What comes to your mind when you think of Victorian England? Confining corsets and waist coats? Strict moral codes? Chimney sweeps? All true. However, in Sarah Waters’s novel Tipping the Velvet, gender roles and other societal expectations of the Victorian time period are flipped on their heads when she writes queer characters who are free to live uncloseted, gender bend, and go to gay and lesbian bars without fear of being ostracized or —worst of all—imprisoned for “sexual deviance.”
The concept is intriguing, and fans of Virginia Woolf’s classic 1928 novel Orlando may find many parallels between the two works, as both books’ main characters make gender transitions in order to challenge gender roles. However, Waters’s novel, unlike Orlando, undermines its overall message when it makes a villain out of its bisexual characters or simply kills them off—something that has often been a staple in older gay and lesbian novels.
Published in 1998, Tipping the Velvet begins with eighteen-year-old Nancy "Nan" Astley, a sheltered, small-town Victorian-era girl who works at her family restaurant by the sea. When she first appears, Nan is a lowly oyster-shucker with a male beau, complying with the societal expectations of the time. However, she goes through a sexual awakening when she goes to the local theater and claps eyes on performer/ male impersonator Kitty Butler for the first time. The two girls become friends and then lovers, eventually moving together to London when Kitty is offered a new performing job in the big city. Before long, Nan joins Kitty’s act as a male impersonator herself. However, after a tumultuous breakup, Nan and Kitty go their separate ways and our heroine continues her journey of self-discovery, alternating between presenting herself as a woman and as a man depending on the circumstances in which she finds herself.
Waters has, in short, created a fantasy world where queerness, while not celebrated by the general population, is visible rather than completely invisible.” After all, Kitty’s male impersonator show is attended by a wide audience, rather than just by lesbian attendees. However, when Nan confesses to her older sister Alice that she is hopelessly in love with Kitty, Alice (who was once her best friend and confidant) shuns her. Likewise, Kitty is afraid of living openly as a lesbian with Nan for fear of what others would think of them. These instances are some of the more realistic elements of the novel, as it reflects the consequences queer people faced when they met a partner but could not act on their feelings publicly—or at all for fear of being ostracized by the rest of society. Waters (who, incidentally has a PhD in English Literature), knows these historical implications and willfully imagines what it would have been like to have queer communities with which her characters can associate. These groups range from the casual lesbian bar setting to the evil Diana’s group of friends who objectify Nan and other male impersonators.
Still, for all its apparently sincere attempts at imagining a safe space and community for its queer characters to live, Tipping the Velvet takes an alarming position when it comes to its possibly bisexual characters, Kitty and Lily. For instance, when Kitty decides to marry a man who she is attracted to, she asks Nan to remain her lover on the side. This feeds into the still widely-held notion that bisexuals cannot “make up their minds” and betray their gay or lesbian partners in exchange for a heterosexual relationship. Similarly, another (possibly bisexual) character named Lily dies tragically in childbirth in the home of her forbidden lover, Florence. In older queer novels, there is a common trope in which one partner dies tragically. Although these are minor characters and our protagonist Nan lives to the end, conventionality rules in favor of allowing a “true” lesbian relationship to develop between Nan and Florence.”)
Could Tipping the Velvet be a millennial audience’s Orlando 2.0? Hardly. Aside from the Victorian euphemisms that would make anyone blush (the reviewer will leave it up to the reader to figure out what “tipping the velvet” means), Waters creates a fantasy world where only some of its queer characters have a sense of community. Although both novels explore gender-bending and experiment with worlds that accept queerness to a certain degree, Tipping the Velvet’s execution does not live up to its promise, villainizing bisexuals or killing them off as a plot device.
