THE DISCOURSE OF AGING IN SOCIAL AND CULTURAL CONTEXT OF THE USA: THE ELDERLY CHARACTER IN THE 18TH CENTURY DRAMA

Abstract

The article tackles the historical and philosophic background of aging in the context of West European
and American mentalities of the late Middle Ages and Enlightenment. On the basis of T.R.Cole’s
“The Journey of Life” and S. de Beauvoir’s “The Coming of Age” the author of the paper studies diachronic
aspects of later life in the US drama of the 18th century.
To characterize late adulthood in the humanities it is signiicant to delineate an ideal old age. T.R. Cole
presumes that it “legitimizes roles and norms appropriate to the last stage of life, providing sanctions
and incentives for living with the low of time”. In terms of Cole’s formula as well as other basic ideas
of puritan worldview shedding light upon aging, the paper demonstrates their implementation in Royall
Tyler’s comedy “The Contrast” (1787). The author of the paper argues that Tyler’s play implicitly promotes
the Puritans’ ideal of the elderly and the metaphor of life as a journey.
The paper demonstrates that although the older adult is a minor character in the comedy, yet he is
represented as a complicated and ambivalent personality. Also there have been detected the markers
of ageist discourse in the framework of poetic peculiarities of the drama.