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'The “I” Inside “Her”': Queer Narration in Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet and Wesley Stace's Misfortune

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'The “I” Inside “Her”': Queer Narration in Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet and Wesley Stace's Misfortune This article was downloaded by: [Emily Jeremiah] On: 07 August 2012, At: 03:44 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Women: A Cultural Review Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwcr20 ‘The “I” inside “her”’: Queer Narration in Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet and Wesley Stace's Misfortune Emily Jeremiah Version of record first published: 25 Jun 2008 To cite this article: Emily Jeremiah (2007): ‘The “I” inside “her”’: Queer Narration in Sarah Waters's Tipping the Velvet and Wesley Stace's Misfortune , Women: A Cultural Review, 18:2, 131-144 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574040701400171 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material. EMILY JEREMIAH w ....................................................................................................... ‘The ‘‘I’’ inside ‘‘her’’’: Queer Narration in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet and Wesley Stace’s Misfortune ENDER is not something one is, but something one does: a series of acts, Grepeated over time, which solidify to produce the effect of natural maleness or femaleness (Butler 1990:33). In this ‘performative’ view of gender proposed by Judith Butler, it is variation on repetition that constitutes agency; by means of subtle disruption, one can ‘work the mobilizing power of injury’ (Butler 1993:123). But one does not do this in isolation. As Butler acknowledges, performativity is always relational: ‘one does not ‘‘do’’ one’s gender alone. One is always ‘‘doing’’ with or for another, even if the other is only imaginary’ (Butler 2004:1). This Downloaded by [Emily Jeremiah] at 03:44 07 August 2012 assertion has significant implications for understandings of the postmo- dern subject. In particular, it demands an awareness of the issue of community, which can be seen as a complex mesh of relational performances. Community and consensus have been widely dismissed by postmo- dernist theorists, with their emphasis on plurality and dissonance, and viewed as the outdated results of a liberal humanist legacy. But as Sara Ahmed has argued, we need rather to explore and expand these ideas (1998:48Á 49). Literature offers a way to do so (Jeremiah 2005:241). Fiction deals in ‘imaginary others’ and can be seen to encourage the development of connectedness (Jeremiah 2002:7). Two recent historical novels by British writers, Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet (1998) and .................................................................................................................................... Women: a cultural review Vol. 18. No. 2. ISSN 0957-4042 print/ISSN 1470-1367 online # 2007 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09574040701400171 132 × WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ....................................................................................................... Wesley Stace’s Misfortune (2005), illustrate this proposition. Both echo Butlerian thought, offering numerous instances of ‘gender trouble’ (Butler 1990). Both also raise the question of narrative, and both thematize and enact an ethical form of telling; these are postmodernist texts, then, that are concerned with community and care. Literary texts are citational (see Bhaktin 1988; see also Butler 1993:12Á 16); they arise from and quote other texts. In so doing, they can ‘work the mobilizing power’ of previous, injurious narratives*as both Tipping the Velvet and Misfortune do. Tipping, Waters’s first novel, is set in the late nineteenth century, mainly in London, and it features a first-person narrator, Nan. Nan begins life as an oyster-girl in Whitstable, but moves to London with Kitty Butler, a male impersonator in the music hall. The two develop a relationship, and Nan joins Kitty’s act; but the affair ends with Kitty’s betrayal of Nan. After a brief career as a (cross-dressed) rent- boy, Nan is taken in and ‘kept’ by a wealthy woman, Diana. Nan is eventually thrown out, and she makes her way to the home of Florence, a socialist feminist with whom she forms a relationship. Misfortune, also a debut novel, is told largely in the first person and recounts the tale of a baby found abandoned in London in 1820. The baby is taken to Rose Hall and adopted by its young master, Loveall. Loveall marries the Hall’s librarian, Anonyma, and the male infant is passed off not only as the heir to the estate, but also as a girl; he is named Rose. After the death of Loveall, the young Rose, confused by the recent revelation of his sex, flees to Turkey. Back in London, and following lengthy investigations, it is revealed that Rose is in fact the true heir to the Hall. Rose, who now comfortably wears a dress along with facial hair, moves back into the family home, ousting his greedy relatives. The house is given over to a hospice and then to the nation. As these summaries suggest, Tipping and Misfortune are both ‘historical’ works that are also examples of the picaresque novel and Downloaded by [Emily Jeremiah] at 03:44 07 August 2012 the Bildungsroman. They cite and queer these genres, as we will see. Both works are concerned with history, with the novel itself, with queerness and with collectivity. And as they demonstrate, these issues can be linked. Re-vising History ‘Theory’ is contingent and its recognitions are sometimes belated: ‘Gender trouble is not new’, Butler remarks, ‘the hybridity of dis- sonance ...is already here, already structuring the gendered lives of many people’ (2005:24). Historical fiction is one site at which this recognition can be developed. By positing a queer past, one performs a ‘re-vision’ of traditional accounts (for example, Rich 1979:35; Millbank 2004:162), ‘THE ‘‘I’’ INSIDE ‘‘HER’’’ × 133 ....................................................................................................... uncovering lives most often ‘hidden from history’ (Duberman et al. 1991). In Waters’s Tipping, when Nan sees Kitty on stage, her view is ‘side-on and rather queer’ (1998:17)* an appropriate description of the novel’s take on history. Both Tipping and Misfortune can be set alongside the work of, for example, Lillian Faderman (1981) and Graham Robb (2003), which uncovers queer lives and which, at the same time, establishes a continuity between queer past and present* an important move if one accepts Laura Doan and Sarah Waters’s contention that ‘retrospection is a condition of homosexual agency’ (2000:12). These features* side-on views, marginal subjects, overlapping past/present stories* can be seen as key to a queer historiography and are also to be detected in the novels examined here. Waters, the author of a PhD on queer historical fiction, as well as of three later historical novels, is an expert on these matters, as will become clear. While Tipping is told in retrospect in the first person, and follows a linear pattern* in a ‘traditional’ way* there are hints of a queer notion of temporality in the text, as when Diana gives Nan a watch, which she does not even bother to set at first: ‘there was really no need, of course, for me ever to wind it at all’ (Waters 1998:285). Time is irrelevant to her* a significant detail in the light of Judith Halberstam’s claim that queer subcultures ‘produce alternative temporalities’. They do so ‘by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience* namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death’ (Halber- stam 2005:2). Significantly, in Waters’s most recent work, The Night Watch (2005), the narrative moves backwards in time, in what could also be read as a queer gesture. Any historical novel, of course, is about the ‘present’ as much as it is about the ‘past’, as already suggested (see here Llewellyn 2004:204). There Downloaded by [Emily Jeremiah] at 03:44 07 August 2012 are numerous Butlerian echoes in Tipping (not least in Kitty’s surname); recent theory is drawn on and alluded to, then. In Waters’s later works, Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002), there are, similarly, Foucauldian echoes, heard particularly in their respective prison and asylum settings. Present-ness is also stressed in Tipping by the repeated use of the word ‘queer’ (Waters 1998:78),1 whose insistent use appeals to and affirms a contemporary queer sensibility (see also Llewellyn 2004:213). 1 The Oxford English In Waters’s Affinity, the writing of history is itself thematized, as critic Dictionary gives 1922 M.-L. Kohlke argues. Kohlke views the character of Margaret Prior as as the date of the first emblematic of the female historian struggling to assert herself, observing recorded use of the word ‘queer’ to denote that ‘her would-be historical subjectivity stages itself in the shadow of homosexuality. her dead historian-father’ (2004:157); Margaret’s father, we learn, was 134 × WOMEN: A CULTURAL REVIEW ....................................................................................................... interested in ‘the great lives, the great works, each one of them neat and gleaming and complete, like metal letters in a box of type’ (Waters 1999:7). Waters’s works challenge such a view of history, exposing it as messier and more queer than traditionally assumed.
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