* * *
On June 21, 1887, Queen Victoria celebrated her Golden Jubilee; she had reigned for fifty years on Great Britain’s throne. She was glad, mostly. At sixty-eight years old, twenty-five years after the death of her beloved Prince Albert, she remained staunchly in mourning—on this occasion, as always, she donned a simple black dress—determined to glorify the husband she had lost and who, by then, many of her subjects had never known. The previous day, she had commemorated the occasion by documenting it in her diary. Her words are bald and forlorn: “The day has come and I am alone.”19 She had, by then, also outlived two children and five grandchildren, as well as John Brown, her dear and devoted companion.
And yet she found satisfaction in the day. Over fifty years, she had cultivated a sensational legacy as monarch of the world’s most august empire. But despite Britain’s grandiosity, Victoria dressed with a plainness that evoked middle-class English domesticity. She was avid in her efforts to oversee the kingdom, but positioned herself foremost as wife, mother, and then a bonnet-clad widow. This maternal iconography was pervasive. At the time of her Jubilee, the queen was hailed as the “Grandmother of Europe”: numbered among her passel of descendants are the odious Wilhelm II, the German emperor who would declare war on England, and Princess Alix of Hesse, who would marry Czar Nicholas of Russia and, later, be killed in the Russian Revolution (she is perhaps best remembered as mother to Princess Anastasia). Among Britons, the queen was worshipped as a motherly goddess. “You go it, old girl! You done it well! You done it well!” applauded a crowd of working-class men as they met Victoria’s carriage. She acknowledged them with a customary nod, but laughed too, and her eyes welled.20
If a woman must grow old, she might as well be the queen of an imperialist juggernaut. To be sure, status did not safeguard Victoria from woe and travails, but as she aged, she attained the luster of immortality (indeed, some thought she would be queen forever). From the British public’s vantage point, the queen could never be Too Much; she was, after all, larger than life.
But Victoria, I suspect, did not share this opinion. While Albert lived, she was assiduous in her efforts not to puncture his ego, even when this meant diminishing herself. She knew her husband could not abide a power imbalance—in fact, he did not believe in women ruling kingdoms on their own—and so even attempted, unsuccessfully, to bestow him with the title King Consort (he was styled as Prince Consort).21 Although women seeking the right to vote would later point to Victoria as an argument for universal suffrage—had she not ruled wisely?—the queen did not support it. When, during the Boer War, women sailed to South Africa to care for the beleaguered troops as well as prisoners suffering in British concentration camps, the elderly Victoria voiced her disapproval, remarking that these “hysterical” women would only be a bother. While she was known for being racially progressive, at least compared to many of her contemporaries, the queen never indicated concern for the indigenous women of India, China, Canada, Argentina, and the inhabitants of many other lands, millions of whom suffered brutalities in her name.22
When, on January 22, 1901, Queen Victoria’s long life at last expired, the era that is her namesake came to a formal, if not ideological, close. Over eight decades, women in Great Britain had seen considerable social advancements. Victorian men might still demand an “angel in the house,” the docile and chastely helpmeet, but women had begun to buck this expectation. Some chose not to marry, living alone, or together with other single women. A husband could no longer assume his wife’s wealth; finally, she existed as an individual in the eyes of the law. The 1891 case Regina vs. Jackson, wherein a Mr. Jackson kidnapped his wife, enlisted guards to hold her prisoner at home, and took her to court for “restitution of conjugal rights,” ruled, blessedly, in favor of the wife. Neither the ghoulish Mr. Jackson, nor any man, could claim legal proprietorship of his wife’s body; this was unquestionably a landmark court decision.23 These are marks of trenchant but circumscribed progress—the British colonies were not afforded the aforementioned liberties—and, because progress fundamentally suggests a process of evolution, it was also, without question, not enough. (For instance, it was 1991 before either England or Wales recognized “marital rape,” and just two years before Regina vs. Jackson a judge ruled that a man afflicted with gonorrhea could rape his wife.)24 But then it would be altogether oxymoronic, the concept of enough progress.
On her deathbed, it’s unlikely that Victoria was dwelling on the legal and socioeconomic achievements of her female subjects. The monarch was no protofeminist, and she had always, even in widowhood, conceived of herself as Albert’s wife with strident adhesion. However, as she prepared for their reunion beyond the grave, she did, it seems, muse upon herself. Inscribed in her funeral instructions was the following note to her children: “I die in peace with all fully aware of my many faults.”
She was at peace. She was not enough—or she was too much: who is to say?
Chapter Twelve
Substance:
An Epilogue
Have I said too much?
Or perhaps not enough?
That’s always the question, after all, and always a fact of our subsistence: we inhabit an illusory binary in whose stewing berth so many of us suspend on tenterhooks, marionettes pulling at our strings.
I wrote this book in order to articulate an argument that has long been clattering around my brain, sometimes unsteadily, but always persistent, like rain from the sky. I wanted to express it to you, but, of course, to myself as well—and in the latter case, it was something of a thought experiment. Was I simply making excuses for my too muchness? Perhaps I had gone to these lengths, ruminating over research, unspooling a thread between the Victorians—whom I love and who frustrate me—and our quivering now, ultimately for the selfish purpose of exonerating myself. A deliverance by book: I suppose, in any case, it wouldn’t be the first time.
In 2017, as I was beginning to draft my manuscript, I listened to New Zealand singer Lorde’s sophomore album Melodrama, which recommended itself to me by the title alone and which delivered the most cathartic emotional wallop. But I was smote by one song in particular, “Liability.” Though its lyrics were resonant, more than anything else they filled me with an ineffable sorrow: “They say, ‘You’re a little much for me / You’re a liability.’” I felt it was my responsibility, to readers, to my writing, and to myself, to approach too muchness from confidence, and not a little righteous anger. I still believe that mode was appropriate. And yet, Lorde reminded me of where I had begun, and where I so often return—to melancholy and resignation, to the gut-churning fear that I will never be capable of living in the world properly, and that I will always, at last, wear out my friends, lovers, even family because I cannot help but be utterly myself: a brimming body of conflicted, burning feeling. Every day I wriggle a bit further from beneath this albatross, but it’s an unwieldy and sticky burden.
I return, often, to that schoolgirl essay composed by a young Charlotte Brontë, first-person narration wrapped in the cloak of character, but indisputably autobiographical in sentiment: “Without wanting to I allowed everything that passed through my heart to be seen and sometimes there were storms passing through it; in vain I tried to imitate the sweet gaiety, the serene and equable spirits which I saw in the faces of my companions and which I found so worthy of admirations; all my efforts were useless.”1 A Too Much heart, as Brontë conceives it, is a thing indiscriminately porous, an organ permeable to joy and sorrow alike: a deluge from “storms passing”; other times, the emollient ripples of a sunbeam. Brontë, or as she would have it, her male speaker, resists this transparency, and despairs after the “serene and equable spirits,” which are not so easy to muster and to project. Like Lorde, Brontë mourns the impossibility of concealing what demands to be witnessed.
I, too, have mourned this, but I no longer want to do so. I no longer want to pant after comely corsets, with all their trappings of performed equanimity and decorum—those cages t
hat will only break my bones and stifle what is mine to declare. And all of it is mine to declare, every last tear and smile and shriek. And what is yours, that of course is your dominion, and your treasure, to brandish or to keep close as you will. Too muchness heaves with potential as a positive feminine force, but it is the choice to wield it that matters most of all.
Emotionally trussed for centuries, we deserve—we are owed—room to breathe. We’ve been taught that disaffection is au courant: better to be Ernest Hemingway’s Cool Girl, Brett Ashley, rather than the beautiful but damned Catherine Earnshaw, killed by her own ravaged desire and abandoned to limbo on earth: a ghost keening over the moors and thwacking her beloved’s windows. (Even I can admit that she’s a bit of a drama queen.) And it’s with good reason that we’re encouraged to be stone cold bitches in the professional sphere. No one listens to a weeping woman.
No one listens until we decide to make ourselves heard. This prevailing narrative—one that champions stoicism at all costs—perpetuates the stigmas with which women are harpooned: we cannot be too sad, or too fat, or too in love, or too depressed. We must whittle ourselves down, mind, body, and soul, our every inch contorted into decorum and cool.
But I cannot do this. I never could, and now, were I magically offered a serene disposition and the capacity for thin-lipped stolidity, I would hold fast to my own alluvion of feeling. It’s a matter of principle and of empathy, too. More than ever, I’m devoted to celebrating too muchness rather than maligning it. To fostering a climate in which we do not simply acknowledge, but honor the various ways a person can dwell in their body and navigate the world. Isn’t it glorious, and a blessing, that there are infinite ways to be?
So I will continue as I always have: as a woman who shows her hand with a flourish. I’ve joked, sometimes, that it would be cheating to claim honesty as one of my virtues because, when you lack a poker face, it’s nigh well impossible to lie. What a relief to gradually—at last—perceive my too muchness not as a public menace, a cause for my shame and for others’ repulsion, but instead as an agent of emotional integrity. A relief, indeed, although I cannot say that it is always easier. In Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, the titular character, wading into the London morning, looks out at the street and thinks, “She always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day.”2 Unlike Clarissa Dalloway, who silently senses and beholds all the world’s tremulousness, I cannot conceal what most stirs me; there is no smooth cohesion to my temper’s skin, no opacity. I can only offer myself in raw unmediated doses, never “this…or that”3—Mrs. Dalloway contemplates how she no longer regards people in these simplified terms—but as all things at once: warm and kinetic, cluttered, exuberant.
This vulnerability, not chosen, but a twinned insistence of soul and physiology, does feel perilous. It can seem, at times, as if I’m handing myself over to the world and hoping, desperately, that it won’t crush me between its fingers. And I have been crushed. I still prefer the risk. I prefer to feel it all, so as not to miss anything. We are all of us in danger, every day; it’s the consequence of a pulse. We cannot remedy the cruelest parts of being human: heartbreak and loss and the torments we endure as we excavate severe self-truths. But we can, I believe, build little harbors for one another.
While the burden of history rests on our backs, no one is forcing our hands. We can sound our desires and demand witness to our too muchness. It would be a continental shift, and one that would demand empathy and reflection rather than the championing of reserve—or vulnerability—for its own sake. But we’ve sure as hell endured far worse.
“You’re my favorite mess,” a male friend once told me when we were in high school. At the time, I thought it was quaint and sweet. After all, I referred to myself this way—a mess—habitually; my friend, in fact, was probably responding to a comment of that sort. How kind people were to handle me with patience—because I was someone who demanded handling like some fretful, mercurial species of bird. I learned myself according to others’ impressionistic remarks. When I was told that I was fragile, and crazy, I believed it. I assumed that these definitions could be depended upon for accuracy precisely because they were not my own and were therefore objective. There is no such thing as emotional objectivity—I knew this even then—and yet I succumbed to a fantasy fed to me through perceived consensus.
I am Too Much. I still type those words with trepidation, but soon I won’t. I am Too Much because the sun gleams through the crevices and crannies speckled inside my heart, and sometimes I am overwhelmed by its broad warmth. Sometimes it still bewilders me, the too muchness of this life, even when I know, finally, that I would not choose another. Instead, I watch those beams across the middle distance, steady, yawning, and yellow. It feels like hope, and just enough of it.
Acknowledgments
I am overcome with gratitude for so many people who have, over the years, offered themselves as shepherds, interlocutors, and mentors, in writing and in everything else. It feels impossible to fully communicate my thanks, but I’m going to try. First and foremost, I am indebted to my marvel of an editor, Maddie Caldwell, who inevitably understands what I am trying to say before I’ve said it, who asks the perfect questions, and who pushes me to excavate the heart of the thing—and, of course, who knows what is simply too cheesy to print. And to my agent—soul sister, really—Anna Sproul-Latimer, thank you for your conviction, which sustains me, for the warmth and steadiness of your support, and for being an incisive, clarifying reader of my work. I also so appreciate the support of Grand Central Publishing: in particular my wonderful publicist, Kamrun Nesa; my marketer, Alana Spendley; as well as Anjuli Johnson, my production editor; Becky Maines in copyediting; and Jacqui Young. And I’m thankful for the collaborative guidance of Anna’s colleagues at Ross Yoon Literary Agency, in particular Dara Kaye, Howard Yoon, and Gail Ross.
Thank you to all the exuberant women and nonbinary persons who shared their experiences with me for the “Loud” chapter; I am so grateful to you for your time and your insights.
Since girlhood I have been positively spoiled with brilliant teachers, so many of whom encouraged me in my writing and, through their tutelage, made me so much better than I would otherwise be: Elizabeth Aldridge, Gareth Clement-Noyes, Patricia Kenan-Herrmann, Ken Miller, Jacqueline Davis, Beth Camper, Andrew Jackson, Sara Reich, and Clare Kerr (I am sorry for being an abysmal chemistry student). And to Carrie Hilborn Gantt: Years ago, at a Parents’ Night, you told my parents that I would be a writer. I am still trying to earn your confidence in me.
I am also greatly indebted to my literature professors at the College of William and Mary, especially Suzanne Raitt, Melanie Dawson, Susan Donaldson, Carter Hailey, and Thomas Heacox. And to my mentors in graduate studies, Robert McRuer, Maria Frawley, Jason Rudy, Orrin Wang, and Sangeeta Ray—the capacious wisdom and insight you have imparted to me is beyond articulation.
Jonathan Auerbach, you have never failed to be at once a source of reason, comfort, and humor. Through you, I learned to teach and to think ever deeper.
Bill Cohen, my mind has been reshaped by your scholarship and pedagogy, and your mentorship is one of my life’s greatest honors.
Deborah Morse, every possibility began with you—with the Victorian novels we read together, the afternoons of drinking tea and chatting about those Victorian novels, and through it all, your steady, affectionate love.
So many artists and writers and thinkers nourished me as I wrote this book, though they might not know it; among them are Maggie Nelson, Marilynne Robinson, Elena Ferrante, Cheryl Strayed, Tori Amos, Jenny Lewis, Robyn, Carly Rae Jepsen, Jane Campion, Paul F. Tompkins, and Lin-Manuel Miranda.
My profound thanks to the writers whose work illuminates and whose kindness has buttressed me, especially Heather Havrilesky, Robin Wasserman, Rebecca Traister, Celeste Ng, Roxane Gay, and Alexander Chee.
Thank you to Stuart and Leah Johnson, who drove me to the hospital and, as a result, saved
my life. I am so fortunate that I lived under your roof.
To Hobo, who is a cat, but who, rightly, would expect to be included.
Sharon Alperovitz, you have my deepest gratitude.
To my community of friends, writers, and colleagues who astound and fortify me and who have been harbors across the years and miles: Devon Maloney, Caitlin Gibson, Becky Erbelding, Lindsay King-Miller, Chris Scott and Ona Balkus, Laura Lorenzo, Kathi Norden, Samyuktha Shenoy, Isabella Cooper, my shine theorists: Katie Stanutz and Liz DePriest, Kisa Lape, Jamison Kantor, Maura and Dan Collinge, Lisa Kirch and James Howes, Margot Anderson, Theresa Glatstein, Lucy Morse, Andy Black, Porter Olsen, Alex Afram, Briallen Hopper, Esmé Weijun Wang, Stassa Edwards, Helena Fitzgerald and Thomas Strickland, Vicki Lame, Mara Wilson, Evette Dionne, Alana Massey, Maris Kreizman, Josh Gondelman, Sarah Hagi, Beca Grimm, Nikki Chung, Jia Tolentino, Kat Chow, Alice Bolin, R. O. Kwon, Nicole Cliffe, Laura June, Jason Diamond, Anne Helen Petersen, Julie Buntin, Jess Bergman, and Joe Berkowitz.
Leigha High McReynolds: It is the profoundest understatement to say that I’d be lost without you. Here’s another understatement: You’re one of the best things to ever happen to me, and your friendship is both a blessing and an honor.
Thanks to my beloved Fairy Godmother, Diane Brassil, who joined my family long ago and whose heart and contagious delight have been precious gifts. And, of course, thank you for rescuing my snowman.
Thank you to my dear family, whose love is by turns a buoy and a lantern: Maria Martin—truly a second mother to me—and Glenn Martin; Michael and Jeanne Cote; Ben and Anna Cote; Eric, Justine, and Malcom Cote; Michael, Jill, Megan, and John Florio; Andrew, Daniel, Carolin, Ben, and Harriet Vorona; Matthew, Jackie, Lauren, David, and Kate Vorona; Nancy and John Quackenboss; Nick Selle and Elena Katherine Selle.
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