Eavesdropping (15 page)

We know the first houses were small, and remained so for thousands of years. Would this, by itself, have fostered intimacy? When we refer to an “intimate” space we usually have in mind an area that is small and bounded. Is there a relationship between small spaces and “inmost” experiences? Do people who share a niche
necessarily
enjoy intimate feelings?

Not if you look at the historical uses of beds. For thousands of years there were no “bed-rooms.” As recently as the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, people were still sleeping all over the house.
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But it was not just that there were no special
rooms
for beds and the things that people did in them. On a tour of France in
1878, Robert Louis Stevenson found himself in a sleeping room that was furnished with two beds. “I had one,” he wrote in his journal, “and I will own I was a little abashed to find a young man and his wife and child in the act of mounting into the other.”
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There were quite commonly too few beds for each person to have one to himself. In some peasant homes, entire families slept together, partly in response to serious heating problems.
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In late eighteenth-century Paris the lower classes still “did not consider sleeping to be an entirely private activity,’ according to historian Rafaella Sarti. “Overall,” she wrote, beds “were a more crowded and promiscuous affair than they are today, and much of the population did not have one entirely to themselves.”
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Among rural peasants in Europe, sleeping alone was still fairly rare a century later.

Family members were not the only ones who slept two or more to a bed. In a court case in Boston, Ann James testified that Mrs. McCarthy, a fellow lodger, had shared a bed with a gentleman named William Stone. This meaning of “sleeping together” is one that we readily understand, but Miss James testified that while Mr. Stone “lay with Mrs. McCarthy in one Bead,” she herself “lay with her two Sisters Abigail and Elizabeth Floyd in another bed in the Same Roome.” In another case of bed sharing, a lodger testified—in clear contrast with most adultery trial testimony—that an unmarried couple had
not
had the sexual intercourse of which they were accused. The woman knew, she said, because she
had slept with the couple
. The bed itself was “very Narrow,” she testified, and it was therefore most unlikely “if not wholly impossible that they should be guilty of that Crime without her knowledge and She observed no such thing.”
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These cases merely indicate that intimate spaces were not necessarily interpreted as opportunities for intimacy in the
emotional
or
sexual
sense. In fact, joint occupation of intimate space
guarantees
little in the way of emotional intimacy. Psychologist Howard Gadlin has written that even where physical intimacy was imposed by
living conditions, “the closest of relationships was formal to a degree we would find not only awkward but contradictory to intimacy.” In male–female relationships, this formality reflected, among other things, “a fundamentalist Christian distrust of uncontrolled earthly pleasures and human passion.”
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Still, domestic privacy encouraged the removal of protective armor and this, more than physical intimacy, encouraged honest personal expression. Free of external constraints, occupants were able to open themselves up to new ways of thinking and behaving. The old checks and balances were no longer needed. Broader and deeper forms of emotional access were literally on the doorstep.

Of course, dropping one’s guard makes one vulnerable. In privacy, lovers “lay bare their innermost feeling to each other,” wrote philosopher and legal scholar Edward Bloustein; “they are lewd and foolish with each other, they stand naked before each other … nothing is held back.” But, he went on, all this is shared on the premise that it will be shared with no one else.
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The “no one else” clause is of course what makes eavesdropping so irresistible, for the practitioners of this interceptive art are not party to any understandings between the intimate principals, nor are they bound by the agreements of others regarding the disposition of any verbal or visual images that may surreptitiously come their way. Free of any such constraints, eavesdroppers are all too glad to share in the intimate experiences of others, and to share the images, as best they can represent them, with others.

As new resources, second-degree privacy and intimacy posed challenging adjustment problems. In their ecological niches, humans would have to learn how to manage intimate experience, the role of reciprocity, the need for trust, and the necessity of keeping close to the vest any acts that had occurred in private, and especially those that took place in secret.

Any progress that has been made on these issues has been decidedly nonlinear. Many behaviors that were previously shielded are now displayed openly, and historically public behaviors are now
kept under wraps. Anita Allen has pointed out that battles over what should or should not be private, and what should or should not be public, are intensifying, with almost daily shifts in the boundaries.
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From the first days of domestication, there were undoubtedly significant differences between the sexes on both sides of the walls. On the inside, allowing oneself to be witnessed in a moment of “weakness” is something that might well have been avoided by anyone—especially men—who cherished their independence and autonomy. In social milieux, to regard with indifference the intimacies of others might have seemed unnatural to individuals—especially women—with a need for deeper levels of connectivity in their own lives.
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In time, insiders would have to learn how to deal with privacy and other new resources. One lesson is that the images flowing from intimate activity can be less important than their mode of transmission. If donated, personal material may or may not be interesting. But if it is stolen, the same material—insofar as it can be considered the same—can be exciting, breathtaking, even erotic. In the late nineteenth century, English sexologist Have-lock Ellis related a story about a Parisian model who had posed in the nude at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, surrounded by aspiring young artists. Suddenly, without notice, the model screamed in terror and ran off to retrieve her clothes. What sent her running was the sight of a workman on the roof, peering through a skylight.

The reason for the model’s reaction reveals an interesting generalization about intimacy. When she went to the Ecole that day, the model had expected to be seen in the nude by strangers. But she had only agreed to her body being viewed by artists. She had not consented to any other process—certainly not theft—nor to any other consumers.
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The same goes for the woman in a scenario offered by legal scholar Richard Parker. He asked his readers to consider the case of a man who, after leaving the bed of his lover,
peers back through the window in order to see her once more in the nude. The man knows that his lover’s body has not changed, and that she has not had time to put on her clothes. His look threatens the woman’s control, but control over what? “It is,” Parker said, “a loss of control over who, at that moment, can see her body.”
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There is one case in which information may be worth a great deal more if donated in confidence than if learned by accident. It concerns an important component of intimacy—trust. People tend to divulge little in the way of personal information unless, as Bloustein suggested, they feel that it cannot circle back to hurt them. How do they develop the confidence that it will not? One way is to reveal one’s feelings, and to expose one’s inner self, in degrees, waiting for reciprocal acts before continuing, or before any increases in intensity. Mutual disclosure of this kind tends to build trust while, paradoxically, making trust less necessary, since each party possesses the tools to hurt the other.

In their privacy, the insiders were more intimately exposed than ever before—to their fellow insiders. In the case of family members, this was undoubtedly beneficial, but not everyone living under one roof was genetically related. One morning in 1680, Nicholas Manning of Salem, Massachusetts got in a great deal of trouble. It began when three female servants walked through his bedroom en route to the kitchen. They did this not because they were rude or poorly trained or disoriented. It was because they had no other way to get there.

Manning’s house had no corridors, but this was hardly a distinguishing feature. When houses were first built, the residents were clearly concerned about privacy, but the privacy they sought was against outsiders. As a consequence, little thought was given to the idea of building
interior walls
that would separate parents from
children, or one lodger from another. The corridor, Raffaella Sarti has written, was a fairly late invention.
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When the servants walked through Mr. Manning’s bedroom, he was in bed with his sister. This, by itself, was less strange than it might seem, given the tendency of family members to bed down together. But, peeking back through the bedroom door, which remained slightly ajar, the servants noted that the rapidly disembedding Mannings were stark naked. This came out in a public trial—a trial for incest.

People spent many centuries living in homes before they got the idea or motivation to create private areas
within
homes. In the sixteenth century, according to Philippe Ariès, the wealthier homeowners in France began to build private halls, stairways, and vestibules.
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Privacy was becoming a value, but there was something else. People were beginning to think of themselves as individuals, as people who differed in important ways from all others, and they sought spaces that would reinforce these differences.
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Earlier, I suggested that privacy fostered truer, deeper, and more emotional forms of intimacy, not just whatever feelings may have been produced by shared occupancy. It also contributed to an aspect of personality that would favor intimacy. This was individualism, a sense of one’s own personal boundaries and distance from all others. Having one’s own space would help to mold this separate being, enabling individuals to make a unique, and uniquely intimate, contribution to personal relationships.

In the nineteenth century, according to historian Alain Corbin, there was a strong and steady current toward individualism in France, and it expressed itself in a number of ways. For one thing, there was an increase in the acquisition and use of Christian names. People also began to acquire domestic mirrors and have their portraits taken by commercial photographers, and they
continued a practice, dating from the late sixteenth century, of keeping a diary in which they wrote about
themselves
, including their own thoughts and feelings.
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In the same period, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that individualism was becoming a goal in America.
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People were obviously spending more time thinking about themselves. “For the individual,” wrote Howard Gadlin, a “separation of the public from the private leads to a great expansion of personal consciousness,” and in ways that would have enriched interpersonal methods of relating. “Individualism and intimacy,” Gadlin concluded, “are the Siamese twins of modernization.”
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Individualism implies a division of one’s self from the selves of others, but privacy also caused deeper fissures
within
each person. The external life of an individual, the life led in the company of others, is his public self. “Behind every man’s external life, which he leads in company, there is another which he leads alone, and which he carries with him apart,” wrote English sage Walter Bagehot over a century and a half ago. “We see but one aspect of our neighbour, as we see but one side of the moon; in either case there is also a dark half which is unknown to us. We all come down to dinner, but each has a room to himself.”
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In the past, people had lived
out
—in nearly continuous sensory contact with practically everyone they knew. When they achieved an interior space, they had two spaces—one that was public, the other private. Each day, individuals ventured into public space and returned home. In time, it was predictable that these broadly different niches would cultivate two broadly different ways of being.

The insider believes that he—unlike those on the outside of his walls—is the only one who knows what he is doing, or habitually does; that no one will see or judge him for any acts that he carries
out. He believes that if he does something—anything—he alone will know about it. It is possible to locate antecedents of conscience and morality here, things that were virtually impossible when the public eye prevented individuals from making their own choices. At home, there were opportunities to live a more self-guided life.

On the inside, a person lived within a few feet of everything he owned. These things would bring back memories of the day he made or found them, or received them as gifts, and this would affect the way the insider thought about himself. Private possessions may be counted among our secrets, since they silently remind us of what makes us different from everyone else. They not only “concern nobody else,” wrote Georges Duby, they “may not be divulged or shown because they are so at odds with those appearances that honor demands be kept up in public.”
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Studies of domestic burglary suggest that the inviolate nature of personal possessions contributes to the inviolacy of their owner’s unique “personality.”

Having their own niche, filled with their own things; having no possibility of scrutiny by, or negative reactions from, external others, the insiders would come to discover—or to invent—a deeper and more contemplative form of themselves, and this form would almost certainly contrast, in specific details, with their public persona. They would have a private self. Today, according to psychologist Roy Baumeister, people think of this self as “the way the person
really
is.” This created an object of endless fascination and, for those who would eavesdrop, new temptations. For behind the walls there were new and more intimately behaving beings.
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