Mirrors, Passion, Power, and Spirit: Fact and Fiction in the Stories of Aging Women

ABSTRACT

This article combines and contrasts two stories of aging women – one based on the classic tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs whose protagonist is the rejected “Wicked Queen” and the second, based on a survey that the author conducted for her women’s college class’s 45th reunion. The voices of narrative storytelling about older women, whether fictionalized or actual, raise issues of Mirrors (loss of beauty and re-framing self-image), Passion (finding a lodestar from which feeling and meaning can coalesce), Power (courage to navigate the world and find inner strength as aging reorganizes priorities), and Spirit (sustenance and wisdom that nourishes, fortifies and comforts) as the final third of life brings challenges and the urgency of time. The article integrates strands of psychoanalytic research and theory about the stories told to women about aging, the stories we tell ourselves, and the move from external concerns to developing internal wisdom for the last stage of life’s journey.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Renée Cherow-O’Leary

Renée Cherow-O’Leary, Ph.D., is President of Education for the 21st Century, a consulting company in New York and Los Angeles that develops curriculum and educational programming for media, human rights, interfaith, and international organizations. She is currently a professor of interdisciplinary courses in the Arts, Culture and Media program at Rutgers University and was a faculty member at Teachers College, Columbia University and a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her work on aging includes serving as a group facilitator in the national Wise Aging program and as a leader of a new course she developed called Life Cycle Wisdom: Interdisciplinary Views on Aging that she is teaching in Manhattan and developing for outreach to other communities. She is married to a psychoanalyst and speaks frequently at psychoanalytic conferences in the U.S. and abroad using literary and artistic frameworks to illuminate psychoanalytic issues.