But as the text takes great pains to emphasize, this parasitic relationship is not one shared by two girls, but rather a girl and a monster, the latter of whom must be divested of her femininity so that she can be butchered by a cadre of vampire hunters. In the aftermath, when Carmilla is dead—irreversibly dead, that is—Laura filters her experiences with the lovely and mesmeric vampire through the antiseptic rhetoric of dehumanization:
The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons…It will never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victim. But it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship.12
Queer women were not ubiquitously visible in Victorian England, but of course they existed, and were not necessarily in hiding: diarist Anne Lister, a nineteenth-century lesbian landowner who engaged in a string of liaisons and, later, married her wife, Ann Walker, with a ring ceremony, supplies just one example of a queer Victorian woman living with relative openness.13 But Lister’s marriage never received official sanction, and as Le Fanu’s novella indicates, the notion of two women in love was, for many, perfectly unthinkable, so much so that a woman who loved another of her sex was no woman at all, but an unholy monster. This sort of paring, Carmilla insinuates, could only be the “resemblance” of real passion, a perverse, translucent imitation of sanctioned marital bliss—or, for that matter, of the chaste feminine bonds deemed appropriate by Victorian standards of etiquette.
To conceive of too much love, a “crime against nature,” the Victorians unwomaned the woman. It’s no coincidence that this kind of conceptual gymnastics also characterized nineteenth-century documentation of female murderers and their subsequent executions. In order to absolve the violence of hanging—violence visited upon a body that could beget and sustain life—lawmakers reasoned that the crimes that sent women to the gallows, often infanticide, evacuated them of womanhood, thereby, through ironic and brutal calculation, creating a warped form of equality between the sexes. Writes Laura Thompson, “The authorities executed women who had become ‘unwomanly’; who had behaved in a manner so unnatural that it rendered them equal indeed with men, and obliterated any special privilege of gender.”14
Heavenly Creatures might not divest Pauline and Juliet of their femininity, but it does insist upon the girls’ self-imposed isolation, as if suggesting that a contorted friendship like theirs could only emerge like a virus sequestered in a petri dish, something impossibly rare and undiluted by the dross of the greater world. And it’s certainly tempting, because their narrative is so bloody, to read Juliet and Pauline as exceptional, to believe that, like Carmilla or the impoverished baby murderers of Victorian England, they must be of a uniquely hostile sort, girls gone wild with bloodlust. But in many ways they are not. They are lonesome and dissatisfied and ravenous for mutual adoration. That night, with Juliet’s departure imminent, they are merely seeking union—to glut themselves on another, to beat back what beckons next.
Killing Mrs. Parker, the girls reason, will ensure they’d never again risk separation. So, together, Juliet and Pauline bludgeon Mrs. Parker in the quiet of the woods. Her daughter strikes first, but each takes a turn crushing the brick deeper into the woman’s skull. But with each ruthless thrust, they visibly come to realize that this botched and insufficient plan could only work in Borovnia, where desires can be witched into fact, ideas into events, where the world always aligns with your reading of it.
The film staggers to its bloody end: Juliet and Pauline, full of spite and desperation, complete their gruesome matricide. We return to the launching ship, the vision in black-and-white turned nightmare. Juliet stands on the deck, flanked by her parents, while Pauline is bound on land. And so, Pauline is left where she began that first day at Ilam, adoring her princess from afar, and this time knowing—wretchedly, definitively—that the gaping maw she sought to close was always determined to rip apart. Her chase is finished, but not because she’s free. Out in front of her has always been futility; she only needed to acknowledge it for the race to be won.
* * *
It would be more comfortable for us to regard Heavenly Creatures as the far-fetched stuff of nightmares, to assume that the too muchness of Juliet and Pauline’s intimacy is wholly unique from the relationships we navigate. Certainly, most of us are—thankfully—not in the practice of plotting murder whenever we’re threatened with separation from a beloved companion. But that yen—to collapse into each other, to love and love and love without quotidian interruption, is also present in Baumbach’s Frances. More recently, Robin Wasserman tackles the muddied boundaries between girl-love and girl-lust in her 2016 novel Girls on Fire. But rather than encourage panic, Wasserman interrogates patriarchal anxieties even as she draws out the teenage girl’s capacity for violence. Yes, teenage girls love more fiercely—and are more powerful—than we might want to admit. They’re capable of violence, and of bloodthirst, and maybe they’ll chalk it up to the love of a girl. Maybe, like Carmilla, that love and the compulsion to gnash one’s teeth are too tangled to parse.
But what is even more compelling than a bloodthirsty friendship is the particular terror with which we consider two girls willing to kill for each other, a fear so poignant we’re quick to imagine it as an epidemic. Heteronormative ideology follows slavishly in the Victorian footsteps of Sigmund Freud: it presumes that without a civilization rigidly arranged around straight white men, women will mutate into Juliets and Paulines, gorge themselves on myopic girl-love, and brutalize anyone who raises an eyebrow. We will luxuriate in our so-called “hysteria,” stoke its fires, let it burn. Or, at the very least, we’ll stop paying attention to men’s demands, gradually realizing that there is more freedom to be found in one another. That, like Laura and Lizzie of “Goblin Market,” our salvation is located in the love of women, rather than in the grand erect institutions of men.
Nick was wrong to suppose that my friendship with Leigha damaged our relationship; in fact, her presence made my circumstances more bearable. And whereas Nick and I are now divorced, Leigha and I remain as close as ever. She and my current husband, Paul, get along swimmingly. It is Paul, in fact, who has soothed my devastation over Amy, who listened with patience and love as I admitted—to the two of us—the long history of my attraction, never doubting that I loved him less. We are hasty to pathologize intimate female friendships because such fervent same-sex romance seems irrevocably incompatible with heterosexual arrangements. But it’s not necessarily; and even if it were, that question is beside the point. The pathologized Too Much friendship reminds us that we build lives with diverse people and in myriad ways. Heterosexuality’s purchase on “normal” has been impressed upon us, not earned. We’re at liberty to blur the lines and chase whomever we choose.
Chapter Five
Plus
A week or two before my first wedding, Nick approached me with a frank request: After we were married, could I please not grow “fat”? He muttered his query through a bashful grin, acknowledging its distastefulness, but nonetheless conveying that he was in earnest. Nick remarked that he had observed a trend in which the wives of certain acquaintances had gained weight early in their marriages. He then articulated his wish that I would not lapse in a similar fashion; besides, he enjoyed having “the hot wife.”
I don’t precisely recall how I responded to Nick, although it would have been characteristic of me, at the time, to merely acquiesce, perhaps with a giggle that affected indignance. But I saw Leigha soon after, and when I mentioned it to her, she responded with bald disgust. How dare he, how objectifying and so forth. Yet we didn’t belabor the topic for very long: I was going to marry Nick—the wedding gears were doggedly churning, seemingly without the opportunity for pause. His remarks were unfortunate, but at the time they didn’t signal any worrisome traits—in part because I was dis
inclined to confront any indication that we were incompatible, but also because I was accustomed to monitoring my body with anxious and unforgiving scrutiny.
As a girl I was reedy thin and board-flat. When one of my friends began wearing a bra in fifth grade, I beheld my own nipples with despair: they were nearly flush with the rest of my chest and stomach. I feared that I was cursed to eternal booblessness. When—WHEN?—would my frame soften into those rounded contours that I so admired on my friend and on other, more amply developed women?
The answer, I would eventually learn, was high school. By ninth grade I had developed some semblance of a figure, enough so that when I tried on a skin-tight, powder blue dress in Guess, Mom refused to buy it for me, hissing, “Rachel, look at your ass!” (Unbeknownst to me, said ass had affixed itself, perhaps in the dark of the night.) For a year or two, my concerns with self-image, although pernicious, rarely extended beyond my face, which I believed to be a hodgepodge of abominations, most of which were located in my nose, pronounced and curved along its ridge. Since middle school my nose had prompted male classmates to make deprecating suggestions of rhinoplasty, and in sixth grade one boy devised for me the straightforward, if not especially inventive, moniker “Nose Girl.” From time to time I would even catch my mother eyeing it while we were drinking coffee at the kitchen table. I would watch, as if in slow motion, her focus meander from the conversation and settle decisively on the center of my face. I’d squirm.
“What, Mom?” I would demand, already anticipating the answer. And so it followed.
“It could just be fixed so easily,” she would respond, tracing in the air, as if on an invisible easel, precisely how a doctor could shave off wedges of bone and cartilage in order to resculpt my nose into something less conspicuous.
Each time our conversations took this agitating turn, I became immediately upset, sometimes tearful, and demanded to know why she didn’t think I was beautiful just as I was.
“Oh, I do, I do,” she would assure me. And I believed her—both because I wanted to and because, even then, I suspected that my mother’s own preoccupation with aesthetic symmetry sprung from the ruthlessness with which she regarded her own appearance—and, yes, specifically her nose.
By senior year of high school, my face was no longer the prevailing site of my body dysmorphia; that feeble grace period concluded abruptly. I wavered between the American sizes four and six when the prospect of losing “five pounds”—an infamously ubiquitous aspiration—first reared its odious head. All at once, it was ever-present and unyielding, this new, nagging concern over whether my body was appropriately barren of fat. I began to compare myself to my friends: the circumference of my limbs, the curvature of my stomach. Meanwhile, Mom cautioned that if I did not take care, I would surely gain weight in my hips and rear end. I began to drink SlimFast shakes and fretfully grab at the fleshy slope of my abdomen.
Now, in my early thirties, my body is both healthy and, for better or for worse, conventional. This is what I tell myself. However, it’s not always what I am told. I have been sternly lectured on the necessity of a diet by certain well-meaning people, including one gynecologist who told me, as she administered a breast exam, that if I wanted to have children, my first order of business was tightening up. “Babies are wonderful, but we don’t have them to improve our bodies,” she quipped, her fingers padding along my bosom. Donning an oversize paper towel, my feet indecorously suspended in stirrups, I found myself ill-prepared to issue a suitable rejoinder. Instead, I gulped back tears.
In the course of my adulthood thus far, my body has enjoyed one brief respite from judgment. Immediately after leaving my first husband I received a bevy of compliments on my figure; even I had to admit that I was more lithe and taut than I had been since college. Six months prior, I had been hospitalized for a suicide attempt and had spent the months immediately preceding and following it plagued with stress-based stomach illness. Fights with Nick often culminated in bouts of late-night diarrhea.
When Paul and I began dating, my quotidian gradually smoothed and brightened, and my stomach regained its equilibrium. As a result, I gained weight. I worried quietly the way most of us do that the body I possessed was unacceptable because it was not some other body: one that is slimmer or that boasts more defined muscles or—irony of ironies—one that is less encumbered by breasts. Nonetheless, my social privilege is substantial because, in terms of corporate marketing, my figure isn’t marked as excessive: I can locate my size in stores, although jeans are something of a gamble. My weight is rarely mentioned unless I broach the topic myself—the exception being when someone suggests that my health, or my author photo, would benefit were I to shed a few pounds. Painful moments, to be sure, and ones that have sent me reeling, but I know many women endure them—and I also know that these passing interventions could be far worse.
Still, the body image rigmarole has become wearisome: establishing a gym routine that is inevitably disrupted by a gaggle of deadlines; crying when Paul tells me that I’m beautiful because it has never been easy for me to trust in those words; ordering diet pills that I take for a week before confiding what I’ve done to Paul (he asked me to flush them, and I did); developing a healthy diet and telling myself that doing so is its own benefit—but as my figure abides, I grow aggravated. Even for someone like me, someone with a common and predictable body that is, if not glamorized, then tolerated, the demand to love oneself becomes a drudging game of whack-a-mole when everywhere present are prickling reminders that your body is too ample, too soft, and too unruly.
* * *
Female bodies have long served as battlegrounds for men’s warring anxieties, although ideals of beauty have mutated over the centuries. But one of femininity’s recurring ordering principles has been to limit and regiment the space we physically claim. Typically, we approach this conversation in terms of weight; and, to be sure, American culture has fostered a noxious environment for women of all sizes, especially those regarded as fat. “In Western society, fatness is interpreted as failure,” writes Anne Helen Petersen in Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud. “It’s a health issue that’s transformed into an ideological affliction…Modern capitalist society hinges on its citizens’ constant drive to consume, but the successful American is someone who’s able, whether through genetics or self-regimentation, to contain the effects of that consumption.”1 In all of its manifestations, too muchness is disparaged as a lack of control, generally the result of unregulated emotion. While the excesses of capitalism are accepted as part of America’s ideology of progress, consumption—particularly female consumption—must never be rendered visible through embodiment. Those effects, as Petersen argues, must be rigorously circumscribed, the process itself mystified through whatever means necessary to maintain a female body that is unassuming in size and girth.
But whether we’ve directed our glare toward weight or muscles or thick thighs, Western society has always reduced women to their fragmented parts, and in so doing, has condemned our bits and pieces as criminally Too Much. The racialized, sexist ideology that scrutinizes women’s body size holds true for conversations about hair, breasts, and even noses. A body without symmetry, or that defies patriarchy-approved measurements, is charged with wayward excess. After all, a body that reads as untamable or defiant dredges up anxieties over all that female bodies can do—and how little men understand them.
Weeks before Mom died, as we sat at the kitchen table—no coffee now; her stomach no longer tolerated it—I burst into tears. To be sure, crying when your mother is dying from cancer is not unexpected. During those miserable months I was always one gulp shy of a sob. But I had mostly avoided these emotional overtures when we were together because I didn’t want her to feel guilty for circumstances beyond her control. This time, however, was different and propelled by greater selfishness. My sisters, both of whom are beautiful and fit according to socially accepted metrics, had briefly joined us, and they turned the conversation to exercise and weight loss. M
eanwhile, my day-to-day had become particularly sedentary, as I struggled to finish a slew of freelance assignments while beating back anticipatory grief. When my sisters retreated to their rooms, I crumpled.
“Am I fat?” I choked out. Self-disgust burbled in the deep of me.
Mom regarded me gently.
“You are a little overweight, honey.”
Another time, I might have sought to defend myself or yelled at her for harboring obscene expectations that were born from her own protracted sense of inadequacy—despite what others told her, I do not know that my mother ever realized she was a beautiful woman. Even in the midst of her cancer treatment, she would bemoan the necessity of—what else?—losing five pounds. It’s not unlikely that her concern over my weight was partially residual projection, not to mention an index of her own anxiety about dying. For Mom, death meant the uttermost inability to care for us; it was forced abandonment.
I recognized all this and realized that I would have given a kingdom for the promise of Mom nitpicking over my appearance for another thirty years. So I hung my head in shame, a slumped white flag. Whatever I was—a little overweight, average, fat, fine—I felt as if I had failed her. I didn’t ask for reassurances or for her to mitigate her assessment of me. Beyond this, my recollection of the remaining conversation is muddy, save for a comment or two about the dangers of carbohydrates and Mom’s own confusion about my transformation from scrawny girl to voluptuous adult—how had it happened, she wondered. It was not the sort of conversation one hopes to have with their dying parent, but then, it was comfortingly consistent in its own warped way. She never meant to hurt me, though she knew precisely how, and nobody loved me more. Somewhere tucked into the exchange—I do not think I am imagining this—her soft eyes sought my own, a gaze shadowed by the fluffy turquoise beanie safeguarding her head from wisps of cold.
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