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Too Much: How Victorian Constraints Still Bind Women Today
£3.70£19.00 (-81%)
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.
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’.
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Additional information
| Publisher | Sphere (23 April 2020) |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Hardcover | 352 pages |
| ISBN-10 | 075158052X |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0751580525 |
| Dimensions | 16.2 x 3.2 x 24 cm |
by The Rodent
I would be the first to admit that I am not American and I tend to be rather literal minded. The main thrust of the book is concentrated on exploring “muchness” and dropping loads of book titles into the text. The effect of Queen Victoria’s reign (1837-1901) on attitudes to women is barely touched upon. The term “muchness” seems to refer to societal tendency to want women to be self-effacing and quiet which is, presumably, supposed to have started during Queen Victoria’s reign and still persists today. OK, clever you Ms Rachel Vorona Cote, look at all the books you’ve read, I’m impressed. What I question is whether the suppression of so called “muchness” actually started during Queen Victoria’s reign and if not why is it labelled ‘Victorian Constraints’. I must confess at this point that, far from having read the book from cover to cover, I gave up early on and then read random sections to see if it got any better so I may have missed something. I cannot deny that the convoluted text is very learned and clever but, for me, tedious and unreadable.