Too Much

by Rachel Vorona Cote

  Tess Durbeyfield, titular character of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles—and perhaps the most famous of the Victorians’ “fallen women”—is plagued by similar mythology in which a woman becomes the product of her ardent emotions and sexual history. If you know the story, perhaps you share my own disdain for her hypocritical husband, Angel Clare, who abandons her after learning that she was raped as a teenager, essentially kept against her will by said rapist, Alec d’Urberville, and in the aftermath bears his illegitimate child. (Naturally Angel has just admitted to a past weekend-long sexual romp, but, oh, how he has repented ever since!) To blame Tess for her trauma is the cruelest folly; even Maggie Tulliver is more directly responsible for her circumstances. But when Tess confides her history to Angel, he reminds us how women who are Too Much are denied power over their narratives, and, crucially, their identities. “Forgiveness does not apply to the case,” he sneers. “You were one person; now you are another. How can forgiveness meet such a grotesque prestidigitation as that?…[The] woman I have been loving is not you.”3

  Tess, whom Hardy sketches as a well-bosomed beauty, has always appeared to me as one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s portraits of Elizabeth Siddal: all softly rounded curves, rose blush on cream skin, and a fulsome mane of hair. But the likeness is doubly fitting—Tess’s short life is rife with suffering precisely because Angel enforces upon her his idealized narrative of feminine purity. He regards her not so much as a woman but as an art object, a portrait of a woman imbued by Angel’s myopic conception of femininity. Tess’s beauty is bewitching when he regards her as virgin soil, “a new-sprung child of nature,” whose body is wholesome because, according to his fantasy, it has been thus far undisrupted. Refusing to parse event from person, Angel contorts Tess’s rape and imprisonment into character traits, rendering her a mere signifier of lusty excess.

  Angel eventually emerges from this bog of misogynistic idealism, but Hardy, true to form, reveals that his character’s enlightenment comes too late. Together, Alec and Angel murder Tess: the first man through sexual violence and manic obsession, and the second by blaming her for being of the world, not—impossibly—transcendent.

  * * *

  I recall the uneasy sense that I too was bound for “fallenness,” because I could never experience any meaningful emotion in a tempered way. It’s nigh well impossible to hide from yourself when your feelings seem to press against you from the inside and, somehow, the outside as well. For this reason, among many others, the crush that blossomed out of my first evening with Paul should have spurred me to distance myself from him. But it makes sense to me that I didn’t. Regardless of this burgeoning affection, I continued to rigorously deny that my relationship with Nick was askew. Marrying him—a respectable, sturdy, ambitious man—was, in retrospect, a way of disciplining myself, a way to suppress the timid but diligent whispers at the back of my brain. “Are you sure you’re attracted enough to marry him?” it asked in a very small voice, one year into our relationship. “Didn’t you used to love sex?”

  At the time, we lived separately while he finished a graduate degree several hours outside of Washington, DC. But despite distance, Nick soon seemed to me insistently present. He, in fact, had become too much, and in a way that felt oppressive: he was too demanding, too aggravated by my professional aspirations. “I’ve never seen you this ambitious,” he once said, his voice saturated with both disapproval and trepidation. When I had slogged through a sleepless week and, come Friday, gazed ravenously at my bed, I balked at his inevitable demands for sex. After five days of abstinence, Nick argued, he required intercourse upon arrival—he was, his tone implied, owed.

  But Nick’s behavior was surely influenced by my own disengagement. I regretted marrying him, though I would not admit it to myself, and if he had not yet deduced that, he certainly sensed my resistance, my yen for separateness. His summons, by way of phone and text and Gchat, became more and more frequent, all of them prickling reminders of marital obligation. I would squirm as my phone rang, exhaling with relief when voice mail finally swallowed the call. We’d fight later, but for the moment, I cradled my delusion of freedom.

  This denial, of course, rendered me eager for greater familiarity with Paul. If I accepted the premise that my marriage was not problematic—or simply chose not to think about my marriage at all—then there existed no discernible reason to avoid someone whose company I enjoyed. Romantic longing ripped a gaping maw in that logic, but I was not operating according to logic anyway.

  Throughout the fall, a collection of intimate rituals crystallized our relationship. While at school, Paul and I paid each other multiple office visits over the course of the day. He accompanied me on my morning walk to the campus coffee shop. Most suggestive, however, were the extensive late-night Gchat conversations where we eagerly confided in each other with the urgency and abundance of two people desperate to make the most of this kinetic bond before it became verboten. We were both aware that our friendship, as it stood, was marred by a certain transience, but we acknowledged this separately, unwilling to mourn the loss before it was inevitable. Instead, we told each other everything we could think to tell, unless it involved my marriage. Together we spun a delicate half-fantasy, neither of us traversing explicit lines of decency, yet willfully ignoring the existence of a husband who would move back to DC that summer and, understandably, would be skeptical of such intimate extramarital correspondence.

  Every so often, I would take the measure of my computer screen, Gchat boxes for Nick and Paul winking side by side (and one sorely neglected). For brief moments here and there, it would occur to me that this fragile simultaneity would eventually crack. Then I would turn on Robyn and twirl around my bedroom, hell-bent on forgetting everything but the motion of my body.

  As Thanksgiving break approached, my primary object was to stave off the assured misery of a long weekend with Nick—by now he would, rightfully, ask what the hell was going on—and devote the hours wedged between bouts of research and writing to spending time with Paul. We had not ventured to plan another one-on-one excursion since the night I first recognized my stirrings of attraction. Now we decided to see a movie, which, at my suggestion, evolved into the commonplace romantic pairing of movie and dinner.

  Paul proposed that we see 127 Hours, and such was my infatuation that I willingly agreed to see a film where a man frees himself from a boulder by sawing through his own arm. With equal enthusiasm, we subjected ourselves to the torture of sitting shoulder to shoulder in the charged obscurity of a movie theater. Always one to balk at violence, I shifted gingerly in my seat until the film’s climax, at which point I plunged my face into Paul’s shoulder. The impulse was born from fear and desire in equal measure, and as for Paul, well, he didn’t remove his arm.

  At the end of the night we parted on the train platform, Paul steeling himself for a red-eye back to Boulder, Colorado, for Thanksgiving break. As we hugged goodbye, nausea began to curdle in my gut. It was untenable, all of it: Paul’s two weeks’ absence; my husband’s imminent arrival; the jagged realization that Paul signified far more than an idle crush. Meeting him had been a significant event, our intimacy a swell of warmth within a newly discovered emotional vacancy. Finally, I acquiesced to what I already knew: I had been wrong to marry Nick. After only a few months, Paul seemed more my match than my husband ever had.

  Riding the train home, my body was weightless and queasy, as if buoyed by a quick suck of helium. “What the fuck do you have to be happy about?” I self-castigated. “You’re holding a blowtorch and pointing it at two men you don’t deserve.”

  It must have been late when I returned to my apartment, but, being in a rather self-absorbed frame of mind, I immediately called my friend Leigha. She already knew that I was unhappy; she also knew that I was spending an ill-advised amount of time with a schoolmate. The moment she picked up, I barely choked out “I’m in love with Paul” before stumbling to the toilet and vomiting convulsively.

  B
ut true friendship weathers a healthy heap of vomit, and Leigha waited calmly as I emptied my stomach of the day’s meals and approximately half a lung. I returned to the phone, incapable of tracing out the plot points of the evening, whimpering desperate, befuddled fragments punctured by the refrain “I love Paul.”

  “No, you don’t,” Leigha soothed, and whether or not she—or I—believed it, that was precisely what I needed to hear, at least that night. It was not so much a statement of fact as an effort to steady me. After all, Leigha couldn’t have known how I actually felt. She had never met Paul; she only knew my perspective of this pseudo-romantic quagmire. So when Leigha said, “No, you don’t,” what I heard was “Slow down.” Her warm, easy conviction gradually placated me. I said good night, wiped the vomit from my lips, and collapsed into a grainy-dreamed sleep.

  * * *

  If the Victorians were singularly preoccupied with sexually deviant women—according to their metrics, anyway—they by no means had sole purchase on the topic. Nineteenth-century literature across the continent meditated on the subject of unfaithful women and their havoc upon hearth and home. Gustave Flaubert is perhaps most famous for his 1856 debut, Madame Bovary, in which the protagonist engages in extramarital affairs to beat back the banality of quotidian life. Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, published in installments between 1873 and 1877, offers a relatively sympathetic depiction of the unfaithful wife, but that sympathy is largely predicated on her debilitating mental instability—paranoia, guilt, jealousy—in the wake of public shame.

  Though we may mourn Anna’s tragic end, within the logic of the novel that catastrophe seems inevitable after the social and familial chasms torn by her infidelity. If her affair with Vronsky culminates from unharnessed sexual passion, then the burden of that dangerous excess tips the scales in favor of tragedy. And were nineteenth-century Russian society kinder to “scandalous” women, Anna still could not outrun the psychic trauma of abandoning her family and taking a lover whom, as a result of her own reeling self-doubt, she could not trust. Anna, Vronsky, Karenin—all three become entangled in the poisonous web that begins to spin once marital vows are transgressed. And as Anna demonstrates, the only exit strategy is death.

  But far more damning—often hyperbolic—portrayals of female infidelity have endured into the present day. The femme fatale trope slinked into American film noir, tempted her hapless gumshoe, and died, sketching a foundational twentieth-century narrative for the hypersexual, unfaithful wife.

  In 1944’s Double Indemnity, Barbara Stanwyck portrays the sinister, beguiling Phyllis Dietrichson who, rotten to the core, effortlessly convinces an insurance salesman (Fred MacMurray) to kill her husband so that she can collect his fortune. Walter, the salesman, is nearly as corrupt as Phyllis: a cloying flirt from their first meeting, he is only too eager to off an inconvenient husband. Yet, it’s Phyllis, not Walter, whom the film urges us to regard as fundamentally irredeemable. She lies and cheats because she is sociopathic—incapable of selfless affection. Walter proves himself a fool, and he suffers for his misdeeds, but his willingness to trust Phyllis conveys the capacity for sympathy and love—and all the more casts Phyllis in the cruel light of an operator.

  In 1981, Hollywood revisited the plot of Double Indemnity with the sweaty, lascivious Body Heat. Again, a depraved, voracious wife, Matty Walker (Kathleen Turner), inveigles and seduces a dunderheaded underachiever, small-town lawyer Ned Racine (William Hurt). Ned is utterly charmed by Matty, and even more so by her reassurance of his sexual prowess; he readily conspires to kill the man to whom Matty is tethered by matrimony. But like Phyllis, Matty schemes only for her own benefit. Regardless of its pleasures, each woman regards infidelity as a means to an end; it results from cool premeditation rather than romantic impulse. However, at the conclusion of Body Heat the moral skews to focus more squarely on the male culprit. During the span of their affair, Matty gifts Ned a fedora, both a throwback to the film’s noir pedigree and a signal that he has unwittingly accepted the mantle of fall man. And take the fall he does, while Matty, flush with her murdered husband’s wealth, escapes to sun-soaked beaches, contemplating the horizon behind dramatic, Audrey Hepburn-esque shades.

  With whom should we sympathize here? No one, perhaps. The film implies that Ned has only himself to blame in the end. After all, did he not enter into a romantic entanglement with a married woman? A married woman, no less, whose palpable sexuality immediately marks her as pernicious, and who wields her desirability as the most potent tool in her kit. Matty’s freedom might be interpreted as a misandrist fantasy, or even fraught with her own misgivings. “Ned, whatever you think—I really do love you,” she tells her co-conspirator before framing him. But the film, committed to the trope of the femme fatale, cannot fully pursue this emotional complexity. Instead, Body Heat ultimately reads most clearly as cruel, if vague, irony, unfolding into the well-traveled narrative of the guilty woman flying free—others, innocent or not, often punished in their stead. It’s a cautionary tale written toward heterosexual men. Don’t be a chump, boys! Beware the poison of sexual excess. A woman who veers from the path of matrimonial fidelity, no matter her intentions, will only shatter you. Perhaps, like Vronsky, you’ll emerge bereft and aching or, like Ned, you’ll be tossed in jail, with only the emotional relics of your obsession to keep you company.

  According to early 2000s Hollywood, affairs of the heart unravel into similarly hyperbolic catastrophe. Adrian Lyne’s Unfaithful (2002), for example, might at first seem sympathetic to protagonist Connie (Diane Lane). At the film’s opening, quotidian life, in its excessive familiarity, has become grotesque. Both Connie’s eight-year-old son and her husband (Richard Gere) pee with the door open. Her son spits indistinguishable mush into her hand—her orders—before heading out the door for school. Sex has become a rare and hard-won activity. Why wouldn’t Paul (Olivier Martinez), the French bookseller, appeal to her as a carefree erotic alternative?

  Importantly, the film eschews the nuances of Connie’s marriage; any displeasure that could be attributed to her husband, Edward, emerges as largely circumstantial, even inevitable. Connie, on the other hand, we are meant to interpret as well-meaning but ultimately too selfish to preserve the sanctity of domesticity.

  Suspicious of his wife’s recent distraction, Edward learns of her infidelity through the efforts of a private investigator, and the truth is his undoing. Jealousy and anger render Edward unrecognizable to himself, and during a vicious confrontation with Paul, he suddenly kills him with a blow to the head.

  Reeling from these increasingly far-fetched circumstances—Edward attends his son’s school play with Paul’s body in his trunk—Connie and Edward find their way back to each other. Connie does decide to end the affair; Edward merely kills Paul before he can receive the message. And what is his explanation, once Connie learns of his violent deed? “I didn’t want to kill him, I wanted to kill you,” Edward sputters in desperate rage. In the logic of the film, Connie’s alienation has conjured her husband’s madness and, consequently, her infidelity is treated as a far greater crime than bludgeoning someone to death. Connie seems to resist this narrative, albeit feebly. “Everyone has accidents,” she tells her son after he wets the bed. Her words are weighted with despair.

  And yet infidelity is no accident. It is a choice, and rarely a healthy one. However, it need not follow that sexual deception yields romantic and emotional Armageddon. We need not cleave to a narrative that pathologizes women who have had affairs as hypersexual, prone to hysteric fits of lusts. When the institutional strictures of heterosexual matrimony, rather than the empathy due to our human fallibility, become the organizing principles by which relationships and women are judged, we limit ourselves to forecasting catastrophe and meting out punishment. We have not yet learned how to respect monogamy without worshipping it. And in our idolatry, we shift the burden of matrimonial upkeep onto women, charging one and all with custody of Penelope’s legacy: to be patient and immaculately long-sufferi
ng, always waiting to serve our Odysseus. Gluttons for pat heteronormative romance, contemporary American society cannot recognize its own terrified devotion to what it understands as normal and natural, instead condemning women who deviate as the ones who cannot suppress our appetites for what we should not want in the first place.

  Enter Tyler Perry and his 2013 film Temptation. A modern-day morality play, the protagonist’s suffering is framed as punishment for her un-Christian deceit. When Judith (Jurnee Smollett-Bell), nourished and bred on southern Christian principles, hands herself over to the erotic passion dominating her lover, the cartoonishly villainous Harley (Robbie Jones), she quite literally risks death. And significantly, it is Judith’s professional ambitions that lead her down this rabbit hole of dissolution. Determined to open her own marriage counseling business, she works late at her dating agency, preoccupation interpreted by her well-meaning but childish husband, Brice (Lance Gross), as neglect.

  Harley, a business client, seizes at every opportunity to join Judith when she is alone at the office. Like Unfaithful’s Paul, he is an oversaturated trope of sexual danger, this time contorted to emphasize its fundamental evil. He is handsome, shifty, invested in pleasure before all else. And lest we not take Perry’s overwrought moral—that engaging in this behavior means tangoing with Lucifer—Harley’s red convertible sports flames on each side.

  At the end of the film, once Brice has intervened, like a superhero, to save Judith from Harley’s clutches, we learn that she has contracted HIV as a result of her affair. In the space of a few years, she grows feeble in health and with contrition: she now works as a marriage counselor—not at her own agency—and, divorced from Brice, only sees him when she visits his pharmacy to collect her prescriptions.