Criticism > Short Story Criticism > The Secret Sharer, Joseph Conrad - Cesare Casarino (essay date summer 1997)

The Secret Sharer, Joseph Conrad - Cesare Casarino (essay date summer 1997)

Cesare Casarino (essay date summer 1997)

SOURCE: Casarino, Cesare. “The Sublime of the Closet; Or, Joseph Conrad's Secret Sharing.” Boundary 2 24, no. 2 (summer 1997): 199-243.

[In the following essay, Casarino regards the closet as a crucial locus of same-sex desire and investigates the possibility of a homosexual relationship between Leggatt and the narrator of “The Secret Sharer.”]

To a nameless traveler on the Djakarta-Yogyakarta Express on a winter night, 1983: it was with you that I first shared the transport of enclosure.

They shut me up in Prose—
As when a little Girl
They put me in the Closet—
Because they liked me “still”—
Still! Could themself have peeped—
And seen my Brain—go round—
They might as wise have lodged a Bird
For Treason—in the Pound—
Himself has but to will
And easy as a Star
Abolish his Captivity—
And laugh—No more have I—
—Emily...

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