ABSTRACT
This chapter charts the affordances of the “closet” for queer theory and modernist studies while recognizing the limitations of the trope as an anachronism, as putatively white, and Western. In light of these limitations, the chapter retrofits the trope by recovering an alternative set of modernist logics—discretion, masks, double lives, and riddles—that have often been understood as closetedness, theorizing their differing ways of imagining and contouring desire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. By more rigorously historicizing the closet, we are able to revisit a range of familiar and less familiar queer texts and see them anew.
