ABSTRACT

Despite the closet’s centrality to queer culture and theory, the metaphor’s various meanings have yet to be disaggregated and defined. Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s identification of the closet with a “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century,” the present article uses an array of late-Victorian sources—especially The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds and Teleny, a pornographic novel sometimes attributed to Oscar Wilde—to describe and distinguish: (1) so-called latent homosexuality (“the unconscious closet”); (2) deliberate strategies of suppression, abstention, and reformation (“the conscious closet”); (3) clandestine pursuits of gay sex and sociability (“the double life”); and (4) performances of a heterosexual persona (“the mask”). This article’s sources further attest to the late-Victorian advent of “closet consciousness”—a recognition among certain homosexually-inclined men that the closet’s multiple modalities, for all their variety, are phenomenologically and ideologically linked.

摘要

尽管壁橱是酷儿文化和理论的核心，但这个隐喻的各种含义还没有被分解和定义。继 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 将壁橱与“同性恋/异性恋定义的危机，指示性男性，可追溯至 19 世纪末”进行识别之后，本文使用了一系列维多利亚时代晚期的资料——尤其是约翰·阿丁顿·西蒙兹的回忆录和特莱尼，一部色情小说，有时归因于奥斯卡·王尔德——描述和区分：（1）所谓的潜在同性恋（“无意识的壁橱”）；(2) 刻意压制、弃权和改革的策略（“有意识的壁橱”）；(3) 秘密追求同性恋和社交（“双重生活”）；(4) 异性恋角色（“面具”）的表演。这篇文章的资料进一步证明了维多利亚时代晚期“壁橱意识”的出现——某些有同性恋倾向的男性认识到壁橱的多种形式，尽管多种多样，在现象学和意识形态上是相互关联的。