Too Much
Page 13
Lately, in my distress, I’ll long for my mother, only to recall that conversation at the cusp of her death, which traveled the topical route of weight loss. I am not angry with her for this, but the recollection of it unmoors me anew, amidst the ambient fog of stress, grief, and a body image that, always tenuous at best, sometimes has the tendency to rapidly deflate. The varying vectors of my too muchness—emotional, mental, physical—converge to produce a body dysmorphic mêlée, and I am undone as a result.
Here, another person might be able to supply a sunny summation to this testimony; I cannot. But if writing has, at times, whittled me down to my rawest self, it has simultaneously etched out a pathway to something better (I suspect this may be the paradox of creative endeavors). I see, in my purview, the possibility for what I know and what I feel to melt together and stiffen like a fist. Because I know that Ella Adelia Fletcher penned a truly monstrous tract of drivel. I know, too, that Little Dorrit ought to have eaten her own dinner with relish, rather than safeguarding it for her feckless father. And I certainly know that one should never model their aesthetic on a person suffering from an acute bacterial infection in the lungs. But when we are fat, when our hair defies gravity, when our noses are not perfectly pinchable, we’re interpreted as wild and unruly, and often foreign. This—I know, I feel—is good. We remind all those buttressed and soothed by patriarchy that we cannot always be trusted to comply and, thus, we become threats, fuses primed to be lit.
Chapter Six
Crazy
There is no looking glass here and I don’t know what I am like now. I remember watching myself brush my hair and how my eyes looked back at me. The girl I saw was myself yet not quite myself. Long ago when I was a child and very lonely I tried to kiss her. But the glass was between us—hard, cold and misted over with my breath. Now they have taken everything away. What am I doing in this place and who am I?
—Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
In many ways, singer Lana Del Rey’s aesthetic cultivates a familiar and well-traveled celebrity image: white Old Hollywood glamour, feminine vulnerability that quivers like petals in rain, and luxuriant sex appeal. She sings with a sweetness that oscillates between girlish conspiracy and world-weary languor. But then, there’s something else, too, something less expected. According to her lyrics, she’s a little bit fucked up—not to an incapacitating degree, mind you, but enough to broadcast a tragically intense sensibility.
This is to say that Del Rey often refers to herself, sometimes obliquely but very often explicitly, as “crazy” or “insane.” In the 2011 single “Born to Die” from her second album by the same name, she croons, “You like your girls insane,” indicating through the song’s romantic nihilist context that she is one such girl. On the same 2012 album, “Off to the Races” couples insanity with drunken vulnerability—Del Rey is the unhinged damsel in distress par excellence: “’Cause he knows I’m wasted / Facing time again at Rikers Island / And I won’t get out / Because I’m crazy, baby / I need you to come here and save me.” On “Cruel World,” the first track on her 2014 album Ultraviolence, she spins a self-mythology of the sad party girl with these languid verses: “Put my little red party dress on / Everybody knows that I’m a mess, I’m crazy, yeah.” (Contrastingly, the love interest to whom the song is addressed is “crazy for [her].”) Ultraviolence especially trades in this variety of depressed chic, with songs like “Sad Girl” and “Pretty When You Cry”; the latter in particular exemplifies our cultural fetishization of feminine sorrow. No ugly crying for Del Rey, that’s for certain, only elegant distress, free of snot and gulping sobs.
Still, her hyperperformative ennui is sly—Del Rey is never fully self-effacing, and her investment in the fantasy implies that it could be just that, a tongue-in-cheek presentation of eroticized sadness that has endured since Ophelia. To some extent, this is likely the case. And yet, because the nuance is not wholly perceptible, and ultimately dependent upon interpretation, the image sticks to Del Rey all the same, rendering her desirable through her specific hyper-feminine emotional fragility: a woman who, by her own account, is both fucked up and down to fuck; sad, but never too far gone to paint her pout into a deep crimson.
It’s an option exclusively available to white women—to claim to be both genteel and crazy, delicate and ever so slightly unhinged. And when, on her 2017 album Lust for Life, Del Rey shifts—for the better, I would argue—toward more assertive emotional nakedness, the transition is amply oiled by her Caucasian beauty. Decisively embracing her melodrama is an alternative afforded to those whose too muchness is considered more socially palatable—to those who need not resist the stereotypes of walloping mental instability ascribed to people of color, particularly black women. Although “In My Feelings” seems like a sort of anthem to too muchness—Del Rey sings about crying into her coffee and in the middle of orgasm, only to demand, with sopranic defiance, “Who’s doper than this bitch? Who’s freer than me?”—it’s white privilege that permits her to elude the gooey label of mental illness and rearticulate herself according to a new, more puissant interpretation. For that matter, it’s that same privilege that enables her to claim a wild vulnerability as fortifying and empowered.
Modern Western society has for centuries pathologized women’s mental health, medicalizing and stigmatizing any aberration from so-called psychological normalcy. Women have long been encouraged, through medication and sundry other means, to suppress the symptoms of mental illness into invisibility, grinding the serrated edges of our emotional expression into smooth, palatable visages. In the meantime, as Anglo and American culture have explored this capacious and unwieldy matter, they have both fetishized and aestheticized it, diminishing and refashioning psychological suffering as something cute, tame, and thoroughly whitewashed. In the broadest terms, mental illness is too muchness with a diagnosis. Of course, in an effort to butt against prevailing conceptions of mental illness, we should never present struggles with depression, anxiety, or any other psychiatric condition as uniformly positive phenomena. It is not for us to speak for others: too muchness, and what it means to inhabit it, can only be assessed by the individual, and experiences of it are endlessly specific. However, because it is already dangerous to live as an “intense” or emotionally voluble woman, the social atmosphere is doubly inhospitable to those who contend with chemical imbalances and the ways in which they manifest themselves. And because American culture shudders in the face of most visible feminine excesses, liberally affixing the label “crazy” to any socially inconvenient behavior, the labile boundaries between emotional intensity and diagnosable illness are always collapsing, rearticulated by hegemonic masculinity not as fundamentally personal experiences to be interpreted by the individual, but as conditions unworthy of distinction, significant only as symptoms that must be suppressed.
In some ways, cultural receptions of women’s mental health can be understood as elaborated reactions to “ugly crying,” a term coined by Oprah Winfrey and overwhelmingly tethered to femininity, which has taken on a life of its own. Superficially, it refers to crying with such gusto that one’s face is slick with fluids and contorted in an unappealing way. Actress Claire Danes is often regarded as the patron saint of ugly crying (think of that tragic moment in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet when she, the titular heroine, awakens to realize that her true love is dead and, before choosing death herself, heaves heavy, viscous sobs). There is, too, the ubiquitous Kim Kardashian meme in which her face is crumpled, mid-weep. But referring to crying as “ugly” gestures to a culture that is agitated by acute misery, that recoils at the illegibility of a woman’s face when, ensconced in the depths of her distress, she does not, cannot, think about her impact on those around her. It registers as disgust and secondhand embarrassment, thinly veiled, masquerades as downcast eyes and about-faces, a retreat en masse from a woman wailing that she wants to die. Barring the instances where they coincide with “genius,” struggles with mental health, in all their gnawing, raw real
ity, do not merely render a woman stigmatized for her illness, but for her deviation from sexual desirability and femininity. By gussying up the image of women’s mental health, we have condemned anew the—so-called—madwoman to the attic.
Fictionalized representations of women’s mental illness reveal the extent to which we circumscribe representations of suffering; even what is deemed appropriate to view from a safe distance is limited. Predominantly focused on white women’s experiences, nineteenth-century Anglo culture’s influence upon tacitly approved aesthetics for “crazy” women accounts for the endurance of these whitewashed narratives. Romantic and Victorian writers were fascinated by mental illness and by society’s anxiety over its relative invisibility. At the time, perspectives were evolving regarding care for mentally ill patients: an 1845 article in the Westminster Review claims that “a pervading air of comfort and cheerfulness” circulates throughout institutions rather than buildings “erected after the fashion of prisons or dungeons” where “lunatics” were chained and whipped and altogether handled with brutality.1 These were urgently necessary reforms. Nonetheless, it is unsurprising that nineteenth-century Britons, including authors, did not always convey sympathy for those who were variously afflicted.
In Jane Austen’s 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice—and in its multiple adaptations—Mrs. Bennet’s fretfulness is presented as comedic absurdity, an index of her dullness and incapacity for serious thought. For many of us, our image of the much aggrieved Mrs. Bennet is shaped by British actress Alison Steadman, who performs the role in the BBC’s 1995 miniseries with deft, whooping buffoonery. Austen likely would have been delighted by the performance and considered it a faithful rendering: after all, her narrator evinces precious little respect for the character. “Her mind was less difficult to develop,” writes Austen of the Bennet matriarch. “She was a woman of mean understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she was discontented she fancied herself nervous. The business of her life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and news.”2 The novel treats Mrs. Bennet not only as a simpleton, but also as a hypochondriac whose anxiety over her daughters’ marital futures is both trivial and a fruitless monomania. And yet, as a mother of five daughters and no sons in an era when women could not inherit property, her ruminations over suitable husbands are not unfounded. Once Mr. Bennet kicks the bucket, the family home, Longbourn, will be wrested from them and delivered to his nephew, the simpering Mr. Collins.
As readers, we also have reason to believe that the Bennet daughters have little to no fortune of their own. Their father, for all the disdain with which he regards his silly wife, is by no means as strategic as he might have been, having assumed that he would, at some point, sire a son. All this is to say that Mrs. Bennet’s fears, albeit expressed with a certain trill vacuity and often without consideration of larger contexts, are fundamentally reasonable. And perhaps if she were depicted as possessing more grace and poise, the narrator might ask us to consider the burden of mothering a team of daughters with no means to care for them if she outlives her husband (Mrs. Dashwood of Sense and Sensibility is, for instance, treated far more kindly in similar circumstances). But we’re meant to regard Mrs. Bennet as years past sexual appeal and almost pathologically foolish; her anxieties and hypochondria are only concerns due to their social ramifications. Her overeagerness to pair off her daughters, most particularly Jane, the eldest and prettiest, backfires in the most flamboyant ways when they’re in polite company. Mrs. Bennet, to say the least, is not stifled by subtlety, and can cause the more reasonable members of her family acute embarrassment, particularly the novel’s heroine and second eldest Bennet daughter, Elizabeth. We are concerned for the girls’ welfare, to be sure, but not because Mrs. Bennet has sounded the alarm. And as for her motherly concern and the strife it engenders, we are hardly asked to consider it at all.
Although Austen gestures to mental instabilities in characters like Mrs. Bennet or Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne Dashwood, she is characteristically subdued and gracefully snarky, maintaining her focus on the comedy of English manners. By contrast, Victorian sensation novelists like Mary Elizabeth Braddon waded eagerly into the subject, and in so doing poked at the larger cultural solicitude surrounding the obscure diagnosis of “madness” and the fear that it would contaminate healthy minds like so much London smog. In Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), her most famous novel, Braddon writes,
Mad-houses are large and only too numerous; yet surely it is strange they are not larger, when we think of how many helpless wretches must beat their brains against this hopeless persistence of the orderly outward world, as compared with the storm and tempest, the riot and confusion within:—when we remember how many minds must tremble upon the narrow boundary between reason and unreason, mad to-day and sane to-morrow, mad yesterday and sane to-day.3
Lady Audley’s Secret is a murder mystery, but it is above all a near-claustrophobic examination of the titular Lady Audley, or Lucy Graham, a young, somewhat trivial woman of mysterious origins who marries the gentle, middle-aged Sir Michael Audley and, soon after, is implicated in the disappearance of George Talboys, the dear friend of her husband’s nephew, Robert Audley, who not a few believe to be in love with George: he ultimately marries Clara Talboys, who bears a striking resemblance to her brother. Robert embarks on a dogged search for his missing friend, and in the process learns that Lucy has, over the course of her short life, assumed multiple identities and committed a slew of crimes in order to achieve the comforts of wealth and to divest herself of her legacy: lunacy. The women in her family have suffered an unnamed but apparently severe mental disease, and her mother was confined to an asylum when she was young. Lucy’s grandmother, we learn, died in a similarly unraveled state.
Lucy functions as both a vessel for Victorian domestic anxieties and as an avatar for the larger fears engendered by “madness.” She does the unspeakable: abandons her child and husband and, through the allure of physical charms, achieves upward social mobility at a time when those with power and wealth relied on social hierarchies both for cultural coherence and as a means of ossifying their plush station above the unwashed masses. Lucy’s mental illness, then, not only signifies the perils of female sexuality—and what it might conceal—as well as the instability of the female psyche, but also the contamination of the upper class by an unworthy interloper (aristocratic Victorians were not especially concerned with diversifying the gene pool). But Lucy’s lifelong terror that she is, by virtue of her lineage, doomed to insanity evokes the marrow-deep terror among contemporaries that their own blood could be sullied and that they could therefore do nothing to prevent their own mental deterioration.
And say one did suffer from a psychological affliction—the stain of stigma upon one’s family would be indelible. Moreover, though care for the mentally ill was finally becoming more humane, a Victorian asylum was by all accounts a dismal place, and in literature it is proffered as the ideal spot to disappear a person who is dangerous, or merely inconvenient. It was regarded as such beyond the page, too. In February 2019, letters revealed that Charles Dickens, weary of his wife, Catherine, attempted to have her imprisoned in an asylum. The couple had been wed for two decades, and Catherine had borne Charles ten children while he cultivated his literary celebrity. But Dickens was eager to persist in his affair with Ellen Ternan, a young actress, and Catherine Dickens was clear as to where she stood in her husband’s affections. She confided in a friend, Edward Dutton Cook, that her husband no longer loved her and that he had exerted disturbing efforts to displace her. “He even tried to shut her up in a lunatic asylum, poor thing!” Dutton Cook wrote. “But bad as the law is in regard to proof of insanity he could not quite wrest it to his purpose.”4 Unquestionably, Dickens’s treatment of his wife was atrocious—there’s hefty evidence that Dickens was not an especially pleasant specimen of man—and it’s fortunate that the law, so often the enemy of women, did not facilitate his lurid scheme. For, as Dutton Cook
indicates, that was not necessarily a given. There’s good reason that the “mad-house” lurks as an obscure menace in nineteenth-century fiction; it needles readers with two simultaneous fears: that they could be insane without knowing it, and, moreover, that they could somehow be wrongfully imprisoned, even condemned to madness through an erroneous life sentence—or, in Dickens’s case, through a manipulative lie—in which they are locked up with “crazy” folks. Braddon’s narrator could be considered empathetic—we’re all mad here, as the Cheshire Cat tells Alice, and isn’t it a beastly trudge when we’re concealing a soul that’s in turmoil? But Braddon’s depiction of the easy slippage into insanity is almost certainly meant, first and foremost, to titillate, to remind readers that they could, unbeknownst to them, be walking among “mad people,” that the symptoms are not always written on the body in a way convenient to those who wish to discriminate.
Disability, like any manifestation of otherness or marginalized difference, is habitually treated as a means of negative identification: we define ourselves against that which we are not, or more appropriately, against the things we fear or consider loathsome. Too muchness, while by no means synonymous with disability, typically yields a similar reaction. When we mark something as excessive, we shore up our confidence that we perform according to social metrics of appropriateness. We are neither too emotional, nor too talkative, nor too sexual, nor too agitated—and so forth. When it comes to mental illness, we’re especially thirsty for clues that buttress our own normativity. “There’s always a touch of fascination in revulsion,” writes Susanna Kaysen in her mental illness memoir, Girl, Interrupted. “Could that happen to me? The less likely the terrible thing is to happen, the less frightening it is to look at or imagine. A person who doesn’t talk to herself or stare off into nothingness is therefore more alarming than a person who does.”5 Braddon’s titular character is the former—distractingly beautiful, harboring a disorder that is mostly imperceptible and, when it is revealed, vaguely, elliptically rendered: