Eavesdropping (18 page)

Elizabeth was a next-door neighbor. Did she eavesdrop because she wished to preserve the moral purity of her neighborhood? She was married. Was she attempting to shore up the institution of marriage? Elizabeth was a young woman, in her mid-twenties. Was she interested in the intimate experience she witnessed purely for its own sake; or was she bored in her marriage and seeking a voyeuristic frisson from observing her next-door neighbor’s tryst?

It is possible, of course, that until the Vintons appeared on the scene, Elizabeth had
no plans
to convey her perceptual images to the authorities. After all, she had seen Mary and Richard doing “wanton” things in the past and had said nothing; had seen them behaving “incontinently” and had kept it to herself. On the day in question, Elizabeth may have been treating the Babbs-in-laws’ misbehaviors as a personal matter, as she had in the past, and may have been observing their trysts out of a strictly personal motivation. But she was interrupted by a married couple, and it may have been their moral outrage that drew Elizabeth into the suit while supplying her with a “cover” or respectable motive for her spying.

If Elizabeth’s eavesdropping underscores the difficulty of separating intimate experience from personal power and social control, so does the case of Raymonde Testanière. Earlier we saw that in her thirteenth-century village in the Pyrenees, Raymonde overheard the whispered conversation of three heretics when she climbed up a dung heap and listened through a chink in an outer wall. One of the heretics was Guillaume Authié. When Raymonde told the bishop what she had seen and heard, she may well have been rewarded for
helping to preserve control. But in a small village, business is rarely impersonal, and this incident was no exception. Raymonde’s employer and provider, Bernard Belot, was an arch enemy of Authié. Belot had fathered at least two of Raymonde’s children, but had thus far refused to marry her. Raymonde may well have reasoned that if she testified against Authié, this would please Belot, redounding to the benefit of her children and her as well as the village and church.

I mentioned earlier that when I told friends I was writing a book about eavesdropping, men and women responded differently. The men either nodded in silence or asked a few technical questions, impassively. Women, by contrast, grinned, blushed, averted their gaze, or raised their hands in mock surrender, as if to say “You got me.” Do the historical records confirm these casual impressions that proneness to eavesdropping is gendered? Do women show up in the court records more often than men?

Yes, they do. In Montaillou, Jacques Fournier’s Inquisition Register details numerous instances of knothole and keyhole eavesdropping by women, along with a few more adventurous cases, and it is clear that the women of the village predominated where these kinds of
in situ
perceptual invasions were concerned. The men “were inquisitive enough,” wrote historian Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie, who translated and interpreted the Register, “but their curiosity was nothing beside that of the women.”
²⁰

Women predominate in the sort of normally concealed eavesdropping that one can do from one’s home, like Margaret Browne, or while moving about one’s village, like Elizabeth Tullett, but what explains this trend? One possibility—a boring one, but we cannot dismiss it out of hand—is that women eavesdropped more often than men simply because they were in a position to do it more often. Sexual misconduct, at least the type that produced
arrests in early modern England, usually took place in a house. If it was detected at all, it would likely be picked up by someone who was also at home at the time, and that would usually be a woman. “The wife,” wrote social sage William Gouge in 1622, “causeth many things to be espied, and so redressed, which otherwise might never have beene found out; for two eies see more than one, especially when one of those is more at hand, and in presence, as the wife is in the house.”
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Of course, we still might wonder why the women provided such rich descriptions of the trysts they spied on, as when Margaret Browne testified to the color of Mrs. Underhill’s underwear, and recalled, apparently verbatim, the words with which the adulterous wife teased and taunted Michael Fludd. There is little in the women’s eye-witness testimony to indicate that they hesitated to describe before an open, male-dominated court sexual encounters that, even by today’s standards, would be called “lurid.”

But we still have a question on the table: did women more frequently eavesdrop about adultery and other things that took place in houses simply because they were home more often? Possibly, but there is a more basic issue here, one relating to the domestic ecology of England (and elsewhere): why were the women at home more than men? It is here, I think, that we are likely to locate a more compelling reason for the gender difference.

Of course we know that for various reasons, some cultural, others biological, women were more concerned than men with the stability of long-term relationships and the quality of child care, which fell mainly to them. Women have long worried about threats to these things, and have therefore been seen as moral gatekeepers, concerned—more than men—with a range of family matters, including marital fidelity. Except for daily trips to the market or village well, they were also expected to spend most of their time indoors, in private space, not in the public areas that were dominated by men.
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For women to police the activities that went on in homes was, for the most part, to act in their own interest.

What are we to make, then, of Le Roy Ladurie’s reference to the “curiosity” of the women of Montaillou? Was this a trivialization of women’s more serious concerns? Surely he was not alone in using this term. In 1616 an English writer, Alexander Roberts, characterized women’s sense of curiosity as overdeveloped. “They harbour in their breast, he said, “a curious and inquisitive desire to know such things as be not fitting and convenient.” Nicole Castan characterized three centuries of French women, beginning in 1500, as “curious by nature.” “Women of the lower orders shamelessly admitted it.” One confessed that “she was ‘obliged’ to follow the movements of a passerby, another that she could not help overhearing a conversation or lying in wait for a neighbor.”
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Exhibit 15 Wartime poster warning Englishmen about female eavesdropping

“Curiosity,” of course, is what biologists would call the “proximate mechanism”—the appetite for intimate experience that was installed in evolution, ensuring that the longer-term informational needs of modern humans would be satisfied. This appetite provides individuals with the experience or information that it will usually benefit them to have, but which they might not actually acquire if looking were only an obligation. Since “curiosity” makes it unnecessary to ingest needed information
dutifully
, it is not trivial at all to identify this psychological mechanism as a relevant component—indeed, it is the critical outer perimeter—of our social intake systems.

Nicole Castan also commented that whatever French women noticed in centuries past “was
repeated
.”
²⁴
In Castan’s remark we find another reason to suppose that
women would have
eavesdropped more than men. Going back a good five hundred years, there is evidence suggesting that women
gossiped
more than men. Recently I summarized this evidence, which cuts across a number of different cultures as well as time periods.
²⁵

If women gossiped more, then they surely would have done more of what gossip entails, that is, would have spent more time disclosing and discussing intimate behaviors. Since eavesdropping is the necessary “intake” mechanism, it makes sense that women would want to devote some amount of time to that activity.

It also means that they might
need
to gossip, at least if they wish to achieve communion with other women. In the early 1970s, sociologist Elizabeth Bott studied twenty families residing in London. She found that the women in these families comprised a network—a gossip network. Mutual aid was extended to those who belonged to this network, and the cost of membership was willingness to gossip and be gossiped about. The rules were simple, she wrote, “no gossip, no companionship.
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But in such an
arrangement the reservoir of material that is used to negotiate companionship has to be refilled, from time to time, by fresh new acts of eavesdropping—a gossip network is an
exchange
network. One cannot expect to get the inside story on everyone else if one never takes a turn in supplying such stories. The message is clear: the indirect cost of mutual aid, at least in Bott’s sample, was
mutual eavesdropping
. What the women comprised was an
eavesdropping-and-gossip network
.

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

Now discussions of gossip, as Oxford psychologist Nicholas Emler has pointed out, almost invariably call attention to degenerate and even malicious aspects of this activity. Gossip, Emler wrote, is regarded as “a rather vacuous, aimless activity which contributes little or nothing of value to human affairs, beyond a degree of entertainment and diversion for superficial and idle minds.” But it gets worse, for gossip is also seen as “a form of mischief, a threat to the good order of society.”
²⁷

Clearly, gossip has a terrible reputation. But let us put aside for a moment the cultural voices that tell us these things and think about the facts. Gossip occurs when two or more people talk about the people they know. The material that is exchanged is usually intimate, relating to personal events and relationships, because people are interested primarily in those things.

Now let us return to eavesdropping. It, too, is preferentially devoted to intimate activity. If eavesdropping involves the theft of intimate experience, the question naturally arises as to what the thief does with this stolen material. Is it merely to be held in one’s mind and savored, or is it to be shared with others? I suggest that wherever the person eavesdropped upon does something that can be portrayed to another, the eavesdropper is likely to convert the residual images into a form of capital. This “intimate capital” is likely to be worth something to others, and may be given or traded away, and if it is, we will say that the eavesdropper has “gossiped.” If this happens, and it often does, the time devoted to eavesdropping may be compensated many times over.

If eavesdropping involves the theft of intimate experience, and gossip its distribution, there may be an analogy between these practices and the theft and sale of merchandise. In her book,
The Fence
, Marilyn Walsh described the social arrangement and flow of goods in a typical larcenous network. The middlemen, or “fences,” are familiar with the thieves and prospective buyers.
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Knowing what sort of material is valued, the fence passes this information along to his suppliers, the thieves, and the thieves then set about to
steal it. I use this analogy because eavesdroppers are more inclined to take in private activity that will interest their friends, who grasp it like a baton and relay it through their gossip networks.

From an evidentiary perspective, adultery trials were gold mines, with the richest possible lodes. But there was another way that eavesdropping crept into court records. Recognizing that behaviors set in motion by eavesdropping could stir up tiny villages, societies enacted laws to address the problem at source. Toward the end of the 1300s, and possibly a century earlier, English villagers were already being arrested for going out at night and listening to their neighbor’s secrets. In due course, the practice took on an architectural focus—the “eaves-drop, the area outside houses where rain fell from the eaves to the ground. Standing there, “eaves-droppers” were able “to listen secretly to private conversation.”
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