“She’s too pale—if she had a little colour she wouldn’t be bad-looking,” [said Aunt Addie].
“I don’t know who she looks like,” said Uncle Oliver, staring at Emily.
“She is not a Murray, that is plain to be seen,” said Aunt Elizabeth, decidedly and disapprovingly.
…
“She’s got her father’s forehead,” said Aunt Eva, also disapprovingly.
…
Emily had reached the limit of her endurance.
“You make me feel as if I was made up of scraps and patches!” she burst out indignantly.5
As if the scenario were not sufficiently cruel, Emily’s maternal family—these are her late mother’s siblings—sees fit to undertake this rhetorical dismemberment just after her father has died, and Emily—orphaned, and soon to be carted away from her family home—is still keening with bitter, distending grief. For the Murrays, their niece’s too muchness, exemplified by her precociousness and self-advocacy, is carved into the illegibility of her features: evident genealogy is clarifying and soothing to a family whose identity is firmly buttressed by familial ties. Emily, Montgomery implies, will never be so easily deciphered.
But her heroine prefers it this way. When she bids goodbye to her father, laid out in his casket, she confides to him that she has not allowed his grim set of in-laws to get the better of her: “‘Father, I didn’t cry before them,’ she whispered. ‘I’m sure I didn’t disgrace the Starrs…oh Father, I don’t think any of them like me…And I’m going to cry a little bit now, Father, because I can’t keep it back all the time.’”6 Emily’s interpretation of honor—withholding the extent of her pain from those she does not trust—was familiar to me. It was a stratagem that I longed to deploy, but found insuperable, like holding my breath indefinitely. Because Emily could—and under the most grievous circumstances at that—I marveled at her, although the restraint is choking and, as her (very understandable) outburst during her audience with the Murrays demonstrates, sometimes wholly impossible to uphold. We congratulate ourselves for self-denial, for holding fast when our nerves cry out, because triumph seems to demand this emotional suffocation. No wonder I felt like an utter loser in middle school when, in the face of childish adversity—someone telling me that I ought to get a nose job or that on a scale of one to ten I was a solid “two”—I cried in the bathroom, in class, or into my pillow for the rest of the night. Still, even Emily feels compelled to warn her dead father that she will “cry a little bit” because she mourns him, fiercely, and because in the midst of her torment, she spends the previous day being ripped limb from limb by a pack of wolfish relatives.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature reflects a bygone period in which girls and women were told, without ceremony, whether they were attractive or plain or wholly unbecoming. Aesthetic hierarchies were often crystalline. Elizabeth Bennet knows that she is pretty, but is never left in doubt that her older sister, Jane, is the family beauty. When Jo March sells her hair to fund her mother’s travel expenses, her family bemoans the loss of her “one beauty.”7 In Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), the narrator dwells insistently upon Mary Lennox’s limp, homely features, beginning with the very first lines of the book, where she is introduced as “the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.”8 Soon thereafter, the little orphaned heroine—they abound, do they not?—overhears the uncharitable observations of her uncle’s housekeeper, Mrs. Medlock: “My word! She’s a plain little piece of goods!…And we’d heard that her mother was a beauty. She hasn’t handed much of it down.”9 Today, remarks like these, not to mention the Murrays’ calvacade of abuse, would be considered gratuitous and inappropriate, although it remains perfectly commonplace to disparage feminine appearance—anyone who writes for the internet encounters as much, sometimes on a daily basis—or to slavishly insinuate that we ought to adjust ourselves according to the prevailing metrics of beauty. Still, we are horrified when, in Anne of Green Gables, the chronically tactless Rachel Lynde eyes a jittery Anne from top to bottom and proclaims, “Well, they didn’t pick you for your looks…She’s terrible skinny and homely, Marilla.”10 Anne, of course, cannot countenance such nastiness and, like young Jane Eyre before her—and with somewhat less composure than Emily—bursts with pained indignation: “You are a rude, impolite, unfeeling woman!…How would you like to be told that you are fat and clumsy and probably hadn’t a spark of imagination in you?”11 To say the very least, there have been healthier exchanges on the topic of personal appearance, though, admittedly, I have always appreciated Anne’s ill-advised, predictably searing outburst—shut up, Rachel Lynde!—and while I often experienced secondhand embarrassment on Anne’s behalf, I found her temper to be vicariously cathartic when weaponized in response to physical insults.
Ultimately Anne must, at Marilla’s demand, apologize to Rachel, but Montgomery has made her argument: young girls do not attain moral robustness by weathering unwarranted criticism about their bodies. Nor is it frivolous for a young girl or for a woman to fret over her appearance, certainly not when we are culturally mandated to strive for an ever-fluttering set of beauty criteria. Yet Montgomery’s narrators are, to an almost bizarre extent, preoccupied with the question of whether or not Anne and Emily grow to be beautiful women (it’s pretty clear that they more or less do). The tension buzzes throughout the novels: Montgomery posits the harmfulness of picking apart little girls for being too pale or too skinny or too freckled, but she is nonetheless steeped in a milieu that privileges these assessments of femininity. She cannot fully deliver Emily and Anne from these concerns, or from the conversations that entangle them, but she can vouch for Anne’s right to anguish, and thwack against the enduring philosophy that it is better to receive insults quietly, even when they cut us to the quick.
* * *
Emily’s allure has always been tethered to her inscrutability and her staunch self-sovereignty, both for me and for her fellow characters. Indeed, her very species seems up for debate, yet another case of feminine too muchness sublimated into something witchy or phantasmagoric. Is she, as some men tease, descended from elves or fairies? (Her pointed ears instigate this hypothesis.) In Avonlea—a world rooted firmly in realism—that possibility would be laughingly discarded. But Emily’s precocity amasses supernatural gravity: even Aunt Elizabeth begins to doubt her Bible-braced convictions in the face of her niece’s otherworldly intuition. Throughout the series, the narrator suggests that Emily possesses “second sight,” and we the readers are supplied with no pragmatic alternative. In a feverish delirium she solves Blair Water’s blackest mystery, one that has long afflicted the relationship between Ilse and her distant father. Years later, Emily and Teddy share a spontaneous psychic communication that proves life-saving; certain he sees Emily on a Liverpool dock, Teddy misses the opportunity to book passage on a ship—one doomed to collide with an iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
These premonitions unsettle Emily—“I don’t want to have any such power…I don’t feel human”—and she endeavors to forget about them.12 As a child, I found her reaction rather ungrateful: who doesn’t want superpowers? The magic that Anne so desperately seeks in the world, that she wills into being, seems to saturate Emily, so much so that she can hardly know herself. And while I might have bristled at this lack of enthusiasm for the supernatural, I consider it fitting, now, that Emily would be unharnessed by these obscure abilities. Suspicious of vulnerability in any form, Emily perceives her “second sight” with reticence adjacent to contemporary social codes: it is an index of her profound sensitivity, its presence a threat to her hell-bent determination to curate her presentation according to her own specific predilections. She perhaps intuits the precarity inherent to broad emotional exposure: when society glares at those who do not self-moderate, it’s dangerous in any case, but particularly so for young women. To be “human,” Emily might say, demands one’s groundedness upon the earth, firmness imbuing one’s most intimate crevices.
Humanity enables us to choose what we share, and where we are soft. And yet, like Anne—and like me, at last—she has always known that it is folly to tether humanness to fundamental self-control, to fullness of comprehension. Too muchness blossoms in the soil, tickling at our feet: senses, inclinations, and urges at times carry us miles past what we understand ourselves to be. But then, maybe Emily is right. Too muchness can trick us into thinking ourselves inhuman; after all, the experience of profound, fiery feeling has always been relegated to the outer lip of cogent experience.
Anne lacks any such powers of premonition; instead, she bewitches her environment through the sheer force of imagination. Under her jurisdiction, the woods neighboring Green Gables become the Haunted Forest; she then contrives ghostly myths so that it lives up to its name. And, aware of her own emotional transparency, she dwells in alternative plotlines that mystify her character as well. As a child she fashions a vast wardrobe of enigmatic identities—“Will you please call me Cordelia?”—and daydreams about the woeful, obscure demise of Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott.” Cooking endeavors mutate into disasters because Anne cannot resist plunging into her tragic world of make-believe.
Ultimately, both Anne Shirley and Emily Byrd Starr thrive—in love and friendship, and in intellectual and creative pursuits, where the structural arrangements are organized for men. Both are desired and adored by the person of their choosing (even if, in Anne’s case, her feelings for Gilbert Blythe are for some time obfuscated by fantasy). Young Anne aggravated me by exemplifying my own idiosyncrasies and my own susceptibility to the world’s most agitating offerings. I was the girl who didn’t want to be born, who predicted, in her tiny infant heart, that she couldn’t live inside cold, unmoderated chaos. But, evidently, I wasn’t an especially perceptive infant—I’ll forgive myself for that much—and for years, I read Anne in bad faith. Yet, even then, I knew that she matured into the sort of woman who embodied my adolescent conception of personal triumph: charming, academically successful, and that bleary red herring, pretty enough. In fact, when I was not wallowing in the depths of despair, Anne Shirley-ness struck me as not only appealing, but perhaps attainable too. Maybe L. M. Montgomery had inscribed my future for me to seek and uncover in due time. Maybe my mother had deciphered these clues first and alerted her flailing daughter. Through this feat of narcissistic projection, Anne’s Too Much life becomes a road map for my own. But who has ever loved a map?
Loving Anne necessitated self-acceptance, and I was uninterested in that endeavor. If I stopped aspiring to stoicism, if I checked my effusive earnestness, if I allowed myself to weep in English class after being harassed outside the bathroom, I would be acquiescing. So instead, I worshipped the girl I could never be: cool Emily. In my estimation, magical abilities—no matter the variety—provided a keener means of survival, a too muchness without the social mortification. Alex Mack’s telekinesis seemed worth the hassle of hiding from a corrupt chemical plant. When I saw The Craft, I bemoaned my own magic-less constitution. And as for Emily Byrd Starr, well, I might have likened her to Matilda or even Willow Rosenberg before placing her within the same domain as Anne Shirley. Something otherworldly had kissed her. No matter what trials befell her on earth—even if she detested her “second sight”—the cosmos had deemed her special.
And yet, aspirations shift and ebb. Anne’s avid heart—its bright, broad welcome—we can hear, and if we can’t precisely place the melody, we’re acquainted with a variation. If we’re reticent in our desires or frightened by our yen for belonging, Anne sings in our stead, without fear and without exposing us. If we’re just as loud, she’ll whoop and laugh and cry in tandem. “My heart is tied to yours,” said my mother. It was an Anne Shirley-ish declaration: vehemently and ardently stating something she felt in her bones. As a girl, I balked at that eager warmth—hers, Anne’s—because I recognized it, glowing at the bottom of me. Both Anne and my mother fell in love with the world, and on the page, where Avonlea beamed with gentle, bucolic grace, that love seemed marvelous. But I had seen my mother weep. I discerned the worldly hazards that could overwhelm an unguarded soul. Fearing annihilation by too muchness, I lamented my own porous skin, knit like hers.
But my mother was not annihilated. Her prodigious love begot strength, and they reinscribed one another like a double helix. They endure, intertwining and blossoming and holding fast in me, although her body has gone. A shattered heart mends infinitely, although it takes variant shapes. It is stained glass, shifted. It is vibrant, evermore.
I will always love Emily, but I no longer want to be magical, nor am I panting after an aloof façade that I could never approximate, let alone perfect. I want to live wide open, to regard too muchness as my entitlement, and as my dear maternal bequest—not as a burden to bear. I want to embrace what I’ve inherited from my mother: a heart that hears everything at full volume. And because I want that, because I love what it entails, I must make a confession. I love Anne too.
Chapter Four
Close
I am a composite of the women I have loved. I am built and reconstituted from my memories of them: words and embraces exchanged, the smell of their hair and the soap smoothed into their skin. This sounds romantic, I know, and it is: my most intimate female friendships have always, at least in my perception, been romances of their own, untethered from my erotic life—unless they weren’t. I have anguished over strife with women dear to me. And I have fallen in love with a woman without realizing it—until she delivered me a broken heart.
My history of female friendship might be recounted by some as a tale of excessive passion—too much passion—as well as conceived, somewhat, as a reckoning with my own bisexuality. Perhaps this is why I’ve always been preoccupied with “dangerous” female friendships—the intimacies from adolescence to adulthood that exist apart from heteronormative arrangements and that are too intensely passionate to be neatly categorized as platonic: the zealous, fleshy sisterly bond of “Goblin Market”; the chilling case of teenage murderesses Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, who kill in the name of their love; Celie’s infatuated devotion to Shug Avery in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple; the gnashing competition that sears the bond between Lena and Lila in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. My interest, I now realize, has always been in the service of self-absorbed curiosity: why am I so enthralled with women? (Besides the obvious, of course: women are wonderful.) I wondered, too, whether there existed a guiding metric to clarify this excitement kindled by women’s companionship. Since high school I would now and again entertain a suspicion loitering at the bottom of my abdomen—that I was attracted to women and to men. Many years later, I determined this to be true. However, my queerness has rarely been a factor in the ardor that charges my friendships. I would argue that many same-sex intimacies trouble the boundary between homoerotic and platonic love, but in my case the only friendships that have made manifest my queer desires are the ones where sexual attraction has transformed from companionate love.
Although it has inspired me to seek resonant narratives, loving women so fervently has never made me anxious or given me especial pause. However, as my search for stories of female homosociality has persisted, I’ve discerned the crawling heteromasculine fear that distorts so many of them as cautionary tales against excess and obsession. In the myopic gaze of contemporary culture, some girls simply love each other too much and, as a result, become tangled in what we might refer to as Too Much friendships—that is, friendships so absorbing that those involved evince interest in little else, particularly heteronormative rituals of dating and flirting. They are intimacies that ignore the arrangements by which conventional American society replicates itself and which, often, refuse to answer questions of definition—What is this affection you share? Are you lesbians?—because in the beaming incandescence of girl love, we are disinclined to pay attention to formalities.
* * *
On a placid spring night, I leaned against my best friend, Leigha, on the steps of the Tho
mas Jefferson Memorial and realized that I wanted to kiss her. It wasn’t precisely sexual, but it listed against that boundary. Moreover, I knew that no one in the world was as dear to me as she was—and that included my fiancé, Nick. Roughly a month later, Nick and I departed for three weeks of travel and an extended visit with his family. Faced with this parting, Leigha and I were bereft; and I especially was inconsolable. Early in our trip, I rapidly tip-tapped through a flurry of lovelorn emails to Leigha. One day, Nick glanced over as I was signing off with a frenzy of “x’s,” “o’s,” and “I love you’s.” “I’m not comfortable with this,” he said. My relationship with Leigha certainly seemed dangerous to Nick, and, to be fair, I had not concealed my attachment from him. But, in fact, it was not so much a hazard as a warning. Engulfed by my love of a best friend, and yearning for a stretch of time where I was unburdened with a man’s emotional well-being, it was becoming clear that I did not want to marry the person to whom I was engaged.
At the time, I defended myself in the way most legible to me: with literary scholarship and Victorian novels. In nineteenth-century England, society didn’t bat an eye at romantic female friendships, and in her book Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, critic Sharon Marcus goes so far as to argue that this “world…made relationships between women central to femininity, marriage, and family life.”1 She moreover posits that “relationships between women were a constitutive element of Victorian gender and sexuality” and that these intimacies existed peaceably alongside heterosexual partnerings.2 Often, Marcus emphasizes, relationships between women buttressed the institution of marriage, even when they were themselves fraught with homoerotism. By way of example, Marcus offers an incisive reading of Charles Dickens’s 1861 novel Great Expectations in which she articulates the erotic longing texturing Miss Havisham’s obsession with her charge, Estella, whom she has instructed to descend upon single men as a beautiful scourge, a siren summoning them to ruin. Miss Havisham, decrepit and disintegrating, nonetheless burns with bitter voraciousness; she is hungry for Estella and for what she believes Estella can do: “Miss Havisham’s enjoyment of Estella is inseparable from her keen awareness of Estella’s power to inflict pain, not only on others but also on Miss Havisham herself. Miss Havisham never exempts herself from her mission to make Estella irresistible, and the love she lavishes on Estella resembles her self-sacrificial affection for her faithless former lover.”3 On her own, Miss Havisham is a fascinating embodiment of excess—a moldering body being eaten by its own unreturned desire and yearning for revenge. Here, as Marcus observes, she provides a stunning counterpoint to the protracted conceptual oppositions of male and female, heterosexual love and homosexual love. There is perhaps no more iconic figure of unrequited heterosexual love than Miss Havisham, and yet she navigates her suffering through queer fantasies.
Too Much Page 7
