In recent years, Merve Emre—a professor, literary critic, and contributing writer at this magazine—has tackled a range of culturally salient topics, including motherhood, emotional intelligence, and gimmicks. She recently shared some thoughts about another: age gaps. Through a selection of novels, from nineteenth-century classics to twenty-first-century spinoffs, Emre describes how writers have made use of age gaps in an array of literary projects, ones examining subjects such as moral pedagogy, parental authority, and aesthetics. Her comments have been edited and condensed.
Emma
by Jane Austen
Published in 1815, this novel centers on the moral education of the titular Emma Woodhouse, which she undergoes at the hands of an older family friend, Mr. Knightley. It shapes her conduct and character, turning her into a marriageable woman; the age gap serves a pedagogical function, with the older man guiding the younger woman toward what Lionel Trilling referred to as “the ideal of intelligent love.”
Of course, education is a social and collective enterprise. One of my favorite chapters in “Emma,” Chapter 5 of Volume I, is a long conversation between Mr. Knightley and Emma’s former governess and surrogate mother, Mrs. Weston. They are speaking about Emma’s education and its various defects, and Mrs. Weston tries to hint to Mr. Knightley that his interest in Emma bespeaks his affection for her. Part of the endlessly interesting questions that “Emma” asks is who is being educated by whom, and whose grand designs are truly realized in a marriage plot.
Middlemarch
by George Eliot
Here is a famously unhappy age-gap novel: the ardent, rash, and open-hearted Dorothea Brooke weds the dried-up clergyman Edward Casaubon, intending to serve as the helpmate of a man who, she believes, is writing something great, the “Key to all Mythologies.” Gradually, she becomes disabused of this notion by, among others, her husband’s cousin, the handsome and romantic Will Ladislaw, who is in love with her.
Eliot, that notably sympathetic novelist, assures us that she’s going to honor Casaubon’s inner life in the same way she does Dorothea’s. But once we glimpse Casaubon’s thoughts, we learn that there’s very little there. Casaubon’s “soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying.” The older man is petty, crabby, frightened, and tries to control his young wife by means of his will—“the dead hand” that Eliot repeatedly compares to the beautiful living hands of Dorothea, who is always reaching out to help those in need.
The Price of Salt
by Patricia Highsmith
Therese, a young woman who aspires to design theatre sets, is working in a Manhattan department store. Just before Christmas, Carol, an older woman going through a divorce, comes in to buy a toy for her child; she and Therese begin to see each other and eventually escape New York on a road trip. In the beginning, the age gap between the lovers is presented as perversely, comically akin to the relationship between a mother and a child. Carol initiates Therese into companionship, into freedom, into mutually satisfying sex. It’s only after Carol leaves her, and Therese begins to understand what she wants for herself, independent of Carol, that Therese can go back to Carol. Marijane Meaker described it as being “for many years the only lesbian novel . . . with a happy ending,” although its happiness hinges on the younger woman supplanting the older woman’s actual child.
Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
There’s a risk in naming “Lolita” as an age-gap novel; its narrator, Humbert Humbert, methodically rapes a twelve-year-old girl and, by dint of his sumptuous prose, dares us to ignore or excuse it. It’s the most extraordinary examination of how our erotic fantasies can cruelly occlude the reality of another, vulnerable person, and it insists that what is scandalous in art is what is aesthetically startling, not sexually explicit.
Two recent novels, Alissa Nutting’s “Tampa” and Lucas Rijneveld’s “My Heavenly Favorite,” react to “Lolita” in thrilling ways. “Tampa” turns Nabokov’s project on its head; it’s narrated by a gorgeous middle-school teacher who begins a sexual relationship with her male student, and, unlike “Lolita,” which is written with exquisite decorum, “Tampa” is gleefully pornographic. “My Heavenly Favorite” responds to a specific line in Nabokov’s afterword to “Lolita,” in which he explains that an American publisher might’ve distributed the novel if Nabokov had turned the title character “into a twelve-year-old lad and had him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in a barn . . . all this set forth in short, strong, ‘realistic’ sentences (‘He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess . . .’).” Rijneveld’s “Lolita” is the unnamed fourteen-year-old daughter of a Dutch dairy farmer who longs to have a boy’s body and is seduced by a veterinarian. Nabokov’s parodying (of Hemingway, I think) inspires some of the grim, grubby frankness of Rijneveld’s feverish prose.
