The Way In

Abstract

This chapter outlines the broad historical and conceptual foundations for the focused explorations on the closet. It analyzes the domestic privacy and modern selfhood that has overshadowed the closet's origins as a site of politicized intimacy and its flexibility as a locus of interpersonal relations in eighteenth-century Britain. It also assesses how the emergence of democratic social feelings has generally directed attention away from the closet and toward more obviously heterogeneous scenes of sociability, such as the coffee house. The chapter considers the closet's peculiar aptness as a setting and symbol of social transition. It explains how the closet is widely recognized as a place where reciprocal feelings could flourish against a backdrop of rigid status distinctions and how it revealed the exhilarating and also uncomfortable new processes and prospects of inclusion.