Call Me Maybe: Telephonic Romances and the Female Voice 1880–1920

I give you my affection and I give you my time Trying to get a connection on the telephone line.

—Kraftwerk, "The Telephone Call"

Walt Whitman never made a phone call. Sitting in his messy room in Camden, new Jersey, in 1890, partially paralyzed and conversing with his disciple Horace Traubel, he admitted to "not once" having touched the new technology that was so rapidly spreading in the United States.¹ While an estimated 467,356 phones were operational in the country by the beginning of that year,² the poet nonetheless chose to send out his "call[s] to the world" solely via paper.³ Still, Walt was intrigued: "Tell me about the telephone," he urged Traubel. "You can hear every word? And easily? Is there an art about it? no? It has a curious meaning to me—a curious meaning indeed." Upon learning of the "manly voice" of his friend's last conversation partner, he added in surprise: "Can you tell that, too?"⁴ Although Traubel's response to Whitman is not recorded, we know that the disciple himself would soon become an avid telephonist, leading, for instance, a ménage à trois with a married couple which seems to have relied rather heavily on telephonic exchanges. Each lover would call "just to hear [the other's] voice."⁵

What the chanter of the "chant of lovers"⁶ and his devout friend then allude to is a romantic (even sexual) potential inherent to the telephone. With mass society and Victorian morality increasingly complicating modern life, the telephone seemed to promise a return to a more direct and heartfelt form of communication—it was the first instant means of medium-to-long-distance communication that made the transition from public to private sphere and could carry something as personal as one's voice. "The modern lover," a magazine piece from 1888 agrees, "is aided by the appliances of science as he is hindered by the intricacies of society."⁷

Counter to the sparse existing scholarship on the topic,⁸ telephony initially entered literature predominantly as an apt theme for light entertainment. Unlike, for instance, the telegraph in its first decades,⁹ the telephone was introduced to late-nineteenth-century U.S. fiction readers almost exclusively (and immediately) through popular romances. That early discussions of the telephone leaned towards the romantic is certainly not a fundamentally new insight. Indeed, this connection is often mentioned in passing in scholarship on the telephone,¹⁰ although it is largely treated as a nineteenth-century curio and not as an object of academic interest in and of itself.¹¹ Broadly speaking, two strands of critical commentary appear to have crystallized around early telephony: an "uncanny" strand (grounded in European authors like Benjamin, Kafka, and Freud) that frames narratives of the technology in largely occult and modernist contexts, and a social studies strand that treats fictional and journalistic pieces as addenda to a larger story centered on the everyday use of telephony.¹² While by no means incorrect, both perspectives reveal only parts of the story.

Blissfully ignorant of Kafka and Freud, a discourse surrounding telephony developed in the United States between 1880 and 1920 that engaged the technology almost exclusively through a genre of "telephonic romances" centered on either the rural party line (one line connecting many) or metropolitan central lines (many lines connecting at one point). Wholeheartedly embracing telephony for its romantic potential, these generally short pieces of literature (some famously authored by Mark Twain) populated every major U.S. periodical of the day from the Atlantic and Harper's to Century and ranged from potentially empowering stories centered on female telephonists to tales of men's "conquest" of telephone operators of the other sex. All of these romances echoed as well as propagated a highly gendered reading of the technology. This gendering, though, appears quite different from Michèle Martin's analysis of the early telephonic network in North America: instead of masculine technology, subverted through its massive popularity with women and henceforth culturally framed as "female" in reaction to such a perceived domestication,^13...