Hawthorne’s argument moves through the literary canon and finds closets everywhere. Not just in explicitly queer literature, but in the foundational texts that have never been read that way. The closet isn’t unique to coming-out narratives. It operates as a structuring principle across canonical literature—a spatial and psychological mechanism that organizes how characters move through the world, what they can say, what they must hide.
By applying queer methodology to texts that aren’t explicitly queer, Hawthorne proposes something larger: that reading itself can be a queer practice. That the tools developed to understand queer literature have applicability beyond their original context. That canonical texts contain patterns and structures we’ve failed to recognize because we weren’t looking for them.
The subsequent scholarship that uses his framework demonstrates the reach. Villette, Dracula, Frankenstein—texts written long before ‘coming out’ was terminology—reveal themselves as narratives built around closets. Characters concealing, revealing, navigating the space between secret knowledge and public presentation. The closet functions simultaneously as haven and prison: a space where something true can exist, and a space where that truth gets contained, restricted, prevented from expanding into the world.
What Hawthorne uncovers is that this tension predates modern queer identity. The mechanisms were there in Victorian literature, in earlier texts. The emotional logic of the closet—safety and suffocation coexisting—is older than the word. Reading with that awareness transforms how entire works function. It reveals authors grappling with concealment and disclosure as central human problems, not marginal concerns.
Details
| ISBN: 9781889431291 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: LGBT Studies/Social Sciences |
| Subject(s): Literary Collections |
| Publication Date: 1998-08-01 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: University of the South |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 276 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: Mark D. Hawthorne was a professor at James Madison University. Making It Ours was published by the University Press of the South in 1998, a small academic press based in New Orleans. The book has been cited in graduate scholarship on lesbian and queer literary theory, particularly in work applying queer readings to Charlotte Brontë and Daphne Du Maurier. It predates but anticipates much of the queering-the-canon critical work that accelerated in the 2000s. |
| Book_ID: 106152 |