Crossing the “Gender Frontier”: Cross-dressing and Male Impersonation in Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet (1998)

Abstract

Culturally accepted gender roles are what we are born into, therefore from early childhood we are being taught how to find our way within specific gender boundaries. Those who decide to transgress these set limits consciously cross what Kathleen M. Brown (1993) called a “gender frontier”—the borderline where two culturally specific systems of knowledge about gender and its nature meet. During the Victorian Era, there were two main ways in which a woman could cross this frontier: first, and commonly accepted one, was to become a male impersonator and perform on stage; second, and a widely ostracized one, was to cross-dress in real life and pass as a man. Even though both ways stemmed from the idea of one sex dressing in the clothes of another, the repercussions of the undertaking of the latter included long imprisonment and years of hard labour. In her debut neo—Victorian novel Tipping the velvet (1998), Sarah Waters presents the story of a protagonist who managed to cross the gender frontier twice, both as a male impersonator and as a cross-dresser. The focus of this paper is therefore on the means and processes of the heroine’s transgression of socially accepted gender roles in 19th century London as presented by Waters in her novel.