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A Quazi-Book/Movie Review/Academic Romp Through Tipping the Velvet
As with most MUST READ and MUST SEE books and movies, it usually takes me about five years before I get around to reading/viewing them. I'm also particularly hesitant when it comes to lesbian fiction because they tend to be god-awful (Rubyfruit Jungle, Desert of the Heart) or dated and depressing (The Well of Loneliness, Stone Butch Blues). This was, however, not the case for my recent consumption of Tipping the Velvet, both the novel by Sarah Waters and the BBC TV series (2002) adapted by Andrew Davies (Pride and Prejudice, Bridget Jones' Diary). The book is on many a dyke's Top 10 list, was a New York Times Notable Book and was remarkably Waters' debut.
The story is set in nineteenth-century Victorian England and is told from the point of view of Nan Astley, an oyster shucker born in the small seaside town of Whitstable, who falls in love with Kitty Butler, a male-impersonator working the music halls, thus beginning her coming-of-age narrative that reads like a roller coaster of interior monologues, sexual discovery, and startling revelations in the seamy underbelly of London. From dresser to drag king to male prostitute to kept boy and puppet to an upper-class society of Sapphists and finally to nanny/housekeeper to a Socialist feminist activist and her brother, Nan's life at times reads more like "Days of Our Lives" than a period piece, and the BBC adaptation definitely plays up the campiness of the book's theatrical trappings. The film has a kind of music video quality to it, a drug-induced frenzy of color and motion, which whimsically captures some the different performances that Nan embodies on her quest for self-discovery. In one sex scene, the camera crops close to the two women's faces, occasionally inverting them to negative-like, alien coloring. (Is there a term for this? Jonny? Anyone?) I'm not sure of the cinematographer's intentions here--if not to graphically illustrate the baring of the two girls' souls...or to highlight the aesthetic contour of their skulls? Moments like this brought out the Moulin Rouge-quality that I find ocularly offensive, but they were few and far between and there were enough hot lesbian sex scenes to distract me the rest of the time.
Another testament to the campy element of the book/series is that all of the reviews I read used the word "romp" in some fashion. The definition of romp, according to dictionary.com, is to "frolic boisterously," which is a campy _expression, in and of itself. I think this paragraph is becoming a bit romp-like, so I'll let it alone. But, I thought it was interesting, nonetheless, how pervasive the word was in my "research." Well, one more thing: Nan's stint as a male prostitute. Here she is, sucking cock in back alleys for "a sovereign a pop" to the tune of carnival music and sweeping close-ups of the men she's servicing, all giddy and eye-lolling. I think one of them even mouthed "wheeeeee!" An otherwise serious change in Nan's life, the scenes encapsulating the experience are treated as comedic and farcical.
I was a little less disappointed with the film's ending than I was with the book--which paralleled too closely the prototypical coming-of-age narrative, in that she becomes essentially married to Flo and settles down into a comfortable role of domesticity. In the film, Nan returns to the stage to pursue her former glory sans Kitty. Maybe I'm a sensationalist at heart but I didn't believe Nan and Flo's relationship resembled anything like romantic love. Their ideals and personalities are at war with each other, which is illustrated at the Socialist rally, when Flo says,
"'You have not sat and listened to one speech here today; I suppose you have not so much as glanced at one of the stalls. All you have eyes and thoughts for is yourself; yourself, and the women you have--'
'The women I have fucked, I suppose you mean'" (453).
The one thing that keeps them together, in essence, is their sexual chemistry--but Nan has that with all her lovers, even the cruel Master Diana. Diana is a fascinating addition to the story--extravagant, bold and ruthless. She lures Nan into a kind of pleasure prison, plucking her off the avenue of male prostitution and fashioning her into a product specifically for her lavish tastes. It is here that Nan begins to discover the perversity of her situation.
"In the next room all was hushed and still. I turned to the trunk again, and lifted its lid...On a square of velvet lay the queerest, lewdest thing I ever saw...
It was, in short, a dildo. I had never seen one before; I did not, at that time, know that such things existed and had names. For all I knew of it, this might be an original that the lady had fashioned to a pattern of her own.
Perhaps Eve thought the same, when she saw her first apple" (241-42).
It is curious that the introduction of Diana and the dildo is her first form of awareness in regard to the "perversity" of her desires. Most would see Nan's stint as a rent boy as "perverse," but she does not describe her desires as "lewd" or "queer" until her relationship with Diana. Nan experiences all manners of wealth, comfort and pleasure in her performances at Felicity Palace, where she is kind of talking window display for Diana and her rich Sapphist friends by day and sex slave by night. Nan is hyper-aware of the role she is expected to play with Diana. "We were a perfect kind of double act. She was lewd, she was daring but who made the daring visible?" (Waters 282). Dianas desire cannot be daring without its visibility to someone else, without an audience, which mirrors Nan's desire as well.
This brings me to the elements of performativity that consume the entire novel, and particularly, Nan's identity. Nan adapts herself according to the way she feels others perceive her, mediating between boundaries of gender identity, sexual identity and sexual behavior. In this way, we as readers never really get to know our protagonist because of the discursive shifts and loopdiloos she takes us through in her pursuits of an "authentic" self. These shifts in identity are most obviously noted in her name changes. She starts off as Nancy Astley, becomes Nan Astley when she is Kitty's dresser, becomes Nan King when she is star of the theatre halls, becomes "the boy" or Neville King with Diana, then back to Nancy Astley when she becomes housekeeper to Flo. Performativity is the one constant in Nan's chameleon-like existence. Even as a renter, she says, "My one regret was that, though I was giving such marvelous performances, they had no audience.I would long for just one eyejust one!to be fixed upon our couplings: a bold and knowing eye that saw how well I played my part" (Waters 207). I would argue that part of Nan's allure, indeed her ability to survive the various worlds she traverses, is her resistance to definition.
Nan exposes the flaws and fractures that exist within categorization and the social constructions of gender and sexual identity. "I saw a little card: Respectible Lady Seeks Fe-Male Lodger--there was something very appealing about that Fe-Male. I saw myself in itin the hyphen" (211). Nan's self-representation lays in the interstices of marginalization, in the liminality of each performance. By embracing her ambiguity, the "hyphen," the between-ness of the sexual landscape, Nan effectively counterbalances the dominance of the socially powerful (the gentlemen she sexually services, Diana and her lesbientourage, etc.) and reconfigures them to meet her own needs as the situations arise. Even at the very end of the book, after Nan spurns Kitty's last advance, realizes she's in love with Flo and ready to embrace Socialism, she admits that performing for other people is the only way she knows how to live. "You were right, what you said before...Oh! I feel like I've been repeating other people's speeches all my life. Now, when I want to make a speech of my own, I find I hardly know how" (471). The book itself (and the TV series) are composed in three parts, similar to the three acts that make up most plays, which adds another element to the performativity of its structure, in addition to the concluding line in the novel. "From the speakers' tent there came a muffled cheer, and a rising ripple of applause" (472).
And of course I have to throw in the universal anecdote that accompanies every moderately successful queer book or film: the disclaimer. "Readers of all sexes and orientations should identify with this gutsy hero as she learns who she is and how to love"(Newsday). Breeders beware! You too might like this book--but not because you're gay or anything, right? |
