Abstract

Henry James's 1903 story "The Beast in the Jungle" has often, since Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's influential 1986 queer reinterpretation, been understood to be about the protagonist John Marcher's closeted sexuality. His friend May Bartram is understood as knowing his secret, but May tells him, in fact, that his secret has changed over time; circumstances have made his secret, many decades after their first meeting, different from what it once was. This essay correlates the depicted passage of time in the narrative with the history the characters presumably lived through, including the invention of homosexual.

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