Too Much

by Rachel Vorona Cote

  We have long struggled with the notion that a woman who has given birth and raised children can and should express her desires openly. One might say we cower under the shadow not of Queen Victoria herself, but instead what her appropriated image came to embody: the symbol of white maternity par excellence. “Modest, domestically inclined, and fertile: this was how Victoria’s reign was depicted at mid-century. Her expanding family was a productive figure for England’s expanding empire,”2 explains literary critic Karen Chase. And so this narrative has endured, contributing to interpretations of adult women as sexless homemakers or grotesquely horny predators. When the term “MILF” entered our vocabulary with the 1999 film American Pie, it was saddled with ridicule. The acronym itself—shorthand for Mom I’d Like to Fuck—accommodates an anonymous subject while thoroughly objectifying “Mom” as a pleasure vessel. The film draws on the term’s rankest association: the MILF in question, played by Jennifer Coolidge, is treated as both joke and novelty. It’s unexpected that a woman with an eighteen-year-old son would be sexually desirable; moreover, that fact is treated as fundamentally humorous. In the film, and on the IMDB database, she is reductively credited as “Stifler’s Mom,” a blaring indication that her significance in the film begins and ends with her curious maternal allure. In 2003 the pop rock band Fountains of Wayne enjoyed significant success with their radio-courting single “Stacy’s Mom,” which follows a similar premise: my girlfriend doesn’t know that I fantasize about her preternaturally hot, divorcée mother. Even now, men in Hollywood toy with this trope. Take, for instance, the 2011 song and accompanying video “Motherlover” by The Lonely Island, presumably a satirical spin on “Stacy’s Mom” and MILF jokes at large. To some extent, Andy Samberg and Justin Timberlake render themselves ridiculous, but the core joke is simple and the same: isn’t it funny that I want to fuck your mother who, in addition to having given birth to you (hilarious!), is certainly too old for me?

  As a matter of practice, Victorian fiction doesn’t chronicle the stories of middle-aged women; they are often sideline characters, figures of fun like Stifler’s Mom or the haplessly eager Mrs. George (played by Amy Poehler) of Tina Fey’s 2004 comedy Mean Girls. What’s more, the concept of aging was still relatively inchoate until the Victorian period. “Senescence,” or old age, was a category that, while recognized, had not yet ossified in either a cultural or socioeconomic way. Chase explains, “In fact, until the nineteenth century the attempt to define ‘old age’ specifically by years was limited and variable. Old age might be determined by looks, experience, feeling, or by the inability to bear arms or to work. Not surprisingly, it is the last—the capacity for work—which lent increasing value to the chronological definition of old age.”3

  Still, by the nineteenth century, those persons between the ages of forty and fifty, if not judged as positively decrepit, were seen as treading into their twilight years. Queen Victoria determined herself “old” by age forty-two—this was in 1861, the year she became a widow, and although she did not know it, only the midpoint of her life.4 But then again, it might not have mattered. Widowhood concluded a distinct and weightily symbolic era: wherein a woman yoked her life to that of another and through that union produced a family. Even for a reigning monarch, this would have been framed as one’s central endeavor, the years in which a woman could be productive in a biological way: for most, her preeminent contribution, according to cultural argument. Aging men might have shuffled home from their stores and their factories, backs bent and joints throbbing. Women became fundamentally extraneous to their purported moral duties, their bodies gradually alien to all that had once rendered them necessary.

  If people of forty or fifty years were cycling out of the quotidian grind, they were simultaneously becoming less compelling figures to society at large. As literary critic Sarah Ross remarks, nineteenth-century novels, particularly those that chronicled women’s lives, tended to exemplify the traits of the bildungsroman, that is to say, they were coming-of-age narratives that “catalogue the choices and missteps toward adulthood and a fully realized self.”5 For both young men and women, these steps lead them to marriage, and for women, they often lead to childbearing. The interior life of a middle-aged woman was, presumably, considered a less fascinating study for the majority of readers because she had already fulfilled her social debts. And if she hadn’t, well, she had long been ousted to the margins of cultural life to keep company with spinsters and childless women and all the rest banished from the Victorian erotic circuit.

  But this is not to say that Victorian novels lacked remarkable female characters who were middle-aged or older. In fact, stories teemed with them, but even in the most flattering cases, these women were generally sites of ludicrous excess. Betsey Trotwood of Charles Dickens’s semiautobiographical novel David Copperfield (1850) emerges as perhaps one of the most beloved (she is without question one of my favorite characters): a flinty but vastly compassionate woman with little patience for men, she rescues David from an abusive household and the wretched labor of a blacking factory, seeing to his education and serving as a surrogate mother after his own dies. Dickens fashions her as something of an eccentric, a source of humor, particularly in light of her fanciful longing for a niece and bombastic fury at the start of the novel, when she finds out that David is not a girl. We learn, however, that Betsey’s distrust of men comes from an abusive marriage she fled long ago, choosing instead to live with an intellectually disabled fellow, Mr. Dick, whom she treats with kindness and not a lick of condescension. We cannot always depend on Dickens—probably the most widely read author of his time, and certainly the most famous—to deliver a tenderhearted and thoughtful portrait of a woman. Yet with Betsey Trotwood, he more or less succeeds.

  For Betsey Trotwood is something of an outlier in Dickens’s oeuvre. We need not look further than two of his other more famous novels for middle-aged or elderly women wallowing or even deteriorating in their own excesses. Most notoriously, the witchy Miss Havisham haunts Great Expectations, the too muchness of her fury and heartbreak rendering her a decaying jilted bride who obstructs the male protagonist’s quest for love by manipulating a young girl to wreak romantic havoc on her behalf. In Great Expectations who abandoned Miss Havisham at the altar is far less significant than the spectacle she becomes: decrepit and bent with unfulfilled erotic longing, grotesque in her curdled happiness and fetid desires.

  In Bleak House (1853) Dickens gives us the detached and disheveled Mrs. Jellyby, a marginal but scathingly rendered character who joins the ranks of his novels’ lousy mothers. Preoccupied by her philanthropic endeavors in Africa, she wholly commits herself to letter writing campaigns while the Jellyby household, together with her gaggle of ragtag children, tumble into disarray. Mrs. Jellyby serves as one of Dickens’s most choleric arguments against women who resist the demands of Victorian maternity and absorb themselves in more self-indulgent activities. Steeped in his own misogynist visions of motherhood, Dickens would have been unlikely to offer, with any degree of empathy, the interiority of a middle-aged woman who simply did not care about parenting. Betsey Trotwood is recuperable because, despite her suspicions regarding the male sex, she ministers to David with all the generosity and sage love of a surrogate mother. Mrs. Jellyby, unable to blame the follies of youth for her wrongheaded notions of charity, dwells in the text as an aging, ink-spotted monster: a woman who has, as far as Dickens is concerned, wasted her own life and all but destroyed her family.

  This is not to say that Victorian literature diminished aging and old women altogether; oftentimes, mature female figures are crucial to a plot’s mechanisms or, like Mrs. Pryor of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, harbor a blistering secret, albeit one that is most crucial in the context of the young heroine’s self-actualization. Chase reminds us that “the ‘marginalizing of the elderly,’ whether it is making the best of a bad lot or choosing one’s destiny, is a complex fate and that it is compatible with central narrative interest…[W]hile the old are
indeed relegated to the outside and while they can rarely choose to alter their position, they retain surprising powers of agency.”6 Without Betsey Trotwood, David Copperfield’s future would have been far less auspicious. As readers of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, we are largely at the mercy of narrator Nelly Dean, servant to three generations of Earnshaws and witness to some of the family’s most lurid history. What her biases may color or shape, what her memory misremembers, and the extent to which she may dissemble we can only conjecture, but in the logic of the novel, the story is hers to tell. Lucy Snowe, of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, reflects on her youth as a much older woman, and she is perhaps one of the genre’s cagiest narrators (Charlotte and Emily Brontë were fond, it seems, of leaving their readers to wonder whether they could trust what they were told). Hannah Thornton, of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855), is an imperious woman, but one whose focus is, to the point of myopia, on the fortune and future of her mill owner son. There are scores of older women in Victorian fiction who, as Chase argues, “retain surprising powers of agency” whether in terms of the story or its telling. Very often, they are important characters. But that does not mean that they are envisioned in full flesh, their histories considered beyond hearth and home, beyond the families they have cultivated dutifully or, as Dickens strives to make eminently clear regarding Mrs. Jellyby—not.

  In the case of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1853), less a novel than a collection of sketches, the story focuses on the lives of elderly women but is narrated by a young woman, Mary Smith, who lives nearby and frequently matriculates among them. The concept of Cranford is, if not fantastical, unlikely: it’s a small town that resembles a single-gender retirement community, with a vigorously entwined circle of elderly women who live together according to a precise, many might say absurd, social culture they have carefully developed, without giving much thought to the goings-on in the rest of Mother England. Gaskell’s narrator begins by delineating these circumstances:

  In the first place, Cranford is in possession of the Amazons; all the holders of houses, above a certain rent, are women. If a married couple come to settle in the town, somehow the gentleman disappears; he is either fairly frightened to death by being the only man in the Cranford evening parties, or he is accounted for by being with his regiment, his ship, or closely engaged in business all the week in the great neighbouring commercial town of Drumble…In short, whatever does become of the gentlemen, they are not at Cranford.7

  The ladies of Cranford are unperturbed by men’s tendency to exodus: in fact, they often find their company provoking, if not altogether agitating. They live according to simple, feminine rituals of gentility, which Mary Smith details with humor and a dash of condescension. Because Cranford inhabitants are poor, they regard displays of wealth as vulgar and weave a collective fable that enables them to recast privation as choice, even luxury—choosing to walk, for instance, in order to enjoy the weather and not because it would be too costly to pay for a carriage. “We none of us spoke of money,” explains Mary, “because that subject savoured of commerce and trade, and though some might be poor, we were all aristocratic.”8 This sense of refinement informs even the smallest habits: Mary Smith’s companions, the spinster sisters Deborah and Matilda Jenkyns, discover that eating an orange presents an especial quandary with regard to gentility. To fully enjoy an orange, one must suck the juice from it, but certainly no proper woman would ever suck among company. So, when Miss Jenkyns and Miss Matty choose to partake in this singularly tricky fruit, they separate to different corners of the house, where they might gorge themselves without fear of disrupting decorum. And when the Jenkynses procure a new drawing room carpet, the impulse for preservation obscures the object’s primary purpose:

  We were very busy, too, one whole morning before Miss Jenkyns gave her party, in following her directions, and in cutting out and stitching together pieces of newspaper, so as to form little paths to every chair, set for the expected visitors, lest their shoes might dirty or defile the purity of the carpet. Do you make paper paths for every guest to walk upon in London?9

  Mary intermittently concludes these descriptions of her friends’ more eccentric behaviors with this rhetorical refrain regarding London practices. She is charmed by her Cranford friends, and she indulges them in their nonsensical endeavors, paper pathways and all; she also implies, through her narration, that these behaviors are preposterous. In this way, she suggests to more cosmopolitan readers that they share an understanding when it comes to the little town’s idiosyncratic conventions. One might also argue that the women of Cranford engage in these seemingly trivial exercises because they possess a certain economic understanding: nothing of value can be taken for granted.

  For all the delight Mary takes in Cranford’s more nonsensical traditions—and in some cases, who can really blame her?—she acknowledges too the robust connective tissue that renders these women, for the most part, allies and sites of mutual succor. When, in the middle of her party, Mrs. Forrester must ask her guests sitting on the sofa to move so that she can fetch her tea tray, no one makes mention of it: after all, to do so would draw attention to the modest size of her home, dimensions so skimpy she’s forced to store serving platters under the sofa. Nor do Mrs. Forrester’s friends raise an eyebrow when she pretends not to know what goodies will be brought from the kitchen (of course, because she cannot afford a cook, she has spent the day baking). And when death or economic calamity comes to pass, the women serve as fierce advocates for one another, particularly for Miss Matty who, Mary Smith concludes, is something of the town’s moral compass. “We all love Miss Matty,” she declares, “and I somehow think we are all of us better when she is near us.”10 Chase posits that “Cranford is a landmark text in the affirmation and celebration of old age, rejoicing in its labor of productivity,”11 and certainly it is remarkable for its privileging not merely of women, but of elderly women, many of whom have never married, and most of whom prefer that men leave them to themselves, determining them to be, on the whole, troublesome bothers.

  But while these character sketches do from time to time reveal secrets of the soul, they tend toward superficiality. Miss Matty emerges as the most gentle of the Cranford residents, having refused the man she loved for the sake of family, and choosing to live instead with her domineering older sister. The novel implies that she may be able to recuperate some of that romantic happiness after Miss Jenkyns dies and she is reunited with her former beau, Thomas Holbrook, but since they are all very much older, the ravages of time have their way: he dies before their courtship can resume. It is possible that Miss Matty would emerge from this bevy of loss and disappointment without bitterness—her character, as we know, is a beneficent one—but the novel assumes the reader’s lack of interest in the shadings of her emotional recovery. Her romantic life holds, it is presumed, minimal fascination for the reader despite it being clear that she is quite ready, as a woman in her fifties, to reconsider her decades-old retreat from erotic life, and she is miffed at the suggestion that she would be too old for this. “‘Martha, I’m not yet fifty-two!’ said Miss Matty [to her housemaid], with grave emphasis; for probably the remembrance of her youth had come very vividly before her this day, and she was annoyed at finding that golden time so far away in the past.”12 Perhaps Mary intuits correctly, or perhaps she makes assumptions colored by her own youth—after all, her account of this exchange is editorial.

  This moment of resistance from Miss Matty, however small, is notable and when, after Mr. Holbrook dies, she evinces her appreciation for romantic companionship, and perhaps even her regret, by finally allowing her housemaid to receive suitors. Ultimately, Miss Matty can only facilitate the erotic lives of younger generations, rather than her own: she instead returns to the woman-centered society upon which she has depended—and which brings her joy—but it is perhaps not all she might have desired, even if it is the ideal sanctuary for others in her community.

  It’s a fool’s err
and to attempt to “correct” Victorian fiction, to say what a society that precedes us by nearly two centuries ought to have done, or how their writers should have written. What we can do is consider the sorts of stories that were published and popular, and Cranford was quite popular. Far less amusing to readers would have been a novel set in England as most Britons knew it narrated from the perspective of a Miss Matty or a Miss Havisham or a Betsey Trotwood, with their pleasures and trials foregrounded in the narrative, rather than held aloft by an amused—or, in Miss Havisham’s case, bewildered and somewhat disgusted—much younger narrator, or set aside in order to chronicle a child relative’s coming-of-age. For them to unburden themselves on the page, without the imperative of entertaining or transforming into a punch line—that, I suspect, would hardly have been enough.

  * * *

  My conception of oldness has always been garbled and slippery. Most aspects of identity are to some extent relational—something you can measure numerically is bound to be. When I was very little, “old” was a catchall signifier for anyone who seemed adultlike; in elementary school, girls who were thirteen were, in my estimation, enviably mature. I wasn’t terribly concerned with what it meant to be “too old” unless the designation pertained to me and inflicted limitations: it seemed terrible, for instance, that I might one day be too old to play with dolls, and tragic that my mother would coddle me less. But youth meant that time yawned before me, languorous and infinite. There was too much time until, all of a sudden, there was not enough of it.