Eavesdropping (3 page)

Even if Margaret was satisfied in her marriage, the sexual scenery that day in June may have awakened feelings that had grown dormant. “I love my husband,” a reader of true romance novels told an interviewer recently, “but it is a mellow, comfortable, long-married feeling. With each new romance I read,” she said, “it brings back the excitement, the sparkle, tears and joy of falling in love.”
²

How did the tryst next door find its way to public trial? It’s anyone’s guess, but Margaret probably told someone what happened, perhaps her women friends. If so, word would have traveled quickly through Houndsditch. Out of sympathy, she may have told her cuckolded neighbor directly. What we do know is that Mr. Underhill immediately initiated an adultery suit—tantamount, in sixteenth-century England, to a divorce proceeding.

How separate was the telling of the tale from the acts that were told? Did Margaret eavesdrop
so that
she could send word of her observations up the civic chain of command, perhaps in revenge for some previous transgressions by Mrs. Underhill, or to give John Underhill the ammunition he needed to end a marriage that had so obviously gone awry? If her motive was not to recite the tale, why did Margaret spend so much time observing the activities next door?

She could have done so simply because the opportunity was “there.” In Elizabethan England domestic walls lulled occupants into thinking they were alone when, in fact, neighbors and strollers were only a structural defect away. Margaret may have found the hole in the wall too tempting to pass up. But this would only account for the first few seconds. What about the next five or six hours?

One possibility is that Margaret enjoyed the view. Voyeurs, as we know, watch sexual activity purely for pleasure, and the pleasure can be very great indeed. Modern research indicates that sexually explicit films give hormonal levels a significant boost, a reason, perhaps, why some humans are able to subsist largely on visual images.
³
But the link between vision and sex is not particularly strong in women—laws against Peeping
Toms
were not written with women in mind—so it is probable that Margaret’s true
motivations lay elsewhere. Perhaps a better place to look for clues would be in the
frisson
—the feeling of doing something that is forbidden or illegal, as when peering through a keyhole, or reading a letter that was addressed to someone else.

As a late sixteenth-century housewife, Margaret was used to being told what she should enjoy and must endure. One of her principal tasks in patriarchal England was giving pleasure to Mr. Browne. But the day in question was different. For Margaret decided, without spousal assistance, what she wished to experience, and to do so, for once, without responsibility or commitment. Or disappointment. “The everyday practice of taking pleasure into one’s own hands is a political act for women,” wrote Mary Ellen Brown in
Soap Opera and Women’s Talk
. “Women usually function in our society as givers, not takers, of pleasure.”
⁴

There is another possibility still, one that has less to do with images than speech. Adultery was illegal—for women. If Mr. Underhill took his wife to court, Margaret would be asked to testify. Her appearance in court would satisfy a civic obligation. Anticipating her testimony, Margaret may have taken unusually detailed mental notes as she watched, aware that doing so would improve her “performance” in the witness box. The color of Mrs. Underhill’s underwear and other gratuitous details may have been offered up in an attempt to establish Margaret’s legal credibility. Even if the neighborly romp was immoral, illegal, and exciting, Margaret could hardly have failed to anticipate a social benefit of having seen it—vocal empowerment. When she took the stand, for one brief juridical moment the most important men in the community—from the vice-mayor and alderman to the court scribe—would listen intently to what Margaret Browne, housewife, had to say about a matter of compelling local interest.

The jurists who thanked Margaret for her testimony did so in robes, but they wore breeches too, and some may have had mixed feelings about the role their star witness had played. To be sure, the aldermen, in their own domestic lives, were—or wished to
be—free to leave home without worrying about spousal misbehavior. On that score, their sympathies would have lain with John Underhill. While he was away, his wife violated her husband’s trust.

But there was a sense in which Mr. Underhill posed a problem too, for he had allowed himself to be cuckolded. The men of Margaret’s era knew there was no way the husband of an adulterous woman could be certain that her children were blessed with his genes. Lacking such knowledge, he might feel justified in shirking the usual paternal responsibilities. In 1622 English writer William Gouge pointed out that female adultery, more than the male kind, presents confusions about paternity. The problem, wrote Gouge in his book about “domestical duties,” was that the unsuspecting husband “may take base children to be his owne, and so cast the inheritance upon them; and suspect his owne to be basely borne, and so deprive them of their patrimony.”
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Margaret Browne lived in a tiny place in the distant past. It would be easy to think of her as “different” from ourselves. But there is a little of Margaret in each of us. We all have a desire to sample, even to experience, the private lives of others. This appetite has no name, but it is widely recognized, at least tacitly. It was at the core of
Le Diable Boiteux
, published by Alain-René Le Sage at the dawn of the eighteenth century. In this novel, a limping demon called Asmodeus magically removed the rooftops of Madrid’s more elegant homes. Exposing the occupants, he told his young student, Don Cleofas, would reveal “the springs of their actions, and their most secret thoughts.”
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In the decades to follow, revelation of thought and action continued to demonstrate broad appeal, as new generations of Asmodeus, dispatched by new authors, exposed pupils to the seamier sites of London and the more fashionable addresses in New York. Reincarnations of the original “devil on crutches” handled
similar assignments in Germany and France. It seemed that whenever anyone wanted to witness private activity, they sent for Asmodeus.

But this expository demon was not just a plot device. Nathaniel Hawthorne confessed envy for Asmodeus, wishing that he, too, might hover invisibly around men and women, “witnessing their deeds, searching into their hearts, borrowing brightness from their felicity, and shade from their sorrow, and retaining no emotion peculiar to himself.”
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Charles Dickens also begged “for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale.”
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Exhibit 1
Le Diable Boiteux

Exhibit 2 “Coupe de maison,” image by Karl Girardet,
Magasin pittoresque
, 1847. The original caption read: “Asmodeus has borne you up above the big city… your eyes have come to rest on an elegant three-story house… Asmodeus has understood; he makes a gesture, and the walls that hid the interior from you have become transparent. Everything that happens there appears before you like so many moving pictures framed under glass.”

The fact is that everyone wonders what other individuals do, feel, and think in private; they wonder what others are like when no one is around. The passionate spectator, Baudelaire wrote, “is an ‘I’ with an insatiable appetite for the ‘non-I.’”
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The idea of unmasking our fellow humans also possesses a vaguely mysterious appeal. At one time, New Yorkers were purchasing up to a hundred telescopes a week. Most of these terrestrial astronomers, a shopkeeper told writer Bill Buford, “are not going home to count the moons around Uranus.” What they are doing, he said, is taking advantage of the “comfort distance,” the space between one’s apartment and perceptually adjacent ones. It is a distance that, if sufficient, lulls occupants into thinking they are alone and, if the optically assisted viewer is lucky, acting accordingly. Buford saw this behavior as an expression of our “insatiable humanity, an appetite for more and more about the human species, the visual equivalent of gossip.”
¹⁰
For that reason, he wrote, it is
bad manners
to close the drapes.

As we cast our own personal gaze on the things that eavesdroppers have witnessed through the ages, we discover some long-shrouded characteristics of our socially curious species that continue to this day. Eavesdropping is a deeply biological trait, with ancient roots. Few if any species do
not
eavesdrop—even plants do it—and the chimpanzees and other primates with whom we share so much of our DNA stop eavesdropping only when they go to sleep. Their societies require that members know who is who, and who is doing what to whom. Since they cannot gossip—there is no ape “grapevine”—others cannot do the looking for them.

When our own species was evolving, and the modern human brain was under construction, those who knew what their associates were doing, or might do in the future, were more likely to survive to reproductive age and to pass on their genes. In order to compete, they had to cooperate with a few selected allies, and this required social knowledge. These early humans, like modern apes, were good at looking and listening, and making the appropriate
inferences. Twentieth-century studies of hunter-gatherers suggest that early members of the human lineage were no less interested in who does what to whom.

But something happened. Ten to fifteen thousand years ago—a grain of sand on the beach of human evolution and history—our ancestors began to live behind walls, and the pool of social information began to dry up. Where casual observation had been sufficient, new and more invasive intake strategies became necessary.

The drive to invade the private spaces of others is universal. The English term “eavesdropping” derives from the practice of standing under the eavesdrop—the place where rain water falls from the roof to the ground—in order to hear conversations occurring within the home. In French, to eavesdrop is
ècouter aux portes
, to listen at doors, as is the Italian equivalent,
origliare alla porta
. In Spanish,
escuchar sin ser visto
means to listen without being seen. In Tzotzil, a language spoken in the Mexican Highlands, there is a verb that means “to observe in secret, from a hiding place.”
¹¹
In German,
horchen
means to listen at the door secretly. In Swedish, an eavesdropper is a
tjuvlyssnare
, basically a listen-thief; in Polish,
podsluchiwanie
implies a violation of privacy, by placing oneself “underneath the private conversation.” In Russian,
pod slushivanye
refers not to “overhearing” but to “underlistening.”

In all these cultures, people have chosen to name this particular temptation: that of listening secretively, especially to speech. But there is no reason why perceptual invasions should not include activity that is seen, smelled, or touched. A great deal of social monitoring is accomplished by eye. Several years ago, the managers of a private club near Washington, DC put silk screens, ficus trees, and potted plants in its spacious dining room to increase a feeling of intimacy. Club members objected. “Now I can’t see who’s on the other side of the dining room,” one woman complained.

The deeper motive, of course, is not merely to see the outer surfaces of others. It is to enter and explore the interior, and to inspect the more privileged material that is kept there; and that is the motive that will concern us here.