Erving Goffman, lobservateur du quotidien (Les Grands Auteurs) (French Edition)

He holds that creole languages are ultimately nothing more and nothing less than the final stage of development of the Indo-European languages after several thousand years of migration across the world. His second point has the status of a presupposition. It involves what he has elsewhere , referred to as language ecology: Furthermore, if the term creole can have any meaning, it is not in the domain of linguistics but in the fields of history and anthropology.

The third point is merely implicit and involves the ideological background against which we for the most. I will go no further into this aspect since Mufwene himself has not done so, but it appears clearly in his particular concern with the denotations and categorizations implied by the very mention of creole languages. But he is concerned with more than the language learning and bilingualism of pedagogical manuals. He takes us through a synthesis of language acquisition theory at grips with the reality of bilingualism and language contact in the framework of formal and informal learning situations.

Ultimately, he poses the fundamental question: How does an individual in a specific sociocultural role become bilingual when he is immersed in a given alloglottal or diglossal community practicing bilingual or exolingual communication? He replies with an elegant critique of, and improvement on, the abstract notions of exposure to a target language and system by allowing for the circumstances and contextualization of acquisition.

He stresses the relevance of asymmetry in exolingual communication and insightfully reflects on the process by which the learner decontextualizes the linguistic data to which he is exposed in order to build up a set of stable resources which can be put to whatever use may be required of them according to context. This leads him to question the usefulness of the notion of competence so that bilingualism can be redefined in terms of access to resources provided by two different languages which can be brought into play in specific social contexts cf.

Under the title Why languages and contacts? He insists strongly on the need to separate the former, assigned to linguistics, from the latter, which must be understood in terms of the anthropology of communication, thus showing the multidisciplinary nature of the study of language contact. At the same time, he sets out a typology of models for communicational contact classified according to criteria such as intensity, quantity, and quality.

Allowance can then be made for the stratification found in both the anthropological setting in which communication takes place and in the language situation. Finally, he attributes the observed complexity of contact structures to interplay in this dual stratification. In , Malcom Ross laid out the notion of metatypy which has since proven so fruitful. Now, in Calquing and metatypy, he deconstructs his earlier account of metatypy and asserts that it is preceded chronologically by lexical and grammatical calquing, a separate process rather than an early stage of a single general process.

He qualitatively distinguises calquing processes, which are nvertheless preconditions for the morphosyntactic restructuring which constitutes metatypy. His reason for making this distinction is that there are languages where lexical and grammatical calques are found with little or no syntactic restructuring. Rather than placing these languages on a scale of metatypy, he prefers to treat them as having undergone calquing without metatypy.

This solution allows him to approach the question of how metatypy develops as a function of the degree of structural difference between the languages in contact. Metatypy thereby becomes a specific type of contact-induced change together with language shift, pidginization, and language mixing. Ross then postulates the strong hypothesis that by default, contact-induced morphosyntactic change in one of a bilingual community s languages entails the restructuring of the whole grammar on the model of.

All of this involves the correlative theoretical elaboration that lexical and grammatical calquing, like metatypy, arises from the bilingual speakers' need to express the same ideas in both their languages. The semantic organization of the lexicon and the morphological paradigms, structure and meaning of lexicalized phrases, syntax, and grammatical functions are all affected by this osmosis because they all encode meaning. Finally, drawing on an approach attributed to Grace , , despite similarities with Hjelmslev's view of isomorphism and levels of language structure, he envisages the existence of a number of different content substances expressing the same notion.

From the standpoint of contact, addressing the longstanding tension between genetic and areal explanations for similarities among languages, Marianne Mithun Grammar, Contact and Time shows that certain grammatical traits which might at first be assumed to be 'unborrowable', and thus indicators of genetic relations, may not be what they seem. The point is illustrated with recurring parallelisms in morphological structure found in languages indigenous to western North America. The area is home to tremendous genetic diversity, with not only numerous languages but also numerous genetic families in the traditional sense.

Many of the languages exhibit elaborate sets of verbal prefixes indicating means and manner of action. Many contain rich sets of verbal suffixes indicating location and direction. Structures like these have sometimes been offered as evidence of superstocks, groups of families related at a more ancient time depth than that recoverable by the traditional comparative method.

Here it is shown that such parallel linguistic patterns need not be the result of either shared history or borrowing as such. Rather, it may have been the precursors to the structures that were transferred, sometimes simply as propensities for certain expressive or stylistic choices that subsequently crystallized in the various languages in parallel ways. In this volume, code-switching CS itself is not a theme, though this is one of the most popular topics in the study of language contact, having been examined from the most varied viewpoints: In Le code-switching comme ressource pour l organisation de la parole-en-interaction, Lorenza Mondada targets something far more specific: This aspect, which might seem a priori to be marginal here, is in fact nothing less than fundamental, as she shows in her discussion of a representative sequence and the exchanges which take place as it unfolds.

CS is thus apprehended as a laboratory for linguistics. She seeks explanations for its pragmatic and sociolinguistic functions, reviews the ways in which its polyfunctionality can be conceptualized, and globally rethinks the question of interactive language by showing how it can itself be a tool for organizing the interaction. The short example of professional interaction which she provides against the background of Auer's perspectives on the contextualization of CS and Sacks's , work on categorial apparatus and conversational analysis enable her to open new horizons.

As has already been made clear, the primary practical focus should thus be not on linguistic structure, which is a construct, but rather on exchange and contact between languages and language varieties within social fabrics through the interplay of the available repertories. Elaborating on the theme of heterogeneity in communication,.

He goes on to examine processes of semiotization as essential features of linguistic and communicational innovation or restructuring, and then uses the notion of contact as constitutive of what he calls things linguistic and makes it the condition of all innovative processes in meaning. Backdrops These varied approaches all illustrate advances in the study of contact, even though, as already stated, they do not cover the entire field.

At the same time, they are grounded in reflection on how language works, how languages develop, how language processes can be recognized and described. I would like to close this introduction by returning to two recurrent themes referred to above which seem to me to be particularly important in view of their generality and their implications. The range of the field of study and the intersection of approaches cognition, social anthropology, linguistics, etc.

It is interesting to note that all the texts in this volume, faced with issues of language contact and hence with setting boundaries, presuppose having defined or revised boundaries on quite another level, sc. This, however, is as far as the general agreement goes. Recognizing an intersection of explanatory approaches with respect to some specific object of study does not imply a need to make identical theoretical choices as a result.

Participation in a common endeavor does not mean sharing a single manner of approach. While a continuity of integration of linguistic, sociolinguistic, anthropological, and cognitive approaches is apparent from Winford's synthetic proposals to Ross's or Mithun's developments, there is no guarantee that this will lead to the adoption of a common analytical framework.

And even within such a framework, there is a range of issues to be dealt with. To see how wide the divergence can be, we need only compare, for example, Zima's strategy of decontextualization and classification for the purpose setting up the degrees and categorial constructs of his anthropological setting, and Mondada's interactional approach stressing contextualisation and sequentiality and showing how seemingly adequate functional categories are elaborated and continually worked over in context, thus preventing them from serving as reference points.

In other words, recognizing that there is work to be done along the borderline of disciplinary fields, hence recognizing the existing border and its relevance, does not entail that the way in which that border is taken into account is predetermined, nor that it need be made an issue in the same way.

At the same time, the standard academic problem of the use of reductive processes for scientific ends another attempt at drawing borders comes to the fore: What justification is there for basing the construction of an object of study on the closure of a domain and the choice of a set of relevant axes to govern its organization?

Essentialist and symbolic representations vs. This theme requires distinguishing two levels. Here is where knowledge is built up from observing ordinary participants in their exchanges, the processes of transformation and reworking of material linguistic elements which are both the vectors and the results of those processes. Here is where we find the selections and outputs of informed participants who provide a supposedly objective account of given aspects of those material features and processes.

This is thus the level of those who see themselves as describing reality and producing explicitly decontextualized knowledge 7. On the first level where the behavior of ordinary participants is apprehended, it is easy to see the value, the necessity even, of taking into consideration their ideas about their language and the symbolic representations which they produce, argue over, cling to, or relinquish in the course of communication. Despite patent differences in their aims, theoretical references, and descriptive projects, approaches as different as those of Py, Thomason, and Mondada show a first-level interest in the production of linguistic forms from a preexisting multiplicity of languages and linguistic behavior patterns which the participants in communication already possess or acquire in context.

Obviously, the practical processes of construction and symbolization exercised by the language learner are of a different order from the ones used by the participants in code-switching as described by Mondada. A fortiori, these are even further removed from the processes by which speakers develop linguistic differentiations to mark their identity, which are Thomason's subject. Nonetheless, in each case, there is a contextually developed process of rearrangement and adaptation which leads to the perception of categorized entities whose essence is re defined. These are essentialized representations whose symbolic value can be activated as a function of individual or collective contextual strategies.

Once activated, they take on historical sense and become a pratical tool of strategic negotiation in the pursuit of interaction. There is, however, generally less interest in what happens on the second level, i. He is rarely questioned regarding the implicit aspects of his output, the nature of his theoretical assumptions, and the implications of his models 8. By describer, I mean the person who gives an account of something, who plays a role requiring reflection and symbolizes his objectivity by placing himself a priori outside the scope of the phenomena he seeks to apprehend 9.

Actually, given that utterances on the second level necessarily state implicit features, they can only be criticized through reference to the explicit propositions observed on the first level. Thus, when Mufwene criticizes some of the explanatory hypotheses which have been put forth concerning the origin, development, and specificity of creole languages, he calls for first-level reflections on the phenomena generated by ordinary participants in communication; but these must necessarily be accompanied by reflections on the implicit propositions and presuppositions of informed participants in description, which eminently pertain to the set of things which I have assigned to the second level.

Indeed, could anything at all be described without implicit assumptions and presuppositions? It is impossible to account for language processes without taking into consideration all the intersections and realignments of approach which occur in what I have finally decided to refer to by the expression things linguistic. Variation in all its forms is the reality to be analyzed and understood in order to grasp the way in which things linguistic work. These three assertions are, of course, no more than an attempt to contribute to an open debate.

Conceiving our approaches as operating in the realm of things linguistic 10 is merely a way of reaffirming the evident link between our object of study and the linguistic facts and behaviors of the real world, while preserving it from the a priori closure that the use of the terminology of a single discipline linguistics would tend to impose on it. Indeed, one does linguistics by practicing a scientific discipline where a preexisting theoretical framework defines the relevant topics and preconstrains the objects of study and how they are described.

One deals with things linguistic, however, by seeking to define an object and seeking a way to describe and analyze it, by finding a way of capturing reality in relationship to its relevant features. This means theorizing practice and defining a field of research. Presses de la Sorbonne-Nouvelle. Auer, Peter Bilingual conversation. This usage of things linguistic is doubtless in debt to Fr.

Gadet who distinguishes sociolinguistics la sociolinguistique from what she calls things sociolinguistic le sociolinguistique. Grace, George W The linguistic construction of reality. Hjelmslev, Louis Prologomena to a theory of language. University of Wisconsin Press. Aspects linguistiques de la migration interne en Suisse. Mufwene, Salikoko S The ecology of language evolution. Myers-Scotton, Carol What lies beneath: Split mixed languages as contact phenomena.

The Mixed Language Debate: Theoretical and empirical advances ed. Testing a model of morpheme classification with language contact data. One mind, two languages: Bilingual Language Processing ed. Linguistic Diversity and Language Theories ed. Adult second language acquisition: Ross, Malcolm Contact-induced change and the comparative method: The comparative method reviewed: Sacks, Harvey An initial investigation of the usability of conversational materials for doing sociology.

Studies in Social Interaction ed. Sacks, Harvey Lectures on Conversation. Van Coetsem, Frans Loan phonology and the two transfer types in language contact. Van Coetsem, Frans A general and unified theory of the transmission process in language contact. Introduction The earliest conceptions of the field of Contact Linguistics envisioned it as a multi-disciplinary area of study, encompassing a broad range of language contact phenomena and issues, linguistic, sociolinguistic, sociological and psycholinguistic.

Linda Rouleau

The field of study developed out of several lines of research dating back to the 19 th century. Among its foundations was work on dialect contact and the formation of pidgins and creoles, as conducted by researchers such as Schuchardt, Hesseling, and others. Other lines of research concerned with contact phenomena included work on the linguistic and social aspects of code-switching, contact-induced language change, the dynamics of language maintenance and shift in immigrant and other multilingual communities, and the nature of bilinguals linguistic competence and cognition.

More recently, Van Coetsem One of the factors that appear to contribute to the apparent disunity in the field is the territoriality adopted by scholars in various disciplines. Researchers in Bilingualism, Codeswitching, Creole Linguistics, Historical Linguistics and so on, seem to want to preserve the boundaries and distinctiveness of their own area of interest. In general, researchers tend to define the field in terms of their particular concerns, or in opposition to other areas of study that investigate language contact.

Despite this heavily linguistic bias, she still includes within the field a wide range of contact phenomena, including borrowing, morphosyntactic change, language attrition, pidgin and creole formation, and Interlanguage, that is, the grammar s of learners of a second language ibid. I alone am responsible for any errors or omissions. Bilingualism, in her view, is concerned with such questions as the social factors involved in how people become bilingual; childhood acquisition of two languages; bilinguals and their cognition; and language policy toward bilinguals.

Thus, on the one hand, she sees bilingualism as akin to sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, and, on the other, to psycholinguistics. This kind of partitioning of the field is also seen among those who study bilingualism. For instance, in his excellent study of the interaction of sociopragmatic and psycholinguistic factors in bilingual language production, Walters Of course, limiting one s study in this way is often necessary and understandable, given the scope and complexity of contact phenomena.

Nevertheless, whether intentionally or not, it encourages an atomistic view of the various areas of study, rather than the kind of comprehensive and integrated approach that the field needs. In fact, all of the phenomena listed above by Myers-Scotton and Walters fall under the scope of Contact Linguistics in the broad sense of the term. Whatever the approach may be, we are all concerned, ultimately, with the same problem how to analyze and account for language contact phenomena.

Hence we should be devoting our efforts to achieving consensus and unity in the field. We might begin by agreeing on the range of phenomena that we are all interested in. There is growing agreement that these include: Bilingual mixture has traditionally been seen as the province of Bilingualism, yet to distinguish this field from Contact Linguistics, as Walters does, is an odd thing to do, since they are concerned with the same issues. With regard to second language acquisition, contact linguists are particularly interested in the formation of indigenized varieties of languages, such as Hiberno English or Singapore English, and the second language varieties of dominant languages used by immigrants in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere.

Borrowing, substratum influence, and convergence have traditionally been the concern of historical linguistics, but their products are now being increasingly examined within the framework of contact linguistics. Language attrition and death has recently emerged as a major area of study in its own right, but the phenomena it deals with are similar in many ways to those found in cases of language shift and convergence. Each of these types of contact has been instrumental in various types of contact-induced change, and in the creation of new contact languages such as bilingual mixed intertwined languages, pidgins, and creoles.

The huge task facing Contact Linguistics is to integrate all of these phenomena and the various disciplinary approaches to them, into a coherent framework. The elements of such a framework include, among other things, a consistent terminology for dealing with the phenomena in question, a common set of criteria for classifying various outcomes of language contact, and a theory that includes all aspects of language contact, whether linguistic, sociolinguistic, or psycholinguistic.

I do not pretend to have such a framework to offer here, nor to be able to show how such integration of approaches can be accomplished. It would be a gigantic, and given our current knowledge near impossible task to cover all of the issues that are relevant to a comprehensive theory of contact-induced change. Hence, I limit my attention to linguistic approaches to contact phenomena and the kinds of progress they have made.

I also briefly discuss ways in which linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to contact phenomena might inform each other. Problems of definition and classification I suggest that there are two broad problems that linguistic approaches have failed to adequate address, with the result that we still lack a coherent theoretical framework of our own.

One has to do with matters of definition and classification; the other involves questions of the processes and principles underlying contact-induced change. Obviously, there is much more to the problem than just these questions, for instance, the role of sociolinguistic factors in shaping the outcomes of contact. But I confine my attention here just to issues concerning definition, classification and process, all of which are in fact closely related. In this connection, I argue that the linguistic model of contact-induced change proposed by Van Coetsem , offers the best approach to understanding such issues.

I also focus particularly on recent research that suggests how psycholinguistic models of language production can shed light on processes of contact-induced change, and perhaps contribute toward the integrated theory we seek. All languages are contact languages. For purposes of contact-linguistic classification, we need another notion than mixing or intertwining. No contact linguist would disagree with Markey s observation.

Usually, however, we focus our attention on a subset of the outcomes of language contact, paying particular attention to salient cases such as bilingual mixed languages, pidgins, and creoles. I follow the latter tradition here, but this does not deny the fact that the processes of change found in these prototypical cases are simply extreme manifestations of what is found in every case of language contact.

The framework I discuss later, that of Van Coetsem , is in fact sufficiently broad to account for most of the phenomena associated with cross-linguistic influence, but I apply it here only to the more limited set of contact languages. For the most part, we still define the class of contact languages in terms of what we know of their history, rather than in terms of the structural or typological features that they all share, or the linguistic processes that brought them into existence. There is continuing disagreement over the classification of contact phenomena, inconsistency and variance in the terminology used to describe them, and lack of consensus concerning the linguistic processes involved in their creation.

Whether one examines code-switching, bilingual mixed languages, pidgins or creoles, one confronts a variety of competing definitions and classifications. For instance, there is still no agreement on what constitutes code-switching as opposed to borrowing, as opposed to code-alternation, etc. This led Clyne Similarly, debate continues as to what constitutes bilingual mixed languages, or as they have alternatively been called, intertwined or split languages.

Here, as in other cases of contact, the tendency has been to identify a prototype, and then try to classify similar outcomes in terms of how well they match that prototype. Traditionally, the bilingual mixed language BML prototype is roughly described as combining the grammar of one language with the lexicon of another, as exemplified by Media Lengua. But, as Matras Fine-grained classifications of contact languages, whether based on linguistic structural or sociolinguistic grounds, are of course useful, but they are not an end in themselves.

What we need to ask is how the particular configuration of linguistic inputs and social contexts produced the. Hence, as Clyne Recognition of this fact has led to drastic revision of definitions and taxonomies in the field of pidgin and creole linguistics. Scholars now acknowledge that both of these labels have been applied too loosely to a broad variety of contact languages. In the case of pidgins, a clear distinction can be made between highly reduced and marginal languages such as Russenorsk, Delaware Pidgin, Eskimo Pidgin and others, and so-called extended pidgins such as Tok Pisin and Bislama, which are as structurally complex as creoles or any other language.

Creoles, for their part, are now recognized as constituting a diverse assortment of contact varieties, ranging from languages like Bajan, which preserves many features of the SW English dialects on which it is based, and at the other extreme, the Surinamese creoles, which preserve far more West African than English features.

It is now accepted that the common thread connecting these outcomes to each other, and indeed to other contact languages such as Hiberno English and Singapore Colloquial English, is that they were created via the process of natural second language acquisition. What distinguishes them, once more, is the peculiar interplay of linguistic inputs and social factors that shaped their formation in the first place. We could cite several other examples of similar weaknesses in traditional classifications of contact languages. In general, it is clear that no single definition is adequate to describe any category of contact languages, or their structural characteristics.

We clearly need a framework that would be flexible enough to recognize these facts. I discuss such a framework in the next section. More recently, other scholars have found weaknesses in these classic frameworks and attempted to further refine the distinction between the two basic mechanisms of contact-induced change. The fact is that the traditional frameworks did not make explicit enough the distinction between the two mechanisms. Moreover, the terminology they used to describe the types of change was variable and inconsistent. For instance, different scholars have used terms like interference and transfer to refer to any type of cross-linguistic influence, including borrowing.

Other scholars restricted the former terms to the effects of an L1 or primary language on an L2 or secondary language, especially in the context of second language acquisition. Moreover, many of the terms used to describe cross linguistic influence were used in various senses, to refer either to the outcomes of contact, or to the putative linguistic processes of change involved. Such vagueness and inconsistency has posed a serious problem for the classification and analysis of contact phenomena.

The most promising attempt to address these problems, in my view, is the framework formulated by Van Coetsem , With regard to classification of contact phenomena, Van Coetsem The types or patterns of transfer, eg. Motivation of speaker for using the language communication, self-identification, etc c.

I focus my attention here on the first of these criteria. Van Coetsem s framework distinguishes between two types of cross-linguistic influence, or what he calls transfer types, namely, borrowing and imposition. Borrowing and imposition, in this framework, are not seen as mechanisms or processes, but rather as vehicles of contact-induced change. In both cases, there is a source language SL and a recipient language RL.

These terms serve as alternatives to various other terms that have been used in the literature, such as donor language, substrate, replica language and the like. The direction of transfer of linguistic features is always from the source language to the RL, and the agent of transfer can be either the recipient language or the source language speaker. In the former case, we have borrowing RL agentivity , in the latter, imposition SL agentivity. Also highly relevant to the distinction between borrowing and imposition is the notion of language dominance. As Van Coetsem In the former case, the recipient language is the dominant language of the speaker, while in the latter case, the source language is the dominant language.

When we speak of dominance here, we are referring to linguistic dominance, that is, the fact that the speaker is more proficient in one of the languages in contact. This must be distinguished from social dominance, which refers to the political or social status of one of the languages. The socially dominant language may or may not be the linguistically dominant language of the speaker. Of course, dominance relationships may change over time, both in the individual speaker. And such shifts in dominance may result in different outcomes, or lead to attrition of the previously dominant language.

These considerations require us to distinguish the agents of change from the kinds of agentivity they employ in introducing changes to an RL. The fact is that the same agent can employ either type of agentivity, and hence both transfer types, in the same contact situation. This is particularly true of highly proficient bilinguals, though not restricted to them alone.

Differences between recipient language and source language agentivity are also related to what Van Coetsem This refers to the fact that certain components of a language, such as phonology, morphology and syntax, tend to be more stable and hence resistant to change, while others, such as vocabulary, are less stable and thus more amenable to change.

This is partly why borrowing tends to be mostly lexical, and to have little if any effect on the recipient language grammar. On the other hand, in imposition, where the source language grammar is more stable and resistant to change, grammatical features can be transferred more readily, leading to significant structural change in the speaker s version of the RL. There may well be differences in degree of stability within different aspects of the grammar, which may lead to different potential for transfer.

Thus certain function morphemes tend to be transferred more readily than others, and word order, for instance, seems to be transferred more readily than, say, embedding strategies. The former has to do with the psycho linguistic processes of change that reside in individual minds, while the latter has to do with processes of diffusion, leveling and focusing 1 Van Coetsem I believe this emphasis on the cognitive processes involved in the creation of contact languages is equally as important as the traditional concern with socio-historical and sociolinguistic aspects of contact.

It allows for new links to be made between purely structural and sociolinguistic approaches to contact, and psycholinguistic models of bilingual speech production. Van Coetsem s approach represented a shift in focus away from taxonomies based on prototypical cases, to classifications based on the actual mechanisms involved in contact-induced change, as well as the constraints on their operation. Moreover, Van Coetsem reaffirmed the distinction between the results of such change, and the processes or mechanisms underlying them.

This remedied a serious weakness in previous approaches, where terms like borrowing, transfer and the like had long been used and still are to refer both to the outcomes of contact, and the mechanisms that produce them. This problem was recognized quite early by Haugen, who noted that borrowing as defined here is strictly a process and not a state, yet most of the terms used in discussing it are ordinarily descriptive of its results rather than of the process itself The same problem existed in the case of transfer.

Recognition of the primacy of process over result leads in effect to more meaningful classifications and analyses of the outcomes of contact-induced change. With regard to borrowing, Haugen introduced a distinction between importation and substitution the latter referring to the recipient language speakers tendency to substitute some of the habits of their own language for those in the source language Van Coetsem, for his part, makes a distinction between imitation and adaptation, which for him come into play not just in borrowing, but also in imposition.

The difference is that, in borrowing, imitation occurs before adaptation, while the reverse obtains in imposition. In borrowing, imitation yields an innovation in the recipient language which is only an approximation to the source language item, which is then adapted to conform to the rules of the RL, whose structure remains largely unaffected. In imposition, on the other hand, adaptation of recipient language L2 material to the source language L1 is the primary mechanism, and usually yields a marked change in the speaker s version of the RL.

Terms like imitation and adaptation are, of course, only metaphors for the true psycho- linguistic processes underlying contact-induced change, which remain problematic to observe and analyze. But they point in the right direction, and they remind us that we must pay heed to both the linguistic and psycholinguistic processes involved in contact-induced change.

Much of the recent literature has been concerned with the attempt to arrive at a more precise characterization of these underlying mechanisms. On the one hand, linguists have been attempting to formulate theoretical frameworks for describing the structural operations involved.

On the other, psycholinguists continue to focus on the language production process itself. Lately, there has been a growing rapport between the two lines of approach, which bodes well for progress toward a more integrated theory of Contact Linguistics. More recently, traditionally distinct fields such as natural second language acquisition and the emergence of indiginized varieties of an L2, have been seen as part of the broader area of contact linguistics. Following van Coetsem s framework, these phenomena can be divided into two broad categories: I am not claiming, of course, that these are the only mechanisms involved in contact-induced change.

Processes of simplification and internal developments, among others, also play a crucial role. But here I confine my attention to borrowing and imposition, which I would argue constitute the only ways in which languages directly influence each other. Lexical borrowing, classic code-switching CS , and some bilingual mixed languages fall into the first category. Cases of pidgin and creole formation, as well as second language acquisition, fall into the second category.

There is yet a third category of contact phenomena that cannot be so neatly characterized, since they involve simultaneous operation of the two transfer types. Some bilingual mixed languages, for example, as well as many cases of structural convergence, clearly fall into this category. I discuss each category in turn, and assess the attempts that have been made to characterize the linguistic processes involved in each case. To a large extent, the confusion results from different conceptions of borrowing that are not always clearly motivated. Given the sense in which I use borrowing here, following Van Coetsem, it becomes a more straightforward task to distinguish the manifestations of this transfer type from other contact phenomena.

It seems clear that most cases of lexical borrowing fall into this category, though it is also possible for vocabulary to be transferred via imposition. Recall that the key criteria for borrowing include recipient language agentivity, and preservation of the recipient language structure.

Charlotte Cloutier

The kinds of classic code-switching that Myers- Scotton and others have described clearly conform to these criteria. This of course corresponds exactly to the workings of recipient language agentivity. Clearly, the linguistically dominant language in these kinds of bilingual mixture is the matrix language. The same can be argued with respect to bilingual mixed languages like Media Lengua, Anglo- Romani, Ma a or Inner Mbugu, and others, as Winford has argued.

Such languages conform closely to the putative prototype of a BML mentioned earlier, which involves a split between the source language of the grammar and that of the lexicon, with variation within the class of function words Matras In Media Lengua, for example, Quechua supplies the vast majority of the grammatical apparatus, while Spanish provides the phonetic shapes of lexical items, as well as some function words such as prepositions, conjunctions and personal pronouns.

The principles and constraints proposed by the MLF model of classic code switching seem to go a long way toward explaining these blends of recipient language grammar and source language lexicon. The more important principles include the Matrix Language Principle that only one language supplies the morphosyntactic frame ; the related Asymmetry Principle that classic code switching is characterized by an asymmetrical participation of the languages involved ; and the Morpheme Sorting Principle that mostly content morphemes and a few system morphemes can be incorporated into the ML from the source language.

Myers-Scotton would later refer to such system morphemes as early system morphemes, including determiners, plurals and derivational affixes, which pattern with content morphemes in conveying conceptual information. This would explain, for example, the fact that Spanish-derived nouns in Media Lengua bring along with them Spanish-derived definite and indefinite articles. It was also limited in that it accounted only for the kinds of classic codeswitching described above including prototypical BMLs.

The model therefore could not be applied to many other kinds of bilingual speech that did not conform to its constraints. Salient cases of such contact phenomena are cases of code-switching in which the ML contains a blend of structural apparatus from both languages as well as certain BMLs that draw on grammatical elements or structures from both languages to make up their grammar. On the other hand, Mednyj Aleut employs finite verb inflection and various grammatical features from Russian, with nominal and nominalized bound morphology and other grammatical features from Aleut.

Cases like these defy traditional constraints on what structural or functional features can be incorporated into the morpho-syntactic frame of the mixed language. But that does not mean they refute the basic distinction between recipient language and source language agentivity that lies at the heart of the distinction between borrowing and imposition. In fact, they represent cases where the two transfer types act in concert to produce a new synthesis of structural and lexical elements.

In such cases, speakers with high degrees of proficiency in both languages can choose to manipulate their resources in ways not possible for other kinds of bilingual speech. So, in a sense, these contact languages do conform to the idea that one of the contributing languages is more dominant in the production of the bilingual mixture. This does not necessarily mean, however, that we can characterize the incorporation of structural elements from the less dominant language as an instance of borrowing transfer in the strict sense.

They include Ngandi, an Aboriginal language of Northern Australia, which has incorporated structural elements from Ritharngu Heath , Asia Minor Greek, whose grammar was heavily influenced by that of Turkish, and several descendants of Oceanic languages in Papua New Guinea, whose structure changed drastically under the influence of the indigenous languages that were originally spoken there Thurston , I think there is good reason for distinguishing languages of this type from BMLs proper, since they, unlike the latter, tend to arise in cases of asymmetrical bilingualism.

This means that many of the features adopted by the recipient language Greek, Ngandi, etc from the source language Turkish, Ritharngu, etc. In Type A, she claims, the actual surface-level late system morphemes come from the less dominant language in one or more constituent types, and function as they would in that language She cites Ma a a language in which practically all the morphosyntactic frame is Bantu, as one example of this type. This is curious, since it implies that Bantu was the less dominant language in this case of contact a claim that is not true either in the social or linguistic sense.

It is clear that it was Bantu-dominant bilinguals who created Ma a, inserting Cushitic content morphemes and some functional elements into a Bantu morphosyntactic frame, in ways similar to the creation of Media Lengua. In other words, Ma a is a clear case of recipient language agentivity. But the dominance relations between Aleut and Russian appear to be far more complex than she suggests.

On the one hand, Aleut supplies most of the lexicon, a variety of function words object personal pronouns, indefinite pronouns, copula, etc. But on the other hand, Russian supplies most of the syntactic structure, including word order, most clause combining elements co-ordinators, subordinators, etc. This led Matras Still, the pervasiveness of Aleut structural elements in Mednyj Aleut makes if difficult to claim that this was simply a case of recipient language agentivity.

Rather, the evidence suggests that this was a case in which recipient language and source language agentivity operated in concert, with Russian playing the primary role in the language production process, particularly at the level of the Formulator. Myers-Scotton s second category of BMLs, Type B, includes cases in which the less dominant language supplies abstract grammatical structure underlying surface-level late system morphemes in one or more constituent types of the dominant language According to her, languages of 3 Van Coetsem But the greater incorporation of structural features in the two latter languages seems to distinguish them clearly from cases like Media Lengua and Ma a, where it is mostly lexicon that is incorporated into the dominant language.

See Van Coetsem One example she cites is Ganjou Chinese the variety of Chinese spoken by speakers of Mongolian and other languages in Qinghai Province. Such languages, particularly Minhe Munguor, have had a profound influence on the syntax, morphology and phonology of Ganjou Chinese. In this case, Myers-Scotton claims, Chinese is the dominant language, while Munguor is the outside language But once more, in failing to make a distinction between social and linguistic dominance, Myers-Scotton seems to misrepresent the nature of the creation of Ganjou Chinese.

Since this is a situation involving language shift from Mongolian and other languages to Chinese, it seems quite probable that the speakers who created Ganjou Chinese were linguistically dominant in Mongolian, etc. This would explain the use of Mongolian morpho-syntactic patterns in Ganjou Chinese a typical product of imposition under source language agentivity in cases of natural second language acquisition.

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I will argue later that the same type of agentivity is involved in the creation of contact languages such as creoles and indigenized varieties of European languages. In sum, then, while Myers-Scotton s language production-based model is a promising attempt to characterize BMLs, her actual classification and her account of their creation are misleading, since they are based on misunderstanding of a the nature of the dominance relationships among the input languages, and b the kinds of agentivity involved in the creation process.

If we take criteria such as these as our starting point, we could argue that there are indeed three types of BMLs, as follows: Most content morphemes and some function items are incorporated from a source language into a recipient language under recipient language agentivity. In such cases, the recipient language is activated as the linguistically dominant language in the production process, and supplies practically all of the morpho-syntactic frame.

Languages like Media Lengua and Ma a fall into this category. Most content morphemes come from one of the languages, but there is a more intricate mixing of structural features from both languages. However, the outcome still preserves, essentially, the core morphosyntax INFL-structure of one language, which presumably is activated as the more dominant language in the production process. While this is similar in some respects to cases of recipient language agentivity, it would appear that source language agentivity also played a significant role.

Languages like Michif and Mednyj Aleut fall into this category. Outcomes in which speakers of an ancestral language have shifted or are shifting to a socially dominant language. In such cases, the ancestral language is the linguistically dominant language, and this leads to imposition from this language on the other. These cases involve primarily source language agentivity.

Languages like Ganjou Chinese fall into this category. Myers-Scotton and others characterize the kinds of mixture found in bilingual mixed languages BMLs as cases of convergence and argues that her approach can explain not only these cases, but also other contact languages as well. But there is a caveat concerning the kinds of convergence that can take place, and the nature of the processes and types of agentivity that lead to them. It seems clear that convergence can come about in different ways, hence it is potentially misleading to think of it as a unified process common.

In fact, convergence is one of those terms that are so poorly defined and polysemous, that its usefulness in describing contact phenomena has been seriously compromised. It seems safer to think of convergence as simply a cover term for various ways in which languages become more similar to each other. As a result, it refers to a linguistic configuration with all surface morphemes from one language, but with only part of its abstract lexical structure from that language, and the rest from another As a process, she describes it as largely a one-way phenomenon [that] involves the grammar and lexicon of a source language, generally one that has more socioeconomic prestige, impinging on another language This in fact is reminiscent of imposition, with certain differences.

On the one hand, it is true that imposition is largely a one-way process that involves transfer of structural and other features from a source language to an RL. But it is not always or even typically the case that the source language is the socially dominant or more prestigious language. But in others, the linguistically dominant language is the socially subordinate language a scenario that is true of most cases of natural second language acquisition, including creole formation.

In still other situations, changing dominance relationships at the level of individual language proficiency lead to growing imposition from a language being shifted to, on the language that was once linguistically dominant the ancestral language. See Winford for further discussion. Despite differences in the contact situations, all of these involve imposition under source language agentivity. We therefore have to distinguish the kinds of convergence that take place in different contact languages by examining more closely the underlying processes.

Combining linguistic and psycholinguistic approaches to language contact So far, there have been few attempts to develop a theoretical model that would account for all the kinds of structural convergence that we have discussed so far. Acknowledging that the original MLF model of code-switching could not account for cases involving structural convergence, they proposed two additional models, the 4M model and the Abstract Level Model, to explain such cases.

The 4-M model refined the earlier distinction between content and system morphemes by proposing that there were three types of system morphemes, divided into two categories, early and late system morphemes. Among the former are items like articles, possessive adjectives, plural number and others, while the latter consist of elements that combine content morphemes with one another into larger constituents or syntactic structures. They include bridge morphemes such as possessive s and of, which expand their heads into phrasal constituents such as NPs, PPs, etc, and outsider morphemes, which create structures such as IPs and full CPs, and express grammatical relations such as agreement, case, and so on.

Cases of structural convergence such as BMLs are viewed as products of the mixture of some elements of abstract grammatical structure from one language with those of the other, to create a composite matrix language frame. Such abstract structure is expressed, in part, by late system morphemes. The messages the speaker intends to convey. Lemmas abstract entries in a speaker s mental lexicon are accessed. Lemmas activate morpho-syntactic procedures e. Phonological representations and surface structure are realized. The hypothesis concerning bilingual language mixture which underlies the 4-M model is expressed by Myers-Scotton The different types of morpheme under the 4-M model are differently accessed in the abstract levels of the production process.

Specifically, content morphemes and early system morphemes are accessed at the level of the mental lexicon, but late system morphemes do not become salient until the level of the Formulator. The 4-M model provides a useful way of distinguishing, and to some extent, explaining the various types of bilingual mixture that we have discussed so far.

In the first place, it provides some rationale for the kinds of mixture and particularly for the incorporation of both content and early system morphemes in both classic codeswitching and in prototypical BMLs. In the second place, the model suggests a way to account for the more pervasive mixture of grammatical elements late system morphemes from both input languages, which we find in non-prototypical BMLs such as Michif, Mednyj Aleut and others. But to understand this further, we need to understand certain other aspects of the language production process.

The model focuses on the way in which lemmas are accessed and activate morpho-syntactic procedures at the functional level of the Formulator. Lemmas are that part of a lexical entry the other being its phonological shape or lexeme which contains information about the semantic, morphological, syntactic and other properties of the lexical item. In monolingual language production, accessing a lemma activates the morpho- syntactic procedures associated with the lexical item in question. In bilingual language production, differences may arise in the way different aspects of lemmas are accessed and associated with source language and recipient language lexemes, creating new combinations of elements of one language with those of another.

The Abstract Level Model is based on the premise that all lemmas in the mental lexicon include three levels of abstract lexical structure, namely: Whereas the 4-M model seems more concerned with the transfer of actual structural elements in composite CS, the Abstract Level Model addresses bilingual speech phenomena such as the mixing of structural patterns, or the expression of abstract structural features from one language by means of surface forms from another.

Though the Abstract Level Model has been applied primarily to cases of composite code switching of the kind found in certain bilingual mixed languages, it has the potential to shed light on other contact phenomena. One weakness of the model, as pointed out earlier, is its failure to differentiate the two primary transfer types, borrowing and imposition, and their associated types of agentivity. Perhaps because of this, it has paid little attention to contact phenomena that involve imposition, that is, source language agentivity.

Among these are the kinds of contact-induced change associated with creole formation, and the emergence of indigenized varieties of European and other languages. The types of convergence that gave rise to these outcomes are quite different from those involved in the creation of bilingual mixed languages. The former involve transfer of abstract structural patterns, while the latter involve transfer of mostly surface system morphemes and the like. Hence different psycholinguistic mechanisms appear to operate in each case.

Let us now examine the role of such mechanisms in creole formation. Creole formation and imposition. Creolists too have struggled to agree on a framework within which creole formation can be explained. Researchers have attempted to explain this phenomenon by appealing to various notions such as transfer, relexification, substratum influence, and convergence. I will argue that all of these labels refer to the same underlying process, imposition under source language agentivity. Research on transfer in cases of tutored second language acquisition is broad in scope, and well documented see, e.

Hence I will pay little attention to it here, focusing instead on how the notion has been extended to cases of natural SLA. Such cases include indigenized varieties of English and other languages, such as Hiberno-English, Singapore Colloquial English, etc. It is now also generally recognized that creoles were the result of processes of natural SLA, albeit in unusual social circumstances. There is a rich literature documenting the ways in which the creators of creoles, both in the Pacific and Atlantic areas, transferred structural and lexical patterns from their native languages to the new contact languages they were creating.

For instance, Siegel , Keesing , and others have demonstrated the strong influence of Oceanic languages on the grammar of Melanesian Pidgin varieties. Siegel has further shown that immigrant languages such as Chinese and Portuguese exerted significant influence on the grammar of Hawai i Creole English. It challenges notions of private and public space, and dramatizes the cultural assumptions about people and events that take place in such areas.

Social arrangements are therefore recognized that restrict such communication to a special part of the boundary, such as doors, and that lead persons inside and outside the region to act as if the barrier had cut off more communication than it does. Civility constructs the illusion of fully private places. Polite people do not allow themselves to listen to the intimate conversations taking place near them in a restaurant; they erect an invisible wall between themselves and the diners at the next table.

Eavesdropping dramatizes the artificiality of such wishful constructs. A contrived scene, secret listening reveals a natural human urge to know about others. It also exposes the factitiousness of barriers we erect not to know about them and ourselves. Eavesdropping stages situated knowledge: Moments of secret listening insist upon the importance of others in the construction and understanding of the self. Eavesdropping offers in miniature a representation of the repeated efforts by which we try to process these other stories; it dramatizes how we need other people and their stories to create meaning and meaningful identities.

In its representation of the particularity of individual acts of perception and their location in specific places and times — in social, physical, and historical context — eavesdropping focuses critical attention on the kinds of perception, the acts of knowing, that the novels of a certain period reveal and shape. As a border activity, dwelling on yet transgressing the boundaries between one space and another, overhearing is a translatio — a carrying across — from one social situation into another; such aural trespass emphasizes the transformation — of both utterance and listener — that occurs in the act of transmission.

Limiting the kinds of eavesdropping scenes under discussion enables me to focus on concepts of domesticity, the ideology of the home, and constructions of gender central to the nineteenth-century novel. It also exposes the paradox of representing the ideology of separate spheres, in that the portrayal of private space requires the narrative violation of that area supposedly impervious to intrusion.

Representations of covert listening stage the publicity of the private either to extol its virtues or to point out its failings. Finally, by keeping my discussion focused on nonprofessional snoops and their overhearing, I stress that the urge to know is not confined to the modern figure of the detective or the spy but, rather, is universal to human experience. Some of us may wish to be detectives, but we are all readers. Her novels sometimes demonstrate how eavesdropping can enable individuals to overcome their isolation from each other and provide narrative resolution, as in Persuasion, where a scene of contrived overhearing helps the heroine speak obliquely of her constancy to the man she loves.

More frequently, however, it becomes divisive, creating misunderstanding among individuals, and fostering narrative complication and distention. Eavesdropping in Austen and throughout the nineteenth century reveals marked differences in gendered agency. For Austen, public and private represent interconnected zones of activity, rather than spheres that must be kept separate. Hence the importance, in her novels, of the parlor.

These narratives reflect the increased complexity of the social worlds they represent: Later nineteenth-century writers examine characters as narrators and present anxieties about the power and agency that a character can assume because of his or her position as storyteller. They also attend to the vast array of literal and social spaces available to the nineteenth-century reading public, and to the porous boundaries between public and private sites, activities, and identities.

The chapter weds an attention to architectural spaces to a discussion of the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres. To contextualize these literary works, I briefly trace developments in domestic architecture in England and France in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Innovations such as the introduction of the corridor and the individualization of rooms demonstrate how architects incorporated notions of privacy and domestic ideology into the design of houses.

The changing architecture of the home and its representation in nineteenth-century fiction register increasing fears about keeping private information and space secure from appropriation and penetration. I investigate these issues in the novels of Balzac and Dickens. Their portrayal of domestic spaces at various socio-economic levels indicates the extent to which domestic ideology, originally a middle-class ideal, had infiltrated all levels of society by the time both novelists were writing.

The representation of eavesdropping in these novels, however, also exposes the constructed nature of domestic ideology; these narratives hint at the futility of erecting barriers between public and private zones and stories. Moreover, the need to display privacy and to convince readers of the attractions of bourgeois life suggests a more ambivalent attitude toward the domestic ideal than convention would admit.

Eavesdropping reveals this contradictory attitude toward privacy and its fictional representation. In its dramatization of the fluctuations of private space and its secrets, covert listening reminds us of how space functions as both social product and social agent. Domesticity is an affective as well as spatial concept. My discussion of Balzac and Dickens centers on four texts: I examine specific acts of covert listening in precise locations and analyze how these eavesdropping scenes home in on concerns central to each text in which they appear.

All four novels closely link eavesdropping and cultural concerns about privacy, family secrets, and social position. In their eavesdropping scenes, these novels attend to the physical and affective dimensions of private space. Eavesdropping scenes represent in miniature the uneasy interpenetration of public and private spheres on which the boarding-house depends. In La Cousine Bette and Le Cousin Pons, the spaces of private life — family mansion, secret love-nest, or humble garret apartment — are subject to unrelenting aural surveillance, their inhabitants and their secrets constantly exposed to a larger public.

The ideology of separate spheres functions effectively only when the secrets of private life have no value on the open market. Dombey and Son expands the definition of eavesdropping to include all domestic spying. Such taxonomy emphasizes the situational and psychological aspects of curiosity and its obverse, paranoia; we dwell in material, social, and affective locations. At the same time, their novels suggest that such secure spaces may, in fact, exist only in fiction. Eavesdropping in their fiction reminds us that privacy and private subjects are unstable constructions of intimate and public forces.

Lived space is social space. Such social mobility produces anxiety as well as anticipation. Eavesdropping figures placement and displacement in social structures — literal and metaphoric — and the affective energies accompanying them. My fourth chapter concentrates the issues of the first three chapters in precise locations: Her eavesdropping represents a double transgression: These rebellious characters flout conventional expectations about gendered appearance and behavior.

The Woman in White insists upon the pleasures as well as the dangers of secret listening, reading, and writing. It exposes a correspondence between sexual and textual bodies and the pleasures that each offers. At the same time, the novel signals the difference between our acts of covert listening and those of characters and narrators. Although its conclusion confirms normative gender roles, the narrative itself thrives on challenges to assumptions about gender, law, and privacy — challenges presented, time and again, through eavesdropping.

Toward the end of the century, eavesdropping in any number of novels offers ample proof of the fault lines in the gendered binary of public and private spaces. Pot-Bouille represents the culmination of a century of rampant eavesdropping. Twentieth-century narratives suggest a very different attitude toward secret listening and its implications.

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I end my discussion of eavesdropping in the nineteenth-century novel with Proust. Here, the making up and the making over of the self are attempts both to define an evolving subject and to elude definition by the other. A la recherche represents hidden listening as paradigmatic of this instinctive curiosity. In its exploration of the relation between self and other and the communicative acts that occur between them, A la recherche expands its analysis of the suggestive relations between reader and narrator that earlier texts such as The Woman in White flirt with exposing.

In both novels, the self-conscious, melodramatic eavesdropping scene reminds us of our own acts of transgressive curiosity, their pleasures and perils. Covert listening stages the proximity of desire and danger, pleasure and fear. My investigation of clandestine listening dwells on three crucial moments in A la recherche: These episodes of secret listening to secret pleasures treat explicitly the subject that nineteenth-century narratives represent obliquely: They relate erotic and epistemological yearnings in a manner that eradicates the conceptual borders of two seemingly different projects.

Only through such listening can one come to read the self in all its contradictions and fluctuations. Proust represents the culmination of nineteenth-century attitudes toward the construction of public and private spaces and selves. The larger implications of eavesdropping in twentieth-century narrative are beyond the scope of this project.

One would think that the consciousness of being subject to an almost inescapable surveillance would be paralyzing. Yet far from limiting our behavior, the awareness of new, subtle means of infiltrating private space seems only to whet our appetite for more diverse forms of hidden listening and more spectacular displays of intimacy. Eavesdropping is a narrative episode that acknowledges — even encourages — readerly identification with and implication in transgressions that reveal the secrets of private life.

Nineteenth-century novels represent the covert acquisition and dissemination of information about various interior spaces: The paradigmatic eavesdropping scene registers historically specific concerns in the nineteenth-century novel while presenting aspects of the novel and the novelistic community that endure. Moments of illicit listening make us rethink the ways in which narratives work and work on us, enticing us in, asking us to ask questions, motivating our own stories about them and about ourselves.

If Heathcliff had not overheard this conversation, or if he had stayed to hear it in its entirety, Wuthering Heights as we know it would not exist; the story set in motion by this partial acquisition of information or misinformation would not unfold because there would be nothing to tell.

Eavesdropping scenes often figure moments of narrative beginning, for they represent how narrative lack is created. As noted earlier, the linguist Graham McGregor has demonstrated how, in situations of controlled eavesdropping, an individual listening to a conversation between two others makes inferences about both the conversation and its participants. Significantly, most interpretive responses consist of creating stories to explain the overheard conversation. The fact that two vastly different novelists — one representing Regency, the other coming out of the English Romantic tradition — both employ eavesdropping scenes at crucial, emotionally charged moments in their narratives suggests the overall importance of eavesdropping as a narrative mechanism and structural dynamic.

More frequently, however, it is divisive, creating gaps of understanding among individuals, as breaks in the actual words overheard mar the content and, hence, the message of an overheard conversation. Illicit listening, far more than overt participation in a conversation, is prone to result in errors in judgment; partial or inaccurate information yields similarly flawed conclusions. This may strike us as a counterintuitive proposition. In early nineteenth-century England, getting to know someone of the opposite sex was often frustrated by the difficulty of finding opportunities for private interaction.

However, this shorter epistemological path, rather than leading to a more rapidly formed and reliable judgment, in fact often leads to misunderstandings, misinformation, and, consequently, erroneous conclusions similar to those that first impressions produce. Eavesdropping becomes less a shortcut than a shortcircuit of information — one that, by its creation of enigmas, engenders the possibility for narrative. Thus both novels present scenes in which the heroine learns how unfavorably she has impressed the hero in their first encounter.

In both novels, the result is the same: However, in Evelina the heroine learns of this indirectly, through a friend. She is much more a heroine in the Richardsonian tradition, whose merit consists less in what she does than what she does not do: In this second conversation, Lord Orville refutes, one by one, the objectionable remarks he had made earlier about Evelina. Burney stages the vindication of her heroine using the same device she had employed to denigrate her: Villars, and thus acquired the knowledge that enabled her to substitute her own baby daughter for Evelina in the home and heart of her father.

Through the revelation of such secrets, the solving of all enigmas, Evelina regains her birthright — her name and dowry — and can therefore marry Lord Orville. She acquires her father, her history, and her future. It also proliferates points of view and stories, and complicates our sense of the people who tell them and the characters of the individuals they concern. A concern for the truth and true stories resonates throughout the book. Collins displays the ease with which people confuse the true and the false, and links such errors of judgment to narrative: The reader, too, finds himself or herself in the position of making judgments about characters and situation, and of trying to anticipate marriages and endings.

Conversation comprises a direct, unmediated form of communication between two individuals. In contrast, eavesdropping is an oblique means of acquiring information about another.

She is the misled reader whom Barthes constructs in his reading of Sarrasine: Eavesdropping in Pride and Prejudice not only prolongs the story of Elizabeth and Darcy; it also triggers other stories and narrative complications. Bennet is a gossip rather than an eavesdropper: She functions as the voice of hearsay: Although not a gossip, Elizabeth, like the reader, proves an eager listener to these first- and secondhand stories. The story unfolding around her — which she is learning through primarily aural means — is more engrossing than the tale she is reading.

Austen continually presents Elizabeth as a recipient and evaluator of stories, and as a creator of her own. Presented, like Elizabeth, at the beginning of the novel as an admitted eavesdropper, Charlotte continues to listen to the conversations of others when it is in her best interest, and ceases when it proves otherwise; she has very pragmatic, selective hearing.

Only when she has secured Mr. Charlotte has learnt not to listen. No wonder, then, that in this very small world of Longbourn and Meryton, people are consumed by fear of being overheard by others. Eavesdropping dramatizes this longing to know — the urge to possess not just secret information, but the larger stories that make such information meaningful. Such larger stories turn information into knowledge. Characters in Pride and Prejudice constantly weigh the advisability of telling versus withholding stories.

Often, bearing news can confer upon an individual greater status than he or she would normally have; the urge to tell is motivated more by egotism than concern for others or for communication. Everyone has stories to tell, and the temptation to tell them is great.

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When they meet for the second time, Austen plays with readers who have assumed that Wickham is the intended partner for Elizabeth. Conversely, those who too readily talk rather than listen lack an awareness of others and possess an inflated sense of their own significance. Our willingness to hear this other story indicates an ability to change for the better, to enter into a conversation with another, rather than insist on telling the story from our own point of view. By the end of the novel, both she and Darcy have learnt the necessity for a different kind of listening: For this to occur, they must be willing to enter into a conversation with an other who is of both a different class and different sex.

Only when they leave the busy parlor and walk alone outside is there opportunity for this private conversation, one that helps them come to an understanding because it does away with all enigmas, snares, and red herrings. This conversation involves the exchange of ideas, emotions, and attitudes with an other; it comprehends an association and familiarity with that other.

Learning about the other provokes an understanding of the self; those who never bother to understand anything outside themselves — the Lady Catherines, the Mr. Collinses, the Lydia Bennets — will never truly know themselves. This confidence depends upon not only a trust in the other, but also a confidence in language to communicate. In her first encounter with her family as a married woman, Lydia reveals a secret: Darcy was present at the ceremony, and in fact helped arrange it.

I ought not to have said a word about it. I promised them so faithfully! It was to be such a secret! The justice of this betrayal at the level of plot seems evident. Public performance and private conversation offer two models of social relationship in Pride and Prejudice; these social models have narrative implications as well.

Idyllic communication denies all theater, it refuses any presence in front of which the destination can be achieved. Narrative communication is the opposite: The Wickhams are constant exhibitionists, and their life together will be one long performance. The Darcys do not perform; they converse. As in Evelina, the protagonists achieve direct communication through the workings of intermediaries: Lady De Bourgh and Mrs.

Consequently, Austen resorts to a form of narrative transgression in which all participants are directly engaged: This transgression is part of an almost complete revelation of information necessary to conclude the narrative. The only information not revealed is that which would dispose Jane not to like Darcy: This last narrative thread is never completely tied up.

The potential still remains, but fictional closure covers it up with the appearance of full disclosure. Narrative resolution comes in Pride and Prejudice when characters and the narrator are content to converse and not to eavesdrop. The novel dramatizes the power of language, particularly its oral manifestations. Whereas Lady Catherine fails in her efforts to prevent the union of Darcy and Elizabeth, Lady Russell initially succeeds in convincing Anne not to marry Wentworth. Shakespeare, The Tempest In ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.

The conclusion implies that their subsequent tale, in its almost perfect completeness, need not be told. Individuals leave the imprint of their imagination on the stories they tell. Covert listening violates the kind of direct communication that it occasionally produces, just as narrative presumes the existence of secrets, yet its activity is the eventual revelation of such secrets, the replacement of lack with plenitude, of reticence with utterance.

Paradoxically, such extraordinary deviations from open conversation are sometimes the only means to effect unmediated communication. In Persuasion, episodes of overhearing occur at critical moments of the narrative; they signal the conditions of narratability yet work to enact its eventual replacement with the nonnarratable.

More overtly than in Pride and Prejudice, Austen links concerns of gender and speech through their representation in acts of eavesdropping. An eavesdropping scene resolves the narrative of Persuasion. It replaces narrative uncertainty with certainty and completeness, enabling Wentworth and Anne to reach a mutual understanding. Communication is not direct but mediated.

Anne rarely addresses another character directly; such utterances usually indicate a critical moment in the narrative, like the final eavesdropping scene at the inn. Instead, the narrative style conspires with the fact that Anne has no listener or confidante except herself and the reader ; most of her conversations are internal, and indicate the strength of her inner voice and conscience.

Persuasion dwells on relations between social and verbal power. The chapter opens with a statement of their physical proximity to but emotional and verbal distance from each other; they encounter each other only in public, and interact directly only in the most superficial manner.

In separate discussions with Mrs. In an analogous manner: Musgrove physically separates them on the sofa. Through this exchange, Anne realizes that, although a frustrating harmony still exists between them in other matters, their emotional estrangement, like Mrs. Whereas the mourning parent can take comfort in conversation with others about her loss, the sorrowing lover has no such solace.

Austen places another eavesdropping scene in the middle of the narrative, where Anne overhears Wentworth explain to Louisa Musgrove the kind of woman he admires. In other words, they discuss persuasion. Rather than provide her with knowledge that would enable Anne to win back Wentworth, eavesdropping here corroborates misunderstanding and provides narrative dilation.

Persuasion is suffused with scenes of not merely conspicuous but also covert overhearing, scenes in which eavesdropping is committed but unacknowledged. Elliot had been the retarding weight, the doubt, the torment. This hidden eavesdropping scene prolongs their misunderstanding. Thus, unavowed eavesdropping scenes create enigmas for both characters and readers that are dispelled only through direct communication and extended narrative.

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The scene replaces a shorter, more contrived conclusion in an earlier draft. Overhearing features in both conclusions, but changes to the initial configuration of characters within the eavesdropping triangle have tremendous implications for the larger narrative. The first version involves an awkward use of Admiral Croft, who enables the lovers to reach an understanding.

Her only action here has been acquiescence: Anne cannot begin the simplest conversation with Wentworth: Despite overhearing how Admiral Croft and Wentworth are misinformed about her marriage plans, she takes no direct action to undeceive them but simply reacts to their actions and words. Wentworth must again solicit a response from her, which he formulates for her: Anne responds in a reply marked by fragmentation, sudden stops, and hesitations: I do justice to the kindness of his Intentions, but he is quite mistaken.

There is no Truth in any such report. In the eavesdropping scene, both lovers engage in ostensible and actual conversations; both their exchanges include an overt and a hidden destinataire. Moreover, the second ending involves the lovers more actively and decreases the importance of the third person in the eavesdropping triad. In Persuasion, it is not a benevolent Mrs. Gardiner or a meddling Lady Catherine who helps reconcile the protagonists, but the heroine herself who woos her lover back.

Anne declares that women feel more and remain more faithful than men do because: You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions. But he is listening, and listening to Anne, whose words now carry an urgent appeal.

Her speech tries to reclaim history, or at least the history of love, from male hands; at the oral level, she succeeds. Its narrative may be ending, particularly if Mr. Elliot continues to elude Mrs. But Persuasion does not conclude on a note of female triumph. The gender debate concludes in a draw on literal and metaphoric levels. Both debaters find themselves at a loss for words.

Yet Austen inscribes a gender difference in this silence: Critics attempt to place Austen in various politically charged categories, often at opposite extremes: Consequently, once she has delineated gendered differences in linguistic and narrative agency, Austen turns to the resolution of her story. Both long for direct dialogue rather than indirect or visual communication. In this relatively secluded space, the lovers reunite in language as in emotion. At last Anne was at home again, and happier than any one in that house could have conceived. Stanley Cavell explains how: We think of marriage.

Paradoxically, Anne and Wentworth have created such intimacy through a means that intrudes on private spaces and conversations — through eavesdropping. It entails contiguity between public and private spheres. It acknowledges the interrelation of the two zones. Croft, everything of peculiar cordiality and fervent interest, which the same consciousness sought to conceal — and with Captain Wentworth, some moments of communication continually occurring, and always the hope of more, and always the knowledge of his being there!

Tact is central to ethical behavior. The marriage of Anne and Wentworth unites the best of both old and new worlds, characterized by verbal tendencies, respectively, of restraint and frankness. Anne educates Wentworth in the value of listening. Though accepting her position of limited verbal and physical agency, she has learned the imperative of female utterance. Persuasion suggests a changed attitude toward storytelling in general. Instead of presenting two sides to every story, as does Pride and Prejudice, the narrative of Persuasion acknowledges the subjective basis of any storytelling.

Austen affirms not only the limits to what can be told, but also how it can be told. It reminds us of the complicity between public and private acts and accounts. In the city, opportunities and motivations for eavesdropping increase. Eavesdropping dramatizes an evolving attitude toward public and private spaces and spheres in Victorian fiction.

Covert listeners are not just couples creating or overcoming misunderstandings, but also baronesses, disgruntled workers, prosperous businessmen, curious neighbors, concierges, old maids, bachelors, prostitutes, and thieves — individuals with motives as varied as their social positions and aspirations. In the ensuing decades, eavesdropping scenes stage the affective, social, and ideological dimensions of private space. Domestic spaces — in everyday life and in their literary representation — acquired a new psychological intensity.

In the fiction of Balzac and Dickens, characters long for secure private spaces yet fear that they cannot be kept safe from prying eyes and ears. A new sense of self and privacy initiated during the Renaissance, finding public and political form in the late eighteenth century, and reaching its apogee in the nineteenth century, finds a correlative in the kinds of spaces the individual imagines and occupies. However, the repeated, obsessive, enactment of this dramatization renders suspect the degree to which even its most devoted adherents espoused the possibility of complete privacy at a time when technologies of publicity were increasing on an unprecedented scale.

This ambivalent attitude toward privacy and technology offers clues for understanding our own vexed relations toward the same issues, even if our response takes quite different forms. If the Victorians present a simultaneous desire for privacy and its spectacle, we seem to revel in a culture of confession and self-display yet to demonstrate a paranoia about intrusions on our privacy. The past ten years in particular have generated a number of interdisciplinary studies or collections of essays that examine the intersection of literature, the visual arts, and architecture and that characterize nineteenth-century culture as one based on imagined or actual looking.

By focusing on the visual aspects of the publicity of the private, this scholarship acknowledges the vast technological changes that were altering the experience of everyday life in England and France; the inventions that transformed quotidian experience often relied on sight to apprehend and process information.

Walls work by preventing families from seeing what their neighbors are doing. Except in the most prosperous homes, walls rarely block out all aural cues about whatever is happening on the other side of the screen, the partition, or the door. In contrast, eavesdropping emphasizes the psychological aspect of nineteenth-century domestic architecture. In this manner, covert listening reminds readers that complete privacy is a myth. Private space depends upon our ignoring the reminders of what exists beyond the bedroom wall or the green baize door.

Instead, people learn to disregard the coughs, shouts, or moans on the other side of the wall. We will ourselves not to hear, or pretend not to hear, what goes on next door. Moments of covert listening remind us of how easy it is to erase the aural wall of privacy that separates families or individuals within families, since such barriers are less physical than psychological.

Scenes of covert listening remind the comfortable bourgeois of the proximity of the working classes just below him, from whose ranks he may have just extricated himself. Admittedly, the works of either Balzac or Dickens could easily be the subject of a full-length study on this topic; numerous critical works have already compared the two authors productively. These novels draw upon the myth of absolute privacy and domestic bliss even as they suggest its limitations.

The urban novels by Balzac and Dickens that I examine suggest the difficulty of establishing an ideal about privacy and private space based upon the English country house, with its physical isolation from neighboring dwellings. The tremendous rise in publicity and urbanization Household words: The nightmare so terrifies him that he wakes, to discover that his dream is real, although later efforts to trace the men or to find tangible evidence of their having been at the window fail.

Bulstrode should be even tempted to listen at the door. As social mobility and technologies of information increase, so do transgressions of privacy and secrets — and with them, anxieties about such perils. Within a village or country town, one is almost certain to be seen or overheard and become the subject of gossip; we refer to the village or town gossip, a single, identifiable figure, whose motives and movements one can gauge. In the city, curiosity remains, but the opportunities and individuals for covert listening multiply. Moreover, the city offers the potential for eavesdroppers one does not know, is not aware of, whose motives and movements are uncertain.

Thus, although fictional eavesdropping is not a predominantly urban phenomenon, examples of it proliferate and assume more varied forms in the city. The vast amount of material I cover in this chapter generates individual readings that resonate with each other rather than a totalizing argument. After a brief history of domestic architecture, I consider four novels by Balzac and Dickens as different textual tableaux that dwell on specific aspects of anxieties about eavesdropping, privacy, private space, and secrets. The French popular press of the time included illustrated cross-sections of apartment buildings that exposed varied interior spaces, their inhabitants, and their activities to the reader.

His illustrated account of the heterogeneous inhabitants of a single apartment house encompasses all of Paris society. Throughout this period, when houses were constructed with a combination of corridors and enfiladed main apartments, the inclusion of a passage deliberately inscribed a difference in the access of various social classes.

They have houses in London, in which they stay while Parliament sits, and occasionally visit at other seasons; but their homes are in the country. However, the organization and design of the English country home was the focus of tremendous attention during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through its location in rural areas, the country home encouraged a relation with nature that urban dwelling prohibited.

Consequently, the large, public rooms of the English country house were usually on the ground floor, which enabled easy access to the gardens and parks. In the eighteenth-century English country home, the numerous and diverse public rooms were used for multiple functions, despite the names by which they were designated.

The bedroom came to be considered an exclusively private space, in contrast to the usage as late as the eighteenth century, where the chambre functioned as both reception room and sleeping quarters. As a result, the elaborate drapery of the bed, the curtains that had afforded its occupants a measure of privacy from other persons in the room, gradually disappeared during the nineteenth century. During the eighteenth century, the concept of interior decoration began to receive serious attention for the first time.

The emergence of this discipline reflects the growing consideration given to the interior of the house, its arrangement and adornment. As the upper and upper-middle classes claimed private spaces of their own, they began to regulate the spaces of their servants and their interaction with their employers. In contrast to having servants work, eat, and sleep with their masters, the innovation of the bell-rope followed by the bell-pull system in mid- to late eighteenth-century English and early nineteenth-century French dwellings provided means of communication with the servants that removed the need for them to remain in the hall the large, central public room , or, at bedtime, in rooms adjacent to their masters.

The Victorian ideal of privacy and morality had reached its fullest architectural expression. A few common rooms the salles or salons offered space for large gatherings and concerts. Separate, smaller service stairs insured that the major stairs would lead the visitor, undistracted by domestic traffic, up to the grand suite of reception and private chambers.

Until the end of the eighteenth century, the imperatives of group interaction overrode the rights of the individual; not until the final years of the century did a private space of family intimacy begin to serve as a model and spread through different socio-economic levels. His attitude represents an ascendancy of bourgeois values similar to the ideological shift in England. In this period, the individually designated rooms for socializing were distinctly male: The disappearance of the boudoir except in the most privileged households indicates the gradual prioritizing of the roles of mother and wife over that of the individual woman and her need for privacy in the nineteenth century.

The salon becomes not just the place for receiving visitors, but, with the dining room, the heart of the domestic establishment. In bourgeois families, the decor and furniture of this salon de famille stressed less luxury than comfort, the place where one could be fully chez soi. In less privileged homes, the dining room often called the salle commune took over both functions of sociability and alimentation. Increasingly in both capitals, through urban planning and market forces, the poor were removed from the dwellings of the rich; only those in domestic service remained.

English urban architecture by the middle of the nineteenth century reflected the segregation of classes by neighborhood, not merely by floor within apartment building. During the first quarter of the century, the most opulent private homes were merely a street away from abject hovels, in which a family of seven or eight lived in one room. However, with the large-scale Household words: In Dombey and Son, Dickens records such a demolition of slums in Camden Town to make way for the railways.

The wide street replaced overcrowded hovels and made possible visual and moral surveillance. These urban renovations created much-needed thoroughfares but also implicit walls cordoning off the middle and upper classes from the poor. His boarding houses and apartment buildings, in their relegation of individuals to particular floors according to rank and ability to pay, retain a sense of social heterogeneity and mobility that by the second quarter of the century was being dismantled.

Although throughout the nineteenth century Paris became increasingly a city of large apartment buildings, the conception and typology of the buildings changed. In the second half of the century, new apartment buildings no longer provided lodgings for a diverse socio-economic clientele, but instead housed people of roughly the same social and economic rank; consequently, buildings began to be constructed with floors of equal size and height. In La Cousine Bette, Balzac describes how: As the city grew, the rich moved west, the poor toward the east.

Physical proximity did nothing to erode the great social distances that separated employer from employee. Not until the second half of the century would the social segregation of Paris, begun during the Restoration, be realized. Despite increasing attempts to segregate the family from the outside world, and thus keep its members and their secrets safe, the bourgeois family itself provided the means for both the creation of secrets and secret intrigues and their revelation to an outside world. Marriages were still alliances between families, not individuals.

The arrangements joining two families involved the same kinds of bargaining and schemes that occurred in the world of business and finance; supposedly separate spheres were in fact quite intertwined. Eavesdropping locates their liminal position in the family spatially, on the edge Household words: Robin Evans notes how early modern literature and autobiography scant on their description of places, architecture, and furnishings.

The space that people inhabit is mentioned in its barest essentials: Such spaces disclose much about the people who occupy them: It exploits the liminal status of the boarding house to investigate the boundaries to family life and its secrets. Not surprisingly, eavesdropping figures prominently in this border-space. Such a site offers shelter, yet in bringing together people unrelated by anything but the need for housing, it remains a semipublic site. The eavesdropping and spying in the Maison Vauquer dramatize the tenuous quality of boarding-house privacy.

This artificial family reveals the underlying currents of self-interest and conflicting desires pervading the idealized body it emulates: Those present chatter about those absent. Created by mere proximity, this community thrives on the speculations that transgress bounds of privacy. The affectionate sharing of news among family members is reduced here to intrusive curiosity. The familial position each occupies has a rough spatial correlative in the particular floor of the house on which each rents a room. Few secrets or hidden caches are safe from him. He ends up on the third floor in a tiny room; his ascension to progressively higher floors provides the inverse spatial correlative to his reduced status within the boarding house.

For them, reserve implies a secret. His attempt to maintain a degree of privacy insures that people will be curious about his life; they act accordingly. Putting this information together with his reticence about his personal life, they fabricate extravagant, criminal scenarios about him: But however awful he or his horrible Household words: Despite the criminal verdict that everyone pronounces on Goriot, they allow him to keep his place in the boarding house because his behavior does not affect their own privacy — indeed, suspicion of him deflects attention from them — and because he contributes regularly to the financial stability of the house: But they continue to suspect, watch, and listen.

He was just going back into his room when he suddenly heard an odd noise. Listening carefully, he could make out the sound of two men breathing. No one had knocked at the door, nor had he heard footsteps, but suddenly he spied a faint light down on the second storey, where Monsieur Vautrin lived.

Then the light went out, he could hear the two men breathing once again, but there was no sound of a door opening or closing. Slowly, as the two men went back down the stairs, the sound of breathing got weaker and weaker. The self-assumed moral rectitude of the inmates makes them take on the role of citizen-policeman, a vestige from revolutionary times when neighbors informed on each other and no one felt safe from the Terror.

The infractions most imagined are those involving the two obsessions of the bourgeoisie: We learn that both servants have been approached by a Household words: If, for the Maison Vauquer, actions speak louder than words, sometimes it pays to silence both. Money buys information or its witholding. The deliberate quality of his eavesdropping is more pronounced, more calculated, and often more successful than other characters. He is also able to keep his own clandestine dealings safe longer from inquisitive eyes and ears.

Rather than thanking the young man for his financial proposal, Anastasie is horrified to discover that he knows her most intimate secrets including the paternity of her children. Confidences, common interest, or financial complicity bind people together more than genuine affection. One would think the revelation of a dangerous criminal living in their midst and posing as an honest merchant would cause more of a stir than the discovery that Mlle Michonneau has turned informer for the police.

What else might she reveal to the police, if offered the right fee? She must be expelled, so that the imaginary security of private space can be maintained. The police chief cannot infiltrate the pension de famille directly, but must convince its members to act on his behalf. Michelle Perrot explains that attitudes toward the police and the law changed between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in France.

No longer did victims turn to the police for help; the police increasingly intervened on their own. People turned instead to the courts, accentuating a tendency to substitute the force of law for private vengeance. Hey, you old bitch, look at all these people. In this pronouncement, Vautrin defines the difference between them: One lodger presents Mme Vauquer with an ultimatum: It also demonstrates the extent to which even the most honest of the pensionnaires recognizes the tenuous security of domestic secrets.

Little separates the criminal from the upright citizen, when it comes to curiosity. We all want to know; we all want to tell. Success resides in knowing when and how to listen, when to tell, when to threaten to tell; almost all secrets have value on the diverse markets of Restoration Paris. Although Mme Vauquer accedes to the group mandate of expulsion, as her boarders dwindle, she seeks someone to blame for her precarious finances and turns upon the departed Michonneau.

In a society where private interests take precedence over all else, for Mme Vauquer the greatest criminal is the one who deprives her of her income. Some forms of curiosity are more sanctioned than others. Eavesdropping, a liminal and suspect activity, exposes how the borders — of public and private, of respectability and criminality — are malleable constructs.

A novel that begins with the minute identification of a mistress with her dwelling-place ends with the tacit admission that such social markers and social walls are quite fragile. In both novels, scenes of secret listening stage problems of knowledge and intimacy — the limits to each, the urge to exceed such limits, the ability or inability to do so, and the implications of such transgressions.

The degree to which each is accepted into the family corresponds with how many family secrets each cousin is privy to. In La Cousine Bette, the story of eavesdropping focuses primarily on the Hulot family and its internecine struggles for money, sex, and power; Bette represents the family outsider whose control of secret stories is almost equal to that of the omniscient narrator. The alignment of eavesdropping with narrative ominiscience and a subtle discomfort with such positioning assumes more overt form in Le Cousin Pons, where the concierge capitalizes on her position as official regulator of the threshold to infiltrate private spaces and learn family secrets.

Although Balzac elsewhere devotes large passages of exposition to more public buildings, in La Cousine Bette his descriptions are almost exclusively those of domestic spaces. Instead, this novel about family life describes in scrupulous Household words: In Bette, characters are continually moving, changing homes, and in doing so, altering their relations with people. Just as people move from one apartment to another, so, too, do they maintain more than one dwelling at a time.

This attention to interior space — the place of confidential conversation — and to the tenuousness of its existence, appears as early as the first scene of the novel. Already this description suggests an encroachment upon private space and a subdivision of land hardly conducive to privacy. The lot that belonged exclusively to the older edifice has been taken over to provide housing for the baron Hulot and his family, whose apartment occupies the entire ground floor of the building.

The erection of this newer apartment building has halved the area of the court that functions as an intermediate space between public and private realms. The setting of Le Cousin Pons presents a similarly encumbered privacy: Both novels thus stress at the outset the artificiality and fragile privacy of the domestic spaces that each narrative will explore. The beginning of La Cousine Bette further emphasizes a concern for privacy and confidentiality. Crevel, through the grand salon into a smaller room and carefully closes all doors and windows before she will speak to him.

However, she leaves the card-room door open: As she came and went, the Baroness, seen by nobody, allowed her face to betray all her thoughts and any one who could have seen her would have been shocked to see her agitation. But when she finally came back from the glass door of the drawing-room, as she entered the card-room, her face was hidden behind the impenetrable reserve which every woman, even the most candid, seems to have at her command. Yet in its representation, we are given access to precisely that information kept from the public.

The Balzacian novel is built upon this paradox. In revealing this secret to readers while keeping it from the most avid eavesdropper of the novel, Household words: It also forms a pendant to the secret betrayal that Bette hides from her family to the very end. Such narrative framing reminds us of the sibling rivalry at the base of La Cousine Bette — a rivalry that is explicitly sexual, but that concerns the stability or destruction of more families and fortunes than those of the Fischer women. With the exception of the second-hand furniture-dealer, the tenants knew nothing of the existence of this little paradise.

So Monseiur le Maire could go in and out of his inexpensive retreat at any hour of the night without any fear of being spied upon. The readers, like Hulot, do not learn of it until several years into the affair and many pages into the novel. The narrator reveals this love-nest just before it changes from being the site of secret liaisons to that of public exposure.

Designed for secret meetings, the layout of each floor and room of this establishment is the same. The narrative describes how: Each of these rooms, built between thick party-walls,. Thus the most important secrets could be discussed over a dinner, with no risk of being overheard. For greater security, the windows had shutters inside and out.

In each betrayal, an extra key unlocks the space and reveals its secrets. Despite the obsessive shutting of doors and windows in Bette, no space, no secret is safe from discovery, for Household words: There is always someone else — a go-between, confidante, or accomplice — who can be corrupted. The solid family dwellings with their multiple rooms and more numerous related occupants are no safer from detection and discovery than the two sites of forbidden pleasure.

Every location is a potential stage for eavesdropping or spying. Individuals employ intermediaries to gain the secrets of a third party. The most publicly sanctioned union thus has at its base private, illicit relationships that threaten the institution of marriage.

In a narrative of relatives and secret relations, everyone is engaged in numerous clandestine confidences and double-dealings; everyone eavesdrops on friends, lovers, and family members in an attempt to understand and profit from the secret exchanges of money, information, and resources. Whispers, side glances, tiptoes, cocked ears abound.

Baron Hulot is simultaneously the individual from whom secrets are often hidden, and who always has something to hide. Almost everyone conceals something from those they love or hate, and almost everyone does not keep the confidences they swear to maintain. Secret stories create secret desires and vice versa , desires that implicate everyone in the novel.

Will you swear to me never to have any secret from me any more than I from you — to act as my spy, as I will be yours? Of all the schemers in the novel, these two women possess the most complete information, so that their machinations are largely successful. Such plots turn strangers into kin, yet such kinship is based upon complementary financial interests rather than mutual affection. Except for the wary baroness, the family members, using Bette as a safe repository for secrets, unknowingly deliver themselves up to her intrigues.