Eavesdropping (28 page)

Exhibit 32
Forbidden Books
, Alexander Rossi, 1897

The desire to sample these illicit worlds was highlighted in several paintings depicting the pleasures of novel-reading. Titles such as
Forbidden Books
and
Forbidden Fruit
reinforce the impression that, for the educated classes at least, the novel was “clandestine reading.” In one painting, an older woman eavesdrops on the romance readers, evidently to make sure their passions were not being dangerously inflamed.

If novel-reading shares properties with eavesdropping, there are other similarities between these means of accessing the intimate experiences of strangers. The novels themselves made frequent use of eavesdropping. Almost every novel by Balzac, Dickens, and Hardy contains at least one bout of eavesdropping, as did novels by Austen and Proust. Since readers would naturally take the eavesdroppers’ perspective, and look at everything through their eyes, this made it easier for authors to portray the other characters as they would normally be in private—unguarded, unvarnished, and vulnerable.

As in intimate eavesdropping, the authors and readers of novels were, and still are, unevenly divided between the sexes. Relative to other books, the writers were disproportionately female, even if female novelists sometimes used male pen names in the belief that this would give them a commercial advantage. Male authors of romance novels tended to keep their authorship quiet. As for the readership, women predominated here, too, even though early eighteenth-century surveys revealed a lower literacy rate in women. Women were drawn to intimate portrayals of characters and detailed accounts of intimate relationships.
¹²
As we saw previously, these things have long concerned women, whose capacity to survive was historically tied to the quality and durability of marital relationships. Men enjoyed reading about these things too, but many were embarrassed to be “caught” reading romance novels. Today, according to literature professor Kay Mussell, romance novels “are with few exceptions written by women, read by women, and published for women.”
¹³

Most romance novels are written to a formula, one that, according to feminist scholar Tania Modleski, is invariant. In every book a young and innocent woman, of modest means, becomes involved with a man who is invariably handsome, strong, experienced, powerful, and wealthy, and usually about ten to fifteen years older. Although this “hero” is initially superior and arrogant, he falls in love with the woman and submits to her control. The heroine acquires power through her lover, and the story ends happily.
¹⁴

Romance novels must be doing something right. One imprint, Harlequin, publishes over five hundred new titles every month, in twenty-five languages. The reason for their popularity is that romance novels offer images that appeal to evolved mechanisms. When women are asked what should
never
be included in a romance novel, their most frequent responses are promiscuity, a
sad ending, rape, physical torture, and a weak hero—things that they would be expected to fear or avoid in real life. When asked
what they like to see in a hero
, their leading responses are intelligence, tenderness, a sense of humor, strength, and protectiveness. Since these are the qualities they seek in real-life partners, romance novels have been called “compensatory fiction.”
¹⁵

In real life, people are able to control access to illicit scenes—that is the purpose of walls and keyhole covers. In novels, the authors exercise this control. But the scenes described in novels, if they had a liminal quality about them, were considered too accessible to proper young women. Critics worried about the ability of readers to distinguish fictive worlds from real ones. When they had finished reading a romance novel, wrote Jayne Ann Krentz, it was feared that, “the young women may not be able to step back out of the fantasy.”
¹⁶

Men had their own concerns. A pervasive element in romance novels is
female empowerment
. The woman always wins. By virtue of the heroine’s courage, intelligence, and gentleness, wrote Krentz, she is able to bring “the most dangerous creature on earth, the human male,
to his knees.”
She tames the hero, and forces him to acknowledge her power.
¹⁷
Romance novels can thus be seen as
subversive
, for they portray, and could be interpreted as recommending, a complete reversal of the power structure of patriarchal societies.

If men feared gossip and scolding, they were no less unnerved by romance novels. In his
Physiology of Marriage
, published in 1829, Balzac wrote that men should give their wives more things to do if they showed an affinity for novels. “To leave a woman free to read such books as the bent of her mind would lead her to choose,” he wrote, “is to drop a spark in a gunroom. Nay, it is worse than that, it is
to teach your wife how to do without you
, to live in an imaginary
world, a paradise. For what do women read? Works relating to the passions, Jean-Jacques’
Confessions
, novels, and all things that are likely powerfully to
agitate their feelings
.” Balzac went on to explain:

In reading plays and novels, the woman, being a creature far more susceptible to loftier feelings than we are, must experience
the most intoxicating ecstasies
. She creates around her an ideal existence that makes everything else look pale; it is not long before she tries to realize this voluptuous life, and convey its magic into her actual life. Almost involuntarily she passes from the spirit to the letter, and from the letter to the senses.
¹⁸

Balzac may have been writing in a semi-humorous vein, but there was serious concern among others, including parents, who were attempting to rear their daughters to be virtuous.

Several writers have pointed to strong similarities between romance novels and soap operas.
¹⁹
Mary Ellen Brown described the common features: the centrality and power of female characters; the portrayal of male characters as sensitive; an emphasis on intimate conversation which carries the essence of the story; a focus on intimate relationships; and use of the home as the setting.
²⁰

It is clear from Brown’s description that soaps appeal unusually to women. Indeed, they are the only type of national television drama that specifically targets females.
²¹
In the early 1980s the audience for network television soap operas in America included
two-thirds of all women living in homes with a TV.
²²
Only one in ten viewers was male.

It is easy to think of reasons why soaps’ emphasis on romance would appeal to women viewers. The stories, like women’s diaries, focus on love, romance, childbearing, health, manners, and morality.
²³
Danielle Blumenthal suggested that women watch the soaps as a means of addressing their own romantic needs. Soap
operas “pay a great deal of attention to the need to explore, express, and resolve all varieties of human emotion, romantic or otherwise,” she wrote. “This is the true source of their appeal to women.”
²⁴

Women do not just catch the odd soap opera when they can; they have favorite soaps, and view them
loyally
. Some have watched the same soap for their entire lives. The television soap opera
Love of Life
was aired from 1952 to 1980. John Keeler, writing in the
New York Times
, expressed wonder about the sort of “unsated curiosity” that could keep a single story going five days a week for 28 years.
²⁵
Little did he know that
Guiding Light
, a sister program that took to the radio waves in 1937, would still be running on TV over seventy years later. But the soaps are not just popular in America. They also command considerable followings places as diverse as Australia, Cyprus, Britain, Pakistan, Canada, Mexico, Ireland, and Greece. Latin American soap operas, called
telenovas
, are the most popular genre of television program in the world, having a worldwide audience of at least
two billion
.

In novels and soaps, the focus is on people that never existed and never will. But we are also drawn to the inner sanctums of real lives. In the late seventeenth century, John Aubrey published
Brief Lives
, a series of short biographies of over four hundred of his famous or unusual English countrymen.
²⁶
Aubrey was clearly an eccentric, and there were few authors who could match his zeal for portraiture. But the desire for personal information about famous people was intense. In the early nineteenth century, American publishers printed hundreds of biographies. In an article in the
Yale Literary Magazine
in June, 1845, a writer said, “Biography has obtained within the last half century a degree of attention and importance it never before enjoyed. Lives of men eminent in art, distinguished for achievements, or notorious for misfortunes or wickedness,
have, during this period, been more than quadrupled … Biography is the rage of the day.”

Readers were hoping for some of the same things that eavesdroppers want. When they first appeared, biographies were the only way, except for eavesdropping and gossip, that ordinary people could learn about the private lives of public figures and strangers. Inside those lives, it was suspected, were the behaviors that facilitated success. If they knew what these behaviors were, readers could emulate them, and more easily ascend the economic ladder. Biographies, according to Scott Casper, were thus treated as “middle-class handbooks.”
²⁷

If private lives conceal the secrets to success, readers would surely want access to this material. In 1816 a critic complained that readers were forced to “look, in vain, for those little foibles and weaknesses, which are inseparably attached to the nature of man.” “We must follow him to his closet,” the critic advised, “we must see him, in the bosom of his family; we must know, whether he acts the hero to his valet de chambre; it is in these situations only, that we can find the motives, that influence his actions.”
²⁸

Writers’ tendency to draw a veil over such private dramas went uncorrected, and the criticism of sanitized biographies continued. In 1827 the
American Quarterly Review
summed up the shortcomings of much American biography. “Your modern biographer,” the
Review
said, “rarely leads you into the private lodgings of the hero—never places you before the poor reasonable animal, as naked as nature made him; but represents him uniformly as a demi-god”. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Casper wrote, a growing number of critics was condemning “the didactic tendencies to whitewash flaws and make subjects into cookie-cutter models of specific virtues.”
²⁹

Although diaries initially featured the public lives of men, they took a turn toward private life in the nineteenth century. In
A Day at a Time
, Margo Culley writes that the trend toward greater privacy
was accompanied by an increase in self-examination, and it is around this time that women became more active in diary and journal writing than men. Their chosen topics were clearly intimate, from pregnancy and mothering to care giving and homemaking, and these were written in a more subjective, sentimental, and self-analytical style than comparable works by men.
³⁰

A spur was provided by Marie Bashkirtseff, a young Russian painter whose passionately self-oriented diaries were written in the 1880s. When these were translated into English, American women seemed to feel that they, too, could begin to stray from their largely familial orientation. At the turn of the century, a nineteen-year-old woman from Butte, Montana—still some decades ahead of her time—opened her diary with:

I of womankind and of nineteen years, will now begin to set down
as full and frank a Portrayal as I am able of myself, Mary MacLane,
for whom the world contains not a parallel.
I am convinced of this, for I am odd.
I am distinctly original innately and in development.
I have in me a quite unusual intensity of life.
I can feel.
I have a marvelous capacity for misery and for happiness.
I am broad-minded.
I am a genius.

Though Mary eventually moved on to other sentence structures, her diary shows a continuing fondness for the first person singular pronoun.
³¹

Nicholas Humphrey has written that a key characteristic of human consciousness—the essential impenetrability of human thought—causes individuals to feel separate from each other. As a
species
, we humans are considered intensely social, so intent are we to find out what is in the minds of others. But as
individuals
, he wrote, our unavoidably separate consciousnesses make us “exceptionally lonely.” In
The Pursuit of Happiness
David Myers wrote, “When a person realizes he has been deeply heard, his eyes
moisten. I think in some real sense he is weeping for joy. It is as though he were saying, ‘Thank God, somebody heard me. Someone knows what it’s like to be me.’”
³²

Autobiography gave people a chance to do something about this—to say: look at me, understand me—and the new life-writers have availed themselves of this opportunity. The proliferation of lifewriting spaces on the Internet, wrote Laurie McNeill, marks an equally unprecedented interest in the lives of ordinary individuals who, before the Internet, had few opportunities to publish their life stories on such a wide scale.”
³³

Historically, ordinary people had public lives but very little privacy, and few wrote biographies. Now, ordinary people spend much of their time in private but are relatively less exposed to friends and neighbors. Perhaps this is why they feel a need to post tiny fragments about their lives online.