“Felt like chap in Paris who picked up fille and went to maison d’amour. In midst of things heard a chuckle. Around wall some tiny holes, behind each some one who had paid small fee for privilege.”
Howard Vincent O’Brien, Wine, Women and War: A Diary of Disillusionment (1927)
It is vulgar to suppose that privacy has no purpose apart from concealment of crime and turpitude, and vulgarity is of course the reason this supposition is so widespread. The fact is that even perfect innocence requires privacy and is soiled by the eyes of a chuckling voyeur. The guiltless uses of privacy are various and not easily summarized, but all are in some way connected to the cultivation of individuality. A savage may be taciturn, but his thoughts and feelings are not private. His thoughts and feelings are reflections of the thoughts and feelings of his tribe.
The savage has a hive-mind, a single heart, and no use whatsoever for privacy.
“There are no doors or windows in Samoa and the uses of privacy have entered into the mind of no native.”**
A civilized individual has his own mind, his own heart, and ample uses for privacy. These three things are connected because, however civilized and individualized a man becomes, he remains at heart a natural savage to whom tribal homonoia sings a siren song. When he is in company, even a civilized man will naturally seek to discover, and in many cases to adopt, the thoughts and feelings of that company. These thoughts and feelings are like a brilliant sun that obliterates the spectacle of the moon and stars of his own, individual, thoughts and feelings. Privacy is like night in its power to disclose the spectacle.
. . . . . . . . . . . . that place
Of stillness and close privacy, a nook
That seemed for self-examination made;
Or, for confession, in the sinner’s need,
Hidden from all men’s view.”***
An exhibitionist is of course gratified by the ocular attention of a voyeur. Such exchanges of felicity are by no means limited to the peep-show puerility indicated in my epigraph, but are in the vast majority of cases disguised by displacement onto physical features less overtly sexual.
“The sexual idea is repressed, and unconscious, the sexual impulse still finding a primitive and symbolic outlet . . . . her hair, her neck, her ankles . . .”†
No one altogether outgrows this primitive desire to look and be looked at, but civilized men (and women) tame the instinct with curtains and veils of privacy, through withdrawal from what a pretentious vocabulary calls “the Gaze.” Their withdrawal from “the Gaze” is also a recoil from what I called the soiling eyes of the chuckling voyeur. A civilized individual is conscious of himself as a unique subject, and therefore disdains to be known as a common object employed for arousal or amusement by coarse strangers.
This is why every civilized individual employs and respects both curtains and veils, and why he (or she) exercises and demands careful custody of the eyes.
*) Anon., Wine, Women and War: A Diary of Disillusionment, sixth ed. (New York: J.H. Sears, 1927), pp. 137-138.
**) Mary V. G. Woolley and John G. Woolley, South Sea Letters (Chicago: The New Voice Press, 1906), p. 85.
***) William Wordsworth, The Excursion (1814), bk. 3.
†) Paul Bousfield, Sex and Civilization (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1925), pp. 109, 126-127.
The Orthosphere 