‘The curiosity with which that fist moves’: Lesbian erotics in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet and Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music

Abstract

Lesbian neo-Victorian novels such as Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet and Emma Donoghue’s Frog Music feature representations of lesbian erotics that are engaged in contemporary discourses of desire in opposition to Victorian pornographic assumptions that pathologize the lesbian subject. Because neo-Victorian cultural production according to Heilmann and Llewellyn engages with reinterpreting and rediscovering the Vicorians, lesbian authors return to that period in order to interrogate where and how lesbian desire might manifest and how that desire can be implicitly converted into a subversive form of power. Waters and Donoghue represent lesbian sexual connection through erotically charged consumption and sadomasochistic consummation represented by moments of lesbian vaginal fisting in an effort to usurp traditional and overdetermined heterosexist ideas of lesbian erotics. Consumption/consummation reinvest the lesbian with erotic power in the neo-Victorian novel.