Eternal Gardens and the Queer Uncanny in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s “In the Closed Room” (1902)

This essay reads Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1904 short story “In a Closed Room” as a queer ghost story of intergenerational female affiliation alongside analysis of the story’s original illustrations, by artist Jessie Wilcox Smith, who lived and worked in a multigenerational lesbian ménage. This reading contrasts the closed room with an open garden, comparing the portrait of a closeted existence versus a yearned-for but impossible space of sexual freedom to similar moments in Nathanial Hawthorne’s 1850 The Scarlet Letter and Henry James’s 1898 “Covering End.” This essay proposes that the Edenic garden is commonly figured as an erotic paradise into which the closet opens out. In specifically fin-de-siècle lesbian representation, this paradise is almost always dwelt in by ghosts; the garden is eternally lush, but the price of entrance is death. The essay engages theories of queer temporality, the uncanny, and the queer child.