Nancy grows more and more comfortable with her own male persona, but chafes under Diana’s class-tinged haughtiness and cruelty.įinally, at the age of 25, she has the opportunity for a mature and mutually affirming relationship with Florence, who is comfortable being a lesbian, and whose socialist convictions allow her to see Nancy as an equal in every way. Nancy’s next relationship is with a wealthy woman in her late thirties – Diana – who exploits Nancy’s vulnerability and takes her on to be her “tart.” Diana is ego-dependent on the outré aspects of lesbianism, and uses Nancy to enhance her own image as a debauchee. I knew that Kitty and I felt just the same – only, of course, about different things.” And there was nothing you would not do, I thought, nothing you would not sacrifice, to keep your heart’s desire once you had been given it. It was a wonderful feeling – but a fearful one, too, for you felt all the time that you didn’t deserve your own good fortune, that you had received it quite by error, in someone else’s place – and that it might be taken from you while your gaze was turned elsewhere. When Kitty asks Nan if she knows how it feels to be given your heart’s desire, Nan thinks: Later, Nan thinks ruefully back to an early conversation. But Kitty is a closeted lesbian clothed in self-denial she would rather go straight than have anyone think she was a “tom.”
Nancy, calling herself Nan King, joins Kitty’s act, and together they win moderate renown as a pair of mashers (girls dressed as boys who perform on the stage). The two get to know one another, and eventually Kitty reciprocates. When she is eighteen, she first sees the male-impersonator singer-dancer Kitty Butler, and falls in love with her. Nancy, who spends her days shucking oysters, visits music halls at night for entertainment. And in a nutshell, or an oyster shell if you will, these are the themes of Waters’ debut novel. And finally, oysters produce pearls, products of the oyster’s response to foreign material trapped inside the outer protective layer. Not only that, but oysters can change their sex one or more times during their life spans.
Oysters, long thought to be an aphrodisiac, have an even more important quality: there is no way to distinguish male oysters from females by looking at their shells. This is an apt introduction to this story about gender bending, sexuality, and lesbian practices in late Victorian England. Her family runs this eating establishment that specializes in Whitstable oysters, or “natives,” which are “the largest and the juiciest, the savouriest yet the sublest, oysters in the whole of England.” The narrator of this book, Nancy Astley, began her life in an oyster-parlour on the Kentish coast in 1870.
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