Loser Lesbians: Failure in Affinity and Fingersmith

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article: Prelude Sarah Waters’s work stirs me up; her novels and their filmic adaptations attract and repel me in nearly equal measure. I have engaged with them for over a decade now and each time I do so, I find myself wondering why works like Affinity (novel 1999, film 2008) and Fingersmith (novel 2002, film 2005) ooze aggression, duplicity, and violence while daringly – and admirably, I would suggest – inserting lesbians into an imagined version of the Victorian era that so completely denied their existence. I find both the narratives and their characters unruly, spiteful, and defiant – by which I mean to say I love them – and I am regularly confounded by their refusal to tell the story the liberal, progress-minded part of me wishes to hear. They present an authenticity – I would say ‘truth,’ but the pitfalls are too obvious and unavoidable – that resonates with, and disconcerts, me. This ‘authenticity,’ as I term Waters’s frequently unflattering, unresolved, unappealing depiction of lesbians, routinely portrays them as cruel, conniving, crass individuals bent upon securing their own survival, furthering their social position and power, and eschewing loyalty for all others. This is not to say that I am some sunny-dispositioned academic seeking tales that deliver a narrative wherein sexual minorities band together in solidarity to form a community and combat the heteronormative hierarchy. If I am completely honest, though, I resent Waters slightly for resisting that impulse to improve so completely, though I admire her restraint. We get too much of Hollywood, Americanized ‘happy endings’ these days; especially since our lived experiences rarely resemble such frippery. Waters foils our expectations on the page and the screen; she forces us to interrogate our desires and leaves me, for one, feeling vaguely insecure.