[Ads-l] Antedating of "Come Out of the Closet" (Homosexuality)

[Laurence Horn]

> On Jan 23, 2018, at 3:16 PM, MULLINS, WILLIAM D (Bill) CIV USARMY RDECOM AMRDEC (US) <william.d.mullins18.civ at MAIL.MIL> wrote:
> 
>>>> There’s also this but I don’t know the broader context of the excerpt:
>>>> 
>>>> 1963   S. Plath in London Mag. Jan. 16   Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
>>>> 
>>>> It’s not bracketed, so I assume it’s metaphorical in one sense or another.
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> The Plath cite is from a poem:
>>> Chttps://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57419/the-applicant
>>> 
>>> and I am not able to tell what the author meant by this use.
>>> 
>>> 
>> Thanks, Bill.  If it were my entry, I’d have at least bracketed if not entirely omitted this occurrence, which I don’t see as having to anything
>> obvious do with the sense glossed above, 'to admit (something) openly, to cease to conceal, esp. one's homosexuality’.
>> 
>> LH
>> 
> 
> That is my take as well, but like I said, it is pretty opaque to me, and I wanted to allow for the possibility I was missing something that was obvious to a Plath scholar (or even an run of the mill English major).
> 
FWIW, the Genius annotation, which may or may not have been provided by an English major, annotates the relevant bit—

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for *that*.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.

--as follows (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57419/the-applicant):

We can speculate why the woman is in the closet. She may be hiding, to try to escape her fate. Or she may be too timid to assert herself.
=========

Plath in this poem, and others (and at times in The Bell Jar, for that matter), depicts women in contemporary America as mannequins (or, to link with the previous thread on digisexuality, as robots designed for servicing men), another reason to take the closet in which the applicant is hiding to be a literal closet, or at least not a metaphorical closet of the relevant kind.


LH
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