Eavesdropping

EAVESDROPPING

We have only so much as to glance at another human being and we at once begin to read beneath the surface. We see there another conscious person, like ourselves. We see someone with human feelings, memories, desires. A mind potentially like ours.

N
ICHOLAS
H
UMPHREY

With the aid of a word I overhear in passing, I reconstruct an entire conversation, an entire existence. The inflection of a voice suffices for me to attach the name of a deadly sin to the man whom I have just jostled and whose profile I glimpsed.

V
ICTOR
F
OURNEL

JOHN L. LOCKE

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford
OX
2 6
DP

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ISBN: 978–0–19–923613–8

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Acknowledgments

List of Illustrations

Prologue

Chapter One
Passionate Spectators

Chapter Two
Under the Leaves

Chapter Three
Open-plan Living

Chapter Four
Reluctant Domestication

Chapter Five
Privacy, Intimacy, and The Selves

Chapter Six
Personal Power and Social Control

Chapter Seven
Passionate Exhibitors

Chapter Eight
What Will the Servants Say?

Chapter Nine
Virtual Eaves

Chapter Ten
Intimacy by Theft

Notes

References

Index

I
DID
the research for this book at the University of Cambridge, New York University, and the City University of New York, completing the manuscript while I was on sabbatical in the Department of Anthropology at Yale University. I have enjoyed the encouragement and advice of several scholars and writers, including Michael Studdert-Kennedy, Kathrin Perutz, Alison Wray, Anne van Kleeck, and Kim Oller, though none has seen the final version of the manuscript. I have also received assistance on specific matters from a number of scholars, including Adrian Treves and Marjorie McIntosh. My greatest debt is to my wife, Catherine Flanagan, who has offered personal encouragement, editorial advice, and countless hours of thoughtful conversation. This book is dedicated to her.

J
OHN
L. L
OCKE

Cambridge, England
Old Lyme, Connecticut
July 2009

Exhibit 1
Le Diable Boiteux

Exhibit 2 “Coupe de maison,” image by Karl Girardet,
Magasin pittoresque
, 1847

Exhibit 3
Overheard
, Jules Adolphe Goupil, 1839–83

Exhibit 4
Curiosity
, Eugene de Blaas, from the
Pears Annual
, Christmas 1892

Exhibit 5
Spionnetje
, or “little spy” (photo by Florien van Beinum and Franz Zwanikken)

Exhibit 6 “Spy hole” in Dinkelsbuhl, an ancient village in Bavaria (photo by Kim Oller)

Exhibit 7
The Maybe
: woman sleeping in a glass case (Fig. 3.7 in A strange alchemy: Cornelia Parker,
Art History, 26
, 2003)

Exhibit 8 Trojan horse eavesdropping. Woman taking a bath while her maid secretly conceals a voyeur. Early nineteenth-century French painting

Exhibit 9
L’Armoire
, etching by Jean-Honore Fragonard, 1778

Exhibit 10 Plan of a typical Kung village (Fig. 3–3 in Lee 1979a, p. 34)

Exhibit 11 The chief’s foot, as drawn by one of the villagers (Fig. 12 in Gregor 1977)

Exhibit 12 Holy watchfulness (Fischer 1989, p. 123)

Exhibit 13
L’epouse indiscrète
(The indiscreet wife), engraving by Delaunay, 1771

Exhibit 14
L’amour à I’épreuve
(Love on trial), Pierre-Antoine Baudouin, c. 1777

Exhibit 15 Wartime poster warning Englishmen about female eavesdropping

Exhibit 16
“Slanderous gossip: it’s beneath you.”
Poster in a Berlin factory in the 1950s warning German women not to gossip

Exhibit 17 Scold’s bridle

Exhibit 18
La Croisée
(The casement window) I, Philibert-Louis Debucourt, 1791

Exhibit 19 “C’est ma femme parbleu! Pas-possible!” (“Damn! That’s my wife!”), Edme-Jean Pigal, 1822 (Mainardi 2003, p. 91)

Exhibit 20
Galerie Colbert, Rotunda
, lithograph by Billaud, 1828

Exhibit 21
A flaneur
(from Louis Huart,
Physiologie du flâneur
, 1841)

Exhibit 22
Paris: A Rainy Day
, Gustave Caillebotte, 1877

Exhibit 23
The Washing Tub
, Pierre Vidal, from an engraving by F. Masse

Exhibit 24
Le Toucher
, Abraham Bosse, 1638

Exhibit 25
Curiosity
, 1817 (from Stone 1990)

Exhibit 26
Madame is Receiving
, Remy Gogghe, 1908 (from Chartier (ed.),
A History of Private Life, IV
, p. 236)

Exhibit 27 “The lady’s maid tries to read her mistress’s letter,” from
The Servant’s Magazine
(Turner 1962, p. 124)

Exhibit 28
What’s in a Name
?, 1892

Exhibit 29
The Private Letter Drawer
, photogravure by Attilia Simonetti

Exhibit 30
Die Lauscherin
(The eavesdropper), Nicholas Maes, 1657

Exhibit 31 Key escutcheon with swinging cover (from Chateau de Villarlon, Minervois, France)

Exhibit 32
Forbidden Books
, Alexander Rossi, 1897

Exhibit 33
Blind Woman
, Paul Strand, 1916

Exhibit 34
Subway Passengers
, Walker Evans

O
N
a flight from Milan to London I was slumped down in my aisle seat, deep in thought as I reviewed an early draft of the manuscript that has become this book. Unbeknownst to me, I was being watched by a woman in the middle seat of the row immediately in front. After we had landed and the passengers were commencing the customary disembarking ritual, the woman startled me by looking over her headrest and pointedly asking if I was writing a book. I answered that I was. What’s it about, she asked. I said my book concerned the intense desire of members of our species to know what is going on in the personal lives of others. At this, the woman burst into ironic laughter since first in watching, and then in asking, she had just expressed two different forms of that very desire.

Watching and asking produce a form of intimate experience, which can be enjoyable in its own right, as well as intimate images, which may be re-experienced when privately brought to mind or—as information—shared with others. Intimacies tend to circulate preferentially among people who know and trust each other, and they usually move swiftly. Since many of these “secrets” ultimately become public knowledge, a look at how intimate material travels enables us to understand the social foundations of scandal, rough justice, and the “news,” even “history.”

I smiled in response to the lady on the plane but I could just as well have laughed, too, for here I was, writing a book about a subject on which there was little in the way of directly relevant research. Indeed, until I began to study eavesdropping—one of the more important ways that ordinary people express the desire at issue—I had never, in many years of research, encountered a
behavior whose actual significance was so greatly at variance with its recognized importance. Look for books on social behavior with the word “eavesdropping” in the index section and you are likely to be severely disappointed. Enter the same word in computerized literature searches and your screen will display a list of books on wiretapping and other forms of electronic surveillance. But the word was coined centuries before telephones and recording equipment were invented, and the practice of eavesdropping documented nearly a thousand years earlier, when people were happy to entrust to unaided senses the question of who was doing what to whom.

Just after I began my studies of eavesdropping, a colleague asked me why I had chosen to address this particular subject. It must have seemed a radical departure from my previous work on the psychology of language. I told him that I had come across Marjorie McIntosh’s analysis of court records indicating that five and six centuries ago, English citizens had, in impressive numbers, been
arrested for eavesdropping
. I wondered what, in the medieval mind, would have caused this behavior to be criminalized, and what the “criminals” themselves were doing, or thought they were doing, when they went out at night and listened to their neighbors’ conversations.