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About the Tipping the Velvet series

2007-10-13
By

Previously published in “The Hatchet: The Journal of Lizzie Borden Studies”

Tipping the Velvet is a three-part BBC series that has been collected on DVD. Set in the 1890s, it is an adaptation of Sarah Waters’s debut novel of the same name. The film focuses on its heroine’s exhilarating and tumultuous coming of age in Victorian England.

Episode 1 opens with a beautiful seashore scene. Then we are in an “oyster parlor” and a female voiceover introduces us to the family that runs it. That voice observes, “Open an oyster and it’s like a secret world in there.” The narrator tells us that her own story is similar. She is 18-year-old Nan Astley (Rachael Stirling). She has a beau, Freddy (Benedict Cumberbatch), but senses that something is missing in their relationship.

At a music hall, Nan gets the first glimmer of what that something might be as she watches male impersonator Kitty Butler (Keeley Hawes) perform. Nan is enthralled but can only interpret her feelings as admiration. Attending the music hall night after night, she catches Kitty’s attention and is hired to assist with her wardrobe. Soon Kitty recognizes Nan’s potential as a performer and they act together onstage as male impersonators. They become fast friends and their friendship deepens until the eroticism lying just below the surface boils over into a steamy love affair.

In Episode 2, Nan meets Florence Banner (Jodhi May), to whom she feels an immediate attraction – one that Nan recognizes as sexual but does not know if Florence can. After Nan is sexually harassed on the city streets, she goes out attired in a male soldier’s uniform. A man who seems taken in by the outfit approaches her and offers to pay for a sex act. The movie does a reversal on the more usual practice of men dressing as women to prostitute themselves. Dressed as a man, Nan performs fellatio for a fee on male customers.

The drag does not fool everyone. Wealthy Diana Lethaby (Anna Chancellor) takes Nan in as a kept woman. Their affair is sensuously hot but marred by the power imbalance between them.

Episode 3 starts off with Nan battered and bloodied, betrayed once and then betrayed again, and finally wandering the streets in a state physically ragged and psychologically despairing. Things can only go up – and they do in a manner that is satisfying for the viewer as well as for Nan.

The DVD includes an interesting interview with Sarah Waters and screenplay writer Andrew Davies. It also has dramatic stills from the series.

Tipping the Velvet is not for everyone as it is frequently sexually graphic.

However, it is an exceptionally well-made program. Movie tricks are used creatively with the film sometimes sped up and other times slowed down, always to good effect to dramatize a mood. The cinematography is vivid, emphasizing rich, primary colors. The script and direction are tight so that not a moment seems wasted. Acting is superb with Rachael Stirling, Keeley Hawes, and Jodhi May especially strong in their pivotal roles. Tipping the Velvet is an unforgettable story of emotional and sensual awakening in the Victorian era.

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  • http://www.geocities.com/rogerfgay/ Roger F. Gay

    Personally, I like some fantasy in my entertainment – but I’ll quickly get bored if plausibility crashes in anything other than well-conceived and well-executed parody. One can be passionate about many things and it may not be much different is relation to sex than mistaking it for sex. One can be passionate about sex and it’s probably honest to admit it. Romance is something else. Forming bonds and maintaining relationships is something else. Imagining passion to be something completely different than sex when it comes to sex is a way to make it more mysterious, interesting, exciting – i.e. sexy.

  • Gus

    PS Nothing imortant in life is “cool”.

  • Gus

    It occurred to me after I submitted my last post that we are obsessed by sex but know little about passion.
    They are not the same. Sex is purely physical; passion involves the whole person.
    That struck me before when some media whiz-bang decided to do a re-make of “Casablanca” starring David Soul and I think it was Cybil Shepherd. This is like trying to do “Gone With The Wind” again with Tom Cruise and Paris Hilton.
    What makes the original a classic is the conflict between the passion between Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart and the fact that a leader of the Resistance loves her and she feels an obligation to him.
    In the Soul-Shepherd version, that’s boiled down to, “Too bad we won’t be able to sleep together anymore”.
    I’ll go out on a limb on the next comment. I’ll be interested to hear the replies to it. I find it interesting that so much of our enterainment is about sex, not passion and fantasy, not reality. To be fair I have to qualify that a bit because alot of the fantasy is just realism in funny clothes, e.g. “Star Wars”, but still, especially in music compare almost anything today with the lyrics of Cole Porter, Ira Gerswin or Lorentz Hart.
    They for the whole person; today we write for the territory from the waist down.
    What d’ya think?

  • http://www.geocities.com/rogerfgay/ Roger F. Gay

    On the better side of literature, I was just reminded today of the Conrad Stargard series, by Leo Frankowski. Frankowski is a medival buff – one of those guys who spent weekends and vacations wearing chain mail and carrying a sword around with other active history buffs. He’s also an engineer, and he puts his knowledge in both areas to work in this very entertaining 7 novel story. Why I should mention this in this discussion — he has a more realistic view of the past, including the roles of men and women. If you’re looking for some reading without a feminist twist, I recommend starting with The Cross-Time Engineer. And yes, although not attempting at all to compete entirely on the basis of erotic repression followed by a messy story ejaculation like a Victorian novel, it has some sex.

  • Gus

    I just re-read Denise’s review. The fact that it was a BBC production seems appropriate. If a script-writer there ever submitted a piece in which something was lacking in a lesbian relationship (which it most assuredly is) they would be out of a job.
    The BBC liberal credo says that bourgeois heterosexual relationships are empty and boring compared to homosexual relationships and that men in particular are just about every negative adjective you can think of.
    This effort reminds me of the uproariously funny Inspector Jane Tennyson series with Helen Mieren (sic). Talk about over-the-top! This series like a contemporary version of “The Perils of Pauline”.
    Earnest, hard-working Inspector Tennyson has a rotten ex-husband, a rotten boy-friend, works with guys who snicker behind her back, has bosses who keep putting her down and seemingly is always investigating crimes in which women are brutalized, tortured,raped and murdered by men which are apparently the only kind that is committed in England.
    The series has a slight anti-male tilt.
    In all this nonsense, which not even Miss Mieren’s talent can redeem, my favorite scene was one in which the earnest, hard-working Jane is trying to persuade her superior that since she has solved every anti-woman crime in England, she deserves a promotion.
    Fat chance. In a wonderfully set-up piece of femimist propaganda designed to roil women’s anger even more, the earnest,hard-working Jane is told by her superior that she’ll have to work harder.
    Coincidenally a set of colorful golf clubs is shown prominently in the back-round behind her superior.
    You could just hear all the women getting their knickers in a twist.
    Tedious trash.

  • amfortas

    Dickens is Girly, Roger??

  • fourthwire

    “Frankly, who the hell cares about women pretending to be men or lesbian relationships.”

    And those instances where I posted to Denise that she’s clueless about the nature of (most) men notwithstanding, she remains oblivious.

  • Gus

    I haven’t seen the DVD in question so I can only base my comments on what has been said above.
    I have just finished reading a service I subscribe to that sends you a new contemporary poem every day. I love poetry, write it myself so this is like my daily poetry vitamin pill.
    The reason I mention this is that today’s selection and the laudatory comments about it, represent one of the 2 great faults (to me anyways) in today’s sensibility.
    The poem and the “criticism” of it was obscure. Words like “coy”,”arch” and “elitest” came to mind.
    “Tipping the Velvet” seems that it might be a good example of the flaw in today’s art: shock value.
    Frankly, who the hell cares about women pretending to be men or lesbian relationships. They have a certain cache for sure but do they do what all great art does, i.e., hit you right in the gut.
    That is either not allowed by contemporary art or contemporary artists in their endless quest for the obscure and the shocking have taken a wrong turn.
    When Yehudi Menhuin, the great violinist, visited a hospital during WWII, he was over-whelmed by the suffering he saw there. He said that the only thing he could think of doing was to play Bach’s violin Concerto in D Minor.
    The curious thing was that soldiers who had never been exposed to classical music or didn’t like it understood the compassion he was giving them via his music.
    I have seen the same thing happen in a psychiatric hospital where I worked when Horowitz’s Moscow concert was on one Sunday morning. The atmosphere was almost religious.
    Nobody reads Job and says, “What the hell was that all about?”
    The gut had been hit and that is the goal, at least to me, of all great art.

  • fourthwire

    Denise, there’s not a SINGLE mention of “rape”, here! What the hell?…..

    Oh, wait…. at least “the heroine” has faced the vile “sexual harassment”.

    I can see just how you must have thought that this bit of vaginized drama was relevant to a men’s news site…….;-)

  • http://www.geocities.com/rogerfgay/ Roger F. Gay

    I’m not much of a fan of Victorian novels. It’s more of a girly thing IMHO. The danger of men, as I understand it, is supposed to have a stimulating effect. It’s a mild version of mixing violence and sex (and sometimes more than mild).

  • amfortas

    Highly erotic (but I would say that, me being quite a naughty chap sometimes). It was an excellent production. Several aspects struck me about the portrayal of the era: there was little mention of the dearth of men at the time, they being in Africa and India (and Afghanistan – Hah! Things change little) being murdered by the thousands for Queen (yes, a Matriarchal Monarchy) and Country leaving the women to the oppression of ?? what precisely, I’m not sure; which partially explained the rampant lesbianism going on and the ‘industry’ of women pretending to be men; and the exploitation of women by women with scant regard for such fripperies as liberty and personal respect – the ‘Wealthy Diana’ keeps Nan a virtual sex-slave and displays her as such in a keep-up-with and out-outrage the Mrs/Lady Joneses. Even Flo can’t keep faithful to Nan’s adoration though and has to marry a real chap – for his money of course.

    Maybe the Suffragettes couldn’t tell the difference between real chaps and lesbians pretending to be chaps, (Queen Vicky wouldn’t have any of this ‘stigma’ stuff for lesbians) and so blamed men for all the oppressing that the women were going to each other with big leather dildos and feather dusters, not to mention home theatre. Even with all that going on, there was still room for the writer to get in at least one misandic phrase or idea every fifteen minutes of script.

    Nevertheless, I rather fancied Nan. At a visceraal level. (The accent ! Ughh). She would be alright for a night if she played her cards right and wore a frock. And Florence could last a fortnight too. Very fetching. Come to think of it, no clothes at all, not even a frock.

    Do you think they might accept jobs as interns when I am elected President?

    Vote #1 Amfortas. A Gnome of the World.







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