Lesbian Invisibility and the Politics of Representation of the Lady and the Humble Servant in Sarah Waters’s Affinity

The publication of her first three novels, Tipping the Velvet (1998) Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002), classified Sarah Waters as a neo-Victorian writer with the open agenda of tracing back the history of lesbianism to the late nineteenth century, when the existence of homosexual practices among women was rendered invisible by its sheer inconceivability. The dominant Victorians’ refusal to make the ideological leap needed to imagine lesbianism into existence condemned lesbian women to lead an angst-ridden and ghostly—or in Terry Castle’s often repeated term, ‘apparitional’—existence at the margins of a patriarchal society ruled by compulsory heterosexuality, while the centre was reserved to the ‘angelic’ women ready to fulfil the prescribed roles of dutiful daughter, wife and mother. The essay argues that, in Affinity, Waters provides a critique of the bleak conditions of these apparitional Victorian lesbians by parodying two utterly opposed literary models of woman: while her representation of Margaret Prior, an upper-class closeted lesbian, takes to a point of parodic saturation and excess the sentimental and Romantic model inaugurated by Samuel Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa and further developed by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh, the representation of Selina Dawes, a spirit-medium convicted for fraud and assault and, most crucially, that of her partner, Ruth Vigers, the humble servant whose presence in the novel is rendered doubly invisible by her condition as a maidservant and as a male spirit’s impersonator, responds to the older, picaresque model of the poor woman as an amoral social climber, presented in novels like Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders and Roxana, or Henry Fielding’s satiric Shamela.