The Hearing Trumpet: Ageism, the Female Body and an Apocalypse

I came to love Leonora Carrington from reading her surrealist novel, Down Below, during a French Surrealism course my sophomore year at New York University. She relays a near autobiographical case of her stint at a sanatorium in Spain, rounds of ECT and nurses straight from Hell. Her words present themselves like automatic writing; a flow of consciousness, but are, in reality, full of methodology and purpose. I find her drawings to be a mélange of frightening, absurd and charming. I can only imagine the emotions and experiences she possessed that gave us such works as Down Below and The Hearing Trumpet.

In the Hearing Trumpet, the protagonist, Marian, describes herself as a 92-year-old woman with a long beard who is deaf and is living with her (in my opinion) ungrateful adult children. Marian is gifted a hearing trumpet, much like a hearing aid, from her likeminded and extravagant friend Carmela. With this gift, Marian overhears her son’s plans to put her in an institution. She is soon dropped off at the strangest, cult-like institution. There, she lives among nine other elderly women. Their lives seem dull and robotic until two of the women conspire to poison another woman, Maude (who inexplicably ends up being outed as a man post-mortem). While I simply cannot summarize the entire plot without a sense of linearity, or sounding insane, the remaining women soon band together, with Carmela joining along in hopes of a safer and purer community.

Then, there is a disastrous earthquake; followed by a visit from Marian's longtime friend Malborough on a Noah’s Ark type contraption from Venice, along with his half-werewolf half-human sister. The five women, Marian's friend, a post-man who enters the scene (giving news of how the rest of the world has pretty much imploded), Carmela’s limousine driver and the new wolf-pups Marlborough’s sister soon gives birth too are the lasting characters in this world. The novel ends with Marian suggesting that the story will be continued by these wolf/human pups eventually and her hopes in that the world will be repopulated in a natural, non-harmful manner after this apocalypse.

It's clear the plot is difficult to follow and not to mention all the religious symbolism I just can’t even manage to tackle, to read The Hearing Trumpet is to enter Carrington’s mind. The terminology she uses to not only create but to sustain this mythological world (which is supposed to be Earth) comes at an ease for her. And, it feels as if she is slightly judging our own confusion… you’ve never heard of a hearing trumpet? You’ve never heard a human speak fluent wolf?

Nevertheless, Marian’s figure, along with the other older women at this institution are important in that we don’t see characters like them – even in surrealist literature. The female body is an, obviously, hyper-sexualized trope. Yet, what happens when that hyper sexualized body ages? What comes of a body that grows undesirable hair? As the female ages, she becomes more "masculine", not only losing her sex appeal but her femininity all together. I find the often gender blending of this novel to be indicative of Carrington’s critique on ageism.

Ageism, in any realm, whether it be art, literature or fashion is all too unavoidable. The fear of growing old isn't just accompanied with thoughts of death but also thoughts of undesirability and invisibility. While there are certain attempts to open modeling for older women, there still is a persistence of youth in fashion. Carrington's novel, while not necessarily pertaining to the fashion world, can help us understand the importance, and also the fun, that comes from entertaining and representing such unique characters.

Like Carrington's painting of the institution, there is a feeling of shame around who is frail and a mirror of existential anxieties of death. These women are shunned from society, which one could point out is how we still choose to treat our elderly. When the female body seems to lose its sexuality, and it wrinkles and droops, society chooses to de-mystify it. And with this demystification, we no longer wish to view it. Modesty is too often associated with older age. What can become the future of fashion once we grow old? Will we be booted from participating? Can older models participate with a sense of normalcy? Carrington doesn't speak to fashion in her surrealist world but I wonder how different it really is from ours.