Each chapter’s one-word title - crazy, horny, loud, old - encapsulates a charge leveled against women throughout the ages, followed by an illuminating discussion on the topic that supports the author’s thesis.Įmbedded in each chapter are Cote’s often harrowing memories of her own life of “too muchness”: of her struggles to contain herself within the cultural boundaries of acceptable female behavior and the fallout from that struggle, and of her eventual (perhaps ongoing) acceptance of herself and her outsized personality, boundaries be damned.Ī scholar of Victorian literature, Cote uses this solid foundation to build her insightful observations on the Victorian age, as well as on modern culture. It is as much a memoir as a work of impressive scholarship it is as comfortable parsing the cultural meaning surrounding Britney Spears’ public disintegration as it is analyzing the feminine mores conveyed in obscure 18th-century texts aimed at improving girls and women.Ĭote develops her unifying theory of “too muchness” through both broad and detailed exploration of European and American culture over more than two centuries. The happenstance resulted in a one-two punch: I was doubly reminded of the many ways women are both silenced into invisibility and simultaneously accused of being “too much.”

This book will tell the story of how women, from then and now, have learned to draw power from their reservoirs of feeling, all that makes us ‘too much’.It was simple coincidence that I happened to read Rachel Vorona Cote’s first book, Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today, immediately after finishing Rebecca Solnit’s memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence. An erstwhile Victorian scholar, she sees many parallels between that era’s fixation on women’s ‘hysterical’ behavior and our modern policing of the same in the space of her writing, you’re as likely to encounter Jane Eyre and Lizzie Bennet as you are Britney Spears and Lana Del Rey.

Rachel Vorona Cote braids cultural criticism, theory, and storytelling together in her exploration of how culture grinds away our bodies, souls, and sexualities, forcing us into smaller lives than we desire. Written in the tradition of Shrill, Dead Girls, Sex Object and other frank books about the female gaze, Too Much encourages women to reconsider the beauty of their excesses – emotional, physical, and spiritual. Lacing cultural criticism, Victorian literature, and storytelling together, Too Much explores how culture corsets women’s bodies, souls, and sexualities – and how we might finally undo the strings.

Too much book rachel vorona cote