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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BetaChapters 4-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Beast in the Closet — James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic”
In this chapter, Sedgwick begins by taking up D.H. Lawrence’s feelings about the work of James M. Barrie. At first lauding Barrie’s writing at the age of twenty-five, Lawrence would later go on to criticize Barrie’s writing as a whole. What caused this shift? For Sedgwick, “the Barrie to whom Lawrence reacted with such volatility and finally with such virulence was writing out of a post-Romantic tradition of fictional meditations on the subject quite specifically of male homosexual panic” (183). Key to understanding Sedgwick’s reading of Lawrence during this period of European history is how Lawrence’s changing view of Barrie occurred during a larger social and historical transformation regarding the way homosexuality had been defined “in relation to the rest of the male homosocial spectrum” (185). Sedgwick finds this opposition to be an “exceedingly potent and embattled locus of power over the entire range of male bonds, and perhaps especially over those that define themselves, not as homosexual, but as against the homosexual” (185). In other words, Sedgwick reads Lawrence’s shift as being informed by changing dynamics between heterosexuality and homosexuality. In addition to Lawrence and Barrie, Sedgwick discusses these dynamics via the work of William Thackeray, George Du Maurier, and Henry James. She argues that the shift in allegiance to the narrative content of stories represented a shift in how heterosexual male entitlement reproduced itself in a new century.
However, as Sedgwick points out, this entitlement “required certain intense male bonds that were not readily distinguishable from the most reprobated bonds, an endemic and ineradicable state of what I am calling male homosexual panic became the normal condition of male heterosexual entitlement” (185). Sedgwick dedicates a large portion of this chapter to an analysis of key male figures in Gothic literature, which serves as literary means for reorganizing the way in which “homosexual panic” comes to be reinscribed at the heart of heterosexual masculinity. For Sedgwick, this is best exemplified by the figure of “the bachelor” who, in response to “homosexual panic,” “atomized male individualism to the nuclear family [...] a garrulous and visible refusal of anything that could be interpreted as genital sexuality, toward objects male or female” (192). Key to the figure of the bachelor, says Sedgwick, is the image of a man who is no longer a hero but is isolated, detached, and beholden to no one, whether a male friend or a female companion. She analyzes the Henry James novella The Beast in the Jungle, which tells the story of John Marcher, a man who does not reciprocate the love of a lifelong female companion named May Bartram, and the similarly themed Barrie novel Tommy and Grizel, and identifies the pernicious logic of homophobia that lies at the heart of heterosexual masculinity, “that the worst violence of heterosexuality comes with the male compulsion to desire women and its attendant deceptions of self and other” (198).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Proust and the Spectacle of the Closet”
In this chapter Sedgwick analyzes the sexual and gender identity of two of Proust’s main characters, Charlus and Albertine, from his famous novel In Search of Lost Time (or Remembrance of Things Past). By analyzing the figures of Charlus and Albertine, Sedgwick is able to tease out the “closeted” nature of Proust’s sexually ambiguous characters and is able to demonstrate the problematic aspect of an individual sexual and gender identity. For Sedgwick, Charlus’s supposed gender identity (Charlus is suspected of being a woman) and Albertine’s suggested sexual history with women lead to the conclusion that despite their differences, both characters are feminized by the story’s narrator.
That is to say, the ambiguity surrounding gender and sexuality, as far as the ambiguity arises from an individual’s less than clear heterosexuality, logically tends toward their being characterized as feminine in some essential sense. Thus she writes
[W]hile the Charlus who loves men is described as typical of “the invert” as a species, the Albertine who loves women seems scarcely to come under a particular taxonomic heading on that account; it is as if the two successive stages of homosexual definition [...] coexisted in Albertine and Charlus in an anachronistic mutual blindness. Or, alternatively, Albertine can seem to some readers to embody the utopian fulfillment of a universalizing view of homo/heterosexual definition, even as the incomparable Charlus...dystopically embodies the minoritizing view (231).
For Sedgwick, this inquiry surrounding the reality or illusion of one’s heterosexual identity, and thus heterosexual identity itself, that comes to be constructed by, and founded upon, the question of one’s homosexual status: “We must know by now [...] better than to assume that there is a homosexual man waiting to be uncovered [...] yet it is by the homosexual question...that the energy of their construction and exploitation continues to be marked” (246). That is to say, within the regime of heteronormativity, heterosexual identity is itself claimed and continuously reaffirmed only in response to the possibility of one’s being caught in the crosshairs of the “homosexual question.”
Chapters 4-5 Analysis
In the fourth and fifth chapters of Epistemology of the Closet, Sedgwick analyzes the shift from Gothic to Victorian literature in its portrayal of masculinity and Proust’s depiction of Charlus and Albertine in In Search of Lost Time. In Chapter 4, Sedgwick begins with a meditation on the differing ways in which Gothic and Victorian literature negotiated the values around heterosexual masculinity and integrated those social norms into their narrative literature.
As she notes:
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).
For Sedgwick, these shifts signaled a recasting of heterosexuality as it navigated the increasing potential of being viewed as homosexual. Unlike earlier Gothic literature, the hero of the Victorian era negotiated the obligation of heteronormativity less through the tenacity of the will and more through the increased seclusion and detachment from the whole of society—for if social interactions presented increased chances of being viewed as homosexual, it was all the better to avoid them entirely.
In Chapter 5, Sedgwick orients the reader to the other side of the spectrum and analyzes two cheer characters in Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, Charlus and Albertine. With respect to the narrator’s depiction, Sedgwick concludes that
Indeed, all the two versions of homosexual desire seem to have in common may be said to be a sort of asymmetrical list toward the feminine: Charlus is feminized by his homosexual desire, but so, to the extent that gender is an active term in her sexuality at all, is Albertine most often feminized by hers (234).
That is to say, just as the figure of the heterosexual male was recast the aloof and secluded hero of Gothic literature, the figure of homosexuality became increasingly hard to pin down, except for the singular fact of homosexuality being tied to the figure of femininity. Thus, Sedgwick concludes that the figures of Charlus and Albertine serve as exemplars of the truth regarding the hetero/homosexual binary: namely, that the ambiguity and indeterminate nature of homosexuality via the vantage point of heterosexuality is debased and acts as the motivating force of the compulsion to perform one’s heterosexuality.
