A Study On The Protagonist Nancy In Tipping The Velvet From The Perspective Of Gender Performativity

As one of the high-profile contemporary British writers, Sarah Waters is known for novels set in Victorian time. Her first novel Tipping the Velvet receives much attention as soon as it is published. This lesbian-love-featured work tells of the protagonist Nancy’s romantic adventure in late Victorian London. The domestic and western research on this novel mostly focuses on its narrative method, genre and writing style. This thesis aims to analyze Nancy’s deconstruction of the traditional biological gender identity from the perspective of postmodern feminist Judith Butler’s gender performativity.In this thesis, firstly, the author describes the protagonist Nancy’s social behaviors resulting from her cognition of gender identity under the biological determinism. The nature of biological determinism makes Nancy a traditional Victorian woman who helps the household, wears women’s dresses and dates with a male boyfriend. However, Nancy deconstructs her essentialist gender identity when she starts her career as a male impersonator. Secondly, Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity that one’s gender is not natural and is the effect of reiterated acting is applied to demonstrate Nancy’s gender reconstruction. And the author uses Butler’s strategy of drag – gender parody as an activity to subvert the traditional biological gender identity and to help Nancy complete her gender reconstruction. The thesis concretely analyses that Nancy drags to be a street prostitute, wealthy lady Diana’s male lover consecutively in her gender exploration and finds the true herself at last. In her drag performance, Nancy acquires, imitates and practices her new gender till she accepts it.At last, this thesis can help readers have a better comprehension of lesbians’ situation in Victorian era. Due to compulsory heterosexual gender norms, homosexuals are only regarded as marginalized groups. In addition, the thesis concludes that Sarah Waters doesn’t intend to only narrate those lesbians’ love stories in Victorian era, but to illustrate the point that there is no absolute distinction between what is man and what is woman. Gender and sexuality can be socially constructed. The coherent pattern that sex determines one’s gender and also requires the opposite sexual desire is not convincing.