Bobker, Danielle. The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy

Abstract

Samuel Pepys, the English seventeenth-century author, politician, administrator of the English navy and Member of Parliament, makes a repeated appearance in Bobker’s The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy. In the prelude to chapter 1, for instance, we discover Pepys’s obsession with his closet projects; from redecoration to construction, these small, intimate rooms, which required at a minimum four walls and a lockable door, “were always on his mind.” In the prelude to chapter 2, meanwhile, it is Pepys’s awareness of the value of secret closet affairs, socially and financially, that are at the focus of our attention. The reader is introduced to the evolution of the eighteenth century’s “material culture of excretion” and “the emergence of a technology capable of instantly flushing away waste” in the prelude to chapter 3. As Bobker surmises, if the “house of office” seems to have held relatively little interest for Pepys, then this is probably a “reflection of the fact” that his “problems with constipation and gas” means “that he rarely has to go there rather than of any prudishness about bodily functions in general or excretion in particular. Finally, in the prelude to chapter 5, the reader is taken from the interior to the exterior and the coach, or “moving closets,” and learns that, like domestic closets, coaches were also a “central object of aspiration and anxiety” for Pepys and his contemporaries. Together, these prelude appearances by Pepys underscore the social and symbolic value of the closet in the long eighteenth century. For Bobker, they are also an innovative way of giving the reader access to and appreciation for the nuanced and layered meanings associated with the closet, both as an architectural space and a social and cultural signifier.Pepys’s centrality here should not be surprising. As a renowned English diarist, Pepys was “the period’s most vociferous and prolific known recorder of these closet conversations.” Indeed, most of these conversations were recorded in one of his closets—between them, he and his wife had three at their house in Seething Lane. As a result, they provide a historical and cultural framework for Bobker’s in-depth examinations of the evolution of the rhetoric of the closet in the main body of each chapter.Bobker examines a diverse range of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British authors and their texts as well as architectural diagrams and prints, including Jonathan Swift’s satirical verse; John Taylor’s The World Runnes on Wheeles (1623); Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768); Miss C-y’s Cabinet of Curiosities; or, the Green-Room Broke Open (1765), attributed to “Tristram Shandy”; and Anthony Hamilton’s Memoirs of the Court of Charles the Second (1859). By populating The Closet with these texts, Bobker underscores the synergy between the emergence of the closet, an architectural space for people, cabinets or “closets in miniature for objects,” and “texts called closets.”Bobker’s desire to explore the under-researched area of the familial and extrafamilial relationships that the closet facilitated sets apart this extensively researched study. In previous examinations of the long eighteenth-century closet, such as Mark Girouard’s Life in the English Country House (1994), Tita Chico’s Designing Women: The Dressing Room in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Culture (2005), Michael McKeon’s The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (2005), and Cynthia Wall’s The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (2006), there has been a tendency to focus on changing notions of selfhood among elite and middling classes. Such a connection is understandable: as a removed, separate space into which an individual entered to be alone, closets not only facilitated the engagement in solitary activities, such as reading, writing, praying, and dressing, but also encouraged introspection and a focus on the self. Moreover, as the value of the domestic interior as a social space increased, the desire for a room that enabled the user to retire alone for temporary respite from sociability also increased. While Bobker also acknowledges the link between the rise of the closet and shifting ideas about individuality, the aim of this meticulous examination of the etymology and rhetoric of the closet is to “expressly [. . .]explore some of the less familiar, less familial, and generally more fleeting attachments of the eighteenth century” and, as a result, “approach[. . .] the category of intimacy from the outside in, as it were, by way of the period’s most desirable rooms.” As a consequence, architectural and textual closets jockey for attention alongside the people who used them, in the same way that they did in the long eighteenth century.Another aspect that distinguishes Bobker’s study is underscored in The Closet’s coda, “Coming Out,” which, as she explains, “brings together two topical undercurrents of The Closet as whole”: sexual minorities and the twenty-first-century media shift. As Bobker explains, “Closets often accommodated homosocial and homoerotic bonds, not least because royals and nobles almost always chose favorites of their own sex to serve them in their most private rooms.” At a time when discussions about sexual minorities and queer and trans recognition are often so polarized, Bobker’s thoughtful and authoritative concluding section is welcome. Of course, such a layered and complex topic warrants more attention than a coda allows.This concern aside, Bobker’s The Closet is a thought-provoking and long overdue study that provides the reader with a more nuanced understanding of and appreciation for the literary and cultural history of these small, lockable rooms and the relationships and secrets that flourished within them. Published in 2020, it is tempting to read The Closet through the lens of the COVID-19 pandemic. If our experience of the pandemic has taught us anything, however, it is that in spite of our tendency to emphasize the importance of the individual, in actuality it is the community—familial and extrafamilial relations—that we cherish most in times of both joy and adversity.