been considered profound, and it was surely Strauss’s intention to depict the Marschallin as a wise woman, reflecting the standard for what women should be and do as they age.
The Marschallin does have one good line about aging, at the end of her famous Act I aria: “And in the ‘how’ — there lies the whole difference.” There’s something nice about the musical setting of that line, too — it ends not ponderously but lightly, suspended in the air, and one may even sing it with a trill of laughter.
And yet. The first lie of Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal — the one I will call “the obvious lie” — concerns inevitability. For women, according to the opera, getting old means surrender and renunciation. The Marschallin’s life, as she ages, must end up as sexless as the convent girl’s life from which it emerged. Audiences typically swallow the lie and applaud her sage retreat. Strauss plays a double game: He gains a reputation for daring by broaching the unusual theme, and yet he comforts his audience by saying something utterly conventional about it.
Now, however, we come to a more subtle lie. Why do audiences accept the inevitability of the Marschallin’s resignation? Consider her erotic choice. This is a woman who was taken from the convent into a loveless marriage, with a husband who is off hunting throughout the entire opera and doesn’t even bother to put in an appearance. So, if the Marschallin really is the wise woman she is supposed to be, what might she look for in a lover? Sex certainly, but that is not the exclusive offering of teenage boys. She would very likely also be looking for conversation, for humor and for real personal love. Instead, she turns to a boy who is no more than 17. She seeks a relationship that is based entirely on his infatuated sexual eagerness; it offers absolutely no possibilities of conversation or genuine personal intimacy, since Octavian, so far as we are allowed to know him, is a very stupid teenager, albeit with pretty manners.
The 18th-century Vienna in which the opera takes place surely contained many men of greater interest, many of them interested in love affairs with married women, since the world the opera depicts is permissive. So what has this wise woman with what one critic calls “acute sensibilities” and “profound understanding” done? Out of all the men around, she has chosen one who is interested in sex alone, who has no capacity for intelligent conversation, and who has no interest at all in her as a person, except as a sex teacher. Why did she make this choice? No plausible motive is suggested. And this absence of motive, particularly in one so wise, creates the lie: the implicit explanation is that this is the only option she has.
This “choice,” of course, explains why the demise of the relationship is felt as inevitable. There’s nothing to sustain it, and so Octavian may as well do as society expects and go marry the rich heiress, his fiancée, Sophie, to whom he has nothing interesting to say either. Soon it will be him off hunting in the countryside, and Sophie will be alone, living out the “inevitable” in her own generation.
The mismatch, of course, has nothing to do with age difference per se (as most commentators oddly suggest that it does). The inappropriateness concerns the fact that Octavian (besides being stupid) is much too young for a mature relationship.
So here’s the subtle lie: a lonely aging woman, in an unhappy marriage, described as beautiful, cannot find an interesting lover. All she can find is a hormonal boy who would sleep with anyone, and she takes what she can get. Strauss’s subtle lie is that a wise aging woman will naturally make a staggeringly inappropriate erotic choice, jettisoning the search for love in a desperate burst of sexual eagerness. And then, being wise, she will give that up and become resigned to a sexless life — apparently because no male not totally preoccupied with teenage hormonal excess will look in her direction. That’s not just a lie, it’s a generative lie, since when people come to believe it, it informs life.
Now we arrive at a third lie, the subtlest of all. The lie is that it is only in this form — where the aging woman makes a terrible choice, and then comes to her senses and renounces that choice — that an audience will accept the representation of the sex life and emotions of an aging woman. In other words, the aging woman has to be punished — and doubly punished, first by being thrust into a stupid and shallow relationship, and then by being made to give it up with high-minded talk about time and inevitability. It is very like the old days in which gay male relationships in fiction had to end with a death. Audiences wanted to punish gay men; they disapproved, and wanted novelists to register that disapproval. Audiences then and now want to punish the aging woman, and thus, aided by Strauss, they construct an aesthetic fiction of the “inevitability” of her renunciation and the “profound wisdom” of her acceptance.
Is this third lie, however, a lie? Is it really possible, audiences being what they are, to represent the sexual/romantic choices of an aging woman attractively, showing her making a good and interesting choice, and then being happy in that choice? To see that the answer to this question is “yes,” we need only turn to Shakespeare, and “Antony and Cleopatra” (1606). Of course, Shakespeare had history at his back, and Cleopatra is one of history’s most fascinating women. Her love affair with Antony was real, and lasted until death. Shakespeare had lived by then through the remarkable reign of a female monarch, Elizabeth, who died in 1603, and who was believed by many to have had a longtime lover; so he knew he could carry his audience with such a tale.
Unlike the dreamy abstractions of the youthful love in “Romeo and Juliet,” “Antony and Cleopatra” depicts what we might call mature love — love between people who enjoy being grown-ups together and who have no desire to transcend human life, because they are having too much fun in life as it is.
Romeo and Juliet don’t eat; Antony and Cleopatra eat all the time. Romeo and Juliet have no occupation; Antony and Cleopatra are friends and supportive colleagues with a great deal of work to do running their respective and interlocking empires. Romeo and Juliet have no sense of humor; Antony and Cleopatra live by elaborate jokes and highly personal forms of teasing. (“That time, — Oh times! — I laugh’d him out of patience …”) Romeo and Juliet, utterly absorbed, pay no attention to others around them; Antony and Cleopatra love to gossip about the odd people in their world, spend evenings wandering the streets, watching the funny things people do, structuring love through daily life. Romeo and Juliet speak in terms of worshipful hyperbole. Antony knows how to make contact with Cleopatra through insults, even about her age; she knows how to turn a story about a fishhook into a running joke that renews laughter each time it is mentioned.
The love between Antony and Cleopatra lasts for at least a decade, and the texture of time past, present and future seasons it. The human body is a river of time, and these two pay attention to one another’s real bodies, not idealized images of the body. And the body is always seen as animated by a lively, searching and idiosyncratic mind that makes contact with another particular mind through intimate conversation.
Cleopatra is clearly supposed to be attractive, but the play, unlike Shakespeare’s sources, plays down this aspect. It is her complicated personality, full of surprises, to which Shakespeare most draws our attention. (“Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.”) Her mode of seduction is above all mental. “Cunning past men’s thought,” as Antony notes, she ingeniously elaborates a whole battery of stratagems to keep herself in the forefront of his attention: flirtation, capricious annoyance, the constant private teasing, frustrating allusions to significant undelivered information; but also, shared ambition, trusting collaboration, sincere deeply felt admiration for his achievements, insistence on her own equality.
Shakespeare’s teenage lovers seem unaware that every human being has flaws and personal vulnerabilities that real love needs to handle gently and respectfully. Not so our aging lovers. In the scene after the devastating battle of Actium, in which their combined military forces were decisively defeated, Cleopatra displays a delicate attunement to Antony’s self-esteem, intuiting what should and should not be said.
And then there’s Octavia, Antony’s lawful wife, and Cleopatra’s outsize jealousy. Aging love always has baggage. Baggage can be a source of richness; it can be a source of pain. It can be both at the same time. What is certain is that living with a partner’s whole past and present life is a challenge that young lovers typically do not have to face. Facing it well requires many qualities — a sense of one’s own limits, humor, altruism, endurance, humility, self-knowledge — that young lovers have not yet been called upon to develop.
Romeo and Juliet’s love transfigured the world by raising love into the heavens: Juliet is the sun, and, as with the sun, we have no idea what, if anything, makes her laugh. Antony and Cleopatra transfigure the world from within, making each daily experience more vivid, funny and surprising. Without each other, they both feel, the world is sadly boring. “Shall I abide in this dull world,” she asks as he dies, “which in thy absence is no better than a sty?” What’s piggish to her is the absence of interesting conversation. So the world does need to be transfigured by love, but the transfiguration is human and particular, rather than celestial and abstract.
What do we learn from this woman, who, unlike the Marschallin, makes a deep, satisfying and mature choice? We see that mature love is both sexual and personal and that its sexuality is itself personal, based upon memory, humor, shared history. For that reason it has a depth that youthful love can’t have, and that the Marschallin’s vain attempt to find love with a 17-year-old could never deliver. For the Marschallin, love brings neither comedy nor tragedy, only polite resignation. For Antony and Cleopatra, love is comic because of its bodily and temporal particularity. And for that reason it is also tragic, open to huge and irreparable loss.
Lies don’t always endure. Finally, in recent years, Hollywood and television, prodded by a group of extraordinary aging actresses (Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep and Diane Keaton among them) are just beginning to move away from stereotypes and to explore the truths that Shakespeare articulated. But that is a story for another day.
This essay is adapted from “Aging Thoughtfully: Conversations About Retirement, Romance, Wrinkles, and Regret,” by Martha C. Nussbaum and Saul Levmore.