This book began with a moment of naïve but genuine perplexity. When I first arrived in the United States to pursue my research, I was struck by what then seemed an inexplicable paradox. On the one hand, never had I felt so engulfed by privacy. The white, middle-class American socialscape—with its isolated, suburban homes and anonymous public spaces, with its codes of politeness and respect for what is none of anyone else’s business—seemed very far removed from the crowded, meddlesome, Mediterranean setting I had left behind. On the other hand, never had I witnessed such compulsion to expose....

In 1846, Sarah J. Hale, an influential writer and the editor of antebellum America’s most popular women’s magazine, Godey’s Lady’s Book, published a novel entitled Boarding Out: A Tale of Domestic Life. The novel was meant to teach readers the lessons of wifely compliance and marital harmony. Its plot traces the deterioration of a typical middle-class family as a result of the wife’s obstinate decision, influenced by the advice of an intimate confidante, to sell their suburban home and move to a boardinghouse in the city. Life in a boardinghouse, she is convinced, not only will reduce her household chores...

In his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Gustav Jung relates that in 1909, during a trip to America on which he accompanied Sigmund Freud, he subjected to his mentor’s analysis a particularly lucid dream. “I was in a house I did not know,” the dream went, “which had two stories. This was ‘my house.’ I found myself in the upper story, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces in rococo style. On the walls hung a number of precious old paintings. I wondered that this should be my house, and thought, ‘Not bad.’ But then...

In the previous chapter we saw how Freud uses the metaphor of domestic architecture to illustrate his notion of a divided interiority. In “The Unconscious” (1915), however, he chooses the metaphor of race instead. He explains that some elements of the unconscious, while seemingly coherent, are constitutively incapable of passing the threshold into consciousness. “Qualitatively they belong to the system of [consciousness],” he writes, “but factually to the [unconscious].” They are comparable to “individuals of mixed race who, taken all round, resemble white men, but who betray their coloured descent by some striking feature or other, and on that account...

At the heart of the American canon stands a room. It is the room where Nathaniel Hawthorne conceived his greatest romance: suffering from the “wretched numbness” that dulled his imagination in the Salem Custom House, unable to find relief in his walks on the seashore and the New England countryside, and intimidated by the spirits of his predecessors in the Old Manse’s study, Hawthorne entered the parlor, deserted at night by wife and children and turned into a makeshift study, to find the ideal place for bringing The Scarlet Letter to life. If the archetypical study, as in Auden’s poem,...

In April 1849, Henry David Thoreau was in the midst of a lecture tour on what would, five years later, become Walden, when he earned the prized endorsement of the New York Tribune. Thoreau, wrote Horace Greeley, the Tribune’s editor, “has built him a house ten by fifteen feet in a piece of unfrequented woods by the side of a pleasant little lakelet, where he devotes his days to study and reflection. . . . If all our young men would but hear this lecture, we think some among them would feel less strongly impelled either to come to New-York...

If persons are walking houses, as Auden imagines, then every jab at intimacy becomes a form of trespass. If persons are defined by privacy, as Thoreau implies, a trifling conversation becomes a profane violation. Privacy and intimacy: what exactly is the relationship between these two terms? Are they interchangeable, as some have suggested, or at least interdependent, the one constituting a prerequisite for the other? Or are they, as the epigraphs suggest, in conflict, even mutually threatening? To the extent that intimacy is understood in terms of the emotional exchange of affairs of the self, privacy has often been imagined...

Today, or so we are told, Americans no longer have privacy. “We are persistently bombarded by reports of people’s most intimate affairs by way of celebrity gossip and human-interest stories, confessional talk shows and soul-baring interviews, and by omnipresent television series and movies that treat the most banal incidents of ordinary life with the utmost gravity,” writes Rochelle Gurstein.¹ Contemporary culture, she suggests, has canceled the boundary between the public and the private. And if few aspects of private life remain shielded from the media, none seem to be protected from high technology. From computerized medical records to electronic credit-card...