Nan King’s Orientation in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet: A Journey of Gender and Sexual Self-Discovery Following “The Slantwise Direction of Queer Desire”

Elsa Adán Hernández

doi:10.2478/genst-2022-0005

Abstract

Abstract In Tipping the Velvet (1998), Sarah Waters explores the notion of “gender performativity” as studied by Judith Butler (1990, 1993). Its protagonist, Nancy Astley, becomes aware of her sexuality and comes up with doubts about her gender as responding to the stable label society has put on her. This naïve girl moves from performing gender on stage to cross-dressing off-stage amid the crowds of London, not following, as Sarah Ahmed (2006) puts it, “the straight line” (p. 70). The aim of this paper is to explain how this straightness – both in terms of direction and heterosexuality – is the term Nancy, later on renamed Nan King, does not feel comfortable with. Throughout the novel, Nan’s discovery of a whole world of sexual and identity possibilities leads her to look for her own orientation, as her position in relation to the rest of “objects” around her is a queer one.

Highlights

In the introduction of her monograph The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (2005), Jeanette King questions: “Why, in the last decades of the twentieth century, should so many women novelists have looked back a hundred years for the subjects of their fiction? [...] What, in particular, is the interest of Victorian constructions of gender and sexuality for modern feminists?” (p. 1)
As Michaela Weiss (2012) puts it, “returning to history, Waters is revitalizing the genre of queer romance and re-creating and recovering a context and a line which have been doomed to be invisible” (p. 51). Such is the case of the opera prima of this British author, Tipping the Velvet, published in the year 1998
It is no coincidence that the attentive reader will be able to recognise the presence and relevance of varied queer or sexual politics theories, as Waters makes conscious use of them in order to trigger new ideas or question wellestablished notions within our cultural parameters

Summary

Introduction

In the introduction of her monograph The Victorian Woman Question in Contemporary Feminist Fiction (2005), Jeanette King questions: “Why, in the last decades of the twentieth century, should so many women novelists have looked back a hundred years for the subjects of their fiction? [...] What, in particular, is the interest of Victorian constructions of gender and sexuality for modern feminists?” (p. 1). 1) and investigate further to uncover some thorny issues that may trigger numerous questions about our behaviour and the understanding of the world that surrounds us This novel was born as a result of Waters’s research work during her postgraduate studies, as it was created to imaginatively fill in those gaps in literary history left by the omission of homosexual writing she discovered during her research years. Gender and sexual politics seem to be, on many occasions, at the focal centre of public perception, and remain more alive than ever Drawing on these notions, I will try to prove that Waters’s rewriting of the Victorian topos of the female-to-male music-hall performer involves a transformation of the protagonist both on and, especially, off stage, and that every step of the way leads her to question certain social assumptions about gender and sexuality both in the Victorian period and nowadays

The limits of gender and Judith Butler’s performativity theory

Performing gender on and off stage

Nancy’s performative actions

Conclusion