Eavesdropping Read Free Page A

indeed. Modern research indicates that sexually explicit films give hormonal levels a significant boost, a reason, perhaps, why some humans are able to subsist largely on visual images. 3 But the link between vision and sex is not particularly strong in women—laws against Peeping
Toms
were not written with women in mind—so it is probable that Margaret’s truemotivations lay elsewhere. Perhaps a better place to look for clues would be in the
frisson
—the feeling of doing something that is forbidden or illegal, as when peering through a keyhole, or reading a letter that was addressed to someone else.
    As a late sixteenth-century housewife, Margaret was used to being told what she should enjoy and must endure. One of her principal tasks in patriarchal England was giving pleasure to Mr. Browne. But the day in question was different. For Margaret decided, without spousal assistance, what she wished to experience, and to do so, for once, without responsibility or commitment. Or disappointment. “The everyday practice of taking pleasure into one’s own hands is a political act for women,” wrote Mary Ellen Brown in
Soap Opera and Women’s Talk
. “Women usually function in our society as givers, not takers, of pleasure.” 4
    There is another possibility still, one that has less to do with images than speech. Adultery was illegal—for women. If Mr. Underhill took his wife to court, Margaret would be asked to testify. Her appearance in court would satisfy a civic obligation. Anticipating her testimony, Margaret may have taken unusually detailed mental notes as she watched, aware that doing so would improve her “performance” in the witness box. The color of Mrs. Underhill’s underwear and other gratuitous details may have been offered up in an attempt to establish Margaret’s legal credibility. Even if the neighborly romp was immoral, illegal, and exciting, Margaret could hardly have failed to anticipate a social benefit of having seen it—vocal empowerment. When she took the stand, for one brief juridical moment the most important men in the community—from the vice-mayor and alderman to the court scribe—would listen intently to what Margaret Browne, housewife, had to say about a matter of compelling local interest.
    The jurists who thanked Margaret for her testimony did so in robes, but they wore breeches too, and some may have had mixed feelings about the role their star witness had played. To be sure, the aldermen, in their own domestic lives, were—or wished tobe—free to leave home without worrying about spousal misbehavior. On that score, their sympathies would have lain with John Underhill. While he was away, his wife violated her husband’s trust.
    But there was a sense in which Mr. Underhill posed a problem too, for he had allowed himself to be cuckolded. The men of Margaret’s era knew there was no way the husband of an adulterous woman could be certain that her children were blessed with his genes. Lacking such knowledge, he might feel justified in shirking the usual paternal responsibilities. In 1622 English writer William Gouge pointed out that female adultery, more than the male kind, presents confusions about paternity. The problem, wrote Gouge in his book about “domestical duties,” was that the unsuspecting husband “may take base children to be his owne, and so cast the inheritance upon them; and suspect his owne to be basely borne, and so deprive them of their patrimony.” 5
The appetite
    Margaret Browne lived in a tiny place in the distant past. It would be easy to think of her as “different” from ourselves. But there is a little of Margaret in each of us. We all have a desire to sample, even to experience, the private lives of others. This appetite has no name, but it is widely recognized, at least tacitly. It was at the core of
Le Diable Boiteux
, published by Alain-René Le Sage at the dawn of the eighteenth century. In this novel, a limping demon called Asmodeus magically