Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "The Beast in the Closet"

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's work in Between Men (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990) seems to me some of the most enduringly valuable literary criticism of the past few decades. She combines an extraordinarily astute philosophical mind with a resilient attachment to the messiness of ordinary life, a sense of how permeated by and yet how resistent to theoretical categories are actual people.

Philosophical thinking often takes its point of departure from a moment of wonder, and uses the energy of that wonder to construct systems. Instead of building systems, Sedgwick seems determined to renew her (our) wonder at the multiple and incoherent contacts between thought and life. One source of this tendency in her thought is an appreciative awareness of how ill her own position fits into the theoretical frameworks with which she most sympathizes: Sedgwick is a woman and a feminist who devoted much of her career to writing about relationships between men, an intellectual and emotional investment not neatly explicable in terms of either desire or identification as we usually theorize them. The first axiom of her "Introduction: Axiomatic" to Epistemology of the Closet is simply (wondrously) that "People are different from each other" (22). If that seems like a surprising statement in a work of "theory," that's just the point: "when dealing with an open-secret structure" like that of the closet, Sedgwick argues, "it's only by being shameless about risking the obvious that we happen into the vicinity of the transformative" (22). I can't think of a better credo for doing theory in general, which less often takes its strength from the discovery of new knowledge than from discovering words for what we on some level already knew (and thereby transforming our knowledge).

In what follows, I'll try to give some background for the psychoanalytic and biographical work that underlies Sedgwick's reading of James, but I'll leave most of her essay on "Beast" undiscussed and open for your comments and questions.

Pychoanalysis, homosexuality, paranoia

‘And this individual who lets himself be f…d calls himself a one-time Presiding Judge?’ 

     – Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of a Nervous Illness (1903)

In 1903, the same year that “The Beast in the Jungle” was published, a successful judge from Saxony, in Germany, published the story of the nervous breakdowns and partial recovery that he had undergone, he believed, because of stress from his work.

Daniel Paul Schreber

Schreber believed that something amazing and terrible was going to happen to him—he was unique among humankind, singled out by God for a special fate. It was not something he would do, but something that would happen to him. And his recovery, at the time he published his memoir, had led him not to give up this belief, but simply to subdue it so that it interfered less with his normal life. His wife of many years was as grateful as he was for the cure he had undergone in a psychiatric hospital.

Schreber published the story of his illness because he hoped it would be religiously edifying. He saw himself (not unreasonably) as part of a long tradition of Christian mysticism.

Schreber’s singular fate, he believed, was this: He would redeem the world. But to do so, he would first have to be transformed into a woman.

Naturally enough, Schreber’s Memoirs interested psychiatrists as much as priests, and in 1911 Freud published his own interpretation of Schreber’s case under the title Psychoanalytic Remarks on an Autobiographically Described Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides). Other psychiatrists, notably Freud’s colleague and sometime-friend Carl Jung, had followed Schreber himself in understanding his paranoia in a religious context. Freud, though, argued that Schreber’s belief that transformation into a woman was a means to religious redemption was a defensive construction of the real logic of his delusion:

We learn that the transformation into a woman (emasculation) was the primary delusion, which was at first adjudged to be an act of grievous impairment and persectution and came to be related to the role of Redeemer only on a secondary level. It is also beyond doubt that it was at first misused for sexual purposes rather than serving higher designs. To put this in formal terms, what was for the patient a delusion of sexual persecution was retroactively transformed into religious megalomania. (Freud, The Schreber Case, trans. Andrew Webber, p. 11, my italics)

In other words, Schreber said that he was to become a woman in order to save the world. Freud’s response is that really, Schreber’s belief that he would save the world functions as an excuse to make morally permissible his desire to become a woman (and thus to have sex with a man).

Freud’s account of Schreber is one of two case studies—the other is the The Wolf-Man—that have been fundamental for later theories, both homophobic and anti-homophobic, of male homosexuality. The particular contribution of the Schreber case has been to associate paranoia with male homosexuality, and this association lies behind Sedgwick’s work in Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet.

In Between Men, Sedgwick studies the formation of modern masculinity from the second half of the eighteenth century to the turn of the twentieth. By analogy with Adrienne Rich’s idea of a “lesbian continuum,” which describes all relations among women as different in degree but not in kind from erotic love, Sedgwick uses the term “homosocial desire” in her study of the relations between men. “Homosocial desire” is, roughly, a gay (male) continuum.

Yet as we discussed when reading Rich—and see in particular Jules’ comment to the Rich post in this regard—this continuum has been (and, it seems, still is) differently structured, differently policed for men than it is for women. This has a lot to do with the history of men’s oppression of women: for lesbian feminists, a “lesbian continuum” has been a politically desirable theory in part because it aligns the interests of straight and gay female feminists against those of anti-feminist men. Obviously, a parallel theory of male desire (a gay male continuum) doesn’t have the same political use for gay men, since there’s no gender-based political movement for men equivalent to feminism. Indeed, when gay men have theorized their sexuality as a form of hypermasculinity—we can see this in Pausanius’s speech in the Symposium, and versions of the idea circulated (in competition with the “inversion” model) in early 20^th century Germany—this has aligned them with male power and against women.

Homosocial desire is thus, on Sedgwick’s account, structured precisely by the vehement denial of any connection between male bonding and homosexuality, and the denial is more vehement in proportion as the connection seems more threatening. (What’s less gay than American football, right?)

What Sedgwick notes about the Schreber case, then, is the counter-intuitive (from a gay-positive point of view) use to which Freud’s insight into the psychic violence done by repressing gay desire has been put:

… Freud’s study of Dr. Schreber shows clearly that the repression of homosexual desire in a man who by any commonsense standard was heterosexual, occasioned paranoid psychosis; the psychoanalytic use that has been made of this perception, however, has been, not against homophobia and its schizogenic force, but against homosexuality—against homosexuals—on account of an association between “homosexuality” and mental illness. (Between Men 20; cf. EC 187)

The distinction made by Sedgwick here is important for understanding her reading of “Beast.” What we see in the Schreber isn’t, in all probability, the psychosis of a closeted gay man. Rather, it’s the psychosis of a primarily straight man induced by the fear that his sexuality isn’t 100% straight. Indeed, the sort of man most immune to what Sedgwick describes as “homosexual panic” would be an out gay man.

Homosexual panic

When Sedgwick first used the term “homosexual panic” in Between Men, she was borrowing it from a relatively rare psychiatric diagnosis, and hoped in her own work to challenge the psychiatric presumption that such panic was an individual pathology by showing its origins in culturally imposed homophobia.

Gradually during the 1980s and ’90s, though, “homosexual panic” (sometimes, “gay panic”) made its way into popular speech, quite independently of Sedgwick’s work, as a term for an increasingly common legal defense for gay-bashers: men who beat or killed gay men were defended in court on the grounds that sexual advances by the gay victim had provoked a sort of temporary insanity in the attacker. The defense sometimes worked, leading to acquittals or reduced charges (as in the case of Jonathan Schmitz, where a fairly clear case for first-degree murder led to a conviction only for second-degree). In the Matthew Shepard case, the judge disallowed a “gay panic” defense. Sedgwick thus retained the term in her reading of James with some misgivings (see EC 19-21), but also with an awareness of how difficult it is to defend the terms of any discussion of homosexuality from misappropriation.

Was Henry James gay?

We didn’t, last week, discuss James’s biography at all, but it forms an important background for Sedgwick’s reading of “Beast” (see 196-199). As is the case for any pre-Stonewall writer, we’d risk some anachronism in calling James “closeted,” but it does seem right, even inevitable, to understand him as a gay writer. Undoubtedly—much of the evidence for this is in surviving correspondence—his most passionate relationships in his later years were with younger men, but there’s no evidence so far as I know that these relationships were sexual, and there’s no evidence that his relationship with Constance Woolson (discussed by Sedgwick on 196-7) may not have been sexual. James’s sexuality, that is, is about as easy to pin down as Marcher’s—and wanting to pin it down, to know it as either gay or straight, is of course just the epistemological impulse that Sedgwick calls into question. 

I'm eager to hear what you make of her attempt to do this, and I hope you won't take my admiration for Sedgwick as a requirement to read her essay uncritically. 

What moments (passages) in the story does her reading shed new light on?

What import does the "closet" have for this story, on Sedgwick's reading? Is her argument that Marcher is gay and closeted? Who does the "closet," as she describes it, affect in the world of this story?

Where do Sedgwick's claims seem most tenuous or strained? Are there passages in the story that it seems not to explain adequately?