50 pages • 1 hour read
Sarah WatersTipping the Velvet
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 11-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary
Nan observes that Diana’s marriage has been erased, with no sign of her husband. Diana is 38 when she meets Nan, has no children, and employs only female servants. When Nan tells Ms. Milne that she has found a new place to live, Gracie responds badly, sad that she will not see Nan again. After she collects her things, Nan walks back to Diana’s carriage, parked out of sight of Ms. Milne’s house. As she returns to Diana’s home at St. John’s Wood, Nan sees Florence waiting for her outside the talk about women’s and labor rights.
Over dinner, Nan asks Diana how she maintains her lifestyle without secrecy and with safety. Diana explains that she found Blake, one of her servants, in a reformatory, serving time for having relations with a house maid. After dinner, they have sex, and Diana commands Nan to sleep in her room afterward.
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary
Nan relates the circumstances of her “confinement” at Diana’s house (268). Surrounded by perfumes and luxury, she has no real relationships with the other servants, including Blake or Ms. Hopper. Diana, Nan relates, often goes without her to visit other friends. When she returns, Diana insists on Nan’s attention, rousing her to unlock the chest that holds the dildo called “Monsieur Dildo.” Diana often looks at lesbian erotica with Nan, who finds the material foreign and odd.
One day, Diana tells Nan that they are buying a suit for her “coming out,” a term that means entering public society as a woman eligible to be married in Victorian Society. She describes the intricate suit—its light-colored linen, cufflinks, and handkerchiefs. After Nan dresses, Diana takes Nan to Cavendish club on Sackville Street, where wealthy lesbians gather. The attendant guarding the entrance notes that Nan’s clothes will be controversial. She meets Diana’s friends, who banter with her, asking for details about their affair and her background. When Nan proves reticent and doesn’t supply details, they try to guess, offering up various stereotypical guesses. Nan accidentally burns her pants with her cigarette, and she swears. Another member, shocked both at Nan’s dress and her language, demands Nan to leave. Diana assents, taking numerous friends back to her mansion with Nan.
Part 2, Chapter 13 Summary
Nan becomes a permanent fixture for Diana, accepted as the boy who accompanies her everywhere. Diana takes Nan to the theater, and on several occasions, Nan recognizes acquaintances from her days doing sex work, including Alice.
Nan wears women’s clothing only to the Cavendish Club, which introduced a rule banning men’s clothing after Nan’s first introduction. During the year of her confinement, Nan rarely leaves the house and Diana guards her closely. Dressing up Nan as various figures, including Perseus, Diana makes Nan act like a statue while her friends come to the mansion and observe her. Diana forces Nan to act as various historical or mythological figures, including Salome and Hermaphroditus, before dressing her with Monsieur Dildo. On this occasion, Diana lets her friends touch Nan as they caress her body and the dildo.
As she recalls her time with Diana, Nan acknowledges her attraction to Diana’s lifestyle, praising her bravery and courage in living her life without care or worry. After almost a year of serving as Diana’s love interest and object, Nan tells Diana that her birthday approaches. They dress up and go to the opera, and Nan wears the expensive wristwatch Diana buys her. At the theater, Diana commands Nan to take their coats to the coat check, where Nan’s friend Billy-Boy from the Britannia theater works. They catch up, and Bill eventually brings up Kitty. Diana grows impatient, and Nan leaves to join her before she can discover all Kitty’s news.
Thinking about Kitty, Nan excuses herself to wait in the lobby. Instead, she walks the short distance to another theater where Kitty now performs. Finding a seat near some boys, Nan notices their unwanted attention, and they cough out a slur in her direction. Finally, she sees Walter and Kitty’s act, with Kitty playing his young son, dressed in a sailor’s suit. After their act, Nan returns and meets Diana in the lobby before returning home. Diana demands Nan to go to Diana’s bedroom. Nan refuses. As Diana’s rips Nan’s clothes off, Diana becomes aroused, and Nan has sex with her.
Part 2, Chapter 14 Summary
Nan wakes up and finds that Diana has left for the morning. As she lies in bed, Nan asks Blake to bring her coffee. After Blake arrives, Nan and Blake talk about Blake’s experience at Diana’s home. A month passes, and Diana and Nan continue to quarrel. As they grow farther apart, Nan and Blake grow closer. Nan asks Blake’s name, and she tells Nan her real name—Zena—and her background. Zena’s original lover, Agnes, left her boyfriend for Zena, but Agnes was sent away from the house where they both worked as maids. A new girl arrived, who discovered Zena’s history with Agnes, using it to coerce Zena into intimacy. When Zena refused, the new girl falsely accused Zena of sexual assault to the lady of the house. They discuss Kitty, and Zena confesses that she recognized Nan from the theaters.
January arrives, and Diana holds a costume ball for her 40th birthday. Diana dresses as her namesake, and Nan dresses as Antinous, the Roman emperor Hadrian’s doomed young lover. Diana acts distant toward Nan, and Diana and her friends peruse a Latin-titled book about lesbians. They call Zena in, demanding to see her vulva. As the women grow excited by their demands, Nan tells Zena to go back to the kitchen while she argues with Diana. Nan begins to insult the women before finally calling Diana old. Diana hits her with the book they’ve been reading and promises to punish Nan. As Nan leaves the room, she sees Zena, who thanks her, but Nan yells at her and goes to her room. Zena comes in to apologize, and they chat. The music swells downstairs, and Nan asks Zena to put Monsieur Dildo on before they have sex. Nan notices soon that the women have arrived upstairs and are watching them. Furious, Diana throws them both out, ignoring Nan’s pleas for forgiveness. Nan begs Diana for her things, but Diana and her friends force them both out, forbidding them from ever coming back again.
Part 2, Chapters 11-14 Analysis
The conclusion to Part 2 sees Nan reduced from her position among London’s wealthy and high society to one of being unhoused and without a job or money. The literary, mythological, and historical references that pepper these chapters foreshadow the end of Part 2 and anticipate Nan’s final and true partner, Florence, briefly introduced in Chapter 11, who brings together Nan’s own working-class background and Diana’s cultured environment. Diana lives up to her namesake, hunting and destroying Nan and Zena as effortlessly as the goddess herself does to Actaeon. In the myth, Actaeon sees the goddess bathing, and she turns him into a stag who is hunted to his death. Using these references and allusions, Waters also shows how literature and history might be revised to include and highlight LGBTQ+ people and subjects.
The focus on Diana in these chapters expands on the topic of Gender and Performance. The novel argues that gender is only performance. Nan lives her life as a boy in every regard, “even when [they] venture[] into the public world, the ordinary world beyond the circle of Cavendish Sapphists, the world of shops and supper-rooms and drives into the park” (279). Nan performs an imitation of masculinity at Diana’s request. Nan, as she did for Kitty, reflects Diana’s desires and character. Kitty was without a family and needed someone to assist her in becoming a star—so Nan abandoned her family. Diana lives only for pleasure, so Nan performs for her pleasure. As she dresses herself, Nan makes this connection, admitting that “[i]t [is] quite like dressing for the halls again—For Diana [is her] only audience” (264). When she breaks from this role, Diana expels her. Diana has made Nan a living statue, dehumanizing her literally and symbolically. Nan’s final costume—Antinous—foreshadows her tragic fall. Emperor Hadrian’s young lover Antinous drowned in Egypt, and Nan’s expulsion parallels Antinous’s premature death. Hadrian remembered Antinous, deifying him. Diana erases Nan from her home and memory.
Nan’s failed performance as Diana’s love object highlights the importance of Class and Society in Victorian England. No matter Diana’s affectations, Nan remains her servant, and Diana’s gifts reinforce this boundary. Nan hears this truth in Diana’s tone when Nan refuses her affectations after the opera. Nan observes how rich people have a particular way of saying “What?”: Nans says, “The word is honed, and has a point put on it; it comes out of their mouths like a dagger coming out of a sheath. That is how Diana said it now, in the dim corridor” (297). Language reflects the class differences between Diana and Nan; Diana shows an awareness of her ability to utilize these class differences as a weapon to achieve her desires. Diana’s friends’ dismissive tones elsewhere reflect their class difference with Nan, like when Maria congratulates Diana on finding Nan. Maria reduces Nan to an object: “She said it as she might say it about a statue or a clock that Diana had picked up for a song in some grim market” (277). These class differences mean that Diana’s authentic life can’t be Nan’s. While Diana “ha[s] awakened particular appetites” in Nan (282), these “queer hungers” prove incompatible with Nan’s own moral character, which she remembers when she Zena. Her desire for Zena and their sex echo Diana’s own denial of consent. Diana, however, can afford the immorality of ignoring consent. Nan cannot and pays for it by losing her position in Diana’s home.
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