Publication details
Performing Ageing in Canadian Fiction: Elizabeth Hay’s Snow Road Station
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | British Journal of Canadian Studies |
| Citation | |
| web | https://doi.org/10.3828/bjcs.2025.13 |
| Doi | https://doi.org/10.3828/bjcs.2025.13 |
| Keywords | aging; gender; intertextuality; performativity; theatricality; social identity |
| Description | This article explores Elizabeth Hay’s Snow Road Station (2023) as a Canadian feminist reimagining of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961), examining how theatrical performance becomes a site for negotiating ageing female identity. Set in rural Ontario and centring on sixty-two-year-old actress Lulu Blake, the novel stages a collapse of professional and personal selfhood that echoes, but ultimately diverges from, Beckett’s existential vision. Drawing on feminist performance theory and social identity frameworks, the article analyses how theatricality and intertextuality shape representations of ageing in Snow Road Station. While Happy Days presents ageing as immobilisation and erasure, Hay recasts this through a feminist intervention that positions performance as a struggle between cultural expectations of invisibility and the insistent presence of the ageing female subject. In doing so, Hay’s novel transforms existential paralysis into a narrative of resilience and social reintegration, grounding later-life identity in seasonal, communal, and performative renewal. |