from LRB
In Northanger Abbey we learn that nothing very awful in the way of immurement or assassination of wives, or any such Gothic goings-on, can occur in an English village, because of its 'neighbourhood of voluntary spies'. In this chilling phrase Jane Austen indicates the social benefits of gossip, and also implies with secret amusement that the moral benefits of novel-reading follow from the fact that the novel is a licensed vehicle for gossip.
...The mainspring of fiction may be the equivocations and uncertainties of the gossip world, or the Olympian and scientific urge to get things defined, sorted out, pinned down. A combination of the two is not uncommon, but can have its drawbacks, exemplified in The Great Gatsby. Gatsby is the ideal person to be talked about, and Nick Carraway, Scott Fitzgerald's narrator, come to New York from the Middle West, can both identify with Gatsby as a figure of mystery and charm, and also consider him objectively as a focus for speculation. Gossip and speculation go together. Anthony Powell's narrator, Nick Jenkins, has the engaging habit of pondering, on our behalf, the possible implications of others' behaviour. Surmise and romance go together, putting fascination in the place of knowledge. In Edith Wharton's novel The House of Mirth Lawrence Selden sees Lily Bart at Grand Central Station, and wonders 'what she was doing in town at that season'. He entertains various possibilities because 'he could never see her without a faint movement of interest: it was characteristic of her that she always aroused speculation.'
...The ideal gossiper is an outsider with no hope of penetrating the secrets that absorb him. Dr Spacks says that she and her friend 'moved from details of our own lives to speculation about others, or from discussion of novels to contemplation of friends' love affair''. A natural transition, seemingly, and yet there is a big difference. One's own love affairs are as vulnerable as those of the friends who may be even now discussing them; and however engrossing, such a mutuality is both dangerous and self-limiting. True gossip should not only offer a state of perfect relaxation but of perfect ignorance as well, with only imagination to do the work.
John Bayley, LRB 22 January 1987
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v09/n02/john-bayley/great-fun
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"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?" asked Jane Austen's Mr. Bennet. Such cheerful banter is surely gossip. Bok is against it when it becomes "unduly invasive," again marking her concern with the absolute worth of another person. But the matter is not simple and Bok's discussion of it, complete with its footnote, is worth quoting to show how she tries to make fair distinctions.
Merely to say that gossip about oneself is unduly invasive... does not make it so. I would argue that additional factors must be present to render gossip unduly invasive: the information must be about matters legitimately considered private; and it must hurt the individuals talked about.
They may be aware of the spreading or of the harm; or else they may be injured by invasive gossip without ever knowing why—fail to keep their jobs, perhaps, because of rumors about their unspoken political dissent. But the speculations in bars or sewing circles concerning even the most intimate aspects of the married life of public figures is not intrusive so long as it does not reach them or affect their lives in any way. Such talk may diminish the speakers, but does not intrude on the persons spoken about...
She thus rebukes malicious gossip, and gossip that trivializes by turning deep aspects of people's character or emotion into banality. Yet it is important to know about other people. The student should know that one teacher is careless in grading homework, or that another is devoted to his students but so miserable at home that his work suffers. Such information is conveyed less by solemn statements than by the whimsy of casual conversation or even ribald jokes.
Ian Hacking, NYRB 31 March 1983
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1983/03/31/kiss-and-dont-tell/
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Your earlier reviews of biographies—of the Wyndham sisters and the Olivier sisters, and to an extent D.H. Lawrence—seem to take some delight in juicy details and narratives of social intrigue. What is your philosophy about historical gossip? Like the gossip of everyday life, do we undervalue it as a way to understanding human experience? What meaning can be found in the sordid or socially fraught aspects of a life?
I wrestle with this a lot! Biography as a genre got itself a bad reputation in the 1990s for what Janet Malcolm, in The Silent Woman, her anti-biography of Sylvia Plath, skewered as "voyeurism and busybodyism." In a coruscating passage—I have to feel strong to reread it without crumpling—she characterizes biographers as people rifling through their subjects' private drawers, fishing out the dirty linen, and dumping it for everyone to see. Having said that, Malcolm herself didn't seem able to keep away from biography. She kept writing it, brilliantly too, even while pointing out what a mucky enterprise it was.
I hope I don't sound like one of the sanctimonious double-dealers Malcolm describes when I say that I think I would want to reframe gossip as something more nuanced than dirty linen. For me there's an unhelpful conflation of gossip with slander—something hurtful, salacious, and probably not true. Whereas in fact good gossip is, as Patricia Meyer Spacks suggested all the way back in 1985, a form of intimate knowledge and knowing, a way of understanding the self and the world. That famous opening line of Pride and Prejudice —"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife"—both honors the importance of gossip in building a community out of disparate individuals while simultaneously pointing out its tendency to self-deceiving limitation. It can't possibly be universally true that everyone thinks Mr. Bingley wants to find a nice girl to marry, but it is the case that everyone in the vicinity of Meryton thinks that he does. It is that shared knowledge that starts the plot moving.
The Dress Form NYRB 13 January 2024
Kathryn Hughes, interviewed by Lauren Kane
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/01/13/the-dress-form-kathryn-hughes/
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re: Mean Girls
... At the film's climax, photocopies of the Plastics' private backbiting "Burn Book" are strewn throughout the school hallways. Cutting across the cliques that were introduced at the start of the movie, the conspiratorial putdowns gathered therein serve the purpose of all good gossip, "perhaps the most familiar and elementary form of disguised popular aggression," as the political scientist James C. Scott has written. "Gossip," he continues, "reinforces…normative standards by invoking them and by teaching anyone who gossips precisely what kinds of conduct are likely to be mocked or despised." Kaitlyn Caussin is a fat whore. Dawn Schweitzer is a fat virgin. Trang Pak made out with Coach Carr. Amber D'Alessio made out with a hot dog. Janis Ian: dyke. Damian: too gay to function. Regina George is a fugly slut. Enough said, the junior girls resort to beating the shit out of one another. Ms. Norbury, played by the architect behind the film's joke-making, Tina Fey, intervenes: "You all have got to stop calling each other sluts and whores. It just makes it okay for guys to call you sluts and whores."
Tired of Pink
Lauren Michele Jackson NYRB Feb 10 2024
https://www.nybooks.com/online/2024/02/10/tired-of-pink-mean-girls/
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