* * *
Across decades of fiction, female heroines possess birdlike bone structure, as if pieced meticulously together from willow branches. From the first lines of George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871), Dorothea Brooke—the beloved, moral linchpin of her community—is presented as singularly lovely, with “that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.” It’s her “finely formed” hands and her “stature and bearing”27 that render her all the more statuesque for being simply adorned, and the narrator often insists upon her ascetic vigor while simultaneously drawing our attention to her features which, enhanced by health, ironically acquire the consumptive pallor and rouge so prized at the time: “[There] was a gem-like brightness on her coiled hair and in her hazel eyes; there was warm red life in her lips; her throat had a breathing whiteness above the differing white of the fur which itself seemed to wind about her neck.”28 In the logic of the narrative, Dorothea’s virtuous heart is evident in her beauty, which is to say that it is manifested in her slender, pale form. She is sometimes described as otherworldly, likened to the Virgin Mary or to a deity, a creature whose stunning allure transcends the mortal coil. Ethereality, even death, is entangled with Victorian notions of beauty: possessing porcelain skin, dazzling eyes, and rosy cheeks suggested one’s genetic predisposition to tuberculosis.29 Dorothea—any woman who claimed such attractions—is deemed desirable because, rather than being too much, her physicality evokes its absolute opposite: she is airy, angelic, weightless.
Just over a decade before Middlemarch was published, Eliot’s novel Adam Bede (1859) introduced readers to Methodist preacher Dinah Morris, who, like Dorothea, is revered as something of a saint. Like Little Dorrit, she starves herself, choosing instead to feed more impoverished members of the community. Her aunt, Rachel Poyser, bemoans,
But as for Dinah, poor child, she’s niver likely to be buxom as long as she’ll make her dinner o’ cake and water, for the sake o’ giving to them as want…as I told her, she went clean again’ the Scriptur, for that says, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” but I said, “If you loved your neighbour no better nor you do yourself, Dinah, it’s little enough you’d do for him. You’d be thinking he might do well enough on a half-empty stomach.”30
This commentary from Dinah’s brusque but affectionate relation is meant to be comical—certain characters find Eliot’s heroine to be a bit much when it comes to self-renunciation. But there is little doubt that Dinah exerts an emollient influence over those she encounters, and it’s through her utter lack of egoism, her willingness to absorb others’ sufferings, that she becomes such a balm. Religious fervor and denial of the flesh might inspire gentle quibbles, but they are by no means disparaged as baleful excess. Yet if it’s difficult, at times, to believe in such a person—if it seems that Dinah could not possibly be human, with all the messy desires bred by personhood—the text perpetuates celestial associations. Like Dorothea Brooke, she calls to mind the Madonna, and is depicted early in the novel “covered with her long white dress, her pale face full of subdued emotion, almost like a lovely corpse into which the soul has returned charged with sublimer secrets and sublimer love.”31 Neither Dinah nor Little Dorrit manifest awareness of bodily requirement, and as Michie notes, Dinah is particularly determined to divorce herself from the flesh.32 To be figured as “a lovely corpse” reiterates the inextricability of her beauty with annihilating self-effacement.
When the women of Victorian novels, particularly love interests, are voluptuous, we are carefully assured that those curves exist in only the most desirable of places. Nonetheless, these plumper, more explicitly sexy women often eschew propriety and, rather than exhibiting robust morals, become fallen women. Hetty Sorrel, Dinah’s conceited, petty cousin, is as extravagantly eye-catching as Dinah is chastely fair. Today she’d be considered a bona fide knockout, and Eliot’s description portrays her as a Victorian pin-up girl:
It is of little use for me to tell you that Hetty’s cheek was like a rose-petal, that dimples played about her pouting lips, that her large dark eyes hid a soft roguishness under their long lashes, and that her curly hair, though all pushed back under her round cap while she was at work, stole back in dark delicate rings on her forehead, and about her white shell-like ears…Hetty’s was a springtide beauty; it was the beauty of young frisking things, round-limbed, gambolling, circumventing you by a false air of innocence.33
Eliot’s narrator protests that these specificities are futile, that unless you are besotted the way Hetty’s gaggle of idolizing devotees are, you can’t possibly comprehend the potency of her appeal. But the pleasure others take in beholding Hetty is mimicked by the evident pleasure of writing about someone so magnificent. It brings more somatic delight, I would suggest, to introduce a reader to Hetty than to Dinah or to Dorothea. But in a Victorian novel, a lavish, no-holds-barred description like this almost guarantees trouble for the possessor of such bounteous charms. Hetty knows she turns heads; she revels in her power to do so, and worships herself like a work of art. In so doing, she forgets the precarity of her position as a young country girl with no money. She becomes pregnant after having an affair with a rich gentleman who forsakes her—and, whether due to her curvy form, her performance of innocence,34 or some combination, nobody notices. She delivers the child, abandons it, and after it is found dead, she is convicted of infanticide. A body like Hetty’s is reason for alarm and for vigilance: for to be so soft, shapely, and luxurious is to invite sin. Ginevra Fanshawe, Lucy Snowe’s coquettish student in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), is more worldly than Hetty, and perhaps for this reason her flirtations do not result in tragedy. But even more so than Eliot, Brontë inscribes her character’s sexual indiscretions through voluptuousness, not to mention explicit gluttony. In her narration, Lucy recounts allowing Ginevra to eat her food, a ritual that satisfies each party in this bizarre symbiosis—she also observes, indulgently, that “Miss Fanshawe’s travels, gaieties, and flirtations agreed with her mightily; she had become quite plump, her cheeks looked as round as apples.”35 Ginevra’s weight gain coincides with her imminent elopement, and just as the buxom Hetty is tethered to images of butter and cream, Ginevra, whose impressive appetite Lucy notes, is inclined to swipe bread and milk from a forbearing Lucy.36 There are no “lovely corpses” here, but rather two fleshy women utterly of the earth, who grow drunk on the sweetness of their charms and the rollicking desire they kindle in others. This vainglorious rapture generally demands a price: Ginevra may wriggle away more or less unscathed, but for Hetty Sorrel, it is her undoing. Better to feed on crust and water, to eye comfort with holy detachment, than to feast and glory in a body that—if you are not very careful—will summon hell on earth.
Even now, conditioning against broader, rounder embodiments begins young. Books like the wretched Maggie Goes on a Diet (2011) by Paul Kramer, featuring a cover with Maggie wistfully holding a tiny pink dress against her body, are targeted at little girls, although in this case, the titular character is fourteen years old. It’s a familiar image, one that emphasizes the woman who spills out from the edges of a bite-sized, hyper-feminine garment—yet another corset, one presented as aspirational. In Kramer’s book, Maggie slogs through a miserable and alienated adolescence until she begins to lose weight, at which point she is deemed worthy of female friendship and, ultimately, romantic male attention. I bought a copy of Maggie Goes on a Diet specifically as book research. The study of it was so blisteringly maddening that I’ve since contemplated setting it on fire.
And of course this preoccupation has long emanated from the nucleus of popular culture, palpating through the zeitgeist. Though some argue that Marilyn Monroe was hailed as a great beauty, curves and all, we must also remember that she was trained, even compelled, to appear docile and pliable. What’s more, her clothes, which were custom-made, accommodated her striking hourglass shape, but according to contemporary sizing, might have, at most, run somewhere between American sizes 8 and 12—hardly �
�plus size.”37 While it’s true that today’s fashion industry scarcely tolerates these sizes, we continue to abide by warped logic when we attempt to render Monroe an icon for bigger women. Yet her fleshy too muchness was always subjected to inexorable scrutiny, her body eyed and strapped into the girdle that would package her, according to Hollywood’s ravenous estimations, in the most befitting and lucrative ways.
The shape of the container may slightly shift, a membranous nip or tuck here and there, but it is always precisely that—containability—at issue: we merely treat it as a “new” problem, its novelty rendered through cultural amnesia. When Lena Dunham first got naked in HBO’s Girls, hordes of viewers were outraged that someone larger than a size two would dare subject viewers to her flesh. After all, Dunham’s body is not tame: it is tattooed, substantial, and rotund; most of us could not encircle her waist with our hands. She is, as Anne Helen Petersen argues, “too naked,” which is to say, she refuses to tidy and burnish herself into a more palatable shape; she resists becoming the artfully restrained “nude.” “The naked body is raw, without pretense, bare; the nude is nakedness refined: smoothed, proportional, pleasing,” Petersen delineates. “Dunham becomes ‘too naked,’ then, when she refuses to turn herself into a nude, insisting on showcasing her body exactly as it appears.”38
For a man to watch such a woman fuck is to confront aesthetic defiance—we were not made for you, and we don’t care what you like—and, possibly, to contemplate the possibility of his own physical weakness. Here is a woman who is firm, thick, implacable. Try as you might to sidle next to her in a murky bar or tug her arm on a dance floor or nudge her to the side on the subway, she will not budge. In a similar vein, when Elizabeth Taylor, one of the Western world’s most venerated beauties, gained weight in old age and illness, she became, with the swiftness of the public’s tongue, a punchline. The erotic chasm between the trim, submissive body and one weathered and fat prompts uneasy laughter: how strange that this body has become illegible and wild, how unnerving that the woman has too.
* * *
Weight necessarily dominates this conversation but, in unsettling step with Lewis Carroll, American culture fears bodily fluctuations in most of their manifestations. If many of us yearned to fill our training bras, girls who developed breasts before junior high were swiftly reduced to the sum of their sexualized parts. A pubescent girl incites particular anxiety because her changes are swift and more visible; she is more liable to slip out of reach. On a man, a prominent nose might be conceived as part of his charm, even his desirability—in Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010), Vincent Cassel is filmed from angles that render his schnoz almost phallic, particularly when he is grasping at Natalie Portman’s quivering, sylphlike Nina. But Jennifer Grey, despite the walloping success of her turn in Dirty Dancing (1987), underwent rhinoplasty in the 1990s, perhaps concerned that her nose rendered her less attractive as a female lead. For all those who hail Barbra Streisand as a unique beauty, there are plenty who have ridiculed her appearance for its lack of symmetry. Every one of us is at liberty to modify our bodies in whatever ways make them more livable or beautiful or pleasurable to us, be it a nose job, liposuction, a breast reduction, or Botox. But we are always sifting through the dross, trying to discern what we are responding to at the bottom of our aesthetic desires. And regardless of what might motivate a rhinoplasty, echoes of racism and anti-Semitism imbue the discourse around noses; after all, prejudice and condemnations of too muchness often share a bed. Anything is too much for us when it is foreign or unfamiliar.
This discourse grows even more fraught around hair, and becomes especially steeped in racism. Perhaps one reason J. K. Rowling so easily envisions Hermione Granger as black is because so much negative attention is drawn to her “frizzy” mane. Harry and Ron only fully recognize her sexual possibility when she straightens it for a school dance: her overall appearance thus becomes tamer and more aesthetically restrained, a picture the heroic doofuses, salivating as they do over the modelesque Fleur Delacour, can better understand.
A black woman’s natural hair, unchastened by products or flat iron, is bound to agitate racist bluster, and the Afro especially elicits glowers of suspicion. In the 1970s a sultry Pam Grier wore her Afro in so-called blaxploitation films, but these flicks were regarded by white viewers as trashy: fetish sites for people aroused by fantasies of asserting their power over black bodies. In stark contrast, Ali MacGraw became a symbol of romantic feminine fragility in Love Story (1970)—Hollywood cool embodied as white beauty with sleek, tamed hair. Although Faye Dunaway took on more daring female roles in edgy films like Bonnie and Clyde (1967), her hair was always perfectly coiffed and her body primly dressed and slim. Grier has long been regarded as an icon among black women, but the Afro—considered an aesthetic political statement in the 1960s signifying Black Power—has for decades been a focal point of discrimination, racially stigmatized as unruly against a sheaf of pliable Caucasian hair.
Prejudice against black hair endures as a rank and rampant presence, especially visible in bad-faith disciplinary measures. In May 2017 high school junior Jenesis Johnson was beset by both her teacher and assistant principal at North Florida Christian in Tallahassee, Florida, because her Afro was deemed inappropriate in a scholastic environment. According to Johnson, the assistant principal expressed her distaste blatantly: “She said, your hair is extreme and faddish and out of control. It’s all over the place.” It was, purportedly, a “distraction” that would merit dismissal from school if Johnson did not alter her style to something pronounced trim and sufficiently compliant by the school’s administration.39 It’s an incident that is as discriminatory and shaming as it is commonplace: black students are charged with a litany of mythical offenses, for instance, wearing their hair in braids40 or in dreadlocks. Each occasion reinforces the fact that when a marginalized person draws attention to herself with aesthetic decisions deemed conspicuous, white authority reels, thunderstruck at her audacious demand for visibility. It is too much, the bloom of an Afro, even if its wearer takes logistics into consideration and, like Johnson, ensured that she never obscured a classmate’s view in class. It is too much, although an Afro is natural hair given space and permission to grow.
What is considered “natural” is so often at the crux when women are accused of too muchness, and in this case, there seems to be no winning. After all, long, ropey braids are verboten as well, precisely because they are so often comprised of hair extensions. What would be suitable—what would appease these school administrators—is the forced, and decidedly unnatural, application of Caucasian trimmings. Dorothy Dandridge’s curls, black hair shorn to approximate the styles of other 1950s Hollywood starlets—that might be judged acceptable. As for Pam Grier’s Afro: these schools protested, “Too much.”
In the meantime, celebrities like Solange Knowles, Tracee Ellis Ross, Shonda Rhimes, and Uzo Aduba walk red carpets in their natural hair, a privileged space, to be sure, but one that nonetheless affords prime visibility in a fashion industrial complex enduringly obsessed with everything that is small and white. Beyoncé, in her 2016 single “Formation,” also makes no apologies in her delineations of preference: “I like my baby hair, with baby hair and afros.” And in 2019, Lizzo released “Juice,” in which she joyfully, and with anthemic aplomb, declares that she will claim space as she pleases and rejoice in it. “No, I’m not a snack at all / Look baby, I’m the whole damn meal,” she sings, exulting in her whopping femininity. Our culture of white supremacy might spit and sputter with indignance, but too many are intent that it should not prevail. Whatever the circumference of one’s nose, one’s thighs, one’s hair—permission is irrelevant to the matter; it’s merely a fiction born from power. There is always space, and it ought to be claimed.
* * *
Writing is a sedentary and vexed enterprise. I have always known this, although it became increasingly evident in graduate school, when I concluded each semester crouched over my laptop in the shado
w of a gargantuan book cocoon. Now that I write for a living, it is something I know with confidence. I type across days and weeks and months; my body settles into the shallow dent of the couch cushion, flesh, stonelike, succumbing to its environment. By the evening my leg and butt muscles hum and the inside of my back seems to flicker, agitation born from inertia. Bone-tired and generally bewildered as to what sort of progress I’m making on my current project, I wallow, my brain seeking out nooks of displeasure. Always reliable is my persistent fear that I’m incapable of meaningful balance—of laboring and living in equal measure, of breaths of fresh air and walks around the block and the whole lousy catechism of wellness. I grab at my stomach, my thighs, and now and then I sob bitterly, although nothing about my appearance has meaningfully changed. I shriek to my husband that I am ugly and spent. I fall asleep in the same spot that I have spent the day writing until he gently nudges me to bed.
When I’m preoccupied by a grueling enterprise—drafting a lengthy essay or wading through extensive, mind-addling revisions—it evacuates me of disposable energy. I belong to a gym, but taking the time to go typically seems a temporal luxury. I’ve begun following YouTube fitness instructors, glaring at their velvety toned abdomens as I flounder through “quick sweat” cardio routines that I can accomplish within thirty minutes—my cat demurely overseeing my exertions from the couch. But like mold, Ella Adelia Fletcher creeps into my head: I am not the Woman Beautiful. I am the Woman Lazy and the Woman Neurotic and the Woman Out of Her Fucking Wits. I am the woman who, even though she has no children and does have a husband who coddles her, can only assume scattering responsibilities before abruptly ceasing regular personal maintenance.
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