All about Closet Work

Danielle Bobker, in The Closet: The Eighteenth-Century Architecture of Intimacy, defines and explicates what she describes as the “rhetoric of closet intimacy” in England between the Restoration and the late eighteenth century (x). Eighteenth-century closets were small private rooms used for reading, writing, and praying. As Bobker points out, the term “closet” had other less well-known uses as well. For example, it was applied to anthologies, privies, and collections of curiosities. While carriages and manuscripts were not popularly understood to be types of closets, Bobker argues that they functioned culturally in similar ways. Her broad application of the term to a wide variety of intellectual and physical spaces has benefits and drawbacks. It allows her to trace complex cultural narratives, such as the shifts from manuscript to print, hierarchy to egalitarianism, and family or class loyalties to friendship based on mutual interests and benefits. However, these insights come at...