Allusion in Tipping the Velvet

Through Diana and Florence, Sara Waters reveals differences in class through different preferences in literature. Diana is the rich and vicious widow bitch who rescues Nan from the streets. Diana keeps her collection of erotic pamphlets and novels hidden away in a trunk in her bedroom, which seems to be the approach of the wealthy. Not wanting to be associated with the 'Tom's' (Kitty's word for openly gay women), the wealthy hide their risque books and magazines. Admirably, the snobbish Diana helps produce a magazine on Suffrage, but considers Nan, the oyster-shop girl, too low class to gain anything from reading it.

Florence's taste in literature are quite different. Being the socialist activist who gives Nan a home after Diana throws her out, we come to understand her as being sensitive, intelligent and romantic through what she chooses to read. Florence spends much of her time working for Women’s Cooperative Guild and the union. Each night, Florence labored for the cause by writing, reading, comparing pages, and addressing envelopes. Through Florence, Nan discovers Elenanor Marx and Walt Whitman. For Florence, the intellectual writers were more of a source of stimulation than pornography. Sharing her preferences with Nan (they read out loud to each other) added the intimacy that solidified their relationship.

Lesbian Audiences

Something that struck me from the reading we did for Tipping the Velvet was the idea that Waters was quoted as targeting the book "primarily towards lesbians." It was a curious quote that came up during the Tipping presentation - the idea that a book can have a targeted aesthetic audience, as opposed to a target market audience. It seemed to me to be kind of a strange statement at first - why would the book need to "appeal" to lesbians more than any other demographic? Surely it could appeal to a rather broad spectrum of readers? But that got me thinking about the reasons one writes a novel. If one wants to make money, universal appeal (or as close as you can approximate) is certainly the way to go. But if one wants to talk about gender analysis and deconstruction, and has the focus of being read by a sympathetic or at least content-literate audience, then certain other ideas become easier to make work. Once you have the lesbian audience in mind, you can highlight certain elements of female or lesbian literature. That first-person vs. third-person argument, for instance. The movement of time and the structure of the plot, focusing on character development over external action. The attention to details associated with the feminine eye or perception. It's interesting to think about how the choice to appeal to lesbians influenced the style of Tipping the Velvet.

In Part Two of the novel, Nan has become very self centered. My annoyance with her started with how she treated Mrs. Milne and Gracie when she left to live with Diana. She knowingly makes promises to them she will not keep and only has very fleeting regrets about leaving them. She has somewhat if a one-track mind that is again seen in her willingness to drop everything in order to start a new life with her partner. When Nan left her family for Kitty, she seemed more upset about leaving even though she was quickly consoled by the prospect of being with Kitty. Unlike Diana, Nan was driven by her love and adoration of Kitty and by Kitty’s love of her. (At the time one does not know if this love is romantic but it is clear that Kitty genuinely cares for Nan.) With Diana, Nan just seems driven by the “500 days of pleasure” since she knowingly goes just to be Diana’s “tart” instead of wanting a real relationship.

Throughout her time at Felicity Place, Nan becomes more enamored with herself (Diana’s house is aptly named with felicity meaning happiness, delight, pleasure, which seems to be all Diana and Nan are concerned with). She spends all day primping and admiring herself as Diana dresses her up in fine clothing and gives her every luxury imaginable. Diana then dresses her up for her friends and Nan comments, “being admired by tasteful ladies—well I knew it wasn’t being loved. But it was something. And I was good at it.” She becomes more impressed by herself and her performances as she spends different paragraphs describing her looks and calls herself “almost unsettlingly attractive.”

Nan’s also begins to emphasize more material things as she only thinks of all her luxurious possessions when she is kicked out of Felicity place and later begs to collect them. As her and Zena wander the streets she keeps talking of Diana and is incredulous that she kicked her out. Even her proposal, in a desperate sort of way, seems half-hearted and selfish. Nan asks, “It won’t be so bad, Zena—will it? You’re the only tom I know in London, now; and since you’re all alone, I thought—we might make a go of it, mightn’t we?” Though in her desperateness I felt sympathy for Nan, I was somewhat glad that Zena left her.

Conveniently Vague

Once again, I want to talk about how the Outsider status of many of our protagonists is influenced by the necessary absence of familial obligations/limitations. Tipping the Velvet is a special case - unlike some of our other protagonists, Nan is neither orphan nor runaway nor grieving daughter, but rather a girl given fairly free rein which she eventually uses to simply leave. Nothing terribly climactic, she just starts living her own life and moving from relationship to relationship, situation to situation. Perhaps the closest example of such easy, passive independence is Lolly Willowes, another feminist read, which got me wondering if that's one of the motivations. Is it a male construction to introduce conflict or tragedy in order to fulfill the orphan fantasy? Perhaps it's a conscious decision on Waters' part to downplay the domestic drama in order to focus on the more important issues of Nan's life. Coming out to your family is supposed to be one of the biggest steps in the path of realized homosexuality, but I think that for feminism's sake, Waters deliberately moves past that to make it about the more nuanced post-adolescent development period.

While reading Tipping the Velvet, I kept thinking how a writing a Victorian novel from a modern perspective influences the text. I thought Fin made an interesting point about how Waters tells the story in a more approachable way than Dickens. She sets up a historical context without the implied understanding of the setting that Dickens uses to address his London audience. Waters creates a setting and language for the reader without assuming that the reader knows about the subject but also without spoon-feeding the information. She uses Nan as a narrator that tells the story as if she is talking with a person, starting the novel by directly addressing the reader with the second person. She then establishes the setting and vocabulary through context clues and carefully chosen details. Waters uses the word queer several times to create a double meaning between the definition at the time the novel is set (Strange, odd, peculiar, eccentric. Also: of questionable character; suspicious, dubious) and the connotations it carries now (of or pertaining to homosexuality). She mostly uses queer when all three meanings can be attached. As Danielle said, it makes the most sense meaning peculiar or of questionable character. However, it is also usually related to Nan’s feelings for Kitty or to dressing in man’s clothing. The modern reader can connect these things homosexuality and therefore to what many people considered (and sadly still consider) “of questionable character.” I was trying to figure out what this double meaning accomplished because it seems to reinforce homosexuality in a negative light. I think Walters must have used this to show the origin of the word queer and emphasize society’s opposition to homosexuality.

Sensitivity in Tipping the Velvet

What is certainly exceptional in Waters' novel is the care she uses in depicting the lesbian relationship. By creating a innocent, honest and open-minded central character in Nan, the reader is able to nearly take this provocative journey of self-discovery along with the main character instead of viewing it from the standpoint of an outsider. With sensitivity and an intimate perspective of the relationship through Nan's viewpoint, Waters is able to take some of the sting out of a relationship that might be difficult to understand by some. Nan is paralleled with Kitty, the character who questions her true identity.

Lavish detailed descriptions evoke a realistic quality, such as describing the warm of her love interest's clothing and the sensuality in her manner. Comparisons between the societal difficulties of homosexual relationship during the Victorian era and present day immediately and effortlessly spring to mind. One questions if a relationship of this nature would be so simplistic in the 1890's?

Water chose a most erotic, yet almost common topic for the opening of the novel-- oysters. The satirical plot of a person of low social class attempting to survive in a corrupt society has been seen in other bildungsromans we have read this semester. We have no overtly evil characters yet. It seems that our characters are forced to deal with their inner demons as a motivation to develop in this work.

Nan seems to be experiencing infatuation with Kitty during the first part of the novel. We are learning to understand her almost completely through her relationships with others. It will be interesting to see the other types of loves she experiences as the novel progresses.

While I found Esty’s argument somewhat compelling, and I do think he drew some interesting claims that could, possibly, be substantiated, I could help but feel like much of his paper had the air of someone grasping at straws. From my reading of The Story of an African Farm, I didn’t feel like there was much of a focus on colonialism. As we discussed in class, I think that a feminist reading of the novel is much more supported by the actual novel itself. Sure, Esty could (and did) find some things that he could make fit into a reading on colonialism, but reading his paper kind of made me wonder how much license we, as readers, have when interpreting a novel. Where do we draw the line between looking beyond the literal and exploring underlying meanings, and reading too much into something? Just because you can find bits and pieces of a story that you can make fit into some hypothesis or idea doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily valid to do so, and while the literary acrobatics can no doubt be impressive, are they worthwhile? I think that I would be more accepting of Esty’s argument if I felt that there was more of an overtone concerning colonialism in the story, but I just didn’t feel that there was. I feel like we would have had to see more of colonialism at play, and we really didn’t. It goes beyond Schreiner being racist in the typically nineteenth century way – there wasn’t much evidence of the native Africans, period. And to me, colonialism isn’t colonialism if the native population isn’t figured into the picture somehow. Even if Schreiner was focusing on the effects of colonialism on the transplanted Europeans, there still has to be some sense of their interactions with the community and people around them. I don’t feel like there is in Story of an African Farm. I’m pretty sure Schreiner could have taken this farm and plopped it down in Louisiana, Ireland, Germany – any place you can think of – and the story would have turned out much the same.