Awkward Encounters with Sarah Waters: Shame, Reading, and Queer Subjectivity

Focusing on Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet (1998) and Affinity (1999), this article examines how the reader-pleasure afforded by contemporary reimaginings of Victorian lesbianism accommodates the complicated emotional response of shame. Through an investigation of how both texts relate queer experience to shame and what narrative strategies facilitate or induce shame in the reader during their reading experience, this article argues that Waters’s work invites a more sophisticated analysis of shame: one that relates to, and arguably reproduces, the empathetic engagement between the text and the reader. In so doing, this article demonstrates the importance of affect and narrative studies in unpacking the complicated reading pleasure afforded by Waters’s writings and its political potentials.