How is the process of becoming old depicted in A.S. Byatt’s 'A Stone Woman'?

In ‘A Stone Woman’, Ines was gradually turning to stone after her mother’s death. The short story details two things in Ines: her flesh and her stone. In the life of Ines, there is a constant process of transformation and her sense of the world changes. Therefore, Ines has a lot to say about growing old. In this essay, then, I will examine how her grief, her slow conversion to stone, and her shift in attitudes to this condition describe the ageing process.

The unbearable suffering of Ines made her demented and in turn indicates her senility. The unbearable suffering Ines underwent reminds her constantly of the death and prevents her from recognizing the time correctly. When Ines lost her mother, she believed nearly all time was evening and ignored “the proper sequences of sun and shadow”. Again, Ines thought unceasingly of her mother after her surgery and she “stopped and looked out of the windows, for minutes that could have been hours, and hours that could have been minutes”. Her psychological perception of time that is different from reality causes us to think that her senescence is relative. And so Byatt remarks: “Ines, who had been the younger woman, became the old woman in an instant”, hinting at the fact that Ines ages psychically. Moreover, it is the suffering in this story that quickens and deepens this process. After her mother disappears, “the final things”, “white face on white pillow among white hair”, come up in her mind “over and over”. The repetition of “white” makes a deathly atmosphere; on the other hand, the poetic language including the use of meter and foot means a slower reading speed that helps to maintain this atmosphere. It plunges me to a further depth of empathizing with her suffering and of understanding why she gets old “in an instant”.

The process of Ines’ transformation shows the growth of her life in stone and the vanishing of her life in the flesh, which is getting older from a human point of view. In the earliest period of the transformation is described as “ a new shimmer of labradorite, six inches long and diamond-shaped, appeared quite imperceptibly below her behind where her eye and not rested.” I have had difficulty reading because this slow pace and infrequent syntax seem cacophonous, those words that begins lines have alliteration made it uncomfortable for me to read. However in the latest period, Byatt uses “chabazite, from the Greek for hailstone; obsidian, which, like analcime and garnet, has the perfect icositetrahedral shape” to describe what Ines wanted to be. These lines have a rhyming quality, and they use the end-stopped line or caesura, in such a way as to suggest the gradual success of the process by which she is changed to stone and grows old. But then Ines first becomes aware of her transfiguration in the bath, which is a beginning of her division. The bath, described as a baptism, signifies birth–at least of a new life, and at the same time the end of, or ageing of the previous life. It was also a Christian notion as in a similar tale from Thorsteinn with a stone man. Although he is at first a Christian who “believe in God and Jesus,” in the end he turns to stone, and the songs that both of them sing, “Trunt, trunt, og tröllin i fjöllunum,” imply that they undergo the same process.

Also, Ines’ loss, the end of her logocentric life, is equated with her loss of the social self, equivalent to the senescence of a people of the intellect. At the outset, Ines is determined to “tidy love away”, to retain her essence and sociability; however, something within her mutinies painfully and forces a tranformation from “a polite old lady” into a “creature moaning”. The “creature” of Ines’ instinct, rather than her rational will, for the “creature” appears to be hostile to the restrictions of her intellect. Moreover, this transformation occurs at the unnatural; indeed, she discovers that “her metamorphosis obeyed no known laws of physics or chemistry.” These scenes gradually link stone and the instinct of Ines and the metastasis of the stone symbolizes the loss of Ines’ intellect. For example, the encrustation of petrified matter was at first “the blemish”, “profoundly unnatural” to Ines’ ideology, but in the process of sedimentation, her attitudes change. When minerals flourish, she begins to call the encrustations “strange and beautiful”, due to the transformation of Ines’ perceptions. The defamiliarization also reinforces a version of it by using the stone to infiltrate the conduct of Ines. “Ines laughed. The sound was pebbly.” The word “pebbly” links the solid “rock” to the auditory “sound” in order to make the transformation of Ines palpable to the reader. From these scenes the lives of Ines once again indicate that her acceptance of these changes results in the loss of her reason, before being aged away.

In conclusion, we have gone into and explained about Ines’s process of ageing by the agencies of her grief, her turning to stone, and her change of attitude. The sorrow disturbed her thinking and precipitated her ageing. In this respect, the transformation of her flesh and her outlook mark her loss of humanity, her loss of sociality which could perhaps be thought of as the degeneracy of the human race. In this narrative, the process of ageing is thus more subjective and phenomenological. Moreover, the dwindling of individuality could also well be taken as a sign of old age too. Thus, the theme ‘health’ might expand in scope and become more comprehensive to include not just what normally passes for corporality but also the social and the ideological.