The Seven Ages by Eva Figes

First published: 1986

Type of work: Social chronicle

Time of work: The 1980’s, with flashbacks to earlier periods

Locale: A small village in the countryside of Great Britain

Principal Characters:

• The Narrator, an unnamed mother and grandmother in the 1980’s
• Kate, the Narrator’s elder daughter, a doctor
• Sally, the Narrator’s younger daughter, a single mother with two children
• Moruiw, a midwife and healer in pre-Christian Britain
• Judith, a midwife and healer in feudal Britain
• Alice, a servant and healer in the sixteenth century
• Lady Lucy, and
• Lady Sarah, sisters whose husbands were on opposite sides in the Civil War in the seventeenth century
• Sophie, the Matriarch, a woman living in the Victorian period
• Dora, her granddaughter, who used her inheritance to start a family-planning clinic
• Granny Martin, the Narrator’s grandmother, a nurse who worked with Dora in the early 1900’s

The Novel

Most of the action in The Seven Ages is in the past, stories of earlier women as remembered by other women and heard by the Narrator, who has just retired to the countryside after thirty-five years of practice as a midwife. She has taken up residence in a small cottage near the farm, where, as an evacuee from World War II, she spent her childhood with her Aunt Doris and her cousin Ada.

While their talents vary, the women from the past are like most women—involved in bearing or not bearing children, and worrying about them as women have been occupied since the beginning of time. While several women of rank, subject to the pains of childbirth as are all women, figure prominently in these tales, the narrators of their stories are women who were midwives until the man-midwives and male doctors assumed authority in the seventeenth century (chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5). The story of Alice (chapter 3) is told by Ann, who was taught to read by her mother, Lady Elizabeth, and who was consequently burned as a witch (during the reign of Mary I). Granny Martin, the Narrator’s grandmother, remembers the story told to her by her grandmother, Nancy, who was in service to Sophie, the Matriarch from the time she was ten years old (chapter 6). The Narrator gives up her retirement after less than two years to support the women’s peace movement in the late twentieth century (chapter 7). This choice serves to declare her own identity.

Time is perceived in this novel by the effects of politics and religion on ordinary people. War is viewed in its social context rather than in its historical context. Whether the fighting was to gain property or to prove whose side God had taken—wars typically involving both God and money—the results were always the same: men killed or crippled, leaving their children deserted and the women to care for the property.

In the sixteenth century, Alice, the great-great-granddaughter of Judith, is a victim of the times. In service as a nun from early adolescence, Alice is sent home with nothing but her cropped hair when the nunneries are closed. (The Church was nationalized under Henry VIII in 1534 and continued so under his son, Edward VI.) Under the new rules, Alice eventually marries a parish priest and bears him six children in as many years. Her husband becomes insane, understandably, when he is told that he was never married but living in sin (Mary I, assuming the throne after her brother, denationalized the Church). Alice’s husband is later restored to his living after Elizabeth comes to the throne in 1558, when the English Church was nationalized for good.

This is a novel about women, narrated by other women—with first names, but without surnames because lineage does not suffice to provide identity. The retired Narrator remains unnamed, even when she goes through her old books, collected over the years like rings around a tree, and comes across her old surname and her married name, which seemed strange at the time. There are no specific references to dates or years, even though the cycle of the seasons figures prominently.

The Seven Ages presents the experience of women who were not directing history but were living through it. The early midwives handed down their knowledge from mother to daughter, but the common interest of these women is of far greater significance than their blood relationships. The fact that Granny Martin is related to the Narrator is not as important as the way this woman influenced her life. Because of Granny Martin’s stories of her experiences as a nurse, the Narrator chose nursing as her own profession. Granny Martin’s memories include how she and Dora were arrested while running a family-planning clinic and saw suffragist Christabel Pankhurst, who was being arrested also: Family planning and female suffrage were equally objectionable.

The collusion of religion and medicine was of no help to women. The mid-wives, practicing healing as revealed by their predecessors, lacked information that is now taken for granted but were dealing successfully with their own experience as women. When the doctors of theology took to dispensing medical advice because their learning had to be superior to that of any illiterate midwife, the results were often fatal. One cannot argue with nature or impose upon it the currently prevailing brand of human logic. When Lady Elizabeth’s husband, in the sixteenth century, insisted on calling in learned doctors, the sufferings of his wife were greatly exacerbated, but their performance was dazzling. Health was not at issue, only theory.

The city hospitals which came into being as enclosure progressed and people were thrown off the common land were little better than pesthouses. Before any knowledge of sepsis, which was not understood until the work of Joseph Lister in the 1860’s, women giving birth in the city hospitals died of puerperal fever, as doctors delivered babies after treating the diseased and dying.

Medical knowledge in the twentieth century seems to have almost no relation to that of previous centuries, yet women are still struggling with the choices available. The Narrator has witnessed one reversal in medical practice. When she was a practicing midwife, women wanted to have their babies in the hospital but were permitted to have only their first child there because of a shortage of beds. As she listens to her daughters arguing, she ruefully remembers that she used her staff privilege to give birth to Sally, her second daughter, in the hospital.

Sally argues that women should have a choice—preferably home delivery and at the hospital only if necessary—for what Sally sees as the most important event in a woman’s life, having a baby. Kate argues that home delivery is neither cost-efficient nor desirable for a number of reasons. The Narrator suggests that where women have their babies is finally not a question of medical theory, but a question of money.

In her ongoing arguments with Sally, Kate contends that most people have no opportunity for choice, that only the rich choose. Yet Kate has become a doctor, which was not a choice for the illiterate but skilled midwives and healers who preceded her. When accused by Sally of liking power, Kate responds that the world cannot be changed without it. Only in the fall, when Sally and her friends are demonstrating against a nuclear missile base, do Kate and Sally unite as equals. While the neighbors nervously view them as a local nuisance—since the base will provide jobs and boost business—and Emily and Adam see the demonstrations as a game, the Narrator eyes her daughters with new respect and knows how deadly serious the game is.

It is Guy Fawkes Day, November 5, time for a mock ritual of rebellion, celebrating the potential of the apparently powerless, warning authorities of all sorts to beware.

The Characters

The Seven Ages offers no character development or plot, as one might expect of a Victorian or Edwardian novel, yet the narratives from the past of those long dead are profoundly moving: There is the sense that one is hearing authentic voices. From old papers, the Narrator reads incomplete facts about Isabel, Lady Lucy’s daughter. From her own grandmother, she learns of Sophie, the Matriarch, and Dora, the granddaughter. The voices from the present, like the voices from the past, offer no internal stream of consciousness or the entire life of any one woman. The character of the Narrator emerges from her memories, her thoughts about her daughters and her conversations with them.

The reader knows very little about Kate and Sally other than their mother’s perceptions: Kate is an empiricist and a hardworking realist, as well as a dedicated doctor. Sally, a struggling and vulnerable idealist, is a young mother having a predictably difficult time financially, as her mother worries that her grandchildren will not survive in inadequate housing. The reader learns that Sally had an abortion, but no further details about her life are provided or needed: Women, individuals, must choose among their available options.

With a small amount of money, the Narrator has several options. This woman has apparently been happy in her profession and is no revolutionary. She locates her childhood in the country under the influence of her grandmother and her cousin Ada, who was killed as a result of a bombing during World War II. Ada was clearly the leader, and together they roamed the countryside and played their games. The Narrator worries about the long-term effects of her daughters’ fatherless childhood, even though she knows that she is not responsible for this lack. Her experiences as a nurse have convinced her that life is cyclical and does not essentially change. It is only after summer has turned again into summer that the Narrator learns that her retirement is over; in winter, she must become active again. For the Narrator, continuity is a matter not of names but of physical traits and manners: Kate has the gestures of Granny Martin; Sally has Ada’s red-gold hair, and her daughter Emily has the eyes of the Narrator’s mother.

Eva Figes’ characters are sparely drawn yet densely substantial. In no way stereotypical, they speak of a day-to-day reality which cannot be mistaken. One does not have to know all the details of their lives to find their reality credible.

Critical Context

The Seven Ages represents one resolution of the themes of identity and alienation with which Figes has dealt in earlier novels. Each of Figes’ novels is an experiment, using a new mode to impose order on chaos, a mode different from any tried earlier. While Figes acknowledges the influences of T. S. Eliot, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and Virginia Woolf, her fiction is distinctly her own. The Seven Ages, for example, yields neither Beckett’s solipsism nor Woolf’s interrelated streams of consciousness.

When Figes published her well-received study Patriarchal Attitudes: Women in Society (1970), an impressively cogent analysis of patriarchy, she had already won the Guardian Fiction Prize for her second novel, Winter Journey (1967). Alienation, identity or its lack, the nature of reality—and of art—are Figes’ concerns. Her innovative power in creating new modes of approaching these themes is beyond question.

Four of Figes’ eight previous novels focus on women: Equinox (1966), Days (1974), Nelly’s Version (1977), and Waking (1981). Waking suggests a comparison which is actually a contrast. This novel presents seven mornings in a woman’s life, from childhood to death, through stream of consciousness and with virtually no dialogue. While Waking has been praised for raising questions about the place of women, it has also been praised as a superbly fatalistic response to Jacques’ fatalistic speech in William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The progression of the woman, or women, in Waking is linear.

The Narrator in The Seven Ages is no fatalist. The world she evokes is no mere state but a living entity with which she must interact. When she observes that the more things change, the more they stay the same, she is trying to maintain perspective; she is bemused and impressed by her grown children, as she is aware of her life completing its cycle.

Bibliography

Field, Michele. “Eva Figes,” in Publishers Weekly. CCXXXI (January 16, 1987), pp. 56-57.

Goreau, Angeline. Review in The New York Times Book Review. XCII (February 22, 1987), p. 7.

Library Journal. Review. CXI (December, 1986), p. 35.

Maja-Pearce, Adewale. Review in New Statesman. CXI (May 23, 1986), p. 26.

Publishers Weekly. Review. CCXXX (October 24, 1986), p. 58.