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ishyface
Tipping the Velvet is one of those books I've read so many times it's all cracked at the spine and falling apart.* There are some books I reread once or twice every year, at set periods- American Gods, for example, I like to read in the autumn, as it's getting just a little bit colder, while I always pick up The Doomsday Book right before Christmas, and Set This House In Order is a total late spring/early summer read. Tipping the Velvet doesn't have a set time. Instead, it's a book I can pick up at any time, in any mood, and feel totally comfortable in, like an old sweater that you're always happy to wear.
I first read the book when I was a tiny queermo in high school. I had picked it up in the bookstore, having heard vague murmurs of it being good from Lesbians On the Internet**; my mum bought it for me, I imagine because she saw the pink shoes on the cover and thought that it was a Nice Book for Nice Young Girls.
She wasn't exactly wrong, now I think about it. Nancy Astley, at least initially, is a very nice young girl indeed: she has a loving family, a home in Whitstable, a beau named Freddy, and a singular passion for the music-hall. While there one evening with her sister, she sees a male impersonator named Kitty Butler and falls hopelessly in love with her, first from afar and then from very, very close. It was the portrayal of first love, I think, that had me hooked initially. I was a sullen, cranky young thing at that age, and tried not to let the world at large know that I had ewwwwwwfeelingsewwwwwww, but I did, and one of my favourite things about the book was how naked the emotions are- how deeply Nan loves, and how deeply she hurts.
"I was eighteen," she says at one point, "and knew nothing. I thought, at that moment, that I would die of love for her." Even now, I read that and think that that could be me, talking about the girl I fell for at the end of that year (to whom I read the book aloud, as a matter of fact).
One of the things I loved (and love) about the book was Nan's unrepentant butchness.*** I was, at the time, a muddled teenage mix of butch and genderqueer and occasional FTM, and I saw something of myself in Nan's transformation from a slightly dowdy Whitstable girl to a London swell, all suits and toppers and cropped hair. That was the year I bought a suit with money I'd saved from my first job, wearing it to my sister's prom with a flower in the buttonhole. I remember looking at myself in the mirror and thinking, with a deep and quiet satisfaction, that I looked good- not just not hideous, for once, but good. Whenever I read the scene where Nan first gets her hair cut and looks at herself I remember that feeling, the rush of surprise and then happiness. It's something, really, to know that you can look good when you've gotten used to the thought that you'll always be ugly. It’s something, as well, to see that in fiction, and know that there are other people who’ve felt this way- enough to write a book about it, even.
One of the other things I loved, of course, is the fact that it's a queer rewrite of Victorian England. Sarah Waters has admitted that she's taken liberties with the setting and the times- probably two women wouldn't be able to shack up as easily as Florence and Nan eventually do, even in metropolitan London, and probably far fewer people knew what a "tom" was, including those who fit the description. But there's always something very satisfying about reading a book set in a historical time period you've enjoyed for years that features queer characters. It's probably what made me reread The Other Boleyn Girl over and over in spite of it being obvious trash: George was written as gay****, and when I was fourteen I needed that. I needed to read about people like me. I still do. That's what keeps me going back to queer lit: I want to read something like Dickens, say, or Hornby, or Vonnegut, but I want to see people like me in the pages, and I want to see them survive. Nan survives. She's happy. When I was sixteen that was so unbelievably important to me.
But I think what really keeps me coming back to Tipping the Velvet, now that I'm older, is the way it portrays Nan meeting Kitty again in the end. She gets her heart broken by Kitty; she runs away from her; she avoids her for long periods and then suddenly wants to seek her out, then goes back to avoiding her; and years later, she finds her again, and there's a moment when you think she's going to take her back. (As a teenager I was like YESSSSSS DO IT; as an adult I'm like NOOOOOOOO KICK HER TO THE CURB.)
"You mustn't think I did what I did easily, or thoughtlessly. You mustn't think it did not- break my heart."
"Why did you do it, then?"
"Because I was a fool! Because I thought my life upon the stage was dearer to me than anything. Because I thought that I would be a star. Because, of course, I did not ever think that I would really, really lose you..." She hesitated. Outside the tent the bustle of the day went on: children ran shrieking; stall-holders called and argued; flags and pamphlets fluttered in the May breezes. She took a breath. She said: "Nan, come back to me."
Come back to me... One part of me reached out to her at once, leapt to her like a pin to a magnet; I believe the very same part of me would leap to her again- would go on leaping to her, if she went on asking me, forever.
When I broke up with that girl I fell for at the end of high school I was still in love with her for months and months, and every time I read that passage I think about how I felt in those months: how miserable I was, how often I thought of her and told myself not to, how often I picked up the phone to call her and got no answer, how I was waiting for her to turn around and say "come back to me." She never did, of course, but I waited anyway. I think everyone does, a little, when they still love someone.
And then Nan KICKS HER TO THE CURB, which my cynical grownup heart thinks is just lovely.
I'm rereading Tipping the Velvet again right now, and I will probably keep rereading it for years. It's a happy place for me to come back to and have a cup of tea in. You need to keep books like that in your life.
* Although admittedly most books look like this when they've been in my company for more than an hour. I tend to be rather rough with my reading material, on the basis that the words can certainly take it.
** A mysterious and shadowy organization that keeps the myth of Imagine Me And You being a good movie alive and well.
*** And one of the things I hate most about the BBC adaptation- and there are a lot of things to hate- is the near-total erasure of Nan's butchness. She passes well enough to work as a rent-boy, but they have her in lipstick and have pretty clearly padded her chest. What even is this fuckery, BBC.
**** ... And incestuous. Whatever, the gay part's more important.
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on 2012-04-22 05:15 pm (UTC)And I am completely in agreement with you about STHIO- it's definitely a this-time-of-year book.
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on 2012-04-22 05:45 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-22 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-22 06:53 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-22 07:01 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-22 07:11 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-22 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-22 09:51 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-22 10:31 pm (UTC)I've seen a fair bit of positive feedback (and no negative, so far) from multiple systems regarding his handling of Andrew and Penny and their alters, which is also heart-warming; talk about another stigmatized group of people who only tend to make in into narratives as a convenient plot device...
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on 2012-04-22 11:54 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-22 06:13 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-22 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2012-04-25 02:15 am (UTC)And that really is a fucked up thing about still being in love with someone after they've broken your fucking heart. A year and a half has gone by and I still sometimes open my email thinking the person I love/fucking despise will have sent me a message.