Houses, Secrets, and the Closet investigates the literary production of masculinities and their relation to secrets and sexualities in eighteenth and nineteenth century fiction. It focusses on close readings of Gothic fiction, sensation novels, and tales by Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, William Godwin, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, and Henry James. The study approaches these texts through the lens of domestic space, gender, knowledge, and power. This approach serves to investigate the cultural roots of the 'closet' - the male homosexual secret - which reveals a more general notion of male secrecy in modern society. The study thus contributes to a better understanding of the cultural history of masculinities and sexualities. Both Eve Sedgwick's theories of the 'closet,' the history of 'homosociality,' and the 'paranoid reader,' and more general theories concerning the workings and politics of secrecy serve as a basis for this argument. Close readings of several extensive narratives demonstrate how (and why) the masculine secret becomes increasingly 'sexualised' in the course of the examined timespan. By doing this, a thus far neglected continuity between the modern 'closet' and the much older, but socially important male secret that has been a literary theme since the earliest novels will be illustrated. The eighteenth century Gothic novel serves as a starting point. The Gothic castle's owner almost always has a secret which is hidden in his castle. An early example of this is the story of Count Bluebeard, which has been influential in both the English and pan-European literary traditions. Bluebeard hides the corpses of all his former wives in a room in his castle, a fate that awaits every woman who tries to disclose his secret. Hence, Bluebeard's secret serves a double function: for him, it is an instrument of power since he possesses knowledge that is denied to his wives; this knowledge is concealed in such a way that the women cannot access it spatially. On the other hand, Bluebeard's secret also causes a kind of masculine paranoia: he constantly lives in fear of disclosure. Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto confronts the reader with a male protagonist whose paranoid need to protect the secret of his illegitimacy and disso- ciate homosocial power from the threat of homoeroticism makes him a misogynistic tyrant. His 'phallic rage' is not only fatal for the bodies of the women around him, but also ultimately destroys the house of patriarchy itself. Ann Radcliffe takes up this theme in The Mysteries of Udolpho, creating the fictional architecture of a Bluebeard's castle which, through its labyrinthine structure, and seemingly impenetrable mystery of locked and unlocked doors, enacts patriarchal terror on the female heroine's mind and body. At the same time, however, Radcliffe questions the ultimate efficacy of such masculine violence, and contrasts Udolpho's failing, masculine spaces with feminine 'alternatives' that provide the novel's (dead and alive) women with the means to have a (secret) room of their own. Finally, William Godwin's Caleb Williams explores the paranoid structure of homosocial masculinities, problematising an obsessive preoccupation with 'honour,' and alluding to the increasingly virulent dilemma of a homoeroticism that gets associated with homosocial secrecy. In eighteenth-century Gothic, then, we already find all the elements of masculine crisis that will continue to preoccupy writers throughout the nineteenth century.With the rise of the middle classes, new forms of privacy, and the emergence of the novel as the genre that explores the workings of the private mind, modern concerns with gendered definitions, increasingly troubled by evolving dichotomies of 'sexual' definition, found their expression in the fictional architectures of the Gothic. By the mid-nineteenth century, these 'closets' had been 'domesticated' in, among other forms, the writings of the sensation novelists. In The Woman in White,Wilkie Collins portrays male characters who struggle (and fail) to define for themselves a stable masculine identity. Weak, ill, and effeminate, the men witness epistemological and spatial power shift to the novel's female characters. The men's paranoid attempts to claim narrative authority over the story and its characters' fictional lives foregrounds the genre's preoccupation with secrecy, and its relevance for politics and rhetoric of gender and sexuality. In No Name, a novel similarly inhabited by male characters of questionable health and virility, Collins further problematises the performative nature of gender roles, and has his actress-heroine subvert the male-homosocial order in liminal spaces which, in themselves, already point towards the unstable ground on which the 'house of patriarchy' is built. Mary Elizabeth Braddon takes these themes a step further. In Lady Audley's Secret, she not only reverses the gendered dynamics of the Bluebeard theme, placing a woman at the centre of spatial and epistemological control, but also suggests a 'way out' of the destructive mechanisms of patriarchal-masculine paranoia, providing her 'queer' male characters with a dream-like, triangulated existence in a fairy-tale ending which, albeit ironically, celebrates deviance as an essential antidote to excessive normativity. Henry James at around the turn of the twentieth century skilfully turns this praise of deviance into a 'queer rhetoric' which never quite says what it actually 'means,' but always productively opens up textual spaces that invite the 'paranoid reader' to see 'sexual' meaning where it never becomes explicit. In"The Aspern Papers," James takes up the theme of epistemological power and its spatial organisation having shifted to women. The tale's protagonist, a male editor, not only struggles to penetrate a woman's secret where none might be, but also displays a sentimental attachment to the fetishised letters of a dead poet, the editor's desire for whom forecloses any heteronormative solution to the story's gendered conflicts. Similarly, in "In the Cage," James demonstrates the blackmailability of paranoid masculinities in creating a female telegraphist whose position at the centre of communication exchange enables her to put pressure on one of her male clients through a mere rhetoric of knowledge. Explicating knowledge of a secret, as James shows, can be more powerful than actually knowing the secret's content. In "The Jolly Corner," finally, paranoia finds its 'sexual' expression in the protagonist's agonised wish and fear to confront his suppressed 'alter ego,' the unnameable knowledge which - ironically - his female friend seems to have penetrated long ago. The destructive dynamics of paranoid masculinity, and its excessive need to dissociate itself from the threats of both 'queerness' and 'femininity' are only a problem, James appears to suggest, so long as one insists on the need to 'speak one's name.' James proposes an alternative: a textual celebration of the ambiguous, the 'sexually' non-explicit, and the open space of possibility. The book's last chapter includes a reading of Sam Mendes' 2012 James Bond film Skyfall. Both a relic from the Cold War and its hyper-masculine rhetoric of a defence against the 'Evil Empire,' and, from the start, a never-quite-serious parody of the very machismo Bond has come to represent, the world's most famous secret agent, and his more than half a century old cultural career are a perfect starting point for an analysis of current concerns with gender roles and the importance of secrecy. Bond, after all, works for the British Secret Service, and thus represents one of the organisations that have come to be modern society's abstracted versions of the figure of Count Bluebeard: intelligence agencies are in control of secret knowledge and its circulation, to the exclusion of the majority of the population. Skyfall here serves as an example to demonstrate how the major nodes around which this book's argument is built - masculinity, secrecy, sexuality, and space - continue, in their interconnectedness, to form an important set of analytical tools for an understanding of some of our culture's most central concerns. Skyfall shows that, in the twenty-first century, a cultural preoccupation with issues of gendered power relations and sexualities has lost nothing of its allure. The Gothic, too, still provides today's storytellers and audiences with a rich imagery of spaces that illustrate and make graspable a psychology of the self that has its roots in the eighteenth century. One of the aims of this book is to bring together research that has been done in gender and queer studies, history, philosophy, and sociology, in order to demonstrate that any attempt to thoroughly understand the ways masculinities have been negotiated and defined in literature since the eighteenth century needs to take into account the difficult (and exciting) relationship between genders and 'sexualities.' Homosocial, patriarchal masculinities, in the long nineteenth century, were not only, albeit crucially, structured around misogyny, but also around varying degrees of homophobia. Literary explorations of the homosocial, heterosocial, homoerotic, and heteroerotic dynamics of modern Western patriarchy have, as the book illustrates, been 'queer' before they could be 'gay,' but this queerness, far from being a marginal phenomenon, makes up much of the allure of these stories, and accounts for the pleasure of engaging with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]