Too Much Book Review
Trigger warnings: suicide attempt; self-harm; explicit quotes from texts on gendered and ableist physical and sexual abuse
A few months ago, I read Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today by Rachel Vorona Cote because it was a $2.99 digital deal. I’m posting this review now, partly because it’s on sale again. I liked it overall, despite some minor issues. I agreed with Cote’s thesis: people who aren’t white, non-disabled, cis het men are especially marginalized as “too much” in various ways. This is particularly true if they have mental illnesses or other disabilities, are fat, or are considered “overly emotional,” even “hysterical.”
She writes best on literary examples juxtaposed with revelations from her own life. Literary examples include Alice in Wonderland, Madame Bovary, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Anna Karenina, Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables, Dracula, Ramona Quimby, Pippi Longstocking, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Cranford, Christina Rosetti, Emily Dickinson, Victorian BDSM erotica, Dickens, Austen, and George Eliot characters.
Cote describes Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, a lesbian vampire novella that predates Dracula, so well that I read it for the first time soon after finishing Too Much. Now, coincidentally, I see it mentioned everywhere: Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s back matter for Mexican Gothic, which I also liked, the horror movie The Moth Diaries, and my Book Riot coworkers’ articles.
When I recently re-watched the 2011 horror movie The Moth Diaries, I noticed all the parallels and references to Carmilla after reading Too Much. A character in the film even reads Carmilla aloud and in a predatory teacher’s class. It’s the same passage Rachel Vorona Cote quoted in Too Much: “You are mine; you shall be mine . . .”
Cote describes loving Lorde’s song “Liability” and Tori Amos’ and Loreena McKennit’s music, like I do. She mentions Salt ’N’ Pepa’s “Shoop” as an example of women’s sexual agency and empowerment in pop culture. I agree. I was amused when it was Maddie’s favorite song in Netflix’s Maid. It’s awful that the song uses the r-word, though. I noticed that even as a kid.
Cote’s book seems to interpret Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) as a possible pedophile infatuated with Alice Liddell. Cote’s interpretation of Alice’s body growing and shrinking is visceral, Freudian, and Kristevan. Other critics have compared Alice’s transformation to hallucinogenics or irrational numbers instead, as I mentioned on Book Riot last month. (Dodgson was a mathematician.) Cote relates Alice’s transformations to puberty and quotes letters from Dodgson, asking Liddell to “mourn with [him]” for her lost, prepubescent body. It sounds like he may have been attracted to her when she was a child — perhaps in a fetishizing way the Victorians may have failed to notice — but we can never know.
I remember reading that Carroll hated the way every illustrator drew Alice with blonde hair. Carroll insisted on dark hair, like his muse, Alice Liddell’s. I always thought that Carroll’s infatuation seemed similar to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan origin story and his friendship with the Llewyn-Davies kids. Both families had a sudden, mysterious falling-out with their adult friend.
I related to the chapter “Loud,” partly because my neurological disability can make tone and inflection hard to regulate. People also consider me over-the-top because of my OCD and cerebral palsy: obsessive thinking and inability to control my body language or facial expressions.
I always enjoy Cote’s online essays and how she weaves her literary and academic background and interests into her personal essays. I cited her in my personal essay for Book Riot on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles years ago. Too Much is frank about her sexuality, friend and romantic break-ups, suicide attempt, depression, anxiety, and self-harm. I appreciate the book’s candor, but if you’re interested in reading it, please note that these may be highly triggering topics.
The book also discusses documented self-harm by Catholic saints. Cote imagines they might have been seeking “transcendence.” Drawing from my own family’s Catholic background, I view these unsettling acts as attempts at atonement, over-zealousness for sainthood, or over-identification with Christ. Some saints deliberately gave themselves the five wounds of Christ’s stigmata, from which the word stigma derives, for example. It’s hard not to view them through the lens of today’s psychology, but I don’t want to imagine what people from centuries ago were thinking. Because these passages are so intimate, though, each reader’s interpretation of them may also be unique and visceral.
The book spends a lot of time on the movie Heavenly Creatures and its subject: the Parker–Hulme murder case. Juliet Hulme, one of the girls who murdered Honora Parker, later changed her name to Anne Perry and published mystery novels under that name. It’s undoubtedly an extreme example of a dangerous, all-consuming fixation with a friend, but that can’t explain whatsoever why the girls chose to murder the mother of one of them.
The final chapter, “Old,” mentions that Queen Victoria was considered “too old” when she had her 10th child at age 38. That reminds me of my mom’s “geriatric pregnancy” at 38–39, when I was born with cerebral palsy in 1989. Cote is right that these categories are porous and change over time, but they’re not even as antiquated as we may think.
There are some casually ableist clichés in this book like “turned a blind eye” or awkward phrasing regarding gender, like “women and femmes.” Most people, including liberal and progressive people, probably still don’t know this. It was published in early 2020 by Sphere (London) and probably took years before that to research and write. The language is typical for many other books published now.
The chapters on Britney Spears and institutionalization are good but somewhat lacking an intersectional, disability justice perspective. Elsewhere, it’s good regarding disability and intersectionality and acknowledges mental illness as disability. When analyzing a didactic, Victorian story about a misbehaving child, Cote writes that “it’s difficult to imagine any child without an acute psychotic disorder mimicking her villainy” (p. 31). I think I understand the intended point here, but it would be much better and clearer without repeating saneist myths equating psychosis with hurting other people. Again, these flaws are subtle, probably unintentional, and many disability-informed editors could have caught them.
The book was written and published when Britney Spears was still under conservatorship and before Demi Lovato came out as non-binary. If another edition is ever published, these examples and references to both pop stars could be updated. Though these sections became dated quickly, they were accurate when the book was first published. That’s inevitable when writing about current stars and pop culture. I disagree with some of its observations, but overall, I liked it a lot.
