“Make Boo Radley Come Out”: Race, Sexuality, and “the Closet” in Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman

This essay builds upon queer theoretical scholarship in southern literary studies that explores the metaphor of “the closet,” as conceptualized by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Harper Lee’s iconic civil rights-era novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Lee’s Go Set a Watchman (2016), a novel composed in the mid-twentieth century but published in the early twentieth-first century, incorporates and expands upon this metaphor. Like To Kill a Mockingbird , Go Set a Watchman turns to the metaphor of the closet not only to explore the experiences of marginalized characters but also to consider how covert ideological acts and beliefs may contribute to social inequality.