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 8-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary
Nan finds a cheap apartment in a lower-class tenement, which she rents with money taken from the theater. Her landlady, Mrs. Best, assumes that Nan is a sex worker and warns her against bringing home men. Nan self-isolates in her own room and refuses to leave. Mary, a servant, brings Nan food and does her errands, worried that Nan will grow sick from not eating. After Mary brings Nan a pie wrapped in a newspaper, Nan sees Kitty and Walter’s picture in the newspaper with an announcement of their marriage, honeymoon, and new act. Nan starts to laugh before she stops herself.
As Nan takes a bath, she has a vision and remembers an old neighbor in Whitstable who died after her heart hardened. Thinking that her own heart has hardened, Nan begins to scratch at her chest and then rises from the tub. Crumpling the newspaper up, she dresses as a woman and goes for a walk. Finding herself the object of looks and suspicion as a lone woman walking through London, Nan decides to dress as a boy. Renting a room by the hour in a building of rooms frequented by sex workers, Nan uses it to change into her costumes.
A man approaches Nan one day, assuming she is a male sex worker. She goes along with his requests, and he pays her, thinking he has slept with a man. Thinking of Walter and Kitty, she continues to work as a male sex worker.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary
Nan discusses the similarities between the world of the theater and the life of the sex worker, with comparisons between types of characters. Nan meets a sex worker named Alice. She calls him a “mary-anne,” a Victorian slang term for feminine people assigned male at birth; mary-annes often included what we recognize as transgender women today. Nan tells him her name is Kitty. Alice helps Nan make sense of the world of sex work. He explains the categories of male sex workers to her and helps her find her place in the trade.
Nan continues her sex work until she returns to her room one day and finds it broken into, with all her feminine attire gone. She tries to sneak into Mrs. Best’s house and into her room but loses her hat as she ascends the stairs. The noise wakes Mrs. Best, who assumes Nan has a male customer in her room. Mrs. Best and her son throw Nan out after seeing her costumes.
Nan rents a new room from a woman named Ms. Milne, who has a daughter named Gracie, who has an intellectual disability. Explaining her need to wear men’s costumes as a theatrical act, Nan tells Ms. Milne about her previous landlord. The months pass, and Nan grows close to Ms. Milne and Gracie. Nan meets Florence one night as Nan sits outside on her balcony and watches Florence and her friends across the street. In the dark, Florence assumes Nan is a man, only to see her in the daylight and realize the truth. After they talk, Florence invites Nan to come to a talk about women’s rights and labor issues.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary
Nan tries sex work again as she runs out of money. Although she approaches several potential partners, she doesn’t succeed with any. Nan is stalked by a mysterious figure in a carriage as she solicits potential customers. The woman in the carriage, Diana, offers Nan a ride together. Nan obliges, and they ride through the city together. They banter back and forth as Diana calls Nan a tease and then admits to watching Nan on the streets for a while, not just that night.
A wealthy widow, Diana takes Nan to her stately home in St. John’s Wood. Diana leads her to a parlor, where she undresses Nan. Diana commands Nan to wear a strap-on as they have sex. Diana invites Nan to spend the night and tells her that her maid will clean up their clothes in the morning.
In the morning, Blake, the servant, brings them breakfast and coffee. As they drink coffee, Diana tells Nan about a Persian story in which a djinn offers a beggar a safe, long life or a short life filled with pleasure. Diana asks Nan what she would choose. Nan chooses the short, pleasure-filled life. Diana asks Nan to stay as her “tart,” or personal sex worker. Nan agrees as Diana explains her pleasure-centered lifestyle. She recognizes a similar impulse in Nan, who realizes the importance of Diana to her growth and maturity.
Part 2, Chapters 8-10 Analysis
Part 2 introduces Diana, a wealthy widow, whose outlook and desires diametrically oppose those of Kitty. Diana can embrace her lesbian identity due to the privileges afforded by her social status and wealth. Reminiscent of Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt whose name she shares, Diana represents an extreme mode of living—authentically cruel, focused on pleasure, and released from the concerns of most of humanity. Diana represents one extreme end of Class and Society in Victorian England, where she can live relatively freely as a lesbian.
Waters relies heavily on the imagery of the Roman goddess in Diana’s characterization. Diana hunts in her carriage, protected by her wealth. Nan’s own precarity leaves her open to his kind of abuse, as Nan’s sex work renders her a visible target for Diana. Diana compares Nan to “a fox” who might “all the time…not know itself pursued” (236), positioning herself as a hunter within this metaphor. Nan accepts and desires the uneven relationship and imbalanced power dynamic promised by Diana, choosing as the beggar does in the Persian story to have a brief yet pleasurable existence. Foreshadowing the destruction wrought by powerful beings like the djinn or Diana, goddess of the hunt, Nan’s time in Diana’s home explores the kinds of abuse that marginalized, precarious people were subject to in 19th-century England.
Nan’s turn to survival sex work stresses the connections between the theater and the world of the sex worker. Both depend on an act that’s temporary and feature actors or performers whose routines result in pleasure for an audience. As Nan observes, when her client approaches the inevitable end of their interaction, “[h]is pleasure ha[s] turned, at the last, to a kind of grief; and his love [is] a love so fierce and secret it must be satisfied, with a stranger, in a reeking court like this” (200). Nan recognizes this kind of love, seeing these fleeting encounters as like her own early journeys to see Kitty in Canterbury. Supporting this connection, Nan takes the name Kitty as her own pseudonym while she performs sex work, blurring the line between her own desires, her sex work, and theater performance.
The differences between acting and sex work highlight the power of Class and Society in Victorian England. As the theft of Nan’s clothes demonstrate, sex workers inhabited a tenuous position in 19th-century London. While actors lack the power of someone like Diana, they can access housing and safe passage: Ms. Milne accepts Nan’s costumes, believing it to be theatrical. Even in her dingy apartment before Ms. Milne’s house, Nan sees that sex workers face stigma, as Mrs. Best throws her out after discovering Nan’s collection of costumes. Nan’s security as a sex worker relies on her ability to lie and cover up her real work.
Men’s suits offer Nan a measure of security while allowing her to express her authentic self. Dressing as a woman, fulfilling expectations, also renders her powerless, as she “who had swaggered so many times in a gentleman’s suit across the stages of London, should now be afraid to walk upon its streets, because of [her] own girlishness” (191). Presenting as a solitary woman on the streets, Nan faces public violence and shaming. Nan’s desire to present masculinely affords her the ability to move freely in a highly patriarchal society.
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