A literary and cultural history of the intimate space of the
eighteenth-century closet-and how it fired the imaginations of
Pepys, Sterne, Swift, and so many other writers Long before it was
a hidden storage space or a metaphor for queer and trans shame, the
closet was one of the most charged settings in English
architecture. This private room provided seclusion for reading,
writing, praying, dressing, and collecting-and for talking in
select company. In their closets, kings and duchesses shared
secrets with favorites, midwives and apothecaries dispensed
remedies, and newly wealthy men and women expanded their social
networks. In The Closet, Danielle Bobker presents a literary and
cultural history of these sites of extrafamilial intimacy,
revealing how, as they proliferated both in buildings and in books,
closets also became powerful symbols of the unstable virtual
intimacy of the first mass-medium of print. Focused on the
connections between status-conscious-and often
awkward-interpersonal dynamics and an increasingly inclusive social
and media landscape, The Closet examines dozens of historical and
fictional encounters taking place in the various iterations of this
room: courtly closets, bathing closets, prayer closets, privies,
and the "moving closet" of the coach, among many others. In the
process, the book conjures the intimate lives of well-known figures
such as Samuel Pepys and Laurence Sterne, as well as less familiar
ones such as Miss Hobart, a maid of honor at the Restoration court,
and Lady Anne Acheson, Swift's patroness. Turning finally to queer
theory, The Closet discovers uncanny echoes of the
eighteenth-century language of the closet in twenty-first-century
coming-out narratives. Featuring more than thirty illustrations,
The Closet offers a richly detailed and compelling account of an
eighteenth-century setting and symbol of intimacy that continues to
resonate today.
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