ABSTRACT

A closeted space for private practices sat at the heart of what literary historians Inga Bryden and Janet Floyd have described as a ‘topography of secret spaces’ which ‘lent themselves to the revealing of interior space, allowing the display of interiors within interiors Chinese box style’. While royal heritage may have added lustre to the closet’s long genealogy it is really its development within the context of bourgeois private space that consolidates its association with sexual deviancy, proscription and ultimate freedom from the 1850s onwards. The particular significance of the closet as a symbolic space became heightened at this moment. Michael Brown attended to both the metaphoric and material qualities of the closet and its status as a largely ‘Western’ concept, tied to specific geographical sites and scales, and architectural curator Aaron Betsky made more strident claims for the importance of its form in his treatise on architecture and same-sex desire of 1997.