"It's every woman's tragedy, that, after a certain age, she looks like a female impersonator. Mind you, we've known some lovely female impersonators, in our time"
About this Quote
Carter twists the knife with a smile: a line that sounds like a throwaway bon mot but is really a demolition charge under “natural” femininity. The first sentence borrows the voice of polite cruelty - the kind society directs at aging women with a straight face. “Tragedy” is doing double duty: it’s the melodrama women are told to feel about their faces, and it’s the social tragedy of a culture that treats female beauty as a rapidly expiring license.
Then comes the sly pivot: “female impersonator.” Carter’s subtext is pure gender-as-performance, years before those ideas got reduced to campus buzzwords. If femininity can be “impersonated,” it was never a stable essence to begin with; it’s a role learned, rehearsed, and judged. Aging doesn’t make a woman less “woman,” it just makes the costume stop matching the script society handed her at twenty-three.
The second sentence is the real Carter move: “Mind you...” is a stage whisper that turns insult into complicity, then flips it into admiration. By conceding “lovely” impersonators, she blurs the hierarchy between “real” womanhood and theatrical imitation. The joke lands because it exposes the original standard as already artificial: if youth is the proof of authenticity, then authenticity is just a lighting setup.
Context matters: Carter writes out of a late-20th-century feminist sensibility allergic to sentimental empowerment. She’d rather show how the machinery works - how misogyny hides inside “taste,” and how the line between glamour and grotesque is policed hardest on women who dare to age in public.
Then comes the sly pivot: “female impersonator.” Carter’s subtext is pure gender-as-performance, years before those ideas got reduced to campus buzzwords. If femininity can be “impersonated,” it was never a stable essence to begin with; it’s a role learned, rehearsed, and judged. Aging doesn’t make a woman less “woman,” it just makes the costume stop matching the script society handed her at twenty-three.
The second sentence is the real Carter move: “Mind you...” is a stage whisper that turns insult into complicity, then flips it into admiration. By conceding “lovely” impersonators, she blurs the hierarchy between “real” womanhood and theatrical imitation. The joke lands because it exposes the original standard as already artificial: if youth is the proof of authenticity, then authenticity is just a lighting setup.
Context matters: Carter writes out of a late-20th-century feminist sensibility allergic to sentimental empowerment. She’d rather show how the machinery works - how misogyny hides inside “taste,” and how the line between glamour and grotesque is policed hardest on women who dare to age in public.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
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