“‘What is it with queers and history?’ Performing History and Gender in Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet”

In this article I this article examines the complex relation between “hybridisation and appropriation” in Waters’s first novel, Tipping the Velvet, whose formal and thematic structure is marked by a tension between originality and adherence to tradition. My contention is that in this novel Waters ‘appropriates’ the Victorian literary (sub)genres of the Bildungsroman and the picaresque novel to subversively recast the gender and sexual stereotypes on which those narrative forms are traditionally founded. Her novels show how notions of ‘deviance’13 were constructed at a sociocultural level; moreover, her works encourage audiences to analyse and resignify those acts and behaviours that were perceived to be deviant as bold, radical transgressions. In addition, I discuss the extent to which Waters’s adaptation of these Victorian narrative forms in Tipping the Velvet allows her to interrogate both the historical novel as a ‘performative’ narrative and the hegemonic ideals regarding gender identities, sexuality and class issues through the notion of performativity.