Tipping the Velvet

“Even now, two decades and more since I put aside my oyster-knife and quit my father’s kitchen for ever, I feel a ghostly, sympathetic twinge in my wrist and finger-joints at the sight of a fishmonger’s barrel, or the sound of an oyster-man’s cry; and still, I believe I can catch the scent of my liquor and brine beneath my thumb-nail, and in the creases of my palm.”

As Nan recalls her memories of working in and living above the oyster parlor, she can sense the smells and sounds of the oyster trade on her hands. Echoing Kitty’s own handling of Nan’s hand decades earlier, these sensory memories and imagery stress Nan’s connection to her home and working-class background.

“My complexion, to be sure, was perfectly smooth and clear, and my teeth were very white; but these—in our family, at least—were counted unremarkable, for since we all passed our days in a miasma of simmering brine, we were all as bleached and blemishless as cuttlefish.”

Comparing her appearance to that of her sister and the other conventionally attractive women she sees on stage, Nan considers her mother’s encouragement to go on the stage. Her white skin, to Nan, doesn’t demonstrate this beauty, but the labor she does at the oyster parlor.

“And how would it be to live at Kitty’s side, brim-full of a love so quick, and yet so secret, it made me shake?”

After Kitty visits Nan and her family for an oyster supper, she asks Nan to join her as her dresser in London. As Nan considers her future, she asks herself rhetorically how she would feel, with a love so lively and, contradictorily, so secret. This mixture of pleasure and pain reflects her own pleasure at leaving for London and pain, as she will have to leave her family behind. The secretiveness of the relationship foreshadows Kitty’s eventual actions and betrayal.