Too Much

by Rachel Vorona Cote

  These Western narratives are, collectively, an index of the broad, cultural interpretation of women as ministers of male pain—women’s suffering is always relationally subordinate. However, the men from each of these narratives vary broadly in disposition and ethos. For instance, John the Savage, from Aldous Huxley’s dystopian Brave New World, engages in self-flagellation not merely as a reaction to sexual longing, but due to a larger existential horror born from his experiences in a spiritually and culturally barren society. As John wrestles in torment, his snakebit romance with Lenina Crowne looms large, but she is one, albeit consequential, example of the moral corruption he rebuffs. Nonetheless, in each text and script women are posited as pain emissaries—in some cases as Jezebels brandishing their bodies to tempt and tease—and these designations obscure their own agonies. When John attacks Lenina, when Claude Frollo witnesses Esmeralda’s hanging in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, their demented logic substantiates: any woman who propels me to masochism ought to suffer. Her own devastated body atones for mine.

  But we might argue that, more than anything else, female self-mutilation has been integrated into cultural narratives in a way unique to the gender. That, in fact, it has been hiding in plain sight as rituals of religion or of beauty. In the Middle Ages, female martyrs like Saint Wilgefortis starved themselves to secure their chastity in the face of eager suitors. Wilgefortis, ultimately, grew a beard, and the rest of her body sprouted a sort of pelage that disgusted her wealthy gallant. Roaring mad at her defiance, her father sentenced her to crucifixion. Certain accounts also tell of the young and avid Saint Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi who, in the seventeenth century, followed Saint Wilgefortis’s example. By age ten, she secretly donned a crown of thorns and whipped herself, both practices of self-abnegation. By age twenty, she had joined a convent, where she limited her diet to bread and water—a dictate from God, she claimed—and coaxed the novices to both whip her and to stand on her mouth. She also continued her ritual of self-flagellation, often in public view, which she undertook to exorcise the demons rollicking inside of her. She died at age thirty-seven, refusing, while on her deathbed, any physical contact from the other nuns, lest they be stricken with erotic desire.

  Centuries later, women continued to brutalize themselves, although the aim, rather than blessed transcendence, was profoundly material. Victorian fashion strapped women into corsets, seizing ribs and lungs in an effort to abide by grinding beauty dictates. They gulped pills containing tapeworms in order to facilitate weight loss (a so-called diet that has not been fully abandoned even today). For hundreds of years women have been grimly disciplining and disfiguring their bodies, shattering their bones, in the service of sexual desirability. But these customs, while violent, are unique and by no means equivalent to masochistic impulse. Moreover, the way a woman chooses to express herself through physical presentation is strictly her business—that she possesses the choice is the paramount matter. Still, we must recognize one bald fact: while women’s bodily suffering has been policed and disregarded, and our grapples with mental health stigmatized, we have always been encouraged to wreak havoc upon ourselves, so long as it is in the interest of male desire.

  In an interview from 2000, critic Elaine Scarry positions suffering and creation as “radical opposites.”1 Hegemonic gender edicts have indeed stipulated our unmaking—our suffering they have brushed aside. In the meantime we have mutilated ourselves, whittling down our bodies according to au courant beauty metrics. And we have been not so much congratulated as admonished against respite. Destroy your body, and perhaps you might live.

  These are socially sanctioned forms of self-harm, acts taught and committed in docile compliance. A woman’s body punished her for donning a corset; nonetheless, the precious resource of cultural capital triumphed over fleshly discomfort. But in the late nineteenth century, doctors took notice of a more singular and specifically masochistic variation of female self-harm—pain inflicted methodically, purposefully, and for its own sake. At the time women’s pain was often—and is still—regarded as a biological and even moral necessity, but when Too Much women regulated their sensorial experiences in such strident ways, the medical institution was baffled, and rather tantalized. Women who intentionally harmed themselves were regarded as sites of sexual excess; in the Victorian era, a time equally infamous for extreme repression and unflagging fascination with sex, medical journals puzzled over the “Needle-Girls” phenomenon—“a peculiar type of self-mutilation…sometimes seen in hysteric persons”2 wherein women began pricking themselves with their sewing needles, even threading them into their skin.

  Of course, not all of these so-called “hysteric persons” used needles as their implement of choice. In 1896, for example, physicians George Gould and Walter Pyle published their observations of one thirty-year-old woman in New York in Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, noting that she had “cut her left wrist and right hand” in late September of 1876. Three weeks later, after being refused opium, she reportedly “again cut her arms below the elbows, cleanly severing the skin and fascia, and completely hacking the muscles in every direction.” She continued this pattern of self-mutilation at intervals of a few weeks, sometimes inserting objects like shards of glass and splinters into her wounds. (According to the article, the woman cut herself for the last time in June 1877.)

  Contemporary medicine diagnosed these women as hysterics, their self-harm a symptom of their femininity and, thus, their fundamental emotional surfeit. For articulating their suffering they were branded with hysteria’s stigma. Many were unnecessarily bundled away in asylums, deemed irreparably ill because their words went unheeded. In L. E. Emerson’s 1914 The Case of Miss A, a psychoanalytical study, he endeavors to understand a twenty-three-year-old patient referred to as Miss A, who told doctors that she had cut herself “twenty-eight or thirty times.” He recounts her history, one fraught with the trauma of sexual assault and its stigma: For “many years (five or six),” she was sexually abused by an uncle and, years later, one of her cousins attempted to sexually assault her as well. Finally, she was abandoned by a suitor after he discovered she wasn’t a virgin. The suitor called her a whore, Emerson writes, and pierced by this rejection, she later carved a “W” into her leg.

  Emerson remarks upon “the sexual nature of her acts,” noting that the “relationship to Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter is interesting.” Operating in the Freudian school, he deduces that there were numerous motives for her self-mutilation: The first was that “cutting was a sort of symbolical substitute for masturbation.” Miss A was also propelled by “a desire to escape mental distress” and a longing to punish herself. Emerson moreover surmises that she intentionally drew her own blood out of “a desire for regular menstruation.” While his interpretations may not be entirely wrong-headed, they are narrow, almost foregone conclusions in an age when women’s suffering was conceived simultaneously as a medical oddity and a gendered imperative, filtered through psychoanalytic discourse that saw women as fundamentally deficient with constitutions too histrionic for measured self-expression. What might these women have said for themselves if male physicians had not been so hasty to speak for them?

  * * *

  “Pain—has an Element of Blank—,” writes Emily Dickinson in Poem 650, “It cannot recollect / When it begun—or if there were / A time when it was not—.” “No Future—but itself.” Pain, as Dickinson imagines it here, is the alpha and omega of a spontaneous universe created with its first throb. It is not deliverance, per se, unless blankness is what you seek, but it is a state that is both complete and transient. There is no evidence to be had that Dickinson was contemplating self-harm when she wrote these verses, yet however unintentionally, she captures a state, an episode I’ve chased like a darting light: it looks like a summons, it seems like a promise, and yet it always slips away, a thingless mirage that tantalizes and vanishes.

  I didn’t know Dickinson’s poem when I was twelve and had begun to rush toward pain as a way of h
arpooning the mass of my emotions. But, always one to seek liberation through words, I hungered for any narrative or scrap of verses that I could interpret, however broadly, as literary companions to my own overwhelming unhappiness. I scrounged and hoarded these lines and passages like treasures: lyrics from a Tori Amos song—I had just discovered Tori and considered her my personal savior—the alienating tragedies of a Cynthia Voigt novel, or harrowing narratives like William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, The Diary of Anne Frank, which I read and reread, and Nien Cheng’s memoir Life and Death in Shanghai. Books like the latter three felt instructive in their engendering of deep humility: I would never suffer anything like these women, real and fictional, and because my father’s family descends from Eastern European Jews, I was aware that people quite close to me, whom I would never know, had endured and died at the hands of evil that cast my own emollient circumstances as shamefully soft. In these ways, the written word provided solace, but elliptically, or, in the latter cases, they supplied that old, treasured idol: perspective.

  But if there were many nonvictimizing narratives about self-harm when I was a young teenager, I did not know them. I did, however, know girls like me, who cut, and when we found each other it was exhilarating, like locating another member of some twisted secret society, the banner of which we had previously carried furtively, and alone. Because cutting was not necessarily a pathway to suicide; it could be managed, concealed, and shared as common, sacred terrain. It served us as a pressure valve for too muchness—a physiological transference. We compared methods and tools, which varied: I preferred scissors; another friend, one of my dearest, hid shards of broken CDs and glass in her bedroom. One night, when I was sleeping over at her house, she retreated to her bathroom to cut in the wake of a romantic disappointment.

  The glass slipped, I think. It sliced her fourteen-year-old skin with more severity than—I hope—she intended. I was anxiously awaiting her return when she burst into her room, slick red blood scribbling down her leg. We huddled together in the dark as she summoned the courage to clean the wound, two quivering figures on the kitchen floor. I was worry-stricken and wanted to tell her to stop—I knew we both ought to, that the monster we indulged only proffered the illusion of a tamer beast—but I also knew that I wouldn’t. And why, in that case, should she listen to me?

  Throughout the rest of junior high and high school, I continued my scissor ritual, intermittently swearing it off forever, but gradually slouching back into the same miserable but reliable practice. I discovered Francesca Lia Block’s novel Violet & Claire, perhaps the first time I encountered a reference to cutting on the page, not to mention a female intimacy that seemed as passionate as the love I harbored for my closest friends. When I read Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower I relished its sentimental maximalism, its depiction of teenagers who sought the “infinite”—big, wide-eyed moments, the possibility of feeling everything—in the context of a visceral story of trauma and mental illness. Books could not cure me, and I didn’t expect them to, but the shame that churned inside my gut whenever I hurt myself or caught a glimpse of the aftermath peeking from beneath my sleeve or at the lip of my shirt began to ease in small but meaningful ways.

  And yet, writing about self-harm as a distinct practice, one undertaken for its own sake, remains relatively spare. By the 1960s, “confessional” poets like Sylvia Plath and others had thrust mental health into Western cultural discourse. Plath only seems to have written about cutting once, but her work renders with unflinching precision the experiences of mental illness and women’s psychiatric care. (Her novel The Bell Jar, published in 1963, is the most famous example and is rightly admired as a triumph of the genre.) Joanne Greenberg’s semiautobiographical novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1964), written under the pen name Hannah Green, is another rare, mid-century text that depicts self-harm. These are important and devastating works. But because Plath died tragically, by suicide, her personage too often becomes obscured by the froth of mythos. Americans do love their sad, sick girls, especially posthumously.

  Plath’s 1962 poem “Cut”—spare, yet visceral—was published in her renowned, posthumous volume Ariel. The title implied rather than stated, we encounter the speaker in medias res, as she observes the pulse of her fresh wound: “A flap like a hat / Dead white / Then that red plush.” “Cut” evokes an aspect of self-harm that most confounds the cultural imagination: that someone—in this case a cutter—might regard her gruesome act with bemusement, wonder, or even relief.

  By puberty, the experience of inhabiting my body had become nearly insupportable, like a top-to-toe experience of staring at the sun. Feeling had become too pronounced, almost synesthetic, and so it was through turning on myself, staging a physical confrontation, that I managed, however fleetingly, to detach from it. Briefly, I could shift the pronouns and transform my body into a depersonalized collection of parts: my torso became a torso; my wrist was merely a wrist. “A million soldiers run / Redcoats, every one,” Plath’s speaker remarks as the blood spills. But this rush, born from the act, is accompanied by curious detachment. “Whose side are they on?” she wonders.3 I chased this ambivalence—to both live in my body and to not care about it, to not even entirely register it as my own, this was exhilaration. The next day, as my skin began to knit itself back together, I would examine the wound as if I had happened upon a blossom or bush that someone else had recently planted, and which I had only just noticed.

  The parameters of self-harm are capacious, so much so that representing it can be a tangled business. Sometimes its circumstances are tethered to a death wish, but not exclusively. Some cutters adopt conventions that they follow with liturgical care, and yet urge triumphs over ritual: if, for instance, I was overwhelmed by the impulse at school, I would surreptitiously scratch my wrist beneath the desk until my nails were wadded with skin. Often enough, cutting doesn’t suit as an accurate depiction of the masochistic practice. And so, within this web of self-harm practitioners, we have few emissaries—people to whom we can turn for resonant testimonials in a similar way to seeking guidance from those in recovery from addiction or those who live with various forms of mental illness: self-harm, after all, generally incorporates both. But representative figures require an element of specificity—they must be remembered for something definitive, an action rounded off with a period, rather than a protracted ellipses. Self-mutilation, cumbersome term that it is, fundamentally defies particular designations. But then every experience of mental illness is a symphony of pain, and though we have sought and appointed ambassadors as a route to understanding, much of our discourse remains reductive, limiting, with so many narratives thus far unheard.

  It was not until the 1990s that the American cultural imagination indicated a degree of readiness to face the severe phenomenon of self-harm. This particular decade saw an uptick in teenage suicide,4 which surely explains the catalyzed social investment. 1994 was also the publication year of Dr. Mary Pipher’s Reviving Ophelia, a book that briefly claimed eminent authority on the fraught experience of adolescent girlhood. At the same time, young women living with mental illness found a surrogate in Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of the juggernaut 1994 memoir Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America. Were self-mutilation to choose a poster child, Wurtzel would likely be assigned that grim title. Now something of a celebrity after Prozac Nation was adapted as a film starring Christina Ricci, Wurtzel has published a number of other books and written for a slew of publications. But in the early nineties, Prozac Nation offered many female readers a familiar but elusive narrative: it chronicles Wurtzel’s experimentation with cutting.

  In Prozac Nation, Wurtzel depicts self-harm as a mode of negotiation, an attempt to harness intangible shitty feelings. This impulse is familiar to me. When my own anguish or shame or self-hatred broiled with overwhelming ferocity, I sought to temper it by giving it a body—my body. It provided me with the illusion of control; after all, it is far easier to assume sovereignty over some
thing we can touch. If the female martyrs rendered themselves whipping posts, flesh to eviscerate as a means of transcendence, Wurtzel employs the body as a canvas with powers of emotional transfiguration:

  I did not, you see, want to kill myself. Not at that time, anyway. But I wanted to know that if need be, if the desperation got so terribly bad, I could inflict harm on my body. And I could. Knowing this gave me a sense of peace and power, so I started cutting my legs all the time. Hiding the scars from my mother became a sport of its own. I collected razor blades. I bought a Swiss army knife, I became fascinated with the different kinds of sharp edges and the different cutting sensations they produced. I tried out different shapes—squares, triangles, pentagons, even an awkwardly carved heart, with a stab wound at its center, wanting to see if it hurt the way a real broken heart could hurt. I was amazed and pleased to find that it didn’t.5

  Here, finally, was sustained attention to cutting—perhaps one of the first instances in mainstream culture and one not exclusively framed as a prelude to suicidal ideation. Taken together, Plath’s “Cut” and Wurtzel’s account of her self-harm rituals gesture to the paradoxical yearning so fundamental to cutting: to at once be fully inside one’s body, but also floating above it, an observer whose interest has been strangely piqued.

  Yet, because the brutalized female body has been so fetishized, depicting female pain in all its visceral nuance can be tricky. Gillian Flynn’s first novel, Sharp Objects, adapted as an HBO miniseries in 2018, introduced a wide audience of readers to one interpretation of female self-harm through its protagonist, Camille Preaker, a journalist who returns to her claustrophobic, Confederacy-bent hometown in order to cover the murders of two preteen girls. The sadism visited upon the young victims, their bodies warped into sites of suffering and horror, sits in restive tension with Camille’s own topography of pain: since adolescence, she has carved words into her skin as a means of creating permanence out of the ephemeral: