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  • Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust
  • Laura Mooneyham White
Gaylin, Ann. Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust. Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Ed. Gillian Beer. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. Pp. xi + 241. ISBN0-521-81585-1

Gaylin's study of the representation of eavesdropping in the realist novel of the nineteenth century joins a rash of fellow studies in the generally excellent recent series, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, a series that began with Mariam Bailin's The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill (Cambridge, 1994). Like Bailin's study and many other titles in this series, as well as many other recent publications in literary and cultural studies, Gaylin offers new ways of understanding the intersections of a given cultural practice and its literary representation - in this case, eavesdropping, a universal if somewhat shabby human act that achieves particular prominence in the plots and concerns of the nineteenth-century realist novel (other cultural practices that have received critical attention of late in relation to this period of the novel's history include blushing, anorexia, photography, fashion, interior decoration, and tourism). What these studies share is an interest in the liminal, the threshold spaces between public and private practice or between public and private consciousness. They thus also share an interest in the ways in which a given cultural practice, such as Gaylin's eavesdropping or Bailin's "art of being ill," allows illusions of private practice in partly public acts, both for characters and for novel-readers such as we, implicated eavesdroppers (of a sort) that we are! Given the realist novel's obsession with the question of knowledge, even when such knowledge is gained by listening behind a door or shrubbery, the practice of eavesdropping more than merits this book-length treatment of its novelistic representations.

The strongest part of Gaylin's book is its synthesizing and comprehensive theoretical overview of the role of eavesdropping as narrative element. The author does not much focus on the actual cultural practice of eavesdropping beyond noting the universality of its employment, but does discuss the pressure put on private communication in the nineteenth century by the accelerating and expanding possibilities of the flow of information, noting that in a world in which more and more seemed publicly - and speedily - on view through mass communication, one finds a corresponding premium put on the ostensibly private. Gaylin provides both a broad and precise theoretical treatment of the epistemological challenges eavesdropping presents to both eavesdroppers and readers. Such knowledge is necessarily partial and limited (Gaylin reminds us of how instrumental and tragic it is that Heathcliff only overhears part of what Catherine has to say about him in WutheringHeights, while the readers of all novels only "overhear" what the narrator allows them to read) and potentially both unethical and unstable, for the listener and/or reader discovers in private without anyone else knowing that he or she know. Gaylin does an exemplary job of raising the stakes for eavesdropping in the novel, showing the [End Page 178] implications for eavesdropping as a mode of understanding how narrative works. She provides, thus, an instantiation in a given widespread novelistic plot device and theme of how she understands narrative to work - following Roland Barthes, as the "presentation of an enigma and the deliberate postponement of its solution"(183).

The individual readings in the following chapters of key nineteenth-century novels which feature eavesdropping are less successful, perhaps because the author seems to relax into somewhat less theoretical and more straightforward discussions of the role of eavesdropping in the plots and into a related discussion of eavesdropping's thematization by the author, whether Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Collins, Conrad, and Proust. As an Austen scholar, I found the discussions of Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion (in a chapter each) to be rather tame, particularly because the role of eavesdropping in these novels has been so thoroughly canvassed in Austen scholarship previously. It was disappointing to discover that the bold and broad theoretical insights about eavesdropping in the book's introduction - especially those concerned with narrative control, readerly ethos and hermeneutics, and the...

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