Finding Oneself in Older Age: Affectivity, Existence, and the Nursing Home

This paper explores the emplacement of older age through an existentialist phenomenological reading of the novel "De grote zaal" by Jacoba van Velde. Published in 1953, the book explores the loneliness, absurdity, and existential anxiety of later life unfolding in a care institution. It tells the story of the 74-year-old widow Geertruide van der Veen who relocates to a nursing home for older women after suffering a stroke. As Geertruide’s sense of being out of place intensifies, she develops a mortal fear of the “big ward,” the area reserved for the terminally ill and dying. Moving through the nursing home, Geertruide finds herself in shifting spatial-affective-existential situations in ways that challenge the common separation of these “dimensions” of experience.