Ageism and omniscience in Charlotte Wood's The Weekend (2019)

Many contemporary cultural artefacts display ageist tropes and tendencies even those that purport to be examples of empowered ageing. This article argues that ageism is embedded in the formal qualities of the literary structure, amplified by an author writing outside lived experience. As such, literature inhabits the subtle knife-edge between exposure and endorsement. While the action of age discrimination might be clearly written into the plot, other avenues of ageism creep in, yet are potentially dismissed. Narrative voice is one device that communicates, or imagines, the subjective experience of being older. Charlotte Wood’s novel, The Weekend (2019), is the story of three female protagonists in their 70s, told through an omniscient narrator, however, the three seemingly diverse characters share the same negative vision of ageing. Mikhail Bakhtin’s conceptualisation of dialogism and monologism helps to tease out the formal and ethical tensions in The Weekend. The tendency towards monologism maybe symptomatic of younger writers projecting midlife anxieties through characters experiencing a life stage they themselves have not yet reached. These twin vectors gravitate towards an ideological closure of female ageing. The Weekend’s quietly insistent monologic ideas about senescence show the extent to which ageism becomes the governing discourse in celebrated literature.