Too Much

by Rachel Vorona Cote

  Chatterbox

  “Do you know where the wicked go after death?”

  “They go to hell,” was my ready and orthodox answer.

  “And what is hell? Can you tell me that?”

  “A pit full of fire.”

  “And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there for ever?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What must you do to avoid it?”

  I deliberated a moment: my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: “I must keep in good health, and not die.”1

  If you know Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), then it’s likely you recall this moment, in which a little girl—our orphaned titular protagonist—guilelessly, and to the horror of her adult audience, suggests her certain damnation. It’s a delightful scene, all the more so because it functions as a pressure valve for readers who have fumed through the novel’s opening chapters. After all, Jane’s plight is maddening: she’s brutalized by a boorish older cousin, and then punished for his sins by her aunt, the spiteful Mrs. Reed. The household treats her as a pariah, and when she is introduced to Mr. Brocklehurst, the oppressive and hypocritical head of Lowood School, Mrs. Reed willfully misrepresents Jane as a veritable hellion. What relief when Jane responds to Mr. Brocklehurst’s interrogation with—albeit unintentional—comedy. And after Brocklehurst’s departure, we enjoy even sweeter satisfaction as Jane, who can no longer countenance her aunt’s injustice, summons her mettle and delivers a withering indictment of Mrs. Reed’s character. It is equal parts delicious and heartbreaking: “You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity.”

  For Jane to assert a fundamental claim to parental tenderness—to declare that her feelings are inherently important—is a meaningful moment in the context of the novel, but, as you might suppose, it would not have been supported by Victorian guides to children’s discipline or the morally didactic literature for young Britons that, since the middle of the previous century, had become commonplace.2 We love Jane Eyre because, from childhood, she understands the sanctity of one’s emotional life and, despite poverty, low social position, and a dearth of physical charms, she demands to be respected—for her sensibility to be respected—on her own terms. This is not the first time that she will draw attention to her passionate inner life: years later, she will confront Mr. Rochester, both her secret beloved and her employer, in a similar manner. For many of us, Jane’s moxie renders her all the more dear and all the more heroic. It also illuminates her singularity in a period that balked at female excess of any kind, and at any age. To broadcast the intensity of one’s emotions shattered every rule of decorum guiding feminine behavior in the nineteenth century. And while we’re no longer quite so constricted, a girl like Jane—ardent, uncouth, and uncompromisingly candid—would make others squeamish. Don’t be so aggressive, some would tell her. Calm down. Shush.

  Charlotte Brontë might have bristled at these directives; after all, she and her siblings were reared with leniency relative to contemporary Victorian children. Their reading material extended far beyond the typical stock of childish morality tales, which was both fortunate and a necessity: the Brontës were a voraciously intellectual set with roving and precocious interests. Too often, however, this shared creative luminescence became a mode of contemplating their sorrows; for the Brontë siblings, youth was wracked with tragic loss. The family matriarch, Maria Brontë, née Branwell, died of cancer in 1821, when the children were still too young to vividly remember her. She was followed in relatively short order by her two eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, who caught tuberculosis while away at school. Ages eleven and ten, respectively, the girls returned to Haworth only to die at the family hearth: Maria on May 6, 1825, and Elizabeth just over a month later, on June 15. Cowan Bridge School, which Charlotte and Emily also attended—they were withdrawn after their sisters fell ill—appears, scarcely disguised, in Jane Eyre, the clear model for Lowood School. Charlotte depicts the brutish treatment the four sisters experienced there and the outbreak of illness that felled Maria and Elizabeth. The character of Helen Burns, Jane’s first and most cherished friend, is, according to Charlotte, a portrait of her eldest sister, Maria, “a little mother among the rest”3 of the Brontë children, brimful of benevolent sagacity.

  The Brontës often seem like a literary flash in the pan, a brilliant crackle out on the English heath: glimmering in sudden, triumphant glory, and then, just as quickly, extinguished. Charlotte, who died on March 31, 1855, at age thirty-eight, likely from complications in pregnancy, outlived her other sisters and brother considerably. In fact, she lost Emily, Anne, and Branwell—her three remaining siblings, playmates, and literary co-conspirators, in the spindly timeframe of eight months. Emily, famous for her ferocious, desolately passionate novel Wuthering Heights (1847), was thirty years old when she died on December 19, 1848; Anne, author of the predominantly autobiographical Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), died on May 28 of the next year, at twenty-nine years old. Branwell died in September 1848 at age thirty-one, his poor health agitated by alcoholism. After their deaths, Charlotte published two novels, Shirley (1849) and her last, the cagey, meditative, achingly lonely Villette (1853). Her first novel, The Professor, originally rejected by editors, was published posthumously by her husband in 1857.4

  The old chestnut in which one claims that a young, deceased person burned too brightly for the world is hopelessly cheesy; frankly, our world would be a better one with more Brontë novels. Yet the Brontës, a coterie of idiosyncratic brilliance, relatively isolated from the churn of the British literary marketplace, have always seemed to me a family that dwelled in a haunted, gossamer space indiscernible to the rest of us. Charlotte and her siblings were, I believe, rife with too muchness, and whatever else that may have meant, they were virtuosos. They also enjoyed a certain mental and physical freedom that facilitated their collective imaginings. Rather than be circumscribed to specific, domesticated spaces, they were encouraged to wander the moors that engulfed their Yorkshire home, and which Emily rendered in Wuthering Heights with ghostly reverie. Moreover, their father, Patrick Brontë, taught his daughters a range of subjects that others would have deemed unsuitable, or at least unnecessary, for young women: mathematics and classics, for example. The Brontë girls were not raised to diminish their talents or to suppress either their appetite for knowledge or the fruits of their studies.

  But, of course, an unconventional childhood does not necessarily shield a little girl from cultural insinuations, particularly where feminine propriety is involved. Accordingly, Charlotte was not immune to the stigma attached to expressing, or even harboring, abundant feeling. While both studying and teaching in Brussels under Monsieur Constantin Héger—for whom she developed a deep, but unrequited, romantic affection—Brontë devised a fictional character to give voice to the frustrations she suffered as a young woman of ardent temperament:

  There was always excess in what I did; I was either too excited or too despondent; without wanting to I allowed everything that passed through my heart to be seen and sometimes there were storms passing through it; in vain I tried to imitate the sweet gaity, the serene and equable spirits which I saw in the faces of my companions and which I found so worthy of admirations; all my efforts were useless; I could not restrain the ebb and flow of blood in my arteries and that ebb and flow always showed itself in my face and in my hard and unattractive features. I wept in secret.5

  Héger, it seems, recognized these traits as belonging to his pupil, and although he didn’t reciprocate her love—he was married and taught alongside his wife—the professor encouraged her to regard herself as exceptional, as a genius, in fact. But then it has often been the case that we make allowances for those whom society designates as uncommonly skilled or clever. (When, later in life, Charlotte made the rare visit to London literary society, she did not slip easily into the fold, although contemporaries like author W
illiam Makepeace Thackeray were bemused by her brash honesty.) Yet the account she provides of herself indicates a queasy recognition that her emotional tumult, the pulsing passion of her inner life, could not be reconciled with any context, whether at home at Haworth or among strange company.

  In 1835, several years before her tenure in Brussels, Charlotte took a teaching position at Roe Head School, which she had once attended as a star pupil and where she cultivated intimate friendships, most famously with her longtime pen pal Ellen Nussey. Her return, however, delivered her into the misery that was the drudging life available to a single woman without independent wealth. She resented her less intelligent pupils—and privately referred to them as “fat-headed oafs”6—ached for her family, and, in general, viciously preferred the fantastic worlds to which she escaped through writing, even when it was ill-advised: for instance, when she was supposed to be teaching class. Meanwhile, she sent bushels of letters to Ellen chronicling her guilt: she was, she feared, not capable of the mild goodness she attributed to her friend. She even frets, as Brontë biographer Claire Harman writes, that she was “too much for Ellen, and was censoring her own post when it became too sentimental.”7 Attuned to the violence of her attachment, which she more or less suggests through elimination, Charlotte writes, “I will not tell you all I think, and feel about you Ellen. I will preserve unbroken that reserve which alone enables me to maintain a decent character for judgment.”8 A tension throbs between Charlotte’s stubborn passion, her yearning to indulge her fantasies and more or less do as she pleased, and her chagrin over her emotional intensity, particularly when what she felt was not especially charitable. A similar vacillation emerges in the character of Jane Eyre: while she never quite capitulates to Victorian expectations of gentle femininity, she is duly chastened for her brash, childish defiance and learns, with time, a quieter form of resistance.

  * * *

  The strictures of twenty-first-century little girlhood might, at a glance, seem inconsequential when set alongside the demands laid before Victorian children—including the Brontës—and yet, present-day expectations are enduringly rigid. It is true that the last few years have yielded a modest offering of feminine fictional icons modeling less constrained behavior—both Brave’s Merida and Moana’s titular heroine are standout examples. The latter’s release was nothing short of sensational: here, finally, is a nonwhite female character who is reduced to neither racial nor gender stereotype. Accordingly, she’s positioned neither as a damsel in distress nor as an object of desire—Moana’s romantic life receives no narrative attention, and her chutzpah saves her island, however much it unsettles her father, the film’s benevolent patriarch. But our excitement over these young heroines belies their enduring paucity. And if we’re delighted over the representation of sassy, brave girls—if we’re still registering them as novelties and dazzling exceptions—it emphasizes the extent to which American popular culture continues to proffer an idealized version of young femininity as white, docile, and amiably stifled (Moana, after all, is one of the only nonwhite heroines Disney offers its viewers).

  Despite nearly two centuries of shifting perceptions, our ideologies of gender and emotion, and the art so finely shaped by them, derive from an enduringly Victorian perspective of little girlhood. Perhaps we are more secular—the Disney Channel does not necessarily threaten its young viewers with a “pit full of fire”—and we’re certainly invested in the window dressings of female empowerment, but claims of progress ring hollow in the wake of cultural ephemera stubbornly insisting that the best little girls are the quiet ones, the ones who smile benignly and who behave.

  Child rearing has a long and knotted history, but along that timeline we can pinpoint certain significant personages who wrote on the subject, namely, late eighteenth/early nineteenth-century British writer Maria Edgeworth, a figure who looms large as an influence in gendered discipline. Edgeworth wrote careful narratives meant to instruct both boys and girls in the appropriate decorum specific to their respective genders. In these moralistic tales, a child would disobey, be punished accordingly, and ultimately learn a lesson about docility in the face of authority. Specifically, early nineteenth-century conceptions of proper, Anglo girlhood were informed by the domestic duties they would perform later in life. If donning a corset—a functionally restrictive undergarment—signaled the transition to womanhood, then the lessons learned by little girls corseted them in figurative ways. There was no room for too muchness when a child was bent over needlework or, in the cases of the less affluent, learning duties in the kitchen. These were tasks that necessitated slight, measured movements and taut physical rigidity. Moreover, they certainly did not require chatter.

  In The Parent’s Assistant; Or, Stories for Children (1796), Edgeworth penned brief, chaste tales intended to instruct young boys and girls in the proper decorum for English youth. Although boys receive greater attention throughout the collection, expectations for young girls are made eminently—not to mention exasperatingly—clear. In “Simple Susan” the titular character provides a template; she is, the narrator extols, a “sweet tempered, modest, sprightly, industrious lass.” But lest we underestimate her virtues, Edgeworth’s narrator elaborates in a fastidious benediction:

  Susan’s affectionate, dexterous, sensible activity was never more wanted, or more effectual. She understood so readily, she obeyed so exactly; and when she was left to her own discretion, judged so prudently, that her mother had little trouble and no anxiety in directing her. She said that Susan never did too little, or too much.9

  To my mind, Simple Susan is simply fucking insufferable. But how could she be anything else? She’s not so much a feasible representation of humanity, let alone a role model; rather, she is an archetype—an assemblage of character traits that Edgeworth deems critical for any little girl’s repertoire. And, of course, our attention is specifically drawn to Susan’s ability to eschew any sort of disagreeable excess. She neither does “too little or too much,” a vague assessment of character if ever there was one, but Edgeworth makes her point. With the utmost diligence, Susan calibrates herself according to contemporary dictates of femininity. She possesses the verve and initiative to be both unwaveringly honest and sedulous, yet her modesty and dedication to serving her parents—like so many fictional mothers of the time period, hers is in poor health—ensures that she will never interrogate the boundaries circumscribing her world. She is exactly what is expected of her.

  I’m not questioning Susan’s specific and, we must admit, bountiful virtues. Goodness has no precise calculus: if Susan’s parents treat her with kindness and care, then she has every reason to respect their wishes. Were modesty not an evident cultural mandate for every person identifying as something other than white, heterosexual, and male, then perhaps its inclusion in Susan’s grab bag of righteousness would not prickle me in the way it does. But Edgeworth’s narrative is prescriptive; she indicates in no uncertain terms that there is a particular, paradoxically impossible way for a young girl to be. Young readers, I imagine, were tasked with striving along that asymptote of good behavior in an effort to mimic Simple Susan’s perfection. They must have sensed the futility, that their moral trajectory would trudge onward toward infinity, never—no matter their efforts—reaching that endpoint exalted by the era’s disciplinarians: where little girls were more akin to little angels who never did or never were too much.

  It follows, then, that Edgeworth’s bad girls were hyperbolic animated ids, little monsters reared through piss-poor parenting. Barbara, Susan’s counterpart, the daughter of wealthy Mr. Case, sits slothfully at home unless she has the opportunity to torment one of the village’s ruddy-cheeked children. She reads lascivious novels—which, even in the era of Fanny Burney, Jane Austen’s eighteenth-century literary predecessor, continued to suffer from prevailing masculine assumptions about their intellectual vacuity—indulges in gluttony, and watches idly as Susan, her nemesis, perkily accomplishes her daily chores. Of course Barbara resen
ts Susan for being universally beloved and assuages her envy by seeking to torment her by any means available. For wicked Seven Deadly Sin practitioners like Barbara, the future—at least in Edgeworth’s universe—is dim. She will be humiliated, humbled, and, if she’s lucky, rehabilitated. Barbara’s antics lead her to be stung by a nasty horde of bees and then, horror of horrors, to endure the unsightly welts that blossom on her face, rendering her physically unbecoming, at least temporarily. In fact, the story ends here for rotten Barbara: too swollen and grotesque to attend a ball upon which she had set her sticky sights, we assume that she remains wretched, unreformed, and, thus, no longer of any concern to us. For Barbara, like Susan, is an archetype of vice more than she is a feasible depiction of little girlhood. She’s so vile, in fact, that it’s difficult to imagine any child without an acute psychotic disorder mimicking her villainy. But ultimately, we’re not to concern ourselves with the complexities of why Barbara is bad but rather to understand, through her impossibly naughty behavior, why Susan is so good.

  Edgeworth and authors who wrote in a similar vein influenced other Victorian and Edwardian authors who, in turn, provided more body to the milieu’s conceptions of girlhood. In 1880, editor Charles Peters began publishing The Girl’s Own Paper—a periodical that became extremely popular—in an effort “to foster and develop that which was highest and noblest in the girlhood and womanhood in England.”10 At the same time, The Boy’s Own Paper was also in wide circulation, and while it too encouraged Christian morals and decorum, its focus on adventure and rigorous activity differed markedly from the female-oriented periodical lauding quiet, domestic pastimes and occupations.

  Author Lewis Carroll—given name Charles Dodgson—betrays even deeper cultural anxiety about exuberant or overly demonstrative feminine behavior in his children’s stories, specifically in the canonical yet chimerical Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Likely enough you know the premise, whether because you’ve read the book, seen Disney’s 1951 animated feature, or even seen Tim Burton’s aforementioned fanciful, off-kilter—and therefore utterly Burton-esque—adaptation from 2010. A young girl is listlessly dozing outside, too soporific to listen to her older sister read, when she suddenly catches sight of a white rabbit—one who happens to be clothed and sporting posh accessories. He dashes across her line of vision and, her curiosity piqued, she follows him, subsequently tumbling down a rabbit hole and into Wonderland. There she encounters a bevy of phantasmagoric creatures, including a fragmentally disappearing cat with a deranged grin, a flimsy-willed, sentient deck of cards, and a caterpillar who, given his hookah habit, seems like he should be rather more patient and amiable than he is.