36 pages • 1 hour read
Eve Kosofsky SedgwickEpistemology of the Closet
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1990A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaSymbols & Motifs
The Closet
It is safe to say that the closet is the cardinal symbol that populates and guides Sedgwick’s text as a whole. For Sedgwick the metaphor of the closet functions as a double-bind and a perpetual threat upon the lives of homosexuals. Sedgwick notes that “[...] every encounter with a new” social situation “erects new closets whose fraught and characteristic laws of optics” necessitate “new calculations, new draughts and requisitions of secrecy or disclosure” (68). In other words, it is constitutive of homosexual life that one’s “being out of the closet” does nothing to alleviate the potential of violence, harassment, or disenfranchisement of basic rights and services that are available to their heterosexual counter parts.
Billy Budd and Claggart
The figures of Billy Budd and Claggart, as explored by Sedgwick, become symbolic of a particular mode of relation that is at once politically charged and epistemologically relevant. For Sedgwick, the principal feature of Billy’s and Claggart’s relation is best captured by the way in which Billy’s many attempts at understanding who Claggart is and what his intentions are gives rise to a type of knowledge, the form of which is identical to the object that is under epistemic investigation. In other words, Billy’s many attempts only allow him to comprehend the moral character of Claggart as secretive, opaque, and ultimately, fundamentally unintelligible. Thus, as Sedgwick writes, Billy-as-paranoid-heterosexual maintains a relation to Claggart such that the “vessels of ‘knowledge itself’ do come to take their shape from the (thematically specified) thing known, or person known.” (97). Just like Sedgwick’s examples of the bachelor in Victorian and Gothic literature, or the compulsory nature of desiring women at the heart of heterosexuality, the paranoid structure of knowledge arises from heterosexuality having to be ever more vigilant in policing the boundary between itself and homosexuality during a historical period where the norms that govern male-male homosociality were being redefined.
The Bachelor
The figure of the bachelor appears in Sedgwick’s chapter that on Lawrence’s reaction to Barrie’s corpus. For Sedgwick, what caused Lawrence to eventually criticize Barrie after applauding his early writing was the shift that took place from Gothic to Victorian fiction; particularly with respect to the hero of its narratives and its implications for human sexual identity. As Sedgwick remarks,
In Victorian fiction it is perhaps the figure of the urban bachelor...who personifies the most deflationary tonal contrast to the eschatological harrowings and epistemological doublings of the paranoid Gothic. Where the Gothic hero had been solipsistic, the bachelor hero is selfish. Where the Gothic hero had raged, the bachelor hero bitches. Where the Gothic hero had been suicidally inclined, the bachelor hero is a hypochondriac. The Gothic hero ranges from euphoria to despondency; the bachelor hero, from the eupeptic to the dyspeptic. Structurally [...] whereas the Gothic hero had personified the concerns and tones of an entire genre, the bachelor is a distinctly circumscribed and often a marginalized figure in the books he inhabits...The bachelor hero can only be a mock-hero; not merely diminished and parodic himself, he symbolizes the diminution and undermining of certain heroic and totalizing possibilities of generic embodiment (189).
Unlike the Gothic hero who is tenacious to the point of martyrdom, the Victorian hero is a male figure who undertakes a close to full scale retreat from the demands of social life and withholds investing his desire in anything or anyone. In other words, Lawrence’s reaction to Barrie’s later writing coincides with this shift in recasting heterosexual masculinity as something disconnected from the world instead of an impassioned hero with whom the reader can identify with and believe in.
