I did not quite get what Eve Sedgwick was trying to do by comparing (or rather contrasting) the events of Biblical Esther with the “closet” of homosexuality. It seemed that her main argument was to criticize the closet as something that essentially keeps gay people separate and segregated from the rest of society, it is something that acts as a barrier between that gay community and the straight community. The very fact that there is a closet to come out of, for Sedgwick, spells certain separation of the gay community. So when she devoted a few pages to the story of Esther and how Esther, sort of, came out of the closet with her Judaism to Ahaseurus, I really saw no connection. First off, Judaism and Jewish identity is a completely different dynamic from a person’s sexual orientation. Secondly, Esther was “out of the closet” to everyone besides the royalty in the palace, her entire community knew her Jewish identity (an issue that Sedgwick addresses which seems to detach this story from her argument even more). I did not see how the story of Esther, even though there is an element of revealing the hidden (Esther, in Hebrew, means hidden), added to or supported her argument.

And as for Fiedler’s argument, it certainly makes sense, but what about Charles Brockden Brown’s “Wieland” or Hannah Foster’s “The Coquette,” both Americna novles with just as much sexual tension and romance as, say, “Wuthering Heights?”