“The Grossest Rakes of Fiction”: Reassessing Gender, Sex, and Pornography in Sarah Waters's Fingersmith

Abstract

This article argues that Sarah Waters's Fingersmith (2002) revisits feminist debates arising from the “sex wars” of the 1980s and 1990s in which feminism was divided over its approach to female sexual representation. I argue that the novel rehearses varied debates on gender and pornography, and I suggest that Waters uses such perspectives to provide her own deconstruction of heteropatriarchal representations of lesbianism in pornography.

Keywords::

• Sarah Waters
• pornography
• gender
• lesbian
• feminist
• sex wars

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Corrigendum

Notes

Notes

¹ In the small number of existent commentaries on the novel, the majority of scholars do not focus on the novel's sexual politics.¹ Lucie Armitt has examined the role of postfeminism and the gothic in Fingersmith, and Nadine Muller has also read the representation of matrilineal relations in the novel. Cora Kaplan has used Fingersmith as a lens to explore the impact of feminism on Victorian studies, and Mark Llewellyn and Marie Luise Kohlke have both usefully, albeit briefly, explored the relationship between the textual and the sexual—Llewellyn to consider Waters's use of genre in the novel and Kohlke to elucidate her claims for neo-Victorianism's sexsationalism. However, there are two substantive commentaries on Fingersmith that have considered Waters's use of pornography. Kathleen Miller, for instance, has explored how Fingersmith's neo-Victorian frame engages an anachronistic representation of the Victorians, their pornography industry, and related sexual markets. Miller focuses on the novel's historicity and “authenticity” in relation to Victorian discourses surrounding pornography. But, as this article suggests, the novel's historicity also illuminates contemporary feminist debates concerning women, sex, and pornography and engages—in fictional terms—in the ongoing (re)assessment of sexualities in the Victorian period. More relevantly, Nadine Muller has usefully examined the relationship between third-wave feminist discourse and pornography in the novel. Although building on Muller's useful insights, I place Fingersmith in dialogue with second-wave feminist and queer debates surrounding pornography (perspectives that Muller elides) and draw attention to Waters's use of lesbianism to address gaps in feminist debates, a theme that Muller does not explore.

² For a detailed discussion on this, see Taylor, “Troubling Childhood Innocence,” and Egan, “Girls, Sexualities and the Carnalities of Advertisements.”

³ For a discussion of how this also functions in Waters's Tipping the Velvet, see Claire O'Callaghan, “Lesbo Victorian Romp”

⁴ Crucially, Fingersmith was published at a time when changes to the legislative entertainment licenses (Licensing Act 2003) enabled lap-dancing clubs to operate under a general premises license, a change that led to the opening of many strip venues in the UK's high streets, and which feminist bodies such as the Fawcett Society have vehemently fought. Waters is a patron of the Fawcett Society.

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Claire O'Callaghan

Claire O'Callaghan is a Lecturer in English at Brunel University. Her research specialisms are contemporary women's writing—especially the novels of Sarah Waters—and gender and sexuality in neo-Victorianism.