Favorite Characters: Nan Astley (Tipping the Velvet)

 

While I thought this miniseries was just pretty good, I’m all about its main character.  Nan is right up my alley – she’s smart and adventurous, she’s brave when it comes to love, and even though her life is so often a mess, she just rolls up her sleeves and keeps going.  Definitely a terrific heroine.

 

Bildungsroman tales are usually good for main character development, and Tipping the Velvet happily obliges.  It’s wonderful to watch Nan’s journey, both from Brighton to London and to a greater, truer understanding of herself.  We meet her as a bright, unpolished small-town girl, sort of vaguely discontented but not quite aware of it.  She works as expected in her family shop, she stays in her small world, and she goes disinterestedly with a boy because that’s what you do.  She assumes that love is something that just happens in the background, nothing worth all the songs about it.

 

Until she goes to the music hall with her family and sees Kitty for the first time.  Onscreen, you can practically see her dividing her life into two phases from that moment:  before Kitty and after.  I adore her early reactions, because she doesn’t realize what’s happening.  She doesn’t know she’s in love; she’s never felt it before, and I suppose it doesn’t occur to her that she could fall in love with a girl.  As such, there’s no shame or secrecy or wrestling with forbidden feelings.  Rather, her regard is open and artless, and this somewhat shy girl bubbles up with talk of Kitty at every chance she gets.  What she feels is a revelation for her, and she simply has to share it with anyone who will listen.  I love that, that innocence and simplicity before she’s taught to be covert with her affections.

 

She’s so awkward and sweet in love.  She throws herself into it with the most headlong abandon, though, as I said, she learns to conceal it (barely – she says and does the “proper” things in public, but her adoration radiates from her eyes and her smile.)  She’s daring, and she gets burned more than once, but even when she’s been torn up by someone who’s careless with her heart, she pulls herself out of it.  She carries on, and after she’s had time to lick her wounds and buck up her courage once more, she throws herself into love again.

 

I’m so impressed with her boldness.  Obviously, it takes a lot of nerve just to be her in the 1890s – to love women, to challenge ideas of gender expression.  It’s thrilling to see how comfortable she becomes in her own skin when she starts dressing in boys’ clothes, so much more confident and more genuinely the person she wants to be.  And I don’t mean specifically from a gender perspective.  I mean, to do and say everything her shyness and shaky self-esteem ordinary prevent.  And beyond that (and her aforementioned courage in love,) she’s brave in so many other ways.  She leaves the only home she’s ever known to venture into the big city, she pursues and seizes a career on the stage, and during her leaner times, she keeps herself alive, putting one foot in front of the other and forever on the lookout for a way to improve her fortunes.  The woman is a boss.