Too Much Read online

  The stories in this book are true. A few names have been changed to protect the privacy of people involved.

  Copyright © 2020 by Rachel Vorona Cote

  A previous version of “Nerve” appeared in Literary Hub, October 27, 2016.

  Previous versions of “Close” appeared in Jezebel, April 21, 2015, and September 23, 2015. “Close” also includes excerpts from “Painted Ladies,” an essay first published online by The Poetry Foundation.

  A previous version of “Cut” appeared in Broadly (now Vice), March 15, 2017.

  A previous version of “Old” appeared in Literary Hub, January 5, 2017.

  Cover design by Jenny Carrow. Painting: Helen of Troy by Anthony Frederick Sandys/Alamy. Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: February 2020

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Cote, Rachel Vorona, author.

  Title: Too much : how Victorian constraints still bind women today / Rachel

  Vorona Cote.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Grand Central Publishing, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019036413 | ISBN 9781538729700 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781538729717 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women--Identity. | Sex role--History. | Excess (Philosophy)

  | Feminism. | Women--Social conditions--19th century. | Women and

  literature--History--19th century.

  Classification: LCC HQ1206 .C7223 2020 | DDC 305.42--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036413

  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-2970-0 (trade paperback), 978-1-5387-2971-7 (ebook)

  E3-20200225-DA-PC-CCC

  E3-20200124-DA-PC-ORI

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One: Wonderland: An Introduction

  Chapter Two: Chatterbox

  Chapter Three: Nerve

  Chapter Four: Close

  Chapter Five: Plus

  Chapter Six: Crazy

  Chapter Seven: Cut

  Chapter Eight: Horny

  Chapter Nine: Cheat

  Chapter Ten: Loud

  Chapter Eleven: Old

  Chapter Twelve: Substance: An Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Notes

  For my mother, Katherine Florio Vorona, whose compassionate heart and boundless empathy taught me that no amount of love is too much. If she had not raised me, and embraced everything I am—with all my excess, unruliness, and contradictions—I could not have written this book.

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  Author’s Note

  Before venturing any further, it’s important that I address a few matters related to diversity in source material. Victorian literature is a useful tool for exploring the phenomenon of too muchness, but like so many mechanisms for critical thought, it is limited, racially and otherwise. Throughout the book, I will reference and draw principally from Victorian narratives and conduct manuals. However, I will also place them alongside others in order to, I hope, provide a broader purview beyond that of the cisgender white woman. That said, I will, for the sake of (relative) brevity, primarily focus on woman-identifying persons over the course of the book, although there remains much work to be done in considering the emotional circumscription of transgender persons, gender nonconforming persons, and men, queer and straight. This is a long and intricate conversation: I submit the following book as one rivulet leading to vaster waters.

  Finally, I want to turn this narrative of too muchness on its head without letting empathy out of sight—this isn’t an excuse to do and say whatever we want, context and consideration be damned. It is, however, a call for others to witness a broad, more complex range of emotional presentation and utterance, and a demand for the space we cohabit to be treated as capacious ground for any expression that is neither malicious nor harmful to folk, flora, and fauna. I believe that this is possible. In writing this book, I am declaring my belief that it will exist, that we are, gradually, making it so.

  Chapter One

  Wonderland:

  An Introduction

  A weeping woman is a monster. So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of expostulation, we’ve flinched in self-scorn—ugh, that was so gross. I am so gross. On rare occasions, we might revel in our excess—belting out anthems with our friends over karaoke, perhaps—but in the company of less sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who meets the world with intensity is a woman who endures lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as without.

  In Victorian England, the medical establishment would have labeled us hysterical, pathologically immoderate in emotional and physiological expression. Here’s how a German-born doctor practicing in London, one Julius Althaus, defined the condition in 1866: “All the symptoms of hysteria have their prototype in those vital actions by which grief, terror, disappointment, and other painful emotions and affections, are manifested under ordinary circumstances, and which become signs of hysteria as soon as they attain a certain degree of intensity.”1 Of course, “a certain degree of intensity” invites a vast range of interpretation, and when it came to emotional eruptions, the Victorians were none too generous. Hysteria was a convenient means of pathologizing—and thus regulating—feminine feeling and its expression. Today, as many among us grieve our political optimism and hammer out our anger on social media, we find our husbands, our boyfriends, our parents, our politicians diagnosing us with similar maladies: we’re wallowing in it, why are we so freaked out, we must be bleeding out of our wherever. Take a Xanax, girl, and calm down.

  We are the women who can hardly contain our screams, and, oftentimes, we don’t. Our muchness oozes from our pores like acidic sweat: ranker, more caustic, less concealable than ever. But however brutally the stigma may sizzle in this political moment, this sense that we are somehow Too Much is hardly new to us—nor will it dissipate whenever Donald Trump’s vise finally unclenches from our skulls. I conceived the idea for this book—a critical cry of bullshit against this concept, Too Much—some years ago, during a comparatively happier presidency. This term, Too Much, pernicious in its ambiguity, attacks with the force of history. It’s the overdetermined exponent of ideologies, centuries old, structured by misogyny, racism, and homophobia. American soci
ety fetishizes white heteronormative propriety: it wants its girls pliable and demure—girls who safeguard both tears and sex for the privacy of the bedroom, who keep their voices measured during meetings, and who brush their hair and blot their lipstick. It worships the woman who, if she should experience distress, will wear her sadness like Lana Del Rey or Middlemarch’s Dorothea Brooke: with genteel sensuality and relative quiet. Anything more—well, that would be excessive.

  Accordingly, “You’re just too much!” is the threat of patriarchy disguised as playful admonition. It is a warning, even a diagnosis. It is saying, “This space is not yours to colonize. This power is not yours to claim.” Systemic oppression relies on the careful partitioning of social space. Specifically, it requires that marginalized peoples—of which women are one broad example, and women of color and queer persons are more pointedly targeted ones—dwell within corners, that we shrink inside walls that loom and compress.

  The public devises unspoken rules of deportment born from anxieties over what we can bear to see expressed—and accordingly, whom we are willing to allow the privilege of expression. Reluctant to countenance emotional and physical extremes in any case, women, long regarded as the lodestars of excess, are eyed like shape-shifters with the power to transform into Medusa. But I’ve since realized that there is power in what others call monstrosity. Our refusal to abide, to prioritize the comfort of the West’s hegemonic governance, lays bare the rickety scaffolding of culture’s so-called behavioral norms. The roots of rules are never so deep that they cannot be wrenched from the soil; man-made boundaries remain at the mercy of the creatures who erected them. For when we are Too Much—and when we refuse to apologize for that—we burst against those walls and marvel as they give way like sand.

  “Lost My Muchness, Have I?”

  I remember little about the circumstances of seeing Tim Burton’s adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. It must have been 2010, because that was the year it was released, and I saw it in a movie theater. My impressions were, and still are, few. Mia Wasikowska is a sweet-faced, impertinent Alice. It disappoints me that she and Anne Hathaway’s White Queen do not embark on a love affair, though I’m certain they develop a queer affection (they’re absolutely making eyes at each other, and you will not convince me otherwise). Tossing the Jabberwocky into the mix seemed a lazy narrative decision. But above all in my recollection, there is the question of “muchness,” and whether nineteen-year-old Alice has retained it after her protracted absence from Wonderland and all the ravages and impositions of early adulthood.

  Muchness: what a word! It was new to my lexicon, and yet it seemed as if I had always known it, my kinship with it sensed, if not fully comprehended, as if its letters were threaded into my veins. But as I left the theater, I contemplated how, for Alice, the Mad Hatter, and the rest of her bizarro entourage, “muchness” although vague in definition, evokes an unambiguously positive quality—something that surprised me, even if I hadn’t yet parsed the reason. Alice’s muchness is her passion, her verve, and her courage. “Lost my muchness, have I?” Alice mutters to herself as she gingerly traverses the Red Queen’s moat, littered with the petrified heads of her victims. When it returns—or had it ever really gone?—she transforms into a mighty warrior, fit to slay a monster fifty times her size. When she returns to her conventional English milieu, this muchness also supplies her with the confidence to reject a marriage proposal in front of an expectant crowd and dash off in pursuit of a more auspicious future. From there the film veers into regrettably imperialist territory, but in any case, Alice’s muchness spares her a life tethered to a sniveling boob and instead sends her on adventures, like a mercantile Mary Kingsley (fittingly enough, Kingsley is her last name in this adaptation).2

  Had I, without context, been asked to describe muchness, I would have offered a definition shot through with censure and cruel self-assessment. Muchness, I might have told you then, was a characteristic—an affliction—possessed by those who were in every way too much: too emotional, first of all, but also too exuberant, too loud, too talkative, too volatile, too brimful of desire. It also connoted mental illness: a genetic cocktail of anxiety and depression primed to seize the brain at any moment. The way I saw it, a woman plagued by muchness is likely to call her friend in a panic at three a.m., gripped by terror over seemingly trivial circumstances. She has more than once cowered in humiliation after someone has told her to lower her voice. Perhaps she is inclined to obsess or to engage in acts of compulsion—maybe she’s even depressed, masochistic. Probably she spends each day stuffing herself into an invisible carton more palatable to general company, like a jack-in-the-box where the head lolls outside the top, a smile slapdashed over a scramble of ugly, brambly feelings. And, if my experience was any indication, she lives in perpetual fear of the time when those she loves will tire of her—when her muchness becomes cause for expulsion, and renders her irrevocably alone.

  A few years later I was working on a doctorate in Victorian literature, and, inevitably, my eye always wandered to passages where female characters erupted with feeling, whether of love or defiance or fury. They were the women I preferred, and with whom I felt an affinity—the ones who wept and feverishly declared their love and rarely apologized. After a tormented resistance, Tess Durbeyfield nakedly expresses her desire for Angel Clare (who, alas, is the unworthiest of feckless assholes). Catherine Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights is cruel to the bone, but I am endlessly in awe of her uncompromising and voracious demand for adoration. Most tellingly, Maggie Tulliver of George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss—impulsive, sometimes baffled by her own excesses—became my Victorian avatar, textual evidence that the vigorous pulsing of my veins was, perhaps, not wholly incompatible with life (though, if you know Maggie’s tragic story, I realize this might seem an ironic comment to make).

  I detected “too muchness” in each of these characters, and in so many more—Victorian literature breeds Too Much women—though I never wrote about it directly, or even mentioned it, for that matter. Graduate school seemed inhospitable to too muchness, privileging those who endured austere conditions of intellectual labor as if training for a bookish Spartan army. What a bizarre badge of pride: the first time a professor skewered my work, I thought, “At least I didn’t cry in his office.” It would be unseemly—presumptuous—and a mark of excessive sensitivity in a context where one was expected to take her lumps with stoic submission. There was no space for Maggie Tulliver or Catherine Earnshaw in graduate school, and by that logic I often wondered whether there was room for me: someone who attempted to be who she wasn’t—measured, demure, cool—and who failed gloriously most of the time.

  But gradually, I spooned meager portions of hope into a theory: that my maximalist personality, my muchness, was no reason for shame but, dare I say it, pride. I had never forgotten about muchness, the word and the notion of it, and as I began to regard its assignations with timid dignity, I considered the possibility of a reinterpretation, one that summoned greater self-regard. Perhaps what others had condemned in me, what I had condemned in myself—this muchness, or because I thought of it in terms of fundamental excess, too muchness—held promise I was only beginning to discern.

  A Theory of Too Muchness

  Although “muchness” is the term that galvanized my idea for this book, “too much” and “too muchness”—the latter a clunky noun form of my own devising—are the phrases I will return to throughout these pages. My reasoning, beyond being loath to steal another’s verbiage, is this: The insidiously destructive accusation of being “too much” has traveled American discourse for decades. Thoroughly vague, it can refer to nearly anything, and often does. We call individual people “too much” the same way we might describe an aggravating workday or an overwhelming to-do list or a night of babysitting three squalling toddlers and an incontinent puppy. In so doing, Too Much persons are maligned as inconvenient bothers, people to avoid because their dispositions, embodiments, sexualities, disabilities, and so fo
rth are disconcerting or uncomfortable to behold.

  This wide-ranging scorn for too muchness is no coincidence or matter of social caprice. Our culture, for all its staggering toward progress, possesses a meager threshold for discomfort when faced with examples of nonnormative difference. We should not be surprised that those most often stigmatized as disagreeably or even dangerously excessive are those who contest white masculine heteronormative and capitalist ideologies. For centuries, white cisgender straight men have defined excess according to the terms that most benefit them, cementing, brick by brick, a culture that caters to their proclivities, comforts, and benefits.

  After all, not all forms of excess are condemned as too muchness. A soldier’s valor in battle, achieved through intense feats of physical duress, violence, and the willingness to sacrifice oneself, has always been hailed as morally upstanding and the most preeminent index of patriotism. Machismo, for all its hazards, commands unflagging cultural respect and racks up sexual currency. Indeed, metrics of excess are rarely, if ever, calibrated according to their masculine appeal, but—still—books and films are every day dismissed for being “too girly.” Although we’ve garnered powerful heroines like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Jessica Jones and films like Captain Marvel and Mad Max: Fury Road, the action film has, to a severe extent, been interpreted as a showcase for outsize feats of masculine strength and stamina. The Rambo franchise, initiated with the 1982 film First Blood, showcases the swarthy and sweat-sheened warrior, John Rambo, who grimaces and cocks his machine gun like an accessorized appendage. Portrayed by Sylvester Stallone, Rambo is a Vietnam War veteran who, over the course of five films, transforms into a herculean, renegade killing machine. His character is not empty of nuance—like so many soldiers, he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder—but Rambo’s intensity, his too muchness, has cultivated near-idolatry not because he thwarts expectations of masculine normativity, but because of the ways he becomes a cartoonish embodiment of them. He is heroic, yes, but his heroism is a feral sort: ferocious and filthy and violent.