Belinda
The following chapter offers a conceptual comparison between the male and the female closet by addressing two novels from roughly the same time period, namely William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794) and Maria Edge- worth’s Belinda (1801).10 As we have seen in the introduction to this thesis,
the late eighteenth century is the time in which closeted identities begin to take shape. The comparison drawn in this chapter is supposed to outline the major similarities and differences between the male and the female closet by taking a look at two prototypical and early gendered closets. The similarities will prove that there is such a thing as a female closet and that one is right to call it a ‘closet’; the differences, on the other hand, will demonstrate that the female closet is no mere copy of the male one but has its own characteristics and specificities. Caleb Williams has often been read as a closet-novel, both due to its focus on the secrets of patriarchy and masculinity and due to its ‘queer’, homoerotic relations between men. Belinda, on the other hand, can be seen as one of the – if not the – first novel(s) to explicitly trace a female closet and make it the pivotal point of the narrative. Although this is an early female closet, in Belinda we can trace specific outlines of the female closet which will reappear in later chapters: We can see how the female closet is, above all, associated with gender non-
10 This chapter is based on my unpublished MA-thesis “The Closet in William Godwin’s
compliance and the transgression of gender norms, how the secret content of the closet is gendered ‘female’, how the female closet’s privacy becomes problematic in a patriarchal society and how female homoeroticism is put in relation to the closet. Both Belinda and Caleb Williams deal with closets that show criminal as well as homoerotic traits; however, their manifesta- tions are different. For women, criminality as well as homosexuality repre- sents a gender transgression and is thus in need of closeting.11 We will re-
encounter these thematic complexes in the section on the criminal closet and the section on the lesbian closet. What the two novels cannot offer an explanation for is the closet of women’s victimisation, the third thematic complex, addressed in the section “The Closet of Female Victimisation”, for it is a specifically female condition in the nineteenth century – in some sense, it is the most characteristically female closet of them all – and forms an exception in that it is expressive of a displacement: The closet is devel- oped by a (female) person in place of another (male) person. Still, Caleb Williams and Belinda will help to make comprehensible the overall structure of this thesis and to sharpen our understanding of the specificities of the female closet as well as the closet in general. In order to make the following chapter accessible for the reader unacquainted with the two novels, a short summary of them follows, before a closer look will be taken at the novels’ spatial and metaphorical closets, the power relations surrounding these closets, the (homo)erotic energies circling around them as well as the queer gender performances taking place in their vicinity.
In Caleb Williams, often seen as a highly political, anarchist novel in the context of the French Revolution, young Caleb, an orphan, becomes a servant in the service of Mr. Ferdinando Falkland. Caleb is marked out as the victim of his master’s displeasure when he, by accident (as he claims), enters his closet and sees him leaning over a chest therein. Intrigued by the contradictions in Falkland’s character and the secrets he seems to harbour,
11 Homosexuality, of course, also represents a gender transgression for men. Homoso-
cial relationships, on the other hand, are absolutely crucial for the patriarchal power system: For men, it is thus of central importance to stay on the right side of the demar- cation line; a line which Caleb Williams constantly blurs.
Caleb sets out to learn more about his master. Mr. Collins, another servant, tells him the story of Falkland’s past: Due to his noble character and gen- eral popularity, Falkland attracted the envy of his neighbour, Mr. Tyrell. The conflict escalated when Tyrell’s niece Emily fell in love with Falkland and Tyrell publicly humiliated Falkland – the same evening, he was found dead. Falkland, however, succeeded in convincing the public of his inno- cence; instead, two servants were found guilty and executed. After hearing this story, Caleb becomes obsessed with his master’s secret: He is certain that Falkland murdered Tyrell and that the evidence is hidden in the closet. Falkland cannot escape Caleb’s intrusions and finally admits the murder to him, prohibiting him by penalty of death to ever speak of it. In the after- math, he sets out to silence Caleb: In public, he accuses Caleb of theft, so that the young servant is brought to prison. Caleb manages to escape, the start of a long journey through England, where he has to live a miserable life while constantly trying to evade the law and Falkland, whose power seems to grow every day. His plans to leave England are thwarted, partly by Falkland himself, and all his attempts at building a life for himself are prevented. His only weapon against Falkland seems to be the truth about the murder; out of loyalty to his master, however, he refuses to tell this story until the very end. Finally, when he feels that he cannot live on oth- erwise, he summons the magistrate and accuses Falkland of murder. Falk- land breaks down and admits to everything, and the two forgive each other, but Falkland dies shortly after, leaving Caleb with the bitter feeling of hav- ing been responsible for his death. In the novel’s original ending, which was only discovered in the 1960s, Caleb’s public accusation of Falkland fails as nobody believes him and Caleb himself dies in captivity, slowly go- ing mad.
In Belinda, often seen as a conduct or courtship novel, the eponymous heroine, Belinda Portman, is to be introduced into society and thus she is sent to live with the lively, witty and charming Lady Delacour. Lady Dela- cour is the soul of every festivity and prefers enjoying herself at social gatherings to staying at home and caring for her family: She is estranged
from both her husband and her daughter and has thus ‘failed’ as both wife and mother. Instead of being taught by her, Belinda educates her mentor throughout the novel. For Lady Delacour has a crucial secret: Her breast was hurt in a duel some years ago, which she fought in men’s clothes, ac- companied by the manly, ‘unnatural’ Harriet Freke, her best friend at the time, but now her sworn enemy. Lady Delacour takes the wound to be in- dicative of breast cancer: Convinced that she is dying, she hides her illness and the medicine for it in her boudoir, to which she finally admits Belinda, her new confidante. Belinda persuades Lady Delacour to undergo an oper- ation which cures her as she was in fact only suffering from a bruise caused by the recoiling gun. She further reconciles the lady to her husband and her daughter. After having thus educated Lady Delacour in what it means to be a ‘proper woman’, Belinda herself has to choose between two lovers: Mr. Vincent, a West Indian Creole, whom she rejects because of his love for gambling, and Mr. Clarence Hervey, a friend of Lady Delacour’s. Belinda finally marries Clarence in spite of his earlier mistakes: Inspired by the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he has brought up a young woman far away from society in order to create a ‘perfect’ wife for himself. The novel ends in a tableau representing successful domesticity as the characters are bound in heteronormative marriages.
The Master’s Closet and the Lady’s Boudoir: Spatialised Closets in Caleb Williams and Belinda
As is frequently the case in novels dealing with the closet, the metaphorical closets in Caleb Williams and Belinda are substantiated by being placed in parallel with spatialised equivalents: The spatial closets serve as the repos- itory of their owners’ secret, their metaphorical closet. These rooms, far from shielding Falkland’s and Lady Delacour’s secrets, on the contrary draw attention to their metaphorical closets: The mere atmosphere of secrecy and mystery surrounding these private spaces leads to suspicions on the part of the people in their environment. Caleb and Belinda are outsiders
within the household and, at the same time, they are both placed in an uneven relationship to a person in power. As the novels focus on their perspectives, the reader is invited to discover the master’s and the lady’s secrets along with them, voyeuristically peeping into the superior’s closet. These spatial closets and their metaphorical equivalents are explicitly gen- dered: While Falkland’s closet, the stereotypical private room of the pater- familias, hides the ‘male’ criminal deed of murder, Lady Delacour’s, the female closet turned sickroom, conceals her ‘female’ secret of failed moth- erhood and women’s transgression against patriarchy.
In Caleb Williams, the spatial closet is introduced within the first few pages of the narrative: Caleb stumbles upon “a closet or small apartment” (Caleb Williams12 6) while wandering through his master’s house, allegedly
“to put any thing in order that [he] might find out of its place” (CW 6). Falkland’s closet can be said to represent the typical male closet in a patri- archal society, a room reserved specifically for the master of the house, a sign of his status and his right to privacy, especially his right to private knowledge. The room itself is, in contrast to many female closets, not de- scribed in detail; the only noteworthy object is the “chest” (CW 6) on whose contents Caleb’s obsession begins to centre. Here we find the box- within-a-box structure so typical of the closet, a doubling of closeting structures that seemingly offers protection against intrusions into it, but in fact makes it even more vulnerable by drawing attention to it. Accordingly, Caleb’s thoughts start circling around the contents of the chest. But it is exactly these contents which the novel never reveals, for Caleb never suc- ceeds in physically penetrating his master’s chest: “The contents of the fatal chest from which originated all my misfortunes I have never been able to ascertain” (CW 293), Caleb states at the very end of the novel. The fact that the truth which the chest is supposed to offer is “always deferred” (Feldmann 76), draws attention to Caleb’s obsession with it rather than to
12 Godwin, William. Caleb Williams. Ed. Pamela Clemit. Oxford/New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2009. References to Caleb Williams will be abbreviated with CW and the page number.
the actual content of the closet. This “remarkable narrative gap” (Verhoeven 211) opens up various possibilities for interpreting the con- tents of the chest. Consequently, it has been interpreted as a “symbol for all secrets” (Kilgour 73), as “a metonymy for mysterious adult sexuality and the guilty unconscious” (von Mücke 331), biblically as a symbol of the tree of knowledge or Pandora’s box (cf. Proske 150) or even biographically as “a highly dramatized symbolical picture of Godwin himself in the act of writing Political Justice” (Furbank 215). But as Verhoeven points out, it is a mistake to believe “that the meaning of the trunk is its contents” (212); it is rather what Falkland and Caleb construct as its meaning. The chest is thus “an empty signifier” (Feldmann 76), whose “signification can be filled by anyone” (Feldmann 76). This is exactly what Caleb does: He is “per- suaded that the secret it inclose[s] [is] a faithful narrative of that [Falkland’s murder of Tyrell] and its concomitant transactions to be reserved in case of the worst” (CW 293). Hence, the knowledge closeted away constitutes a typical ‘male’ criminal secret: The knowledge of a deed committed to protect patriarchal power interests. It is, most likely, the secret of Falkland’s dishonourable murder of his rival Tyrell, of how he “watched [his] oppor- tunity, followed Mr Tyrell from the rooms, seized a sharp pointed knife that fell in [his] way, came behind him, and stabbed him to the heart” (CW 132). This deed represents both a transgression of the law in the juridical sense and of the laws of honour in which Falkland roots his identity and mascu- linity. Falkland within his closet is supposed to represent the patriarch in full control of his (and his family’s) secrets; the novel, however, comes to subvert this idea, as the patriarch begins to lose this control through the insatiable “curiosity” (CW 115) of his subordinate, who involves him in a homosocial power struggle. Consequently, Caleb deprives Falkland “of something to which he, and particularly he as a man, feels he has a right: the right to withdraw from the ever-prying public eye into a place of safety” (Ellis 153).
However Caleb’s motives are to be interpreted, he is “not altogether innocent” (Storch 199) when it comes to his dealings with the closet. Alt- hough constantly protesting his innocence, even Caleb comes to the con- clusion that he can “recollect nothing, except the affair of the mysterious chest, out of which the shadow of an accusation […] could be extorted” (CW 155; emphasis mine) and that “[i]n that instance no doubt [his] con- duct ha[s] been highly reprehensible” (CW 155). After all, on several occa- sions Caleb actively tries to force his entrance into the closet and into the chest – and by that, into Falkland’s mind. Transgressing the boundaries implicitly and explicitly set to him, Caleb “intrudes upon his employer’s masochist communion” (Roemer 49) with his secret, hidden within the chest. Directed “by some mysterious fatality” (CW 128), he becomes so obsessed with Falkland’s closet that instead of participating in the efforts to put out a fire on the estate, he uses “chissels [sic] and other carpenter’s tools” (CW 128) to attempt to open the chest. In trying to gain knowledge of the secret by all means, Caleb thus becomes suspect himself, which shows that “intimate knowledge makes each the guilty party” (Mackie 185). The secret is therefore more than just knowledge that Caleb seeks and can walk away from after attaining it: In a scene reminiscent of a marriage cer- emony (cf. Fincher 111), Falkland makes Caleb “attest every sacrament, divine and human, never to disclose [the secret]” (CW 131). As the keeper of his secret, Caleb is bound by the same limitations as Falkland, so that “[w]hen Falkland admits that he is the murderer of Tyrell, Caleb is placed involuntarily within the closet that Falkland inhabits” (Fincher 111). This scene thus demonstrates one of the main mechanisms of the closet, in which revealing the secret, that means coming out of the closet, has a po- tential to create ever new closets.
The gendering of space in the eighteenth and nineteenth century means that equivalent rooms are given different names depending on the gender of their occupant: Falkland’s closet is paralleled by Lady Delacour’s
“boudoir” (Belinda13 21) in Belinda. Similar to Falkland’s closet, Lady Dela-
cour’s boudoir is introduced at the beginning of the novel, demonstrating its centrality within the overall plot: Shortly after her arrival in the Delacour household, Belinda realises that her new mentor has a secret, for there is “some mystery about her ladyship’s toilette” (B 20) and about the way she obeys her servant Marriott’s every whim. Thus, it seems to Belinda “as if Marriott [i]s in possession of some secret, which sh[all] for ever remain unknown” (B 20) and she quickly associates this mystery with the “little cabinet beyond [Lady Delacour’s] bedchamber, which [she] call[s] her bou- doir” (B 21) and which no one is allowed to enter, except for Marriott. In contrast to Caleb, Belinda does not try to force her way into Lady Dela- cour’s closet; instead it is Lady Delacour herself who comes to confess her secrets willingly. In a gesture heavy with meaning, she “let[s] her mask [fall]” (B 30) after attending a masquerade and laments her loss of “‘repu- tation, happiness […] to the love of frolic’” (B 30). But instead of orally communicating her story, Lady Delacour at first uses her boudoir as a vis- ual sign of the closet by “bidding Belinda follow her […] to the door of the mysterious cabinet” (B 30, 31). In doing so, she reveals her boudoir to be a sickroom, with “vials” (B 31) and a “strong smell of medicines” (B 31) for what she believes to be a cancerous breast, but also a form of “vanity chest” (Wu 33), hiding Lady Delacour’s cosmetic secrets which help her to keep up the appearance of health and thus “to be admired as a fashionable bel esprit” (B 10).14 “[I]n a spectacle tinged with Gothic terror” (Wu 55), she
goes as far as “baring one half of her bosom, […] reveal[ing] a hideous spectacle” (B 32). Hence, Lady Delacour’s confession is highly dramatised, with a clear emphasis on visual and bodily aspects: As a transgression against the norms of femininity, the secret is inscribed upon the female
13 Edgeworth, Maria. Belinda. Ed. Kathryn J. Kirkpatrick. Oxford/New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2008. References to Belinda will be abbreviated with B and the page num- ber.
14 This is one of the ‘dangers’ associated with the boudoir: It offers “the possibility that
body, and upon an exclusively female body part, as illness, a typically ‘fe- male’ condition.15 It is this inscription that contributes to the difficulty of
keeping the secret, for it makes Lady Delacour, unlike Falkland, dependent on others and passivises her.
The spoken revelation of the secret only follows as a second step. Where most of Falkland’s story is told by Falkland’s steward Collins as his mediator, Lady Delacour’s is “‘related by herself ’” (B 35). Consequently, it is less idealised: After all, Collins tries to convince Caleb of Falkland’s in- nocence, whereas, in the logic of the novel, Lady Delacour’s function is to caution Belinda against imitating her lifestyle, thus serving as a “Dreadful Warning” (Atkinson and Atkinson 96). But what is the secret hidden within the boudoir? In general, it is the secret of gender non-compliance, of “‘a life of folly’” (B 32), by which Lady Delacour refers to the tale of her un- happy marriage to Lord Delacour, her failures as a mother, her affair-like relationship with Colonel Lawless for whose death in a duel she thinks her- self responsible, and, above all, her friendship to Harriet Freke who con- vinces her of a duel with a Mrs. Luttridge, dressed in men’s clothes. This participation in the duel as well as the donning of men’s clothes do not only deviate from the norms prescribed for women, they also constitute an unlawful act at the time (cf. Ty 164), marking Lady Delacour’s closet as criminal. It is from this duel that Lady Delacour derives her breast injury, for the gun “‘recoil[s]’” (B 58) when the duellists decide to fire into the air instead of performing the actual duel. Consequently, Lady Delacour’s se- cret is intricately bound up with the question of gender transgression, which is greatly emphasised by the fact that it is her breast, supposedly one of the strongest markers of femininity, which is hurt. For her wound can be seen as a “symbolic punishment for her disobedience of the codes pre- scribed by patriarchy for the female sex” (Ty 164), as “signal[ing] both her maternal failure and her sexual ambiguity” (Greenfield, Mothering 108), “as
15 The nineteenth century “romanticizes the notion of woman as a permanent, a neces-