Eavesdropping (23 page)

At one franc,
physiologies
sold for less than a third of other books’ cost, and they were clearly designed to be sold in the streets. The
flâneur
who produced them, wrote Christopher Prendergast, “makes the city safe and innocuous by classifying its population in the form of picturesque character sketches, giving a picture of Paris as ‘harmless and of perfect bonhomie.’”
²⁶

The public couldn’t get enough of these whimsical guides to urbanized
Homo sapiens
. Between 1840 and 1842, at least 120 different
physiologies
were sold. It is estimated that half a million copies were printed—approximately one for every Parisian who could read.

So now we see. These mysterious characters, strolling impassively through crowds, savoring their solitude, speaking to no one, and giving no clues to their purpose, were interpreters of the human condition. They, like other naturalists, were conducting research on living beings. Because of their orientation to visual scenes, and their disposition to categorize people, they were, in their own quirky way, dealing with the stranger problem. Those who shelled out one franc could go around Paris like amateur ornithologists with their field guides in one hand and a pair of opera glasses in the other.

That the
flâneurs
were planning to tell a story about their perceptual experiences suggests another reason to suspect a male bias in
flânerie
. “Urban stories,” wrote sociology professor Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, “can be told only by those immune to the stress and the seductions ofthe city, who can turn those seductions to good account, that is, into a text that will exercise its own seductions.”
This, she argued, would have been men, women being “components of the urban drama that the
flâneur
observes.”
²⁷

Did the
physiologies
accomplish their purpose? It’s difficult to tell, but the public’s reading of them, according to Benjamin, “served to reduce the crowd’s massive alterity to proportions more familiar, to transform its radical anonymity into a lexicon of nameable stereotypes.” This, he said, gave readers “the comforting illusion that the faceless conglomerations of the modern city could after all be read—and hence mastered—as a legible system of differences.”
²⁸

Paris was not the only great city in Europe to build arcades, nor was
flânerie
impossible without them, especially when the viewer was stationary and his subjects on parade. In 1840 Edgar Allen Poe wrote a detailed account of his own experience as a
flâneur
in the city of London.
²⁹
In “The Man of the Crowd,” one encounters Poe sitting in the window of a coffee house, nursing a cold, observing pedestrians. When he first looked out the window, Poe saw the passers-by as undifferentiated masses, but he quickly began to focus on details, examining “the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.” One class of Londoners that caught Poe’s eye was a tribe of junior clerks, “young gentlemen with tight coats, bright boots, well-oiled hair, and supercilious lips.” Poe also noticed pickpockets, gamblers, clergymen, peddlers, street beggars, feeble and ghastly invalids, modest young girls, and women of the town. In a perfect statement of the
flâneur’
s purpose, Poe wrote, “It was impossible to keep track of what everyone was up to, but one could determine whether individuals belonged to categories that required evasion or embrace.”

In Paris, the days of the arcadian
flâneur
were numbered. The first nail in the coffin was driven by the police, mid-way through the nineteenth century, when the prefect ruled that no arcade on private property could be made accessible to the public without permission of the police. Around the same time, Napoleon III commissioned Georges-Eugçne Haussmann to rebuild Paris. This
meant, at a minimum, replacing many of the narrow streets with broad boulevards. These boulevards were to be lined by sidewalks along with gutters and underground drains. Pedestrians would be able to walk along the sides of boulevards, undisturbed by vehicles and animals. In the 1850s, three thousand new gas lamps were installed in Paris, and many of these were kept burning all night. Paris had become a good place to walk, and the new strolling venues lured people out of the arcades. After a half-century of applied anthropology, the
flâneur
was losing his natural laboratory.
³⁰
About to make her debut was a new sort of spectator, one with an entirely different purpose and style. It was the
flâneuse
.

With streets that were cleaner, drier, and safer, there were diminishingly few reasons why women would feel it necessary to avoid them. But there were also some significant new
intérieurs
, and these ushered in new reasons to spectate, reasons that appealed particularly to women.

In boutiques, women could only see and touch things that were kept behind glass, and one had to be cautious. The price had to be negotiated—one could easily make a bad deal—and shop policy often forbade refunds and returns. All this changed in 1869, when Aristide Boucicaut opened Bon Marchè, the first major department store in Paris. It took up an entire city block.
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Like the arcades, it was an indoor-but-public space, and it was designed especially for women.
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In Bon Marché the merchandise was on the floor, and women were encouraged to inspect everything. In
Au bonheur des dames
, a novel published a dozen years after Bon Marché opened its doors, Emile Zola wrote about the allure of this new experience. Undoubtedly the
dames
were amazed at the large volumes of merchandise, but Zola suggested that the shops were also “selling aspirations, status, dreams and yearnings.” Zola understood that stores like Bon
Marché had erotic connotations for women, that “the bright, subtly designed emporia ‘seduced’ them into buying the goods on offer.”
³³

In Bon Marche women could touch women’s lingerie, even, if they chose, fondle it. This, as Valerie Steele has written, evoked feelings of sexual intimacy.
³⁴
In
Les Grands Bazaars
, published in 1882, Pierre Giffard wrote of the woman who, “prey to the seductions of lace,” empties her purse, “her eyes on fire, her face reddened, her hand shivering.”
³⁵
The texture of silk, wrote one woman, “gives me voluptuous sensations even stronger than those I feel with the father of my children.”
³⁶

“The female
flâneur
, the
flâneuse
, was not possible until she was free to roam the city on her own,” wrote media theorist Anne Friedberg, a freedom that “was equated with the privilege of shopping on her own.”
³⁷
In the late nineteenth century, department stores were built in London, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Immediately, window-shopping became a popular pastime. In 1902 a writer for
New York Sketches
, Jesse Lee Williams, grumbled about the magnetic allure of shop windows, “which draw women’s heads around whether they want to look or not.”
³⁸
Shop windows feminized the sidewalks, adding a feminine component to
flânerie
.

Eventually, the onslaught of cars and trucks on the boulevards of Paris made streetwalking less desirable than it had been in the past.
³⁹
Fortunately, Haussmann not only built boulevards and sidewalks. He built parks. By 1870 Paris could claim about 4500 acres of municipal parkland, nearly one hundred times more than the city had on offer twenty years earlier.
⁴⁰

Like the arcades, beautifully ornate city parks encouraged leisurely displays of men and women. They became a human pageant, a stage for all human activity, from work and play to love and death.
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These promenades provided citizens with opportunities to see and be seen while garbed in their finest clothes.

“The urban promenade,” wrote history professor Penelope Corfield, provided the perfect venue “for the citizens to sally forth to view the sights and each other.” Participants enjoyed “the pleasure, puzzle, and necessity of scrutinizing each other discreetly.”
⁴²
Adding to this pleasure and puzzle was the fact that everyone was not exactly as they seemed, or wanted to seem.

Promenades were not just for men or women. They were for couples, and for families. These familial promenades performed an instructive or regulatory function. When a family went out for an evening stroll, it was assumed that the husband would “see himself as others saw him,” according to architect Galen Cranz, “the head of a family, wife on arm, children in tow, all in Sunday best. Reformers reasoned that he would experience this as pleasurable and resolve to make it the mainstay of his life.” In 1890 the commissioners of Boston’s parks department saw public viewings as a course of moral instruction. The mere sight of “good women and dutiful children” was expected to exert “a wholesome influence” on other patrons, and to do so far more effectively than laws and police ever could.
⁴³

In the early 1970s the patrons of two parks in Portland, Oregon were questioned. A fifth or fewer of the interviewees said they went to the parks to wade, eat, talk, read, or engage in crafts or hobbies, or to exercise. The majority of patrons—fifty-five percent—said they went to the parks in order to “watch other people.”
⁴⁴
Around the same time, professor of landscape architecture John Lyle studied the great parks of Paris and several neighborhood parks around Los Angeles. He found that the favored places “were usually in the hearts of the parks, where crowds of people often would promenade along major paths or around bodies of water, while others sat watching them.”
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There is a huge dramaturgical component here. Like a theatrical production, public life “requires actors and audience, a stage and a theater,” wrote Suzanne and Henry Lennard. “Some persons sit or walk in public in order to be seen, to display particular attire, and
thus to impress an imagined or real audience. They wish to be identified as a member of a group, or try out a special role or a new identity. They seek an audience.” Responsively, we, the other exhibitors, “fantasize about their origins, purposes, and possible relationship to us.”
⁴⁶

Outdoor bars and cafés have been popular in Europe for many decades, but people watching and social displays may be growing in popularity, at least if Dutch sidewalk cafés are any indication. In the city of Utrecht, the amount of space devoted to sidewalk cafés tripled between 1970 and 1975, and had doubled again by 1991. Similar growth occurred in other cities in the Netherlands. In the early 1990s, Dutch urbanologist Jan Oosterman wrote that the main reason people sit and sip coffee in sidewalk cafés is to “watch people go by.” “The chairs,” he noted, “are always placed towards the street, as the chairs in a theatre are placed towards the stage.” The patrons don’t want “to get involved with anybody passing by,” wrote Oosterman. “It is mainly the spectacle that people come for.”
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We are all exhibitors and spectators. We display ourselves and check out each other’s displays—as though we were attending a continuous costume or masquerade ball. These dispositions, as we have seen, are linked to facts about human biology, but their timing and appearance are sensitive to cultural factors. Places, like walls and arcades, are important. So are laws, religion, and social and economic competition. One dramatic factor, acutely felt by the rich and famous owners of manorial homes, was the ubiquitous presence of servants—individuals who were paid to keep an eye on their master and mistress but frequently saw too much.

I declare, having served in the capacity of manservant to his excellency Marquis Francesco Albegati for the period of about eleven years, that I can say and give account that on three or four occasions I saw the said marquis getting out of bed with a perfect erection of the male organ … and this I saw and observed with complete certainty and without being deceived, because I was in a position to observe it and see it at my ease because of my employment.                  A servant, in his testimony, 1751

E
NSCONCED
in their mansions and stately homes, the rich and famous were a cause of curiosity. Everyone wondered how they lived. Remarkably, opportunities to find out were freely available to a class of people who were poor and ordinary. They worked and slept under the same roof, and were expected to linger outside bedroom and parlor doors in case they were beckoned. With eavesdropping in their job descriptions, these domestic servants—generally young and vulnerable—saw and heard things that normally occur, and did occur, behind closed doors. If the mistress of the house was charged with adultery, or the master was accused of sexual neglect, butlers and maids—usually the only
witnesses—were called to testify. Telling the truth could fortify their employment, or threaten it. So could lying.

Servant testimony was rich in intimate details—of morning erections in allegedly impotent husbands, beds that were “tumbled” and stained, sofas indented by the backs of unfaithful wives, and gentleman callers struggling to regain their composure as they buttoned up their breeches. The stories of servants and their masters read like novels, with characters truly named Munnings Capp, Clotworthy Dobbin, and Wortham Hitch, and virtues like obedience, loyalty, and honor juxtaposed with contempt, betrayal, and shame. Inevitably, the possibility of bribery and blackmail lurked. Life in a stately home was problematic. Servants knew too much.

On May 15, 1776, John Potter Harris, twenty-six, of Basinghurst, England, brought suit against his wife, Elizabeth, twenty-three. She was “vicious and lewd,” he claimed, and had forgotten her conjugal vows.
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