The Open Closet in Dubliners: James Duffy’s Painful Case

Taking its cue from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet, this essay interrogates the heterosexual norm in three contexts to uncover the homosexual panic found in the text of “A Painful Case.” Beginning with the story’s intertext, Henry James’s “The Beast in the Closet,” I move on to look at late-Edwardian homosocial tensions resulting from in the Labouchère Amendment and a series of public sex scandals following the conviction of Oscar Wilde. Finally, I consider the unusual and near-universal heterosexual unanimity in the story’s critical reception. As Sedgwick predicted, this analysis reveals the presence of male homosexual panic in each of these contexts.