When she first appears, Nan is a lowly oyster-shucker with a male beau, complying with the societal expectations of the time. Published in 1998, Tipping the Velvet begins with eighteen-year-old Nancy "Nan" Astley, a sheltered, small-town Victorian-era girl who works at her family restaurant by the sea. However, Waters’s novel, unlike Orlando, undermines its overall message when it makes a villain out of its bisexual characters or simply kills them off-something that has often been a staple in older gay and lesbian novels. The concept is intriguing, and fans of Virginia Woolf’s classic 1928 novel Orlando may find many parallels between the two works, as both books’ main characters make gender transitions in order to challenge gender roles. However, in Sarah Waters’s novel Tipping the Velvet, gender roles and other societal expectations of the Victorian time period are flipped on their heads when she writes queer characters who are free to live uncloseted, gender bend, and go to gay and lesbian bars without fear of being ostracized or -worst of all-imprisoned for “sexual deviance.” What comes to your mind when you think of Victorian England? Confining corsets and waist coats? Strict moral codes? Chimney sweeps? All true.
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