Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self by Patricia Meyer Spacks Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust by Ann Gaylin (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.4, 2005 1093 the case study writ large of Elizabeth Rowe), Prescott ranges far beyond the familiar names of women's writing in the period (Behn, Manley, Haywood, ete.) to address such writers as Mary Davys, Penelope Aubin, and Jane Brereton, and their deploy? ment of genre, form, and literary tradition. An impatient reader might want more detail on each of these writers, but precisely one of the strengths of this book is its breadth of analysis. Moreover, this approach allows Prescott to demonstrate her cen? tral argument: that we need to rethink women's literary history by adopting a more 'pluralist' mode of analysis that is properly capable of handling the complexities of women's work in literary culture. This is an astute, elegant, and lively book that will be necessary reading for scholars in the field. University of Kent at Canterbury Sasha Roberts Privacy: Concealing theEighteenth-Century Self. By Patricia Meyer Spacks. Chi? cago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2003. vii + 242 pp. ?25; $36. ISBN 0-226-76860-0. Eavesdroppingin theNovel fromAusten toProust. By Ann Gaylin. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2003. xi + 241 pp. ?40; $55- ISBN0-521-81585-1. What is privacy? Both these studies examine ideas about privacy, primarily through fiction and its explorations of self in relation to others. They make an interesting pair in two respects: first,taking up notions ofthe private inuneasy relation to Habermas's concept of private and public spheres; second, charting social relations through aural dynamics, with an emphasis on the sense of hearing which offersa welcome departure from literary criticism's recent indebtedness to theories of the visual taken from film theory. Both books make novels central, though Spacks includes four diarists and a few poets, yet their fresh perspectives on fiction's modelling of the self through privacy and what encroaches on it has implications across genres. Spacks argues that the eighteenth century pays new attention to privacy; Gaylin that the nineteenth century does too. Can they both be right? Both invoke archi? tectural history?for instance, closets in the earlier period, boarding-houses in the later?to suggest that organization of domestic space shapes people's sense of privacy. That aspect ofthe topic probably deserves a whole book rather than interdisciplinary nods, yet both critics turn selective evidence to good account to suggest a subtle, complex, shifting relationship between material culture and textual representations; both use novels to show that architecture alone neither creates nor necessarily guarantees privacy. The ironies are creative: Gaylin's central motif, that physical seclusion makes characters vulnerable to eavesdropping, shows how privacy is full of insecurity; likewise Spacks argues that privacy, which she distinguishes from solitude, involves mental fencing rather than spatial separation, and can be both trap and release. Spacks stresses that her account of 'psychological privacy' is not a simple story: the experi? ence of a reader, for instance, is private in terms of putting your nose in a book, but sociable in terms of connecting you to a community of characters. Nor is it a simple storyof progress: eighteenth-century novelists vary in their attitudes and assumptions regarding the virtues and dangers of solitary reading, although nineteenth-century novelists assume that reading is a solitary pleasure. Gaylin takes up this story to propose that the eavesdropper is a figure for the reader: both are solitary, both seek the secrets of others, both make narratives out of bits and pieces of information, both often leap to wrong conclusions which the author's plot then pleasurably corrects. Both Spacks and Gaylin argue that women have a difficultrelation to privacy, not least because surveillance of sexual and moral matters puts them under pressure to 1094 Reviews hide desire and its secrets. As Spacks describes the dilemma of the modest woman, in relation to Burney's heroines, 'She must be willing to make everything known, be? cause she has nothing to hide; she must hide everything, because decorum demands that virtue subsist in private' (p. 101). Such paradoxes also govern polite conversa? tion, simultaneously recommended as a form of good manners and feared as a scene of hypocrisy. For some of Austen's heroines, the...