In class, we talked about whether Tipping the Velvet was more of a coming of age novel or a coming out novel. One thing that I thought was interesting about this question when it was posed was that it seemed to assume that the two were necessarily mutually exclusive for Nan, which I didn’t feel was the case. For Nan, I felt like her coming out and coming of age were inextricably bound together, and much of her journey toward discovering herself and growing up was tied to her becoming comfortable with and understanding her own sexuality. In the beginning of the novel, it almost didn’t seem like Nan thought of herself as a lesbian – she seemed to just think that she had fallen in love with Kitty. She didn’t love women, she just happened to love a person who happened to be a woman. Part of this, I’m sure, is due to the fact that Kitty seemed so vehemently against the idea that anyone might perceive them to be “toms”, but there still didn’t seem to be any sense from Nan that she understood herself to be a lesbian. However, as the novel progresses, through her interactions with Diana and Florence, I think we see Nan come to the realization that she is a lesbian, and start to embrace this. I think that along with Nan’s playing with gender representation, experimenting with her presentation of herself and somewhat blurring those gender lines, Nan’s entering into these relationships and sort of discovering that she is a lesbian are really the driving forces behind her development as a character and a person in the novel. Throughout the novel, we see her negotiate her ideas about her own gender presentation and sexuality, and I think that this is a big part of her growing up, and I think this is what forms the basis of her coming of age tale.