Too much How Victorian constraints still bind women today

In her first book, Vorona Cote blends the personal and the academic to explore the enduring legacy of Victorian ideals of womanhood. These ideals seemingly held women on a pedestal but, of course, only women who were white, straight, and cisgender, and conformed to particular behaviors. Vorona Cote posits that society, then and now, censures women for their too muchness : for being too big, too loud, or too expressive. She mines Victorian literature, today's pop culture, and her own experience in chapters that explore topics like women's friendships, sex, mental health, and aging, to show how non-conformists are still labeled as hysterics, just using different language. While seeing the relationship between Jane Eyre and Britney Spears or Miss Havisham and Madonna is fascinating, Vorona Cote's combo of criticism, theory, and memoir gets muddled at times, and her thesis gets lost in the personal (and vice versa), while her writing runs the gamut from academic to confessional. Readers who enjoy a feminist take on pop culture, à la Bitch magazine, will be right at home.--Kathy Sexton Copyright 2020 Booklist

Cote, a former PhD candidate in Victorian literature at the University of Maryland, traces the "unspoken rules" that govern the expression of women's emotional and physical desires to 19th-century medicine and culture in this vigorous, wide-ranging debut. Noting that "hysteria" was a widespread medical diagnosis given to Victorian women exhibiting all kinds of "inappropriate" behavior, from sighing and sudden laughter to self-mutilation, Cote analyzes how writers including Elizabeth Gaskell, Christina Rossetti, and the Brontë sisters "contemplate the circumstances of women in an age when emotion was so viciously policed and pathologized." In chapters devoted to mental health, infidelity, body image, ageism, and sexual desire, Cote confesses to her own "alluvion of feeling" and relates personal experiences, including a suicide attempt and the end of her first marriage, to characters and plots in Victorian literature and figures from modern popular culture, including Britney Spears, Lana Del Rey, and "Stifler's Mom" in the movie American Pie. She conclusively shows that women have been "emotionally trussed for centuries," and empowers her readers to embrace their "too muchness" as an "agent of emotional integrity." Though Cote's blend of memoir, criticism, and history sometimes feels unfocused and idiosyncratic, her overarching arguments are apt. Readers whose tastes run from George Eliot to Lorde will embrace the book's feminist message. (Feb.)