Too Much
How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today
by Rachel Vorona Cote
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
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Pub Date Feb 25 2020 | Archive Date Sep 01 2020
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Description
A weeping woman is a monster. So too is a fat woman, a horny woman, a woman shrieking with laughter. Women who are one or more of these things have heard, or perhaps simply intuited, that we are repugnantly excessive, that we have taken illicit liberties to feel or fuck or eat with abandon. After bellowing like a barn animal in orgasm, hoovering a plate of mashed potatoes, or spraying out spit in the heat of expostulation, we've flinched-ugh, that was so gross. I am so gross. On rare occasions, we might revel in our excess--belting out anthems with our friends over karaoke, perhaps--but in the company of less sympathetic souls, our uncertainty always returns. A woman who is Too Much is a woman who reacts to the world with ardent intensity is a woman familiar to lashes of shame and disapproval, from within as well as without.
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. 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. 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.
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."
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781538729700 |
| PRICE | $19.99 (USD) |
| PAGES | 352 |
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
Emma F, Librarian
Rachel Vorona Cote's Too Much is a deeply interesting examination of the ways that Victorian's objectified women and blocked off what they were allowed to be. She looks at what happened to women when they went beyond the tight boundaries that society established for their expression, and who took it upon themselves to draw those boundaries in the first place. A first rate work of pop history, Too Much is sure to draw the eye of many readers.
Review to be posted upon publication.
Kali T, Reviewer
From this day forward, if I catch any woman saying she is "too much", she's getting a copy of this book. It took me years of recovering from abuse to realize that I might be "too much", too loud, too emotional, too crazy for some people... those are not my people. This book is a reminder to women everywhere that being "too much" is the only way to be.
Deanna O, Reviewer
This book is very near and dear to my heart. Rachel Vorona Cote talks about “Too Muchness” which I’m sure many of you are familiar with: too loud, too large, too imaginative, too sexual, too irreverent, too independent, or you take up too much space.
The author examines how the Too Muchness of women in Victorian were treated and then ties it to how women are still limited, stifled, exiled, caged, and bound by those philosophies today.
Each chapter is about a different type of Too Muchness and embedded in these themes are beautiful, deeply vulnerable personal stories.
I savored this book. Rachel Vorona Cote wields her academic prowess and sharp eye with an incredible clarity and sturdiness. The English major inside delighted in taking a deeper look at the fictional women who inhabit our cultural landscape and discovering new ways to understand them (and myself). (There is a chapter that includes Alice in Wonderland that is so insightful.)
Full disclosure: The author is a friend of mine, but that doesn’t change the fact that I adored this book.
Thank you to NetGalley and Grand Central Publishing for the eARC in exchange for an honest review.
Readers who liked this book also liked:
Jodi Picoult; Jennifer Finney Boylan
General Fiction (Adult), Literary Fiction, Women's Fiction
