Miss Havisham is an extreme, and admittedly bonkers, example, but there are countless others: more explicit than Miss Havisham and Estella, and less deranged, too, these same-sex intimacies flourish in Victorian fiction without, to our knowledge, stirring suspicion in even the most conservative corners. Wilkie Collins’s novel The Woman in White (1860) depicts the passionate devotion shared by half sisters Marian Halcombe and Laura Fairlie, who bemoan their imminent separation due to the latter’s marriage. “Poor dear Laura hardly leaves me for a moment, all day,” Marian narrates, “and, last night, when neither of us could sleep, she came and crept into my bed to talk to me there. ‘I shall lose you so soon, Marian,’ she said; ‘I must make the most of you while I can.’”4 Yes, Laura crawls into bed with Marian to talk, but Collins implies that their emotional closeness cannot be parsed from their physical affinity—to “make the most” of Marian communicates a full-bodied relationship: one shaped by caresses and love-flush, hushed tones.
Christina Rossetti invokes nearly identical language in her 1862 poem “Goblin Market”: an intensely homosocial and dizzyingly synesthetic portrayal of a young girl who, after being seduced into eating deadly magic fruit, idles at the edge of death. She attains salvation by lapping up the juice that streams down her sister’s face after a confrontation with the goblins (emphasis mine):
She cried, “Laura,” up the garden,
“Did you miss me?
Come and kiss me.
Never mind my bruises,
Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices
Squeez’d from goblin fruits for you,
Goblin pulp and goblin dew.
Eat me, drink me, love me;
Laura, make much of me;
For your sake I have braved the glen
And had to do with goblin merchant men.”5
Although “Goblin Market” ends with the abrupt and sanitized moral, “For there is no friend like a sister,” the poem carries a visceral physical charge. Laura clips a lock of her own golden hair to pay for the goblins’ fruit, a significant gesture because hair, both as an image and as a literary figure, evoked female sexuality. Victorian readers would have understood the act of cutting one’s hair as a mark of lost innocence. When Lizzie angers the goblins by resisting their overtures, she withstands their brutal attack and commingles the pleasure of renunciation with near-sexual violence. And, of course, the sisters’ intimacy, like that of Laura and Marian, is rooted in deep physicality—“Laura, make much of me,” Lizzie exclaims, as she drips head to toe with pulpy juice. Some illustrators have even interpreted “Goblin Market” as pornographic. But as scholar Dinah Roe observes, Rossetti “disguised Pre-Raphaelite realism with allegory and fantasy, thereby avoiding the critical outrage”6 that attended others’ work—like, for instance, Rossetti’s brother, Dante Gabriel. A painter and poet, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, together with those who shared his creative philosophies, met with scorn from Victorian critics, including Charles Dickens, for his keen sensual depictions of the day-to-day, on the canvas as well as on the page.
And of course, there’s the famously melancholy scene in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in which a young Jane crawls into bed with her dearest friend, Helen Burns, who is dying from consumption. It brims with the tender, unabashed love of two little girls who have been permitted so few choices and such skimpy happiness in their short, beleaguered lives. But for a slip of time, in the midst of suffering’s shadow, they are free to adore one another:
“Jane, your little feet are bare; lie down and cover yourself with my quilt.”
I did so: she put her arm over me, and I nestled close to her.
…
“How comfortable I am! That last fit of coughing has tired me a little; I feel as if I could sleep: but don’t leave me, Jane; I like to have you near me.”
“I’ll stay with you, dear Helen: no one shall take me away.”
…
She kissed me, and I her, and we both soon slumbered.7
There is no template for friendship, but this compassionate exchange between Jane and Helen—a declaration of love, and a farewell—has always seemed to me an antidote against the rhetorical scourge lambasting the too muchness of earnest, devoted companionship. Outside of heteronormative romance, we’re taught to be embarrassed to love one another this way; it’s the stuff of childhood fancy. As adults, we must renounce maximalist gestures before we commit ourselves as disciples to the temple of irony, where we filter so many of our most meaningful sentiments. Had Helen lived, she and Jane would have dedicated themselves to each other fully, just as they do in girlhood and perhaps even more so. But then, Victorian culture accommodated the maturation of female friendship, so long as it was not a hindrance to hetero-domestic affairs.
My friendship with Leigha was only a hindrance to my relationship with Nick because, as I contemplated my affections for her, an inconvenient possibility gripped my brain: maybe I simply didn’t love my fiancé enough to marry him. Maybe I wouldn’t revel so desperately in this love for my best friend if I also found romantic solace in the person to whom I had pledged myself.
I suppressed these prospects with all the violence of someone who knew them to be truths.
Years later, after I was divorced and remarried to my husband Paul, this lesson was substantiated, albeit elliptically. One sultry June night, I received an email from Amy, a dear friend from college, who informed me that she could no longer tolerate our friendship—could no longer, as it felt, tolerate me. In many ways this was my doing. Amy was smart, the sort of smart that’s sharp and urgent and that makes me fall in love with a woman before I’ve thought to say hello. She was an early champion of my writing career—and more confident in my abilities than I was able to be; I’d grown increasingly dependent on her for guidance and validation as I picked through the mire of my insecurities and, all too often, fretted the way so many of us do that I was an abject impostor. Amy became a gleaming target for my lifelong impulse: to find an outside authority on my life, and to trust them in lieu of myself.
In the meantime, my mother had been diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer—a week and a half before my wedding to Paul, in fact—and I found myself bewildered by these circumstances. Since graduating college I had both propelled and leaned upon a very specific narrative of myself: that I would complete a doctorate in English literature; that I would write predominantly in the service of highbrow academic pursuits; that my mother would witness this life I had determined as my destiny.
Suddenly, I was suffering pangs of vexing recognition: I no longer wanted to pursue an academic job, or to even complete my dissertation—or, more precisely, I did not want to complete my dissertation so much that I was willing to sacrifice even an hour of my new, fledgling writing career. And my mother—how much longer would she live? I reeled in this paucity of information and confidence. My selfhood, comprised of an acolyte’s devotion to the ivory tower, and of my imperfect but fiercely hewn relationship to my mother, was cracking open in protracted, sometimes exhilarating, and often terrifying ways. I turned to Paul, as always, and to Leigha. But I wanted Amy too, with a need that unsettled me, particularly as I began to discern her burgeoning irritation. I suspected that I asked too much of her—that she bear witness to my proliferating existential fears and reassure me of my capabilities and, whatever annoyances I engendered, that she treat me like a convalescing kitten. Yet I couldn’t stop.
I’m too sensitive to plead ignorance of my own desires; all the same, I’m impressively adept at tucking away scraps and shards of recognition—a thump in my gut or a fizzle in my upper chest or words, like fluorescent lights sizzling inside my head, “Kiss them!” “Kiss them!”—as if they had never manifested. Yet I knew that I had been attracted to Amy since college, although it had never occurred to me to say anything to her. At the time I had been in a relationship with the person who would become my first husband, and I was invested in maintaining what struck me as a reasonable and wise course. Because the
information had never seemed relevant, and because I’m especially disinclined toward romantic rejection, I pretended to myself, my audience of one, that these urges I had noticed were misinterpretations. But as my queerness asserted itself as an inviolable aspect of my identity, it became increasingly difficult to dismiss it as an insignificant personality wrinkle, although I knew there would always be limitations to my experience. Once I knew I wanted to spend my life with Paul, who is cisgender and straight, my interest in other genders struck me as little more than untried fruit on a platter, one that, when it sailed past, I had rejected by choosing something else. Still, sometimes, when Amy visited me, or when I sat close to her in a bar or a theater, I would consider, a little sadly, how any romance between us likely would have been a full-scale disaster, but that if she had been game, I could never have said no.
When Amy ended our friendship, everything I had always known and soundly ignored cackled in my face like a hyena. As far as she knew, she was rejecting my—admittedly imperfect—companionate affection. But it seared marrow-deep as a repudiation of unconfessed love. It didn’t matter, I realized, that I had always shied away from pursuing a relationship with her—that I had, ultimately, wanted Paul more. I had loved her too, as a friend, and as someone I had desired: mourning her, I realized, would be a wretched ordeal.
And so it has been. So it is. Losing her has been one of the great heartaches of my adulthood: exponentially more painful than leaving my first husband and, in some ways, more humiliating. I’ve cultivated something of a smugness about my performance as a friend: I always assumed myself to be an excellent one. When friends thanked me for my steadfastness, I was grateful, but I also lapped it up like a parched cat, delighted that I could continue to treat my fantasies as fact: I was Rachel, the Good Friend. The Best Friend, even. The Best Fucking Friend.
I am, mostly, a good friend. I’m reasonable enough to understand that the women in my life have saved me every time I’ve foundered, and that without them I would be a howling misery. I am empathetic, generally. I am loving, nearly always. But I was an inconsistent, sometimes greedy friend to Amy, and whether this unspooled from silent romantic affection ultimately doesn’t apply to the case. What I tried to be was a platonic friend, and when she judged me on that basis—when she considered how I measured up against what she wanted—Amy felt compelled to let me go.
In my more tempestuous moments, I’ve raged to Paul and to Leigha about how Amy treated me as Too Much, and how unfair it seems, how hypocritical when she knew and supported the premise of this book in its earliest stage. When she was, in certain ways, as Too Much as me. Once in a while I lapse into self-castigation and call myself a chump for struggling so in the wake of a lost friendship that, by now, has calcified. Sometimes, mercifully, I forget about Amy. Often enough, I remember her with something like empathy and sad acceptance. But every now and then, I feel a fool. I ought not—I know this. We have all shit the friendship bed at some time or another. But too muchness is already such a painfully stigmatized quality: when it becomes the grounds for rejection, we are predisposed to slip into self-loathing. It’s what society has tacitly asked of us, after all, in the interest of our rehabilitation. And yet I am fortunate. In the face of these sputtering waves of shame, for some, I have always been just enough.
* * *
As we contend with the juggernaut of heteronormativity there has been a fissure—for many of us, it’s not important that our relationships with women fit comfortably within that context. If “Goblin Market” were written today, Fox News would screech, “Incest!” When girls clambor into bed together onscreen, somewhere, an insecure buffoon crows, “Lesbians!” We are culturally resistant to the concept of continuums. Marcus points out,
The received wisdom has been that all bonds between women are structured by the opposition between women and men, and therefore that women must either be rivals for men or comrades in the fight against patriarchy. In the latter view, friendship, erotic desire, and sexual relationships between women are interchangeable, since all three are considered subversions of a heterosexual order that requires women to subordinate their bonds with one another to the demands of men.8
Lingering anxieties that this is the case, that it’s a cultural hazard whenever women are more interested in one another than in having sex with men, propels the impulse of social surveillance: to ruminate over feminine intimacy, to represent them in ways that shore up heteronormative male-centered institutions.
In cinema, Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha departs from the premise that female friendship is uniquely and independently sustaining and provides an innocuous but tellingly prescriptive cautionary tale against prioritizing one’s friendship with a woman and—this is the reasonable part of the film’s warning—losing one’s selfhood in another person. The titular character (played by Greta Gerwig) flounders precisely because she attempts to carve out a narrative in which she identifies herself through her best friend, Sophie (Mickey Sumner). When that friend commits to a romantic relationship and, consequently, distances herself from Frances, the latter teeters into an acute crisis of identity. There is a useful moral here, of course: don’t treat your best friend as a mirror. But Baumbach depicts Frances’s desire to grow old with Sophie as immature and even semidelusional. The movie does not merely imply that what Frances envisions is too much for Sophie, but that it’s too much for any friendship (and we know this is not the case). Despite a worthy message that we thrive best when our dreams and desires are not tied up in others’ agendas, the film doubles down on the importance of Frances quitting her romance with her dearest friend.
The beginning of Frances Ha posits Frances’s unhealthy attachment as the result of tightly hewn intimacy that she cannot accept as rooted to a specific moment in female twenty-something adulthood. Early in the film, Frances and Sophie are cozied in bed. The light is dim; shadows brush across their faces like gauze curtains. Frances asks, “Tell me the story of us.” The title character delights in the romantic plot Sophie proceeds to sketch because it promises to activate a grand narrative, one that sits in marked contrast to the protracted stasis that otherwise defines Frances’s professional life. As a twenty-seven-year-old apprentice at a New York modern dance company, she cannot yet call herself a professional dancer; she is only “someone who dances.” While Sophie has already begun to carve out a niche in publishing, Frances scrapes together teaching gigs for peewee ballet classes to make rent.
And yet, at the beginning of the film, Frances impetuously shrugs off these material concerns. She instead dwells in transient moments of shared intimacy with Sophie: roughhousing in the park (“Not the hair!” squeals Sophie, the more particular of the two); drunkenly popping a squat in the subway; acquiescing to Sophie’s nightly demand that Frances sleep in her bed—so long as she removes her socks. Each woman has lovers, but committing to anyone but Sophie registers as far-fetched to Frances. And, for the time being, Sophie refers to her own boyfriend, well-moneyed dudebro Patch, with diffidence.
Reciting the Story of Us—a fantasy in which the two are wildly successful, regularly vacation in Paris, and choose lovers over husbands—slakes Frances’s thirst for a life narrative that is, yes, immeasurably fulfilling but more vitally marked by lasting togetherness. It signifies a pact, both sacrosanct and noble, intertwining Sophie’s life with hers. Ambitions, sex, love: these are threads woven through the grand tapestry of two women descending upon the world, arm in arm.
But the Story of Us is not, we quickly learn, the story Sophie actually envisions for herself. After Frances surprises Sophie with a romantic post-work picnic early in the film, the two board the subway, and Sophie’s attention swivels to her iPhone. Her standoffish behavior prompts a chagrined Frances to ask, and ultimately insist, that she be privy to the conversation. And so we learn: Rather than renew her lease with Frances, Sophie wants to move to a swanky Tribeca neighborhood ludicrously out of her best friend’s price range, and she has waited until the day before confirm
ing to tell Frances of her plans (this is a shit move on Sophie’s part). And so, the ur-text of their friendship rendered obsolete, Frances must rummage and fumble to assemble a different life than the one she anticipated. Her plot points, once fixed, are now scattered and roving, simultaneously throwing into question who Frances will be if not, first and foremost, Sophie’s friend.
Thus the film begins to chronicle Frances’s process of relinquishing a bundle of dearly nurtured fantasies, most of them tethered to Sophie. And when Sophie moves to Tribeca and becomes goopy-syrupy monogamous with Patch, Frances must come to terms not only with Sophie’s abiding absence, but also with the fictions that have propelled her faith in their shared future.
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