Epistemology of the Closet

In this chapter, Sedgwick begins by taking up D.H. Lawrence’s feelings about the work of James M. Barrie. At first lauding Barrie’s writing at the age of twenty-five, Lawrence would later go on to criticize Barrie’s writing as a whole. What caused this shift? For Sedgwick, “the Barrie to whom Lawrence reacted with such volatility and finally with such virulence was writing out of a post-Romantic tradition of fictional meditations on the subject quite specifically of male homosexual panic” (183). Key to understanding Sedgwick’s reading of Lawrence during this period of European history is how Lawrence’s changing view of Barrie occurred during a larger social and historical transformation regarding the way homosexuality had been defined “in relation to the rest of the male homosocial spectrum” (185). Sedgwick finds this opposition to be an “exceedingly potent and embattled locus of power over the entire range of male bonds, and perhaps especially over those that define themselves, not as homosexual, but as against the homosexual” (185). In other words, Sedgwick reads Lawrence’s shift as being informed by changing dynamics between heterosexuality and homosexuality. In addition to Lawrence and Barrie, Sedgwick discusses these dynamics via the work of William Thackeray, George Du Maurier, and