Gaylin, Ann. Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust.
Writing in 2004, Gaylin promotes her study of eavesdropping in the novel as a corrective to vision-centered narrative theory and analysis. Eavesdropping, she claims, carries a special status in the novel as a genre because covert listening stages “the manner in which stories are generated and resolved” (2). As she argues in her “theory of eavesdropping,” clandestine listening dramatizes the construction, transmission, and reception of narrative. Eavesdropping figures a “primal human curiosity” (7) and the “readerly pleasure” (8) of accessing the secrets and private lives of others. It demands “an act of interpretation” (9), as listeners need to piece together bits of overheard information into a coherent narrative. Issues of identity are also at stake in eavesdropping, she argues, as the act reveals how identity is shaped by “rumor, innuendo, suggestion, and discussion” (11). In her close readings, Gaylin focuses on eavesdropping in the home, “domestic spying” as she calls it, rather than aural surveillance in professional and political spheres. This, she claims, brings to the fore issues of privacy and publicity central to the nineteenth-century novel, which requires the “narrative violation” of domestic spaces “supposedly impervious to intrusion” (18). She traces these themes of privacy and publicity in depictions of listening found in Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Collins, and Proust.
Gaylin’s is the only book I’ve found that focuses explicitly on depictions of listening in the nineteenth-century novel. Of course, Gaylin and I are interested in different types of listening—she, in clandestine eavesdropping and surveillance, I, in listening to reading aloud. We also diverge in methodological approach. Gaylin sees her book as having primarily narratological stakes; she is interested in how eavesdropping reflects and informs the construction of narrative. She is not at all concerned with sociocultural histories of sound and listening in the nineteenth-century, as I am. Her justification for discussing the nineteenth-century novel, as opposed to the novel more generally, is—I think—a bit underdeveloped. She claims that concerns with distinctions between the public and the private acquired a “particular urgency” (2) in the nineteenth century. I am not sure if I agree with this claim (these concerns certainly seem to have a particular urgency in the twenty-first century as well), and Gaylin certainly is not dedicated to supporting it. While she nods to sociocultural changes, like the rise of corridors and individualized rooms in Victorian homes (59-64), she focuses on eavesdropping not within its historical moment, but rather as a technique of and commentary on narrative. She has, however, already been a valuable interlocutor for me, and I conversed with her Austen chapters in my article on listening in Persuasion.
