Tipping the Velvet

In Tipping the Velvet, gender and performance connect through individual agency. Nan, Kitty, and Diana demonstrate how gender can be performed, linked to the costumes, actions, and appearance that they adopt. Tipping the Velvet is in conversation with a long line of LGBTQ+ scholars who have written about the connections between the perceptions of gender and the act of performance. Judith Butler is the most notable scholar in this field and wrote the seminal queer theory text Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990, eight years before Tipping the Velvet was written. Butler’s scholarship was cutting-edge when Waters wrote Velvet, placing the novel in direct conversation with their work. Butler traces the performative nature of gender through the repetition of language and actions that prescribe gender: The ideas we have about the genders of “man” and “woman” are constructed through daily repetitions of action and language that validate these views. Gender, for Butler and queer theorists, is not a given but rather a socially constructed epiphenomenon.

In Waters’s novel, Nan’s performance of masculinity leads her to a complex relationship with self-identifying as a masculine person/man, which Nan expresses through vivid figurative language. Nan uses contradiction and juxtaposition to frame the often-contradictory feelings and perceptions she experiences when dressed as a man. She notes that she is “[c]lad not exactly as a boy, but, rather confusingly, as the boy [she] would have been, had [she] been more of a girl” (120), while the Madam of Berwick Street is “never quite sure if [she is] a girl come […] to pull on a pair of trousers, or a boy arrived to change out of his frock. Sometimes, [she is] not sure [her]self” (195). Nan’s frequent use of contradiction and juxtaposition while describing her feelings illustrates the breakdown and uncertainty of gendered perceptions surrounding her person. The instability of Nan’s gender reflects the core premises of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble: Gender is unstable and fluid, and the line that supposedly separates men and women is easily broken by those who play with gender expression on the margins of society. What we perceive as somebody’s gender is an identity that is built through repetitions of this performance: Nan goes out regularly dressed as a man, and people perceive her as a man, ergo she is a man as far as the public is concerned. Nan demonstrates gender as an epiphenomenon of experience through her repeated performances of masculinity until society comes to view her as a masculine person, such as in her sex work, where she works as a male sex worker.

While Nan’s performances show the instability of gender categories, her thoughts and feelings often align with today’s understandings of gender dysphoria. When she puts on Diana’s suits, Nan comments that the suits “magically unfit[] [her] for girlishness, for ever—as if [her] jaw had grown firmer, [her] brows heavier, [her] hips slimmer and [her] hands extra large” (381). Nan views these traits she associates with men as desirable in herself. While Nan’s performances of gender show that gender is a surface-level distinction, one that is easily malleable, her internal dialogue reveals a need for performance to match an internal sense of authenticity. The push and pull between gender as “shallow performance” and gender as an innate internal need for self-expression is present in many queer theorists’ works on gender. This dilemma was at the heart of many third-wave queer feminist conversations. Nan’s experiences interrogate how complex, internal notions of gender and sexuality interact with the more performative aspects of identity to create our public and private gendered identities.

Nan’s sense of gender and her gendered performances are complicated by the fact that she lives in a highly patriarchal society that is hostile to people who present as women. When Nan finally emerges from Mrs. Best’s tenement presenting as a woman, she faces danger and insecurity in London, to which she’s unaccustomed—she “[is] stared at and called after—and twice or thrice seized and stroked and pinched—by men” (191). Nan’s preferred gender expression allows her to temporarily lean on the safety afforded to cisgender men in public—they are not “stroked and pinched” by passersby, unlike people perceived as women. Nan’s experience shows that the performance of gender, while immaterial and mutable, is often a matter of very real safety and security.

Kitty has a vastly different relationship with gender and performance than Nan. Kitty believes that the gender binary must remain intact and that any crossing of the boundaries between “man” and “woman” must be temporary—the performance must be recognizable as such. She articulates this when she looks as Nan in a man’s suit and describes the costume as “[t]oo real. She looks like a boy […] And that ain’t quite the idea now, is it?” (118). The idea, according to Kitty, revolves around a performance that doesn’t threaten her own feminine identity or the distinctions between men and women as gender categories. Kitty’s ideas about gender and performance are exemplified by her decision to enter into a loveless heterosexual marriage: Like her drag performances, Kitty treats her sexual attraction to Nan as something that is “not real” and must end in a return to the status quo.

Diana complicates the examples that Nan and Kitty separately embody. While never dressing as a man, she uses her social class and wealth to behave toward women as men do. Harassing Zena and taking ownership of the women with whom she surrounds herself, Diana abuses women as men traditionally do in her patriarchal society. Diana subverts the gendered dynamic, taking a woman dressed as a man as her subordinate. In her subversion, Diana demonstrates that actions and performance are as intimately bound up in gender as clothing.

Ultimately, clothing and gendered performance is affirming to Nan’s queer identity. Nan leaves behind costumes, such as the Guardsman outfit and the linen suit she wears for Diana, becoming a “trouser-wearer” when she lives with Florence (433). Embracing her identity with clothes that match her inner character, Nan wears clothes she finds comfortable and loves a woman openly. Nan turns the costume of gender to her own benefit, deciding how to present and whom to love publicly.