In the late autobiographical writings of Frederick Douglass, we find a different accounting of the past and a different narrative strategy that adds new dimensions and chapters to our understanding of the senescent subject. The concept of chronological aging suggests an inevitable, even, and incremental process, but this is not the only way in which aging has been experienced. These meanings had special import to those who lived and aged through this period of contested and changing descriptions. Not only were people unsure about what number of lived years qualified one as an old person, but the meaning of old age itself was in flux. In the later years of the nineteenth century, prior to the development of senescence as a unique and distinct stage of life, the meaning of old age was up for debate. While certain long-held prejudices and accounts of aging have remained fairly static, much has changed with regard to how we understand aging and the elderly. Old age and even one’s experience of old age, like so much else, is socially constructed.
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