Patricia Meyer Spacks - Gossip

ALSO BY PATRICIA MEYER SPACKS

The Insistence of Horror: Aspects of the Supernatural in 18th-century Poetry

The Poetry of Vision

An Argument of Images: The Poetry of Alexander Pope

The Female Imagination

The Adolescent Idea: Myths of Youth and the Adult Imagination

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright 1985 by Patricia Meyer Spacks

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

Portions of this work were previously published in The Hudson Review and The Yale Review. Borderlands was first published in The Georgia Review. The Talent of Ready Utterance was first published in Women and Society in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Ian P. H. Duffy, published by the Lawrence Henry Gipson Institute.

Owing to limitations of space, all other acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material will be found following the index.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Spacks, Patricia Ann Meyer.
Gossip.
1. English literatureHistory and criticism.
2. Gossip in literature. 3. Gossip. 4. American
fictionHistory and criticism.
I. Title.
PR 408. G 66 S 6 1985 820.9353 84-48663
eISBN: 978-0-307-80666-6

v3.1

For Aubrey Williams

The best of life is conversation, and the greatest success is confidence, or perfect understanding between sincere people.

EMERSON

To write a book about conversation appears to generate conversation. Many people have talked with me about gossip; many have supplied me with references, to texts and to pictures; many have read and commented on my manuscript. They have made it, at times, a happy communal experience to work on this subject of communal talk. To acknowledge the abundant help I have received therefore gives me special pleasure: sharing ideas on the subject of gossip has supplied much of the gratification of writing this book.

A year at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, provided an ideally communicative atmosphere for my work. I am grateful to my fellow Fellows and to the staff, particularly to Rebecca Sutton and Alan Tuttle, who found the books I needed, and to Margaret Bockting, who typed the entire manuscript. A Faculty Fellowship from Yale University also helped to support this project.

The book has been enriched by suggestions from Houston Baker, Richard Bjornson, Frank Brady, Harriet Chessman, James Dalsimer, Pamela Daniels, Teri Edelstein, Elizabeth Ermarth, Jo Ann Fineman, Christine Froula, Joseph Gordon, James Baker Hall, Jerome Handler, Barbara Harman, Myra Jehlen, Paula Johnson, Deborah Kaplan, Elizabeth Long, Adrienne Munich, Maggie OConnor, Darius Ornston, Thomas Pavel, Mary Poovey, Ernst Prelinger, Mary rice, Leslie Rado, Gail Reimer, Joyce Root, Margery Sabin, Judith Spacks, Lance Stell, Joan Stewart, Mark Taylor, Larry Thomas, Robert Thompson, Thomas Vargish, Thomas Whitaker, Carolyn Williams, and Bryan Wolf. All of them have helped to make this work better than it would otherwise have been, and have added to my pleasure in writing it.

Five people in particular devoted time, attention, and wisdom to large portions of my manuscript: Margaret Bockting, Werner Dannhauser, Margaret Ferguson, Carol Gilligan, and Aubrey Williams. They have enlarged my comprehension of more than gossip; to thank them adequately exceeds my capacities.

Think of gossip as a version of pastoral. Not just any gossip: the kind that involves two people, leisure, intimate revelation and commentary, ease and confidence. It may manifest malice, it may promulgate fiction in the guise of fact, but its participants do not value it for such reasons; they cherish, rather, the opportunity it affords for emotional speculation. Temporarily isolated from the larger social world, having created for themselves a psychic space like that of Arden or Thessaly, they weave their web of story. Their art, like other oral forms, endures only briefly; its transience heightens its value. Like the fictions of Spensers shepherds or Virgils, such gossip may comment both obliquely (by its implicit assertion of opposed values) and directly on societys corruptions.

Or think of it as drama. Two characters more cheerful than Becketts, but testifying their closeness like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot, speaking the language of shared experience, revealing themselves as they talk of others, constructing a joint narrativea narrative that conjures up yet other actors, offstage, playing out their own private dramas.

Or as fiction: fragments of lives transformed into story.

Gossip diverges, of course, from these and all other forms of art in lacking a conceivable audience (as well as a consciously structured form), and in spilling over, sometimes dangerously, into the real world. No spectator watches, no reader pursues a printed or written text, no auditor listens. Indeed, the privacy of the dyad or small group involved in this kind of talk largely determines its special tone. The presence of even a single observer would change the conversations character: no longer true gossip, only a simulacrum. Gossip is not literaturenot pastoral or drama or even fiction. On the other hand, to dwell on its analogies to literature both focuses attention on gossips positive aspects and illuminates the dynamics of real texts. If I speculate here about gossips problematics, I do so partly in the hope of finding new ways to think about perplexities of narrative and voice and subject in realistic fiction, new ways to understand historical and proximate forces generating the novel, new ways to read biography and published letters. To think about gossip and literature also provides a vantage point from which to take gossip itself seriously. Gossip is not fiction, but both as oral tradition and in such written transformations as memoirs and collections of letters it embodies the fictional.

It would seem logical to begin with a definition. Instead, I shall begin with a quotation. The actual practices of the English linguistic community with regard to the wordform poetry have been and remain so divergent and inconsistent that any resolution or answer would constitute merely one more ad hoc and essentially arbitrary definition of the term, with no greater claim than any other to descriptive accuracy. It would not, then, be at all unreasonable or frivolous to conclude that poetry simply cannot be usefully defined. Even less unreasonable, less frivolous, to come to a similar conclusion about gossip, which means many things to many people and even, at different times and in different contexts, to a single person. Always it involves talk about one or more absent figures; always such talk occurs in a relatively small group. As a group expands, the level of its gossip usually deteriorates: no more than two or possibly three at a time can engage in what I call serious gossip.

Let me isolate two typical modes, at opposite ends of a continuum, by way of description if not definition. At one extreme, gossip manifests itself as distilled malice. It plays with reputations, circulating truths and half-truths and falsehoods about the activities, sometimes about the motives and feelings, of others. Often it serves serious (possibly unconscious) purposes for the gossipers, whose manipulations of reputation can further political or social ambitions by damaging competitors or enemies, gratify envy and rage by diminishing another, generate an immediately satisfying sense of power, although the talkers acknowledge no such intent. Supplying a powerful weapon in the politics of large groups and small, gossip can effect incalculable harm. Iago typifies the purposefully malicious gossip at his worst, sowing insinuations which generate tragedy.