Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust (review)

Eavesdropping in the Novel concludes in hortatory mode, with the injunction that "We must overhear actively, reminding ourselves of the high personal and political stakes involved in trying to understand other people and ourselves by gathering together the scraps of ever more complex information and forming them into narratives" (177). This imperative prepares for the book's final words: "Through our eavesdropping, we shape our world and ourselves" (178). Such directives call attention to new assumptions—well, old assumptions become new again—of literary criticism. To examine the operations of nineteenth-century fiction, it now appears, can instruct us in how to lead our lives.

Eavesdropping may not at first glance seem a promising subject for a critic's endorsement. Like gossip (a related subject frequently touched on here), it has a bad name. Ann Gaylin, however, sees it not only as a figure for novel writing but as an activity that declares the actor's will to make sense of the world. Curiosity dictates the eavesdropper's behavior, as it shapes the procedures of readers, who share with the eavesdropper the primal drive to learn secrets. As a principle of discovery, curiosity, like the eavesdropping it fosters, furthers knowledge and growth. Moreover, "eavesdropping dramatizes, through its tableaux of private worries breaking into public cognizance, the making of a self founded on a split between two versions of identity" (11). Such claims for eavesdropping's fundamental importance (and these are but a few of many), made at considerable length, frame the critical discussion in Gaylin's study. That discussion involves texts from two countries and ranges from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. The authors it ponders are Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Proust, and Conrad. With varying degrees of success, it argues for the centrality to novelistic enterprises of eavesdropping scenes. Scenes of eavesdropping, Gaylin points out, inaugurate the action of Pride and Prejudice: Elizabeth Bennet overhears Darcy's negative opinion of her, while her friend Charlotte hears Bingley's enthusiasm for Jane. It resolves the plot of Persuasion, when Wentworth hears Ann holding forth about the difference between men and women, women being, in her view, the more constant lovers. It figures importantly in Marcel's acquisition of sexual knowledge in A la recherche de temps perdu and causes a murder in The Secret Agent. The sheer abundance of eavesdropping scenes in the novels Gaylin cites comes as something of a surprise.

A large issue closely implicated with that of eavesdropping is the relation between public and private, as a matter of conception and of literal space. Eavesdropping in the Novel returns frequently to the public/private nexus, most saliently in its discussion of "domestic spaces" in Balzac and Dickens. As other critics have noted, the idea of privacy had assumed so much resonance in nineteenth-century Britain that there appeared an "urge to stage or publicize private life in order to affirm its virtues" (59). The impulse to publicize and the desire to privatize thus went hand in hand—a situation, Gaylin points out, analogous to our own. Eavesdropping, of course, publicizes the private in ways usually thought illegitimate. It represents an intrusion on private space, space which, in the nineteenth century, was being ever more sharply defined, as apartment houses burgeoned in France and the idea of an Englishman's home as his castle flourished (an idea comically literalized in Wemmick's establishment in Great Expectations). Private space depends on physical barriers, which interfere with lines of sight: you can't see through the wall to know what your neighbor is doing. But walls do not necessarily prevent eavesdropping. Thus the fantasy of an unseen hearer embodies the precariousness of privacy.

Gaylin economically summarizes the architectural changes of the nineteenth century before calling the reader's attention to how often and how importantly both Dickens and Balzac make use of eavesdroppers and...