1

Writing the Gentleman, Dressing the Novel:

Nature and Manners in the Fictions of Fielding and Sterne

1. Introduction

Prefacing Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, an early critic declares

himself “charmed” because Pamela “pours out all her Soul in [her

letters] before her Parents without Disguise; so that one may

judge of, nay, almost see, the inmost recesses of her Mind” (8).

To such praise, Henry Fielding responds explicitly in Tom Jones.

Blifil’s feelings, he declines to investigate too deeply, jabbing

at Richardson by quoting his reviewer’s exact language: “As

[Blifil] did not, however, outwardly express any such Disgust, it

would be an ill Office in us to pay a Visit to the inmost

Recesses of his Mind, as some scandalous people search into the

most secret Affairs of their Friends, and often pry into their

Closets and Cupboards, only to discover their Poverty and

Meanness to the Word” (4.3.143). Fielding mocks Richardson’s

“scandalous” narrative and advocates social interaction rather

than psychodrama. Engaged in the theater as he was, he focuses on

relations among characters so static as to be near-allegorical.

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Rather than dramatize the conflicted psychology of each

character, Fielding centers his texts on characters misreading

each other; surface appearances, dress, diction, and affective

responses are the means by which he develops plot and character.

In 1711, Pope published his Essay on Criticism, in whic

h he writes,

Poets, like painters, thus unskilled to trace

The naked nature and the living grace,

With gold and jewels cover every part,

And hide with ornaments their want of art.

True wit is Nature to advantage dressed,

What oft was thought, but ne’er so well

expressed;

Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,

The gives us back the image of our mind. (293-

300)

The politics of reading outlined by Pope establish reading as a

way of recognizing one’s own self—it “gives us back the image of

our mind” (300). Texts stabilize reading subjects by reference to

the ‘nature’ from which they emanate. Here, the culture being

naturalized is a nascent complex of sex-gender, class, and race

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relations, a society moving to domesticate women, establish the

cultural dominance of the moneyed white middle class, and

maintain it by means of unpaid slave labor—largely through the

Atlantic slave trade. A literary style that erased the material

conditions for white, masculine, middle-class dominance

functioned to naturalize bourgeois cultural dominance. The

genteel subject must read itself into being.

“Nature” is at once the starting point and standard for art,

and yet if it is not dressed “to advantage” (Pope 297)—that is,

if it is underdressed or overdressed to hide “want of art” (296),

it becomes vulgar. Only an appropriate dress creates the

aesthetic experience of discovering on the page one’s own

thoughts—“the image of our mind” (300). Creating an aesthetic of

the ‘natural’ is central to justifying the dominance of the

English middle class after the Bill of 1689. Self-contradictory

as it is—if something were truly ‘natural,’ it would not need

dress and ornament to look so—that aesthetic undergirds the

establishment of an individualist system grounded in ‘natural’

rights and affective interiority. Crucial to its establishment is

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the dress, the surface presented in texts—nature dressed to

advantage.

Near the century’s end (1790), Edmund Burke, a conservative

thinker writing on the French Revolution, laments that all

the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn

off. All the superadded ideas, furnished from the

wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart

owns, and the understanding ratifies, as a

necessary to cover the defects of our naked

shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in

our own estimation, are to be exploded as a

ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion. (192)

The dressing of our “naked shivering nature” remains a crucial

metaphor for thinking of both literary and social narratives.

Pope and Burke both use explicit metaphors of dress to image the

proper aesthetics of the natural, but Burke adds “the heart” to

“the understanding” as crucial to the furnishing of the “wardrobe

of a moral imagination.” The appeal to sensibility and sympathy

develops in mid-eighteenth century fiction as it works to

naturalize genteel masculine cultural dominance. Nature must be

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dressed but with restraint: not to the point of affectation, the

realm of profligate aristocrats, effeminate fops, and promiscuous

coquettes.

Given the concern with dress and ornament both early and

late in the eighteenth century, Henry Fielding’s introduction to

Tom Jones locates itself squarely within this discursive

tradition. Presenting his text as a feast, he declares that “the

Excellence of the mental Entertainment consists less in the

Subject than in the Author's Skill in well dressing it up”

(1.1.36-37). The dressing of which he speaks is culinary, but it

serves the same metaphorical purpose as Pope’s wit and Burke’s

moral imagination. Tom Jones investigates at length the

vicissitudes of a social model centered on dress: Fielding’s

characters are aware at once of its vital role in establishing

their dominance and its unreliability as a grounding for

character. Taking Fielding’s social system as a point of

departure for Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne exposes the

anxieties that bedevil those being pressed to embody normative

masculine gentility. Tristram writing his autobiography is a

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project of self-stabilizing that ultimately discards his father’s

obstinate misogyny and produces the gentleman of feeling.

The rhetorical use of dress to ground arguments for social

position displays striking similarities with the promotion of

literary fiction in Fielding and Sterne. Regarding fashion in the

early eighteenth century, Erin Mackie writes, “In order to

maintain its nonpareil prestige, style must continually reject

what is (already) established as fashionable” (Market 6). That

necessity also binds narrative style, and Fielding in particular

goes to great lengths— in the preface to Joseph Andrews, for

example—to establish the novelty of what Francis Coventry called

a “new species of writing.” But however novel this new kind of

fiction is, it must be ‘natural’: it “confines [itself] strictly

to Nature from the just Imitation of which, will flow all the

Pleasure we can convey to a sensible reader” (Fielding, History of

Joseph 4). We return to what is ‘natural.’ That ground had been

laid early in the century—and laid as unstable whether on purpose

or not.

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Introducing Mr. Spectator, Joseph Addison seeks to gratify that

“Curiosity, which is so natural to a Reader” (1.1), regarding

“whether the Writer of it be a black or a fair Man, of a mild or

cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other

Particulars of the like nature, that conduce very much to the

right Understanding of an Author.” By means of a twofold

justification, he legitimizes the voice of Mr. Spectator as well

worth heeding in all things public and private. He first

establishes himself by his birth

to a small Hereditary Estate, which, according to

the Tradition of the Village where it lies, was

bounded by the same Hedges and Ditches in William

the Conqueror’s Time that it is at present, and

has been delivered down from Father to Son whole

and entire, without the Loss or Acquisition of a

single Field or Meadow, during the Space of six

hundred Years. (1–2)

By this means, he situates Mr. Spectator in a tradition of

genealogy as the mark of legitimacy, a model infused with the

right of primogeniture. After this nod to traditional

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genealogical legitimacy, though, he proceeds to legitimize his

opinions by reference to his behavior, beginning in the cradle:

“I threw away my Rattle before I was two Months old, and would

nor make use of my Coral ’til they had taken away the Bells from

it” (2). So worthy is he that even before he could speak, he

displayed the dignity and deportment of a true gentleman. He goes

on: “I distinguished myself by a most profound Silence [...] and

indeed do not remember that I ever spoke three Sentences together

in my whole Life.” In short, “wherever I see a Cluster of People

I always mix with them, tho’ I never open my Lips but in my own

club” (4). His gentility, Mr. Spectator marks by silence and non-

participation. To this ostensible merit, he adds an “insatiable

Thirst after Knowledge” (2), which takes him “into all the

Countries of Europe”—the Grand Tour expected of all worthy

gentlemen—“before returning to my native Country with great

Satisfaction.” Thus he characterizes himself “rather as a

Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species” (4). That

vantage, he maintains, makes him “a Speculative Statesman,

Soldier, Merchant and Artisan, without ever medling with any

Practical Part in Life”:

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I am very well versed in the Theory of an

Husband, or a Father, and can discern the Errors

in the Oeconomy, Business, and Diversion of

others, better than those who are engaged in

them; as Standers-by discover Blots, which are

apt to escape those who are in the Game. (4-5)

He posits himself as barely existing, social only silently. As

“nobody in particular,” he becomes “an acceptable representative

for everyone” (Lynch 2.82).

Mr. Spectator’s genteel character proves stable only insofar

as it continually takes as its object of enquiry some other, not

himself, to which attention is diverted. The Spectator is replete

with criticisms regarding various kinds of excess. Proper

gentility lies in careful balance, which Mr. Spectator sets out

to strike. Having positioned himself as a model, though, he

thereafter provides only negative definitions, mystifying the

concept. The recognition model he champions—ostensibly, one

‘naturally’ knows gentility, being of course genteel oneself—

leads almost exclusively to denunciation of what is not genteel.

Continual scapegoating of the coquette and the beau, the prodigal

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and the miser, the prudish and the vulgar, directs the gaze

elsewhere, defining gentility only by opposition. Even as the

genteel is naturalized, it is also mystified.

Mr. Spectator sets out to order society and recommend proper

opinions and behaviors. The logic by which he develops his

arguments is binary, presenting two polar extremes and rejecting

both. His model of change requires both recognizing and avoiding

excess. With respect to avarice, for example, Mr. Spectator

suggests that most

of the Trades, Professions, and Ways of Living

among Mankind, take their Original either from

the Love of Pleasure or the Fear of Want. The

former, when it becomes too violent, degenerates

into Luxury, and the latter into Avarice. (Addison

55.232)

Illuminating the extremes, he implies an unspecified central

point as the most desirable. In this model, love of pleasure and

fear of want are the two forces to which all human motivation can

be reduced. Moroever, the proper balance between them remains

unspecified. Such vagueness very usefully situates a moralist and

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an author, who must forthwith publish another paper pretending to

clarity, but actually offering definitions that are, at best,

negative: they specify only what one ought not be or do. This

strategy keeps readership engaged, desiring an answer

indefinitely postponed, and thereby grounds a culture of

consumption for middle-class values.

To the Mind of Mr. Spectator (whether voiced by Addison or

by Richard Steele), a “Man that Is Temperate, Generous, Valiant,

Chaste, Faithful, and Honest, may, at the same time, have Wit,

Humour, Mirth, good Breeding, and Gallantry” (Steele 51.219-20).

Hume’s remarks in “On the Standard of Taste” reveal the

contradictions necessitated by this list of qualities in no way

particularized.

Every voice is united in applauding elegance,

propriety simplicity, spirit in writing; and in

blaming fustian, affectation, coldness, and a

false brilliancy: But when critics come to

particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes, and

it is found, that they had affixed a very

different meaning to their expressions.

12

The stability of a masculine identity grounded on a list of

universal virtues relies on its never being articulated, on never

revealing the “particulars” lest the “unanimity vanishes.” The

true gentleman is pitted against bawdry, which

would smite and reprove the Heart of a Man of

Sense, when he is given up to his Pleasures. He

would see he has been mistaken all this while,

and be convinced that a sound Constitution and an

innocent Mind are the true ingredients for

becoming and enjoying Life. (220)

Mr. Spectator particularizes a bawd: a “Man who loves his Bottle

or his Mistress, in a manner so very abandoned, as not to be

capable of relishing an agreeable Character” (219). What can be

classified as bawdry is specified; what characterizes a gentleman

is vague abstraction.

In discussing the proper behavior of women, he mobilizes the

same binarizing rhetoric. Considering the proper manner of

enjoying a play, he outlines the coquette’s behavior in the

playhouse as “so much taken up with throwing her Eyes around the

Audience, and considering the Effect of them, that she cannot be

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expected to observe the Actors but as they are her Rivals, and

take off the Observation of the Men from her self” (Steele

208.315). The coquette is overly concerned with the legibility of

her glances and her character. In an earlier issue, though, he

has published a letter addressed to him with respect to a young

lady’s lack of breeding.

Dear Mr. Spectator, help me to make her

comprehend the visible Graces of Speech, and the

dumb Eloquence of Motion; for she is at present a

perfect Stranger to both. She knows no Way to

express herself but by her Tongue, and that

always to signify her Meaning. Her Eyes serve her

yet only to see with, and she is utterly a

Forreigner to the Language of Looks and Glances.

[...] Then she is no more able now to walk, than

she was to go at a Year old. By Walking, you will

easily know I mean that regular but easy Motion

which gives our persons so irresistible a Grace

as if we moved to Musick, and is a Kind of

disengaged Figure; or, if I may so speak,

recitative Dancing. (Steele 66.281-82)

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Here, we get the undesirable that opposes overmuch self-

consciousness, that is, its utter absence. That dichotomy implies

a ‘proper’ middle ground, which of course remains unspecified.

The lady in question is being admonished for her eyes, which

“serve her yet only to see with,” for she knows nothing of the

“the Language of Looks and Glances”—precisely that for which the

playhouse coquette was being mocked. The one is at fault for

attending too much to her body as a legible object in society,

and the other, for being completely ignorant of it, as if her

body were an exclusively biological rather than cultural object.

She walks to change her place, rather than to display a grace as

“irresistible [...] as if we moved to Musick.” Both assume the

masculine viewer as an undisclosed reference point, the subject

who observes the excesses and defects in all around him.

The strategy of using excess to imply a desired middle takes

as its object not only behaviors, but also appearance. In a

tirade against “the Beauties,” he declares them, “whether Male or

Female” (Steele 87.369),

the most untractable People of all others. You

are so excessively perplexed with the

15

Particularities in their Behavior, that [...] one

would be apt to wish there were no such

Creatures. [...] The Handsome Fellow is usually

so much a Gentleman, and the Fine Woman has

something so becoming that there is no enduring

either of them.

The same rhetoric of deplorable excess establishes genteel

masculinity as persistently out of reach, as is dramatized most

exquisitely in Tristram Shandy’s comical struggle to achieve it.

There is such as thing as being “so much a Gentleman [...] that

there is no enduring” one. Even being beautiful is excessive

enough to fall short of gentility. Genteel masculinity is never

comfortably donned in the critical eyes of the Spectator.

Moreover, if it is to be endured—that is, if it is perceived at

all—it is already failed, since gentility is predicated on its

status as an undisclosed reference point. Because of this

fragility it must perpetually deflect attention from himself as

an object of scrutiny—just as Hume points out of the vague list

of qualities which, when prodded further, reveal little in terms

of unanimity.

16

The lack of specificity in the definition of genteel

masculinity, together with scrutinizing attention to failures to

embody it properly, ensure that the aspirant maintains two

stances: first, perpetual anxiety regarding his claim to it, and

second, assumption of a stance like Mr. Spectator’s, in which

from which he might establish his own claim by pointing out the

faults and failures of others. Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, and

Tristram Shandy feature in three different narratives in which

these two subject positions are continually in tension. The three

navigate differently, and to different ends, but all three strive

to embody the normative codes they have inherited, thereby both

perpetuating those codes and revising them. Joseph Andrews is

written as the paragon of gentility—both bred and born. The

difficulties of establishing this claim narratively are precisely

that they must go unscrutinized to maintain their claim to

gentility, and yet because it is a narrative, they must be

described. Tom Jones goes further and produces a gentleman not

held to early standards of gentility, gesturing towards a

selfhood beyond blatantly visible and performable traits, and

develops the figure of the fallible gentleman who side-steps

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rigid codes of behavior towards a grounding on affect. Tristram

Shandy showcases the distinctively narrative nature of self-

creation. He grounds his masculine gentility on imperfection

rather than strict cultural adherence, transcending the

mechanistic and linear embodied by his father.

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2. “Good Clothes”1 and “Common Humanity”2: Fielding Writes the

Gentleman

“Put together with great Elegance”3: Constructing Gentility

At the heart of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones lies a question current

in both the social and the political spheres in mid eighteenth-

century England: ought gentility be ascribed to birth or to

breeding? In The Compleat English Gentleman, Defoe considers both,

comparing a vertical model of social legitimacy in which one’s

surname entitles one to assume the title of gentleman to a

horizontal one, in which one’s status derives from those with

whom one surrounds oneself and proper manners, taste, and

affective responses secure one’s recognition as genteel.

Fielding’s picaresque protagonists, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones,

spend most of their texts considering breeding and society as

their only claim to gentility. By the end of their texts, though,

1 Fielding, Joseph 4.6.257.2 Fielding, Tom 14.8.677.3 Fielding, Joseph 1.8.33.

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and after much ink has been spilled grounding it on sensibility

and society, taste and conduct, both are revealed as unknowingly

genteel by birth. The resort to a genealogical model might appear

to establish it as the more legitimate: always already, albeit

unwittingly, they were gentleman born. Yet the narrative

naturalizing of sensibility and society as gentility’s proper

grounding occupies most of the text and still stands.

Repeated scenes of recognition, failed and successful,

foreground the instability of a linkage between physiognomy and

identity. In Joseph Andrews, “relations between individual identity

and bodily surfaces [...] are no longer being taken for granted”

(Lynch 27): the features that enable Parson Adams to be

recognized as a Gentleman instead of a Robber are the same that

confirm the suspicions of the “Set of young Fellows” who

apprehend him and Fanny, resolving to “carry them both before the

Justice” (Fielding 2.10.123). The fellows

laid hands on him, and one holding the Lanthorn

to his Face, they all agreed, he had the most

villanous Countenance they ever beheld, and an

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Attorney’s Clerk who was of the Company declared,

he was sure he had remembered him at the Bar.

It is not until later, when

One of the Company having looked steadfastly at

Adams, asked him ‘if he did not know Lady Booby?’

Upon which Adams [...] answered in a rapture, ‘O

Squire, are you there? I believe you will inform

his Worship I am innocent.’ […] “Sir, I assure

you Mr. Adams is a Clergyman as he appears, and a

Gentleman of a very good Character. I wish you

would enquire further into this Affair: for I am

convinced of his Innocence.” (2.11.129)

The squire recognizes Adams as a “very good character” by his

relation to Lady Booby. Here, social status is grounded

horizontally, by reference to the company one keeps. Skin,

clothing, and the arch of a nose as indices of genealogy have

proved unstable. Given the proliferation of capital and increased

social mobility among the mercantile classes, genealogy itself is

no longer reliably knowable, and character, established through

society, taste, and opinion, becomes a stabilizing force.

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Earlier, Parson Adams has saved Fanny from a being ravished

at roadside and he stands in the dark thinking how to proceed. At

this, Fanny takes alarm:

The Silence of Adams, added to the Darkness of

the Night, and Loneliness of the Place, struck

dreadful Apprehensions into the poor Woman’s

Mind: She began to fear as great an enemy in her

Deliverer, as he had delivered her from; and as

she had nor Light enough to discover the Age of

Adams, and the Benevolence visible in his

countenance, she suspected he [...] had rescued

her out of the hands of one Rifler, in order to

rifle her himself. (2.10.122)

Had she been able to see Adams, she would have recognized “the

Benevolence visible in his countenance” and would have trusted

him, as does the innkeeper who later extends him credit because

he “look[s] like so honest a Gentleman” (3.8.221). Adams’

expression, we’re asked to believe, establishes his character.

“In the eighteenth century’s somatic culture,” writes Lynch, “the

face thus derives its significative centrality from a semantic

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complex in which the ethics, the physiognomic, the typographic,

and even the numismatic merge” (30).

Earlier still, Adams sits beside the road reading Æschylus, when

a gentleman approaches.

Adams stood up, and presented a Figure to the

Gentleman which would have moved Laughter in

many: for his Cassock had just again fallen down

below his great coat, that is to say, it reached

his Knees; whereas, the Skirts of his great Coat

descended no lower than half way down his Thighs:

but the Gentleman’s Mirth gave way to his

Surprise, at beholding such a Personage in such a

Place. (2.7.113)

Place is linked to personage, context to character. Recognizing

gentility in an ill-dressed parson is harder by the roadside than

in an inn or in London. Unsurprisingly, then, the gentleman

approaches Adams tentatively, only somewhat reassured by his

cassock, his book, and the literacy it implies:

The Gentleman, who had at first sight conceived a

very distasteful Opinion of the Parson, began, on

perceiving a Book in his Hand, and smoking

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likewise the Information of the cassock to change

his Thoughts, and made a small Advance to

Conversation on his side, by saying, Sir, I suppose

you are not one of these Parts? (114)

To Lynch’s “semantic complex” (30), then, I would add the

geographic: there is a proper “Place” for a given “Personage”

(Fielding 2.7.113) both in the narrative and in the country roads

of England.

At the end, a strawberry-shaped mark on Joseph’s skin serves

to establish his genteel birth. Joseph’s standing returns to a

genealogical grounding of gentility when he discovers his long

lost father, a wealthy gentleman, from whom, as a child, he was

stolen by gypsies. That ending might seem to advocate the

vertical model, preserving the traditional importance of birth.

In fact, though, it reads as simply redundant: Joseph’s gentility

has already been established by his conduct and the character it

bespeaks.

With the introduction of character, gentility itself is

posited as ineffable, not reliably readable in surname or

costume. Recognizing it becomes a sort of detective work, in

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which the superficial shifts from founding the claim to helping

to confirm it. To bespeak the gentleman, various kinds of

evidence must concur, as Defoe makes clear in The Compleat English

Gentleman. One not born but bred to gentility, as Tom and Joseph

seem for most of their texts, must begin from “an original fund

of wealth, wit, sense, courage, virtue, and good humour” (4) and,

to those native gifts, add

a liberal education for the service of his

country; [...] the greatest and best actions;

[...] a vast fund of learning and accquir’d

knowleg; [...] a clear head, a generous heart, a

polite behaviour.

By such acquirements, one “shews himself to be an accomplish’d

gentleman in every requisite article.” Defoe writes primarily to

justify the bred gentleman’s legitimacy, yet later seems to tip

the scale the other way:

I am resolv’d however to give antiquity its due

homage; I shall worship the image call’d antient

lineage as much as possible without idolatry;

[...] no lustre of antient gentry shall be

ecclypst by me, onely with this excepcion, that I

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must intreat the gentlemen who are to value

themselves chiefly upon that advantage, that they

will stoop so low as to admit that vertue,

learning, a liberal education, and a degree of

naturall and accquir’d knowledge, are necessary

to finish the born gentleman; and that without

them the entitul’d heir will be but the shaddow

of a gentleman. (5)

Though Defoe admits the bred gentleman’s claim to the title, he

seems reluctant to dismiss a social hierarchy that sets the born

gentleman above the bred, were that born gentleman properly

“furnish[ed],” both morally and intellectually.

On the throne of Britain a similar tension was at play. The

Jacobite rebellion of 1745 persists as the political backdrop of

Tom Jones. Tom himself is determined to risk his life for the

Hanoverian forces, fighting against the Jacobites, who sought to

set on the throne of the United Kingdom the Catholic Charles

Edward Stewart, son of the exiled James III, the Old Pretender.

An argument at an inn shows the tension between the Stuart and

the Hanoverian claims.

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“What do you think, Gentlemen? The Rebels

[Jacobites] have given the Duke the Slip, and are

got almost to London—It is certainly true, for a

Man on Horseback just now told me so.” [...]

“I am glad,” cries the Clerk, “for [...] I

would always have Right take Place.”

“Ay but,” answered the Landlord, “I have

heard some People say this Man hath no Right.”

“I will prove the contrary in a Moment,”

cried the Clerk; “if my Father dies seized of a

Right; do you mind me, seized of a Right, I say;

Doth not that Right descend to his Son? And doth

not one Right descend as well as another?”

“But how can [Charles Edward Stewart] have

any Right to make us Papishes?” says the

Landlord. (12.7.569)

The Stuart claim to the throne is that of genealogy, the right to

govern passed from father to son. The Hanoverian claim, on the

other hand, is that of social aptitude, they being Protestant

like the majority of the country. The tension between the Stuart

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and Hanoverian claims to the throne mirrors that between the

birth and breeding in claims to gentility.

When Joseph steps into the clothes of a gentleman, the text

begs the question of gentility’s proper ground. Mr. Booby

furnishes Joseph with

a blue coat and Breeches, with a Gold Edging, and

a red Waistcoat with the same; and as this Suit,

which [...] exactly fitted him; so he became it

so well, and looked so genteel, that no Person

would have doubted its being as well adapted to

this Quality as his Shape; not have suspected, as

one might [...], that the Taylor’s Man wore those

Clothes home on his Back, which he should have

carried under his Arm. (4.5.254)

We’re left unsure whether the clothes make Joseph appear genteel

or merely reflect the gentility that is his not only by breeding

but, as is eventually revealed, by birth. In other words, it is

unclear whether “clothes [...] wear us and not we them” or vice

versa (Woolf 4.188).

Near the end of Joseph Andrews, Lady Booby’s maid Mrs.

Slipslop remarks that “there was always something in those low-

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life Creatures which must eternally distinguish them from their

Betters” (4.6.258), evoking the genealogical model in an attempt

to flatter her mistress. Lady Booby, though, confutes her,

arguing that Joseph is an “Exception to [the] Rule.” Earlier, Mr.

Booby has asked Lady Booby to “admit [Joseph] to be of our Party”

(5.255), given that “he is now below, dressed like a Gentleman,

in which Light I intend he shall hereafter be seen.” Lady Booby

not only admits him but encourages him to stay the night,

extending codes of sympathy that bind the genteel:

the Lady of the House [...] informed Joseph (whom

for the future we shall call Mr. Joseph, he having

as good a Title to that Appellation as many

others, I mean that incontested one of good

Clothes) that she had ordered a Bed to be

provided for him. (4.6.257)

Smitten with Joseph’s bland good looks (1.8.33), Lady Booby

abdicates blood loyalty, demanding of Mrs. Slipslop whether

Joseph was not “more worthy of Affection than a dirty Country

Clown, tho’ born of a Family as old as the Flood, or an idle

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worthless Rake, or little puisny Beau of Quality?” (258) and

lamenting,

And yet these we must condemn ourselves to, in

order to avoid the Censure of the World; to shun

the Contempt of others, we must ally ourselves to

those we despise; we must prefer Birth, Title and

Fortune to real Merit. It is a Tyranny of Custom,

a Tyranny we must comply with: For we People of

Fashion are the Slaves of Custom.

Bemoaning “Custom” as what binds “Quality,” she disconnects it

from the “real Merit” that marks gentility.

Lady Booby, though, is so inconsistent—admiring Joseph but

deriding Fanny—that her favor is exposed as having to do less

with her principles than with his pretty face. Once Joseph is no

longer a servant, she feels free to express admiration she had to

disguise or deny when he was a footman:

Is he not so genteel that a Prince might without

a blush acknowledge him for his Son. His

Behaviour is such that would not shame the best

Education. He borrows from his Station a

Condescension in everything to his Superiors, yet

30

unattended by that mean Servility which is called

Good Behaviour in such Persons. Every thing he

doth hath no mark of the base Motive of Fear, but

visibly shews some Respect and Gratitude, and

carries with it the Persuasion of Love—and then

for his Virtues; such Piety to his Parents, such

tender Affection to his sister, such Integrity in

his Friendship, such Bravery, such Goodness, that

if he had been born a Gentleman, his Wife would

have possessed the most invaluable Blessing.

(4.6.258)

Distinguishing being “born a Gentleman” from “Behaviour [...]

that would not shame the best Education,” Lady Booby declares

Joseph “so genteel that a Prince might without a blush

acknowledge him for his Son.” Even without the ne plus ultra that is

birth for her, she grants a gentility grounded in merit. This

judgment is based on the absence of strong passions that would

mark him as an object of scrutiny. Showing “Respect and

Gratitude” and having “no mark of the base Motive of Fear”

qualify him “visibly,” that is, superficially, for gentility.

31

Strikingly, though, she refuses to accept Fanny’s company,

framing the request as an imposition on her “Good-nature”

(4.6.255).

“Nephew,” says she, “don’t let my Good-nature

make you desire, as is too commonly the Case, to

impose on me. Nor think, because I have with so

much Condescension agreed to suffer your Brother-

in-law [Joseph] to come to my Table, that I will

submit to the Company of all my own Servants, and

all the dirty Trollops in the Country.” (255-56)

When sensibility and decorum ground gentility, the recognition

implicit in “suffer[ing]” such company as Joseph’s advertises

one’s own possession of those qualities and thus one’s own status

—provided, of course, that one does not over-expend the currency

of recognition, or “Condescension.” In this society, gentility is

never unilateral. Acknowledging another’s status and virtue

enters both parties into a social transaction whereby one is

granted gentility, and the other, confirmed in his or her own.

This trade resembles market relations, and that similarity leads

to situations in which it is explicitly framed in economic terms

32

and therefore presents itself as no longer sympathy but something

more like prostitution.

In Tom Jones, the discomfort with grounding a sex-gender

system on a market foundation is explored in Tom’s experience

with gallantry. Nightingale reveals to Jones his knowledge of

Jones’ affair with Lady Bellaston and assures him he is “not the

first young Fellow she hath debauched,” convincing Jones that her

“Reputation is in no Danger” (15.9.721). Much earlier, as their

affair is just beginning, the narrator remarks

the many Obligations which Lady Bellaston, whose

violent Fondness we can no longer conceal, had

heaped upon him; so that by her Means he was now

become one of the best dress’d Men about Town;

and was not only relieved from those ridiculous

Distresses we have before-mentioned, but was

actually raised to a State of Affluence, beyond

what he had ever known. (13.9.635)

Lady Bellaston’s favors set Jones under an obligation that

reveals the tensions between money and virtue. The narrator

apologizes for his situation, denying any personal motives for

33

entering such a relationship with Bellaston and displacing

responsibility to the mechanics of credit.

The economic engagement with Lady Bellaston establishes “the

unhappy Case of Jones” (13.9.635): he owes her a debt he cannot

pay in kind and therefore must pay in some other ‘good.’ Lady

Bellaston is described as having

indeed been once an Object of Desire; but was now

entered at least into the Autumn of Life; though

she wore all the Gayety of Youth both in her

Dress and Manner; nay she contrived still to

maintain the Roses in her Cheeks; but these, like

Flowers forced out of Season by Art, had none of

that lively blooming Freshness with which Nature,

at the proper Time, bedecks her own productions.

Associating Lady Bellaston with “Dress and Manners” as opposed to

“Nature” tacitly opposes her also to Sophia, the embodiment of

‘natural’ femininity. Lady Bellaston is likened to a hot house

flower, “forced out of Season by Art” and therefore ‘unnatural,’

i.e., lacking the “lively blooming Freshness” that “Nature”

bestows. This narration initiates a shift in blame, transferring

34

fault from Jones, who trades sexual favors for money and status,

to Lady Bellaston, for needing to ‘buy’ him. Ascribing that need

to her lack of youth distinguishes her relation to Tom from

Sophia’s. Both are economic transactions, but Sophia’s marriage

is framed in terms of sensibility, duty, and obedience, while

Lady Bellaston is cast as a wealthy seductress. The difference

lies in the agency of the feminine party: the narrative takes

feminine agency and sexuality as blameworthy in itself and

positions Jones, dependent as he is (and therefore ‘wounded’ in

his masculinity), as naive victim.

Though Jones sees the “Discouragements” of Lady Bellaston’s

fading beauty, he also feels “his Obligations [...]. He knew the

tacit Consideration upon which all her Favours were conferred”

(13.9.636). That “Consideration” is no more “tacit” between the

characters than between the narrator and reader, but it is

obvious to both pairs. “Necessity,” we are told,

obliged [Tom] to accept [the favours], so his

Honour, he concluded, forced him to pay the

Price. This therefore he resolved to do, whatever

Misery it cost him, and to devote himself to her,

35

from the great Principle of Justice, by which the

Laws of some Countries oblige a Debtor who is no

otherwise capable of discharging Debt, to become

the Slave of his Creditor.

The ironic distance between Tom and the narrator enables the

latter to mediate our judgment. In Tom’s previous affairs, the

narrator has established the situation and left the specifics to

us. The encounter between Tom and Mrs. Waters, for example, is

described in inflated euphemism that stops short in deference to

propriety:

In short, no sooner had the amorous Parley ended,

and the Lady had unmasked the Royal Battery, by

carelessly letting her Handkerchief drop from her

Neck, than the Heart of Mr. Jones was entirely

taken, and the fair Conqueror enjoyed the usual

Fruits of her Victory.

Here the Graces think proper to end their

Description, and here we think proper to end the

Chapter. (9.5.450)

Of this technique, Claude Rawson remarks, “Telling the reader

that you are not telling is itself a way of telling, and the

36

avuncular geniality or fuss suggests that a posture of worldly

cool is being relaxed” (124). Mrs. Waters is a feminine agent but

is not punished as such; instead, she becomes instrumental in the

revelation of Tom’s genteel genealogy. Sustained in the realm of

sensibility, this relation does not expose its economic aspect.

Here, seduction is not a market transaction but a battle, in

which Mrs. Waters is “the fair Conqueror” (Fielding 9.5.450). Her

“relaxed” (Rawson 124) yet proper position allows her unscathed

passage through the text.

Nothing we’ve seen Tom do suggests that he is above trading

sex for status. The apologetic narration ‘dresses’ the facts,

guiding the reader to ‘proper’ affective identification with him.

By means of money, Lady Bellaston inverts conventional gender

roles: for her sexual pleasure, she holds a handsome young man

“Slave” to his “Creditor” (13.9.636). Such rhetoric enables the

narrator to disengage Tom from moral reproach by diverting us to

the sordid effects of a market economy, pointing out that he is

merely acting according to market standards of justice. Shortly,

this shift of blame pays off, altogether extricating Tom from

‘slavery.’ As his friend Nightingale tells him stories that

37

impugn Lady Bellaston’s character, Tom says, “I am so entangled

with this Woman that I know not how to extricate myself”

(15.9.721), eliciting further ‘evidence’ of the lady’s

unworthiness. Consequently, Tom

began to look on all the Favours he had received,

rather as Wages than Benefits, which depreciated

not only her, but himself too in his own Conceit,

and put him quite out of Humour with both. [...]

The Result was, that though his turning himself

out of her Service, in which Light he now saw his

Affair with her, would be the Loss of his Bread;

yet he determined to quit her. (722)

Once Tom construes of the “Favours” bestowed by Lady Bellaston as

not “Benefits” but “Wages,” the relationship becomes exclusively

economic, such that “turning himself out of her Service” is a

matter simply of market relations, having no moral or affective

value.

Tom’s shift from sentimental to economic shows the

implication of gentility, masculine and feminine, with the

intensifying naturalization of an asymmetrical sex-gender order.

38

Ladies past their prime engage as agents in the trade of money

for sex: such behavior is held contemptible. Sophia, who has

“that lively blooming Freshness with which Nature, at the proper

Time, bedecks her own productions” (15.9.722), engages the

marketplace as not agent but object in a transaction between men.

Consequently, she is held to be, “both in Mind and Body,

consummate Perfection,” along with wisdom, as her name suggests.

The ineffable “Principle” (4.6.155) that distinguishes Tom as a

Gentleman is described as a certain “Somewhat about him, which

[...] Writers are not thoroughly agreed in its Name” (154).

Locating the principle of gentility in some invisible quality

gives it a useful flexibility. Its “Use is not so properly to

distinguish Right from Wrong, as to prompt and incite them to the

former, and to restrain and with-hold them from the latter.” This

principle, being internal and private, is illegible from the

outside, so pretenders must convince observers that they possess

it. In Rakes, Highwaymen, and Pirates, Erin Mackie observes,

With the eclipse of aristocratic ideology and its

categorical investment in inherited status, the

39

claims of class affiliations rise in importance.

The significance of one’s place in a vertical

chain of inherited rank diminishes; relations

with one’s social equals across a set of

recognized commonalities of interests and

cultural norms increases in its value as a means

of securing personal authority and prestige. What

this means for the modern gentleman is not that

he in any way relinquishes authority, but that he

secures that authority by altering the ground of

its legitimacy and the mode of its

representation. (6)

That gentility is flexible enables its use in bonding lateral

“class affiliation,” which can ensure the subject not only the

title of gentleman, but more importantly genteel society.

Marriage presents a strategy of securing such society.

Contrasting the rigid discourses exemplified by Mr. Thwackum

the divine and Mr. Square the philosopher with the ineffable

gentility rooted in and expressed through affect, Mackie sees “a

point of view that assesses damage and reparation not through

juridical or religious discourses but through the private

40

discourse of sensibility” (Rakes 149). Fielding’s narrator

foregrounds the tension between superficial piety or legalistic

obeisance and ‘true’ sensible gentility. What marks Tom Jones as

a gentleman, we are asked to believe, is something more than

meets the eye; we must trust that “though he hath the Character

of being a little wild,” there is no “Harm in the young Man”

(4.10.169) and that if “he did not always act rightly, yet he

never did otherwise without feeling and suffering from it” (6.155,

emphasis added). His flaws are acceptable as long as they are

defined as didactic. This definition is disjoint from any

evidence of learning or change, and it is only in their being

labeled didactic that they become acceptable, not in their actual

effect on Tom’s character. Such defining attributes, “feeling and

suffering,” invisible though they are, can be sensed and elicit

favor:

Young Men of open, generous Dispositions are

naturally inclined to Gallantry, which, if they

have good Understandings, as was in reality Tom’s

Case, exerts itself in an obliging, complaisant

Behaviour to all Women in general. This greatly

41

distinguished Tom from the boisterous Brutality

of mere Country Squires on the one Hand; and from

the solemn, and somewhat sullen, Deportment of

Master Blifil on the other: And he began now, at

Twenty, to have the Name of a pretty Fellow,

among all the Women in the Neighbourhood.

(4.5.150)

Open, generous, and gallant, Tom is positioned as the middle

point between the crudity of “mere Country Squires” and the

pomposity of his half-brother Blifil, and this middling

sensibility marks him as a “pretty Fellow.” That Blifil’s

respectable birth proves less important than Tom’s sensibility,

beauty, and popularity shows the diminishing “significance of

one’s position in a vertical chain of inherited rank” (Mackie,

Rakes 6). “Personal worth,” as Mackie explains, “gravitates from

the contingencies of wealth and status inward to an ethical-

aesthetic realm variously manifest as taste, sensibility, and

virtue” (7). Blifil’s sullen solemnity aims to assert superiority

rather than to establish lateral bonds. Good breeding and good

intentions, by contrast, enable Tom to draw the affection and

42

sympathy of other characters, establishing him as genteel by

connection.

That point can be extended to the reader. The empathy that

sways various characters in Tom’s favor is expected to extend to

us. The narrator stands as apologist for Tom’s actions, even when

he is shown a rascal and a profligate. We are told he is sensible

of his wrongs and suffers from them. We are shown no suffering

nor any change in his character after he promises repentance and

reform. We are merely assured by the narrator that Tom does

indeed suffer exquisitely for not acting rightly. The reader who

credits this claim and empathizes with Tom is in turn established

as genteel by affective association.

Asserting what we do not see proves variously useful. After

learning of Mr. Allworthy’s recovery, Tom is “drunk” first “with

Joy” and, later, “quite literally,” having been “very free [...]

with the Bottle” (5.9.225). Here, his behavior is attributed to

“naturally violent animal Spirits.” Like the ineffable principle

of sensible gentility, these “animal Spirits” locate Tom’s

character out of sight within his person:

43

Drink, in reality, doth not reverse Nature, or

create Passions in Men which did not exist in

them before. It takes away the Guard of Reason,

and consequently forces us to produce those

Symptoms which many, when sober, have Art enough

to conceal. It heightens and inflames our

Passions, (generally indeed that Passion which is

uppermost in our Mind) so that the angry Temper,

the amorous, the generous, the good-humored, the

avaricious, and all other Dispositions of Men,

are in their Cups heightened and exposed. (226)

Like the Freudian model of the mind, this claim presumes there is

a part of us more true than the surface with which we dress it.

The notion of a truth behind the “Art” of concealment locates

character beyond one’s reach, whence it can be used to excuse

such failings and shortfalls as Tom’s raucous behavior. Like the

principle of ineffable gentility, it is flexible in application:

it can excuse any and all sorts of behavior, and its location

within the self—rather than, say, in a divine sphere—presumes an

inalienable individual character.

44

This individual character, being out of reach, must be

inferred. Given social interaction, character cannot be simply

private, despite its invisibility. On the contrary, invisibility

sets up a guessing game, in which each is intent on assessing the

gentility of every other, given words and actions. Performance

determines possession of the genteel principle. Always, though,

the possibility of feigning or concealment remains. When Tom is

thrown out of doors by Mr. Allworthy, the narrator assures us the

judgment is unjust. Nonetheless, Tom submits. In taking his

leave, moreover, he displays a truly genteel manner, kissing

Allworthy’s hands “with a Passion difficult to be affected, and

as difficult to be described” (6.11.278). Language falls short of

communicating genteel affect, such that we never entirely know

whether it is “affected” or genuine. To mitigate our doubt, the

narrator invites us into a shared affective culture—greatly

relying on Tom’s constant failures and reversals. When Tom

decides not to pursue Sophia, for example, the narrator writes,

“It is difficult for any who have not felt it, to conceive the

glowing Warmth which filled his Breast in the first Contemplation

of this Victory over his Passion” (279), creating a division

45

among his readers. Those who have felt such “Warmth” can

sympathize even with emotions beyond the narrator’s linguistic

prowess; those who have not, cannot. Such failure positions the

latter as inadequate; according, they are cast out of the

affective society the novel seeks to construct.

A more striking instance of this tactic appears in

discussion of Love—the opening essay to the sixth book. The

narrator writes,

Examine your Heart, my good Reader, and resolve

whether you do believe these Matters with me. If

you do, you may now proceed to their

Exemplification in the following Pages; if you do

not, you have, I assure you, already read more

than you have understood; and it would be wiser

to pursue your Business, or your Pleasures (such

as they are) than to throw away any more of your

Time in reading what you can neither taste nor

comprehend. (6.1.242)

The readership is again divided into those qualified to read the

text and those who are not; the latter ought waste no more time

on what is beyond them. Likely, few readers would set down the

46

book for such a reason. This passage implies a norm that requires

readers to grasp the ineffable affective standards by which the

narrator defines gentility. Love and sensibility, and their

effects on the human frame, are proposed as distinguishing the

moneyed middle class with its emerging narrative genre, the

novel, from both the prodigal and immoral aristocracy with its

heroic poetry and the base and simple peasants with their

burlesque.

Grounding Tom’s genteel masculine identity in sympathy and

sensibility—and thus in

society rather than genealogy—suggests that codes ought follow

action rather than action, rigid codes. In The Theory of Moral

Sentiments, Adam Smith begins by claiming,

No matter how selfish you think man is, it’s

obvious that there are some principles in his

nature that give him an interest in the welfare

of others, and make their happiness necessary to

him, even if he gets nothing from it but the

pleasure of seeing it. (1)

47

Smith’s theory proposes that one try to feel what others feel and

base moral action on such empathic effort. Near the end of Book

15, Tom succeeds in marrying Mr. Nightingale to Miss Nancy, a

match to which Nightingale’s genteel father is opposed, Nancy

being the daughter of a single Innkeeper, Mrs. Miller.

Nightingale has argued that were he to marry so far below him,

the world’s opinion would be his undoing, and Tom has retorted,

And what is this World, which you would be

ashamed to face, but the Vile, the Foolish and

the Profligate? Forgive me, if I say such a Shame

must proceed from false Modesty, which always

attends false Honour as its Shadow.— But I am

well assured there is not a Man of real Sense and

Goodness in the World, who would not honour and

applaud the Action. But admit no other would,

would not your own Heart, my Friend, applaud it?

(15.7.675)

The argument of the Heart triumphs; Nightingale and Nancy marry,

whereupon the narrator raises the question of Tom’s motivation,

assuring us that Tom “had a very considerable Interest in

bringing [the marriage] to that final Consummation” (8.719). This

48

interest, though, is benevolent: Tom “was never an indifferent

Spectator of the Misery or Happiness of any one; and he felt

either the one or the other in greater Proportion as he himself

contributed to either.” This account lines up neatly with Smith’s

first argument, on which he bases his theory of morality and

sensibility.

Repeatedly, the heart and its ‘natural sympathy’ are invoked

as the proper ground of moral action and therefore the defining

aspect of gentility. Impoverished after ending his affair with

Lady Bellaston, Tom receives a letter from one Mrs. Hunt, a

wealthy widow who suggests their marriage, which would bring her

sexual pleasure and Tom a significant fortune. Given the

improbability of his ever marrying Sophia, Tom “almost determined

to be false to her from a high Point of Honour; but that

refinement was not able to stand [...] against the Voice of

Nature, which cried in his Heart, that such Friendship [with Mrs.

Hunt] was Treason to Love” (15.11.731). The argument against

putting economic interest before the sentimental equates “Heart”

and “Nature” as the ground of moral action, referring us again to

the invisible field of affect.

49

Comparing Fielding’s Tom Jones to Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa,

Samuel Johnson sees

all the difference in the world between

characters of nature and characters of manners;

and there is all the difference between the

characters of Fielding and those of Richardson.

Characters of manners are very entertaining; but

these are to be understood by a more superficial

observer than characters of nature, where a man must

dive into the recesses of the human heart.

(Boswell 389)

Johnson’s definition of “nature” as interior feeling and

“manners” as superficial gestures presumes a code on which

Fielding’s narrator draws in distinguishing Lady Bellaston’s

artificial manners from Sophia’s natural beauty. Tom’s response

to Mrs. Hunt’s proposition, however, confounds that distinction

and invokes instead a more flexible model grounded, like Adam

Smith’s, in sympathy and sensibility. Commenting on Johnson’s

argument, Boswell concurs:

Fielding’s characters, though they do not expand

themselves so widely in dissertation, are as just

50

pictures of human nature, and I will venture to

say, have more striking features and nicer

touches of the pencil; and though Johnson used to

quote with approbation a saying of Richardson’s,

“that the virtues of Fielding’s heroes were the

vices of a truly good man,” I will venture to

add, that the moral tendency of Fielding’s

writings, though it does not encourage a strained

and rarely possible virtue, is ever favourable to

honour and honesty, and cherishes the benevolent

and generous affections.

Opening Book 11 of Tom Jones, Fielding himself weighs a fallible,

flexible model of virtue against an absolute, prescriptive one.

He quotes Horace’s Ars Poetica,

But where the Beauties, more in Number, shine,

I am not angry, when a casual Line

(That with some trivial Faults unequal flows)

A careless Hand, or human Frailty shows.

(9.1.501)

Affirming Horace’s acceptance of fallible humanity in the arts,

Fielding defends his own style of characterization:

51

All Beauty of Character, as well as of

Countenance, and indeed of every thing human, is

to be tried in this Manner. [...] In the Theatre

especially, a single Expression which doth not

coincide with the Taste of the Audience, is sure

to be hissed; and one Scene which should be

disapproved, would hazard the whole Piece. To

write within such severe Rules as these, is as

impossible to live up to some splenetic Opinions;

and if we judge according to the Sentiments of

some Critics, and of some Christians, no Author

will be saved in this World, and no Man in the

next. (502)

What Johnson sees as ‘natural’ in Richardson’s texts, Boswell

describes as a “strained and rarely possible virtue” (389), and

Fielding critiques as unrealistic through his fallible heroes.

The reader who sets such high standards, he puts off by

interweaving his story with his criticism. The explicit linkage

of textual and moral standards reminds us again that a single

discourse promotes both his new genre and his model of genteel

masculinity.

52

In arguing that Tom “had almost determined to be false to

[Sophia] from a high Point of Honour” when “the Voice of Nature

[...] cried in his Heart” against “Treason to Love” (15.11.731),

the narrator disengages nature from honor, the rigid codes of

which lead Tom to contemplate forsaking Sophia. Here again,

Fielding diverges from a superficial model of gentility, in which

rigidly observing some set of requirements grounds social status.

His attention to a flawed humanity and explicit apology for the

marks of imperfection in the characters, the text, and the world

establish imperfection itself as a mark of the “common Humanity”

he champions as truly distinctive of the middle class (14.8.677).

This naturalized “Humanity” also undergirds attacks on such

feminine agents as Mrs. Hunt and Lady Bellaston, helping to

secure the asymmetrical sex-gender system central to establishing

that class’s cultural dominance.

“In which the History is concluded”4: Marrying the Gentleman

4 Fielding, Tom 18.13.870

53

The ending of this novel shows Fielding’s narrator distancing

himself from its action. Tom is at last revealed as the nephew of

Mr. Allworthy, adding birth to his already established merit and

thus meeting both conditions for gentility. By her father’s

orders, Sophia is betrothed to Tom. As from engagement to Bilfil,

she demurs, though this time without revulsion. But her will is

trumped by filial duty and the orders of her father: when he

demands, “Hast nut gin thy Consent, Sophy, to be married To-

morrow?” she replies, “Such are your Commands, Sir, [...] and I

dare not be guilty of Disobedience’” (18.12.868). The grounds on

which she is married to Tom are the same as those on which she

was to be married to Blifil. Ostensibly, her loathing for Blifil

poses a much larger obstacle than her doubts about Tom’s

fidelity. That, she asks leave to test by delaying the marriage

one year; she is expressly refused by all the male company. Her

father closes the scene with “Harkee, Mr. Allworthy, I’ll bet thee

five Pound to a Crown we have a Boy to-morrow nine Months” (869),

revealing clearly his own interests in the marriage. Sophia

performs the approved feminine role in marriage: that of object

54

in an economic transaction for children, land, money—and

therefore status.

At their wedding, the narrator says,

Their former Sufferings and Fears gave such a

Relish to their Felicity, as even Love and

Fortune in their fullest Flow could not have

given without the Advantage of such a Comparison.

Yet as great Joy, especially after a sudden

Change and Revolution of Circumstances, is apt to

be silent, and dwells rather in his Heart than on

the Tongue, Jones and Sophia appeared the least

merry of the whole Company. (18.13.871)

Disconcertingly, the couple does not look so merry as we’re asked

to believe they are. And the narrator’s final words are at once

so hyperbolic and so perfunctory as open more questions than they

close.

To conclude, as there are not to be found a

worthier Man and Woman, than this fond Couple, so

neither can any be imagined more happy. They

preserve the purest and tenderest Affection for

each other, an Affection daily encreased and

55

confirmed by mutual Endearments, and mutual

Esteem. Nor is their Conduct towards their

Relations and Friends less amiable, than towards

one another. And such is their Condescention,

their Indulgence, and their Beneficence to those

below them, that there is not a Neighbour, a

Tenant or a Servant who doth not most gratefully

bless the Day when Mr. Jones was married to his

Sophia. (874-75)

The neatness of this resolution is suspicious, given not only the

sudden turn of Fortune, but the terms on which Sophia is given to

Tom—terms the narrator suggested we despise when the man in

question was Blifil. It is this last clean-up that makes the text

comic in the classic sense. Given Fielding’s attention to generic

conventions throughout the book, it seems likely that Tom and

Sophia’s ending is there for exclusively conventional reasons.

Such narrative rigidity proves a parallel to the rigid behavioral

codes being evaluated in the text’s field of character. The

novel’s second book provides the most convincing evidence of the

narrator’s view on marriage.

56

Its seventh chapter is titled “A short Sketch of that

Felicity which prudent Couples may extract from Hatred; with a

short Apology for those People who over-look Imperfections in

their Friends” (2.7.96). It describes the marriage between

Captain Blifil and Mrs. Blifil, Allworthy’s sister, who is

eventually revealed as Tom’s mother. The account shows them both

learned in divinity and therefore often arguing on the subject.

Before marriage, the captain, “like a well-bred Man, had [...]

always given up his Opinion to that of the Lady,” and she

“retired always from the Dispute, with an Admiration of her own

Understanding, and a Love for his.” Once married, however, the

captain “grew weary of this Condescension, and began to treat the

Opinions of his Wife with that Haughtiness and Insolence, which

none but those who deserve some Contempt themselves can bestow,

and those only who deserve no Contempt can bear” (97). Given her

husband’s insolence, Mrs. Blifil begins to hate him, and yet even

in their hatred the narrator imputes a difference in status:

The Captain’s Hatred to her was of a purer Kind:

[...] He looked on a woman as on an Animal of

domestic Use, of somewhat higher Consideration

57

than a Cat, since her Offices were of rather more

Importance; but the Difference between these two,

was, in his Estimation, so small, that, in his

Marriage contracted with Mr. Allworthy’s Lands and

Tenements, it would have been pretty equal which

of them he had taken into the Bargain.

That passage seems at first clear evidence of misogyny. But the

sentences that follow, calling out to us and thereby implying

consensus, complicate that reading. First, the narrator is

describing the opinion of a character plotting against the

protagonist Tom and therefore cast as villain—Blifil’s father, no

less. Second, he addresses us directly and in a tone decidedly

ironic:

as many of my Readers, I hope, know what an

exquisite Delight there is in conveying Pleasure

to a beloved Object, so some few, I am afraid,

may have experienced the Satisfaction of

tormenting one we hate. It is, I apprehend, to

come at this latter Pleasure, that we see both

Sexes often give up that Ease in Marriage, which

they might otherwise possess, tho’ their Mate was

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never so disagreeable to them. Hence the Wife

often puts on fits of Love and Jealousy, nay,

even denies herself any Pleasure, to disturb and

prevent those of her Husband; and he again, in

return puts frequent Restraints on himself, and

stays at home in Company which he dislikes, in

order to confine his Wife to what she equally

detests. Hence too must flow those Tears which a

Widow sometimes so plentifully sheds over the

Ashes of a Husband, with whom she led a Life of

constant Disquiet and Turbulency, and whom now

she can never hope to torment any more. (97-98)

Here, we get the narrator’s own voice, and as plot and character

distance the narrator (and behind the narrator, Fielding) from

the opinions he relays, the irony in this passage complicates

simplistic readings of the narrator’s—or Fielding’s—conception of

marriage.

This portrait of marriage—particularly of the woman who

proves to have birthed Tom—qualifies his virtuous reformation,

which the plot seals by marrying him to Sophia. Is Tom’s ‘happy’

marriage anything more than a generic convention, a means of

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tying the knot that defines theatrical comedy? Various gaps in

the text problematize the marriage plot: perhaps most

importantly, the absence of Sophia’s voice and opinion from the

last chapters, despite the space earlier accorded her filial

dissent and self-assertion. Happiness seems impossible if

predicated on dissolving the feminine voice into the masculine.

Wisdom (Sophia) goes mute, suffocated by generic conventions. The

tension threading the novel’s last chapters shows the narrator

rethinking virtue as fallible and fluid and Fielding working

toward narrative conventions that can accommodate his new species

of writing.

The marriage between Mr. and Mrs. Blifil is the most obvious

counter-narrative to the marriage plot, but there are many

others. The couples Tom encounters are not examined so directly

as Mr. and Mrs. Blifil, but they are similarly flawed. Of the

text’s virtuous couples, such as Mr. Allworthy and his wife, only

one spouse remains, which seems to imply that virtue and goodness

is possible only after the death of the spouse. Of the couples in

which both spouses are present, none are shown very kindly, and

most are either profligate, decadent aristocrats like Sophia’s

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cousin Mrs. Fitzpatrick or verbose, unlearned, quarreling

peasants, such as the various innkeepers. The evident failure of

secondary couples, together with the absence of Sophia’s voice

and the overt critique of the social institution of marriage

early in the text, complicates a reading of the marriage plot as

satisfying closure. Unlike the bawdy slapstick of Tobias

Smollett’s Roderick Random, for example—in which marriage works

simply as neat denouement to the protagonist’s adventures—the

ironic detachment of Fielding’s intrusive narrator distances us

from the marriage plot and opens it to serious question.

Tom Jones sustains two visions of marriage side by side.

First, as an inevitably unsatisfactory institution grounded on

spouses’ relinquishing of their wills and comforts, and second,

as the necessary conventional conclusion to the narrative of the

lovers Tom and Sophie, in which the aforementioned discomforts

are neatly erased. This tension mirrors the broader one explored

in the novel between born and bred gentility. Although Tom is

revealed a born gentleman in the end, the development of a

fallible gentleman grounded in affect remains. The reinstatement

of a status quo at the end of the text—i.e., the primacy of born

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gentility and marriage and unproblematic social structures—is

pitted against the arguments of the rest of the text, in which

contrary and questioning attitudes are cultivated in the reader

through the narrator’s ironic conversation. The professed

didactic purpose of the text lies then, in the reader’s reaction

to the conventional endings—of the gentleman as well as of his

marriage.

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3. From Pretty Face to Man of Feeling: Tristram Shandy and the

Wounded Masculine

“Is a man to follow rules—or rules to follow him?” Tristram

Writing Himself

Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is riddled with contradictions,

omissions, verbosity, and silence, and so is the critical corpus

it has amassed. Jonathan Lamb calls it “the most eccentric

production within the already varied collection of narrative

types of eighteenth-century fiction” (153), and Patricia Meyer

Spacks, “the best [example of] the genre’s developing resources

and the sense of wide possibility that had accrued to it” (254).

It is at once on the fringes of an urban literary culture based

in London, “the least rule-bound of the British eighteenth-

century novelists” (Lamb 153), and the inheritor of a comic-

satiric legacy that runs “from Cervantes to Fielding” (Folkenflik

50). The text’s attitudes towards the rise of the binarized sex-

gender system are as complicated as its generic categorization.

Ruth Perry recognizes the text as “rooted in the primacy of male

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friendship and in a subliminal mistrust of women” (30), while

Elizabeth Harries suggests that while it “tends to shore up

traditional definitions of the ‘female,’ [...] the novel

repeatedly questions traditional definitions of the ‘male’” (116-

17).

The text itself resists stable definition. Its first words

are a melancholy “I wish.” Fielding’s History of Tom Jones, by

contrast, begins the story proper by establishing a solid

location: “In that Part of the western Division of this Kingdom,

which is commonly called Somersetshire, there lately lived (and

perhaps lives still) a Gentleman whose name was Allworthy” (37).

Tristram’s wistful introduction is hardly solid narrative ground.

As Spacks accurately notes, “Nothing actually happens in the

first sentence” (255). The end of the text is no better. It ends

with neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with the narrative

equivalent of a shrug and a mumble. As Walter Shandy and my uncle

Toby talk about the Shandy bull’s inability to sire offspring,

spinning one absurdity upon the next, Mrs. Shandy interrupts

them:

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L——d! said my mother, what is all this story

about?—

A COCK and a BULL, said Yorick—and one of the

best of its kind, I ever heard. (9.33.588)

And so ends the ninth and final volume of the text, proclaiming

itself a cock and bull story, within which even the characters

are at odds over categorization.

Tristram’s text reflects Nussbaum’s proposition that “the

‘self’ of autobiography is an effect of ideology and a mediation

of its conflicts, and that a politics of writing and reading is

implicit within it” (xxi). Through its narrative eccentricity

Tristram’s text eludes notions of authorship holding that “a

pregiven self exists and can be recovered through texts” (6). In

a fit of authorial anxiety regarding the continuity of real and

narrative time, Tristram inspects the two and a half volumes he

has written in one year and compares it to the quantity of his

life still to be written, concluding, “It must follow, an' please

your worships, that the more I write, the more I shall have to

write—and consequently, the more your worships read, the more

your worships will have to read” (4.13.257). The adoption of

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temporal unity to such an illogical extent parodies a direct

equation between real and narrative time, and therefore real and

narrative self, and facilitates a reading of his self in light of

the way “conflictual discourses are yoked together within an

ideology to encourage bourgeois subjects to (mis)recognize

themselves” (Nussbaum 10). Tristram’s ‘self-biography’ showcases

in lurid detail a psyche besieged by modern class and gender

anxieties, writing itself to recognize itself.

In The Economy of Character Deidre Lynch examines the growing

attention to ‘proper’ characterization as opposed to “mere

grimace.” Like the growing concern for regulation and

codification of social behavior evidenced by the proliferation of

behavior manuals, the codes and regulations surrounding proper

characterization in literature aimed at “distinguishing polite

from popular culture” (57) and establishing one’s social standing

by “enjoying a character,” to the end of “asserting that one did

not belong to the sort of undiscriminating audience that would

take pleasure in either caricatures or ‘monstrous over-done

Grimaces’ of the burlesque actor.” With the success and growth of

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print culture, and its increased accessibility, print became yet

another means of fabricating status.

In Tristram Shandy, Lawrence Sterne not only obfuscates but

mocks the conventions of characterization with an exuberant over-

and underdoing. The novel is at once staggering in its prolixity

and baffling in its omissions. It takes, for instance, almost two

pages to move past Trim’s opening of his discourse upon the death

of “master Bobby” (5.7.325).

He was alive last at Whitsontide, said the

coachman.— Whitsontide! alas! cried Trim, extending

his right arm, and falling instantly into the

same attitude in which he read the sermon,—what

is Whitsontide, Jonathan, (for that was the coachman’s

name) or Shrovetide, or any other tide or time past,

to this? Are we not here now, continued the

corporal, (striking the end of his stick

perpendicularly upon the floor, so as to give an

idea of health and stability)—and are we not—

(dropping his hat upon the ground) gone! in a

moment!—’Twas infinitely striking! Susannah burst

into a flood of tears.

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The narrative unfurls, reiterating Trim’s triumphant statement

five times with reflections on the precise manner and temperament

of his speech and the exact and marvelous way in which the hat

fell. Having digressed, Tristram must call himself back,

I’ve gone a little about—no matter, ’tis for

health—let us only carry it back in our mind to

the mortality of Trim’s hat.—“Are we not here now,—

and gone in a moment?”—There was nothing in the

sentence—’twas one of your self-evident truths we

have the advantage of hearing every day; and if

Trim had not trusted more to his hat than his head

—he had made nothing at all of it. (326)

This is just one of several of Tristram’s interpretations of the

moving scene, so “express[ing] the sentiment of mortality, of

which it was the type and fore-runner” (290). This passage

foregrounds the complexity of reading meaning from action—or from

writing—focusing on the minute details that influenced a proper

sentimental reading of Trim’s actions. Such baroque layering of

precise, highly detailed characterization overwhelms the initial

meaning with a proliferation of hermeneutic possibilities. It is

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repeated so many times that the chapter’s ending sentence,

Tristram’s charge, almost edict, that we must “meditate [...]

upon Trim’s hat” (291), becomes a caricature of what began as a

sentimental memento mori. Tristram’s hyperbolic philosophizing

elicits laughter rather than the serious reflection it ostensibly

demands. Tristram caricatures the codification of literature and

‘good taste’ by so overdoing it that its apparent meaning is met

with the opposite affect.

At the same time, Tristram uses omission to elicit a

similarly comic response from the reader. Discussing whether to

call a midwife or a doctor for Elizabeth Shandy’s delivery of

Tristram, my uncle Toby comments,

“My sister, mayhap, quoth my uncle Toby, does not

choose to let a man come so near her ****” Make

this a dash,—’tis an Aposiopesis.—Take the dash

away, and write Backside,—’tis Bawdy.—Scratch

Backside out and put Cover’d-way in,—’tis a

Metaphor;—and I dare say, as fortification ran so

much in my uncle Toby’s head, that if he had been

left to have added one word to the sentence,—that

word was it. (2.7.90)

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The substitution of ‘arse’ with **** allows for the proliferation

of meanings that come after. This device is explicitly commented

on by Tristram only in this passage. More often than not these

substitutions go unaddressed—most noticeably so when it takes him

six chapters to address the complete omission of the eighteenth

and nineteenth chapters of the ninth volume, narrating my uncle

Toby’s amours with the Widow Wadman.

It is this hermeneutic duplicity that drives Tristram’s text

as both a search for meaning and a parody of the search for

meaning. Writing to recognize himself, he produces a superfluity

of selves with no conclusive “pregiven self” to be “recovered

through text” (Nussbaum 6). Irony is defined in Fowler’s Dictionary

of Modern English Usage as an “utterance that postulates a double

audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear and

shall not understand, and another party that, when more is meant

than meets the ear, is aware both of that more and of the

outsider’s incomprehension” (qtd. Furst 2). Wayne Booth suggests

in A Rhetoric of Irony that although irony can be explained by

verbalizing the latent meaning, it is not reducible to the

explanation. That is, one can explain that a person looking out a

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window at a rainy day who exclaims, “What lovely weather!” means

not that but its opposite, but the total semantic connotation of

the utterance is available only in its complex sense, which

preserves both meanings side by side. Tristram’s hermeneutic

multiplicity maintains Trim’s meditation on death as a meditation

on death and as a comic-absurd rendering of the memento mori. The

asterisks in my uncle Toby’s speech maintain the omitted word,

yet add several onto it, commenting then on the effects of each

addition, complicating a simple reading of his text and therefore

of his character by providing a multitude of Tristrams,

confounding the postulated project of genteel self-fashioning.

Tristram Shandy begins as an attempt to re-birth Tristram in text

and do it better than his parents, as he mourns in his opening

wish, and yet, as the text goes on, production of the self

collapses slowly into furrowed brows and uncertain laughter.

The narrative structure of Tristram Shandy is woven with the

same anxieties that riddle his divided subjectivity and hesitant

self-positioning. It is a decidedly auto-biographical text,

depicting “the formulation of a gendered bourgeois subjectivity

that learns to recognize itself” (Nussbaum xiii), and yet, it is

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the writing of his text that is dramatized in the text, given

that Laurence Sterne is the man writing Tristram Shandy writing

his “Life and Opinions.” In that sense, it joins Ulysses in the

category of self-begetting novels, i.e., texts that narrate their

genesis. Regardless of which genre it is thrust into, Tristram

Shandy reveals “the ways in which texts fail to measure up to

generic expectations, the ways in which they are only hesitant

thrusts and starts toward autonomous self-fashionings” (4). To

call it a novel is simplistic, as many critics have pointed out—

the term was not available then in the same way it exists today—

but the subjectivity it narrates establishes a narrative

internality which is difficult not to read at least as proto-

realist.

In Theory and the Novel, Williams’ narratological analysis of Tristram

Shandy reveals, using Gerard Genette’s largely structural

terminology, that in “Aristotelian terms, [...] digressions form

(reflexive) pockets within the sequence of the plot, [...]

subordinate to the plot within which they occur” (35). He

proposes that rather than “feeding into the chain of actions that

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comprise the plot proper, their specific action is, very

literally, the act of narration.” To further this point, he

introduces Genette’s distinction of narrative types according to

temporal position:

(1) the subsequent, or past-tense narration,

where the time of the plot is beyond that of the

story [...]

(2) the prior, which is rare, and is predictive

[...]

(3) the simultaneous, or “narrative in the present

cotemporaneous with the action” [...] and

(4) interpolated, which is inserted between the

moments of action.

With reference to these categories, Williams concludes that

Tristram Shandy, “as a narrative of the plot of Tristram’s

autobiography, most obviously seems a subsequent or past-tense

narration. However, insofar as it recounts the act of narrating,

it actually forms a simultaneous narrative.” He rewords this same

claim later in different terms, stating that the diegetic level

in the “hierarchy of narrative levels” (40) is Tristram’s

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narrating, rather than any particular event in the ‘plot’ of his

book. He apostrophizes,

Why is the depiction of writing at once separated

off and considered external to the diegesis, and

given a different status, despite its depiction

of a series of events, even if those events are

“literary”? Why is the “(literary) act” not

considered an act? (36)

He reads a “present-tense narrative of narrative” (48) in

Tristram’s digressions:

To sketch out the lineaments of this level of the

narrative, in 1.18 Tristram testifies, “I am now

writing this book for the edification of the

world—which is March 9 1759” (42). In 1.21 [...]

he says he is writing between 9.0 and 10.0 in the

morning of a rainy day, March 26, 1759 (57). In

4.13, [...] he tells that he is a year older but

has only “got [...] almost into the middle of my

fourth volume and no farther than to my first

day’s life” (257). In 5.17, he names the day

(“and I am this day (August the 10th, 1761)”

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(339). In 7.1, he speaks of his lodgings and his

goal to write two volumes a year. Finally, in the

last dated reference, in 9.1, he tells how he is

rather informally dressed: “And here am I

sitting, this 12th day of August 1766, in a

purple jerkin and yellow pair of slippers,

without either wig or cap on” (546). (Williams

48-49)

These indications are regarded as ‘digressions’ when the text is

read with Aristotelian plot-centric narrative structure in mind,

but their role is functional. It establishes the diegetic level,

the present tense, and therefore casts the whole text as a

simultaneous narrative, in Genette’s terms.

Using letters to signify temporal placement in the

reconstructed plot of Tristram’s writing, Williams codes the

narrative progression of the text. His system is as follows,

Tristram Shandy can be roughly divided into five

narrative blocs, in chronological order: the

first (A) from about 1695 to 1697, when [my

uncle] Toby was at Namur and was wounded, and

came to stay with his brother Walter; the second

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(B) occurs primarily around 1713, and culminates

in [my uncle] Toby’s adventures with the widow

Wadman; the third (C) centers on 1718, when the

autobiographical narrative properly begins, and

is marked by Tristram’s birth on November 5,

1718, or more exactly by his begetting in March

1718, and extends to the slam of the window sash;

the fourth (D) occurs for the most part in 1741,

and accounts for Tristram’s European tour, which

takes up the seventh book; the fifth (E) [...]

occurs from 1759 to 1766 and incorporates the

account of Tristram’s narration. (41)

Williams codes the narrative for analysis in three levels: a

“macro-plot” (45), where he assigns one letter to each volume, a

“trace-outline of the plot,” which elaborates the “macro-plot”

outline slightly, and a “micro-plot” analysis, in which he

minutely schematizes a section of the text from 1.21, to 2.6, the

beginning of which is my uncle Toby’s smoking his pipe, and the

end of which is my uncle Toby’s taking the pipe from his lips.

The “micro-plot” he uses to support his proposal of the diegesis

of the text as E, i.e., between 1759 and 1766 when Tristram is

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writing. The macro-plot establishes the “locus” (44) of the

narrative as the conversation downstairs between the two

brothers.

Williams codes the plot outline, with volumes separated by

hyphens, “E (C-C-C-C-C2-C-D-B-B)” (44), and more particularly, “E

(C (C1, A, A1)-C (A, B)-C (A, B)-C (B, Cd)-C2-C (C2, A, B)-D

(Dd)-B-B)” (43-44). In the simpler outline it is clear that the

first six volumes maintain C as their locus, that is, the birth

of Tristram upstairs and the two brothers talking downstairs, the

last three break the pattern. This shift in narrative focus

suggests the seventh volume as a turning point in Tristram’s

narrative, after which the subject he comes back to again and

again changes from Walter Shandy and my uncle Toby talking while

Elizabeth Shandy, unseen, gives birth to Tristram, to my uncle

Toby’s amours with the Widow Wadman.

In Williams’ proposed narrative of narrative, the diegetic

level, seven years pass. The fictional composition aligns with

Sterne’s composition beginning in 1759 and ending in 1767.

Although not at first evident, the clues to a shift in Tristram’s

“Opinions” are laid bare by Williams’ own argument. It is this

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temporal progress in the writing that leads me to add to

Williams’ claim that the narrative is not only simultaneous but

also interpolated. It is simultaneous within each volume, but the

temporal distance between one volume and the next is itself part

of the narrative when the nine volumes are read as one continuous

narrative. In regarding the narrative as interpolated, spanning

seven years, it is possible to retain Williams’ reading of the

text as a “narrative of narrative” (48) and still to see in that

“present-tense,” a development, although not necessarily “a

climax or end, to a final resolution of the action,” but

definitely a change in “the state of affairs depicted in the

novel or the condition of the protagonist” (45). Most noticeably,

Tristram’s treatment of class and gender shift after the seventh

volume.

By this light, Tristram Shandy becomes a text depicting the

transformative literary act of self-narration. It showcases the

vicissitudes of creating a narrative self. Adding to this

Nussbaum’s proposition that autobiographical narration

facilitates “the formulation of a gendered bourgeois subjectivity

that learns to recognize itself” (xiii), it is the literary act

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of shaping said subjectivity that is showcased throughout the

narrative. Moreover, given the time separating the composition of

its volumes and the recorded change in Tristram’s “Life and

Opinions,” Tristram’s text displays the development of a “gendered

bourgeois subjectivity” desperately trying “to recognize itself”

in the received normative social code. Between the first volume

and the last, Tristram’s account of himself as a genteel subject

decidedly develops. This change makes possible a reading of

Tristram’s text as a narrative of bourgeois becoming, accompanied

by a narrative of comical shortcomings in the face of

prescriptive models of gender and class relations.

“Viva la Joia! Fidon la Tristessa!” Discovering Sensibility

The opening chapters of the first volume provide a thorough

characterization of Tristram at the beginning of his narrative

journey. His account of his “Life and Opinions” begins with a

plaintive grievance of his begetting “the night, betwixt the

first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of March in the

year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighteen” (1.4.8-

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9). In the first page he laments the first of four catastrophes

he describes as the reasons behind his subsequent “misfortunes”

(7). He begins, “I wish my father or my mother, or indeed both of

them as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded

what they were about when they begot me” (1.5). The reasons for

his wish being

not only [that] the production of a rational

Being was concern’d in it, but that the possibly

the happy formation and temperature of his body,

perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind;

—and, for aught they knew to the contrary, even

the fortunes of his whole house might take their

turn from the humours and dispositions which were

then uppermost. (1.5)

With these lines, Tristram provides an epistemological

counterpart to the Great Chain of Being, versified in Chaucer’s

General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. In Chaucer, the narrative

focus grows from the elements, through minerals, animals, humans,

to an implied God beyond the “hooly blisful martir” Thomas Becket

(17). Tristram, in his wishes, writes a similar progression, the

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foundation of which is not metaphysical but epistemological and

relates to his worldly affairs. Of least importance is “his body”

(1.1.5), followed by “his genius and the very cast of his mind.”

At the top of it all, and most revealing—since his positioning of

mind over body is hardly surprising given his obsession with

early modern thinkers such as Locke and Bacon—are “the fortunes

of his whole house,” the Shandy house. The creation of a

subjective order of being aligns with Tristram’s project of

defining “a gendered middle class subjectivity that, in producing

and reflecting class consciousness, claims territory that was

previously unavailable to the lower laboring classes” (Nussbaum

xiv). Once the subjectivity of Tristram is established as

underpinning the whole text, the depiction of all the characters

becomes his construction of them and dramatizes the consequences

of striving to embody the norms that shaped this emerging

“gendered middle class subjectivity.”

Tristram’s father, Walter Shandy, “who was an excellent

natural philosopher, and much given to close reasoning upon the

smallest matters” (1.3.7), talks of Tristram’s begetting as an

“injury” of which he “had oft, and heavily complain’d.” Walter

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laments, “wiping away a tear which was trickling down his cheeks,

My Tristram’s misfortunes began nine months before he ever came

into the world.” Here, Tristram is writing his farther’s opinions

more than forty years after they were voiced: they represent,

then, not necessarily fact but Tristram’s internalizing of his

father’s notions. Walter’s world is decidedly deterministic and

operates on comically mechanical principles. This determinism

weighs heavily on Tristram, and the notion that it bent him to

misfortune even before he was born is mirrored in his own opening

wish. In explaining his critique of his parent’s begetting him,

he asseverates that

nine parts in ten of a man’s sense or his

nonsense, his successes and miscarriages in the

world depend upon their [animal spirits’] motions

and activity, and the different tracks and trains

you put them into; so that when they are once set

a-going, whether right or wrong, ’tis not a

halfpenny matter,—away they go cluttering like

hey-go-mad; and by treading the same steps over

and over again, they presently make a road of it,

as plain and as smooth as a garden-walk, which,

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when they are once used to, the Devil himself

sometimes shall not be able to drive them off it.

(1.2.5-6)

In a mechanical world, no change is possible, once the springs

are set “cluttering like hey-go-mad.” For Walter, then,

Tristram’s very baptism is irreversibly consequential and

therefore a tragedy. Such is the view from which Tristram begins

his narrative.

As he develops, Tristram will turn from his father’s world

view, which holds a man driven by “animal spirits” transmitted in

the act of engendering (1.2.5), to his own focus on sensibility

as the guiding force in humankind. In the first volume, though,

he bemoans at length his position in the world,

I wish I had been born in the Moon [...] for it

could not well have fared worse with me [...]

than it has in this vile planet of ours,— which

o’ my conscience, with reverence be it spoken, I

take to be made out of the clippings of the rest;

—not but the planet is well enough, provided a

man could be born in it to a great title or to a

great estate; or could any how contrive to be

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called up to publick charges, and employments of

dignity or power;—but that is not my case; [...]

for which cause I affirm it over again to be one

of the vilest worlds that ever was made;—for I

can truly say, that from the first hour I drew my

breath in it, to this, that I can now scarce draw

it at all, for an asthma I got in Flanders;—I

have been the continual sport of what the world

calls Fortune [... who] in every stage of my

life, and at every turn and corner where she

could get fairly at me, the ungracious Dutchess

has pelted me with a set of pitiful misadventures

and cross accidents as ever small HERO sustained.

(1.5.10-11)

He ascribes his condition to an external feminine “Fortune” and

writes himself as explicitly the “HERO” of his tale. The wounded

masculine self being “pelted” by feminine agency is a trope

running through the first volumes of the text. His four

misfortunes revolve around geniture and gender, and he writes the

occasion for three of them as originating from women. In his

begetting, the animal spirits were disturbed by his mother, his

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baptismal name was miscommunicated to the parson by a feminine

messenger, and his abrupt circumcision happened in the falling of

a window sash opened by Susannah. Early on, he adopts a position

of victim, casting feminine agency as his tormentor and the

reason he would flee the world.

The class anxiety which serves as the backdrop to most of

his anxieties—his house as the top of his priorities in his

begetting, as well as his lamenting of not being “born [...] to a

great title or to a great estate”—is mirrored in Walter Shandy’s

own desire to improve his class situation. When Walter Shandy is

first properly introduced, Tristram admits, “My father, you must

know, [...] was originally a Turky merchant, but had left off

business [...] to retire to, and die upon, his paternal estate”

(1.4.9). The anxieties surrounding class and his father and

gender and his mother stand as backdrop to Tristram’s whole

textual project.

In the fifth volume, when Walter Shandy learns of his eldest

son’s death, Tristram explains his father’s mourning process,

Now my father had a way, a little like that of

Job’s [...] when things went extremely wrong with

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him, especially upon the first sally of his

impatience,—of wondering why he was begot,—

wishing himself dead;—sometimes worse:—And when

the provocation ran high, and grief touched his

lips with more than ordinary powers,—Sir, you

scarce could have distinguished him from Socrates

himself. Every word would breathe the sentiments

of a soul disdaining life, and careless about all

its issues. (5.13.333-34)

The resonance between this voluble contemptus mundi and Tristram’s

lamentations in the first volume establishes Tristram’s

development as turning from his father’s “Life and Opinions”

towards a narrative production of his own, becoming a self-

possessed subject in a capitalist marketplace, where in theory

“what makes a man human is freedom from dependence of the wills

of others” (Macpherson 263). Even early on, the parallel between

Walter’s “wondering why he was begot” and the wish with which

Tristram opens his text is not exact. Tristram bemoans the manner

in which he was begot, not the begetting itself, and wishes not

for death but for a “different figure in the world, from that, in

which the reader is likely to see me” (1.1.5). Tristram begins by

86

taking the position of the ‘wounded masculine,’ like his father,

but he laments not the fact of his existence, but the manner of

it.

What provokes Walter’s self-occupied grief is his son

Bobby’s death, which, in displacing the responsibilities of

primogeniture onto Tristram, proves one of his core anxieties. In

the fifth volume, explaining the genesis of Walter’s “Tristra-

poedia” (5.16.336), his method of educating Tristram after

Bobby’s death, Tristram writes,

I was my father’s last stake—he had lost, by his

own computation, full three fourths of me—that

is, he had been unfortunate in his three first

great casts for me—my geniture, nose, and name,—

there was but this one left; and accordingly my

father gave himself up to it with as much

devotion as ever my uncle Toby had done to his

doctrine of projectils.—The difference between

them was, that my uncle Toby drew his whole

knowledge of projectils from Nicholas Tartaglia—My

father spun his, every thread of it, out of his

own brain,—or reeled and cross-twisted what all

87

other spinners and spinsters had spun before him,

that ’twas pretty near the same torture to him.

Only after Bobby’s death does Tristram become any kind of

priority for Walter, and even then, his parenting consists of

recording his own opinions for Tristram one day to embody. The

“Tristra-poedia” is not a synthesis and sampling of available

knowledge, but a written version of Walter’s “own brain.” Taking

his son’s education to require simply unmediated transmission of

himself, Walter ignores the child’s mother Elizabeth. This

fantasy of masculine self-reproduction becomes parodic in its

failure. The Tristrapoedia consumes Walter’s attention, and

during the more than three years he spent in its making, Tristram

says, “the misfortune was that I was all that time totally[...]

abandoned to my mother” (5.16.338). Walter’s pedagogy defeats its

aim; his project proves not only solipsistic but sterile.

About Walter’s pedagogy, Tristram muses that “the wisest of

us all, should thus outwit ourselves, and eternally forego our

purposes in the intemperate act of pursuing them” (5.16.338).

This comment reflects not only Walter’s project but Tristram’s

own. Tristram’s own text performs both a disruptive function,

88

dissociating himself from his father and taking possession of

himself, and at the same time reproduces Walter’s impulses. He

adopts a self-reflexive approach Walter evaded, the fashioning of

his own opinions, furthering Walter’s form but shifting the

content. Both resisting and replicating his father’s shadow,

Tristram takes as the object of satire “the search for meaning

rather than the meaning tout court” (Lamb 157). Tristram’s relation

to Walter can be reduced to neither only resistance nor only

replication; instead, a dialectic emerges: he strives at once to

embody Walter’s expectations and to reject them, producing a self

through the narrative mediation of the two impulses.

Walter’s self-defeating pedagogic project is interrupted by

Tristram’s fourth misfortune, that of his accidental

circumcision/castration—the extent of the injury is never

specified. Tristram’s textual project is cut off at a

conversation about the impotent Shandy bull. Interrupted

narration dramatizes the failures around which the Shandy

masculinities are constructed. Anxieties about castration,

impotence, and geniture litter the text and conjoin with class

89

anxieties to produce an anxious genteel, masculine, capitalist

subjectivity.

Wayne C. Booth suggests that “Tristram Shandy is an

elaborate evasion of the promise given in the title” (169). The

title is not the only failed promise in the text. Tristram

assures the reader that

whether pish was an interjection of contempt or

an interjection of modesty, is a doubt, and must

be a doubt till I shall have time to write the

three following favorite chapters, that is, my

chapter of chamber-maids—my chapter of pishes, and

my chapter of button-holes. (4.14. 259)

In the next volume, published a year later, Tristram comments on

his promise:

Amongst many book-debts, all of which I shall

discharge in due time,—I own myself a debtor to

the word for two items,—a chapter on chamber-maids

and button-holes, which in the former part of my

work I promised and fully intended to pay off

this year: [...] I pray the chapter upon chamber-

maids and button holes may be forgiven me,—and

90

that they will accept of the last chapter in lieu

of it; which is nothing, an’t please your

reverences, but a chapter of chamber-maids, green

gowns, and old hats. (5.8.327-28)

The continual positing of debts and subsequent failure to pay

them exactly, making do instead with substitutions and patches,

reflects Tristram’s anxieties regarding the capitalist world in

which he attempts to secure a place. This comical piling of

narrative debt upon debt showcase the ways in which the emerging

capitalist economy’s expectations weigh upon the emerging genteel

capitalist subject.

In the seventh volume, Tristram’s attitude changes from the

first volume’s lamentation of maltreatment by Fortune. His cough

as a marker of impending death shifts from a cause for static

bemoaning to a cause for action and mobility, as Burton suggests

as his conclusive cure in Anatomy of Melancholy—the source of a

considerable amount of Tristram’s reflections. The seventh volume

begins with Tristram’s turning away from reflexive lamentation

and obsessive writing of himself into society and toward mobile

self-actualization.

91

Addressing himself to his “spirits” (7.1.431), which in the

first volume he declares to be the cause of his various

misfortunes, he writes,

I have much—much to thank ‘em for: cheerily have

ye made me tread the path of life with all the

burdens of it (except its cares) upon my back; in

no one moment of my existence, that I remember,

have ye once deserted me, or tinged the objects

which came in my way, either with sable, or with

a sickly green; in dangers ye gilded my horizon

with hope, and when DEATH himself knocked at my

door—ye bad him come again; and in so gay a tome

of careless indifference, did ye do it, that he

doubted of his commission.

His attitude towards his spirits has radically evolved. After his

“narrow escape” from death, Tristram, conversing with Eugenius,

decides to take matters into his own hands. He declares,

But here is no living, Eugenius, replied I, at this

rate; for as this son of a whore [i.e., death] has

found my lodgings—

92

—You call him rightly, said Eugenius,—for

by sin, we are told, he enter’d the world—I care

not which way he enter’d, quoth I, provided he be

not in such a hurry to take me out with him—for I

have forty volumes to write, and forty thousand

things to say and do, which no body in the world

will say and do for me, except thyself; and as

thou seest he has got me by the throat (for

Eugenius could scarce hear me speak across the

table) and that I am no match for him in the open

field, had I not better, whilst these few

scatter’d spirits remain, and these two spider

legs of mine (holding one of them up to him) are

able to support me—had I not better, Eugenius,

fly for my life? (432)

This exchange is the genesis of the seventh volume, and it is

with the motivation of flying for “life” that Tristram sets upon

his journey across France. Nearer the volume’s end, after

narrating his journey, he writes,

I had now the whole south of France, from the

banks of the Rhone to those of the Garonne to

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traverse upon my mule at my own leisure—at my own

leisure—for I had left Death, the lord knows—and

He only—how far behind me—“I have followed many a

man thro’ France, quoth he —but never at this

mettlesome rate”—Still he followed,—and still I

fled him—but I fled him chearfully—still he

pursued —but like one who pursued his prey

without hope—as he lag’d, every step he lost, he

softened his looks—why should I fly him at this

rate? (7.42.481-82)

If we are to read Tristram’s character from his hobby-horse, as

he says we should, and take the volumes he publishes as his

hobby-horse, then Tristram in the first volume has been almost

completely superseded by a Tristram who flees “chearfully” and

does it not as cruel Fortune’s victim but for “life.”

The way Tristram responds when, in the seventh volume, the

ass he is riding decides to stop in its tracks and go no further

shows him transformed. Given his account of Walter’s reaction

“when things went extremely wrong with him, [...] of wondering

why he was begot,—wishing himself dead;—sometimes worse”

(5.13.333), and the parallel between this reaction to misfortune

94

and that of Tristram himself in earlier volumes, he now reacts

very differently. Tristram, “leaping off his back, and kicking

off one boot into this ditch and t’other into that,” tells his

ass, “I’ll take a dance [...] so stay you there” (7.43.484).

Then, dancing, he continues his journey.

It is only in the seventh volume that Tristram centers his

narrative on himself, in a style similar to Yorick’s in A

Sentimental Journey. The volume ends with Tristram leaving his

carriage for one last digression on his path across France.

Discussing his writing about the plains, his “Plain Stories”

(7.43.483), he describes his method: “in short, by seizing every

handle, of what size or shape soever, which chance held out to me

in this journey—I turned my plain into a city” (484). Sterne himself

praises such cheerful adaptability in a letter: “In short we must

be happy within—and then few things without us make much

difference—This is my Shandean philosophy” (485 n.9). After his

ass stops and refuses to go on, Tristram tells him, “I never will

argue a point with one of your family, as long as I live; [...]

I’ll take a dance, said I—so stay you there” (484). He meets

Nanette, a “sun-burnt daughter of Labour,” who approaches him:

95

“We want a cavalier, said she, holding out both her hands, as if

to offer them—And a cavalier ye shall have; said I, taking hold

of both of them” (484-85). He writes, “It taught me to forget I

was a stranger—The whole knot fell down—We had been seven years

acquainted” (485). It is by engaging a working-class woman that

the anxiety-ridden gentleman escapes obsessive self-reflection.

Tristram’s representation of Nanette relies on constructions of

the feminine as Other, a limit and boundary, “the necessary

frontier between men and chaos” (Kristeva, paraphrased Moi 167).

Here, the chaos is Tristram’s own psyche, and women represent the

boundary between “sense” and “nonsense” (Sterne 1.1.5).

What Tristram sees in the “sun-burnt daughter of Labour” is

a way out of obsessively measuring himself by standards of

gentility and toward connecting with the exterior world. In the

same position, Walter might have launched his diatribe against

women:

not only, “That the devil was in women, and that

the whole of the affair was lust;” but that every

evil and disorder in the world, of what kind or

nature soever, from the first fall of Adam, down

96

to my uncle Toby's (inclusive), was owing one way

or other to the same unruly appetite. (9.32.586)

Walter’s ascribing all misfortunes to women is not far from

Tristram’s bewailing the torments of a feminized Fortune. Again,

it is the focus that shifts. Walter speaks of “every disorder in

the world,” while Tristram focuses on his own.

Tristram’s experience with Nanette in the seventh volume

finds a parallel in the ninth, in which he narrates the receipt

of news that a bull is impotent and Mrs. Elizabeth Shandy’s

interpolating call for meaning: “L—d! [...] what is all this

story about?” (588). In the first volume, Mrs. Shandy is the

first character to speak other than Tristram. She is written

asking Walter, in the middle of his monthly conjugal duties,

“Pray, my dear [...] have you not forgot to wind up the clock?”

(1.1.6). Walter reacts angrily: “Did ever woman, since the

creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly

question?” after which an external voice asks, “Pray, what was

your father saying?—Nothing.” Shortly, Tristram says his father

had made it a rule for many years of his life,—on

the first Sunday night of every month throughout

97

the whole year,— [...] to wind up a large house-

clock which we had standing upon the back-stairs

head [...] —he had likewise gradually brought

some other little family concernments to the same

period, in order, [...] to get them out of the

way at one time, and be no more plagued and

pester’d with them the rest of the month. (1.4.9)

The winding of the clock and Walter’s monthly sexual intercourse

become associated in Mrs. Shandy’s mind, which explains her

“silly” interruption. She begins the text by interrupting

reproduction.

In the last interaction of the last book, Mrs. Shandy

interrupts Walter’s praise of the Shandy bull, which utterly

ignores the creature’s obvious impotence—another representation

of masculine failure. Mrs. Shandy interrupts not to disrupt

reproduction but to call for meaning. For the Shandy family, she

offers a way out of the recursive masculine loop in which, for

the first six volumes, Tristram shows Walter and my uncle Toby.

She becomes the Other that establishes boundaries necessary for

self-possession. What the “sun-burnt daughter of Labour”

98

(7.43.484) does for Tristram in the seventh volume, Mrs. Shandy

does for the whole text at the end of the book.

When Tristram sets aside early eighteenth-century standards

of masculine gentility and shifts to a narrative of love and its

vicissitudes, the phallocentric focus can begin to shift.

Unsurprisingly, it is the status of my uncle Toby’s phallus, and

of his actual penis, from which much of the last two volumes’

comedy originates.

Near the end of the seventh volume of his Life and Opinions

Tristram resolves to tell “of my uncle Toby’s courtship of widow

Wadman” (6.36.420), he declares it will “turn out to be one of

the most compleat systems, both of the elementary and practical

part of love and love-making, that ever was addressed to the

world.” He asks the reader,

are you to imagine from thence, that I shall set

out with a description of what love is? whether

part God and part Devil, as Plotinus will have it

—Or by a more critical equation, and supposing

the whole of love to be as ten—to determine, with

Ficinus, “How many parts of it—the one,—and how many the

99

other;”—or whether it is all of it one great Devil, from

head to tail, as Plato has taken upon him to

pronounce; concerning which [...] conceit of his,

I shall not offer my opinion.

Effacing his own opinion inscribes him into the gentility

constructed by Mr. Spectator, who lives “in the World, rather as

a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species,” ostensibly

discerning “Errors in the Oeconomy, Business, and Diversion of

others, better than those [...] engaged in them” (Addison 1.81).

This model cannot reliably guide Tristram, of course, given his

intention to write his opinions. Like his relation to his father,

though, his engagement with widely circulated notions of genteel

masculinity is a dialectic of resistance and reproduction. His

anxieties in the first six volumes revolve around his perceived

failure fully to secure the identity of gentleman.

As his text progresses, Tristram turns from assuming his

father’s position of genteel patriarch and toward my uncle Toby’s

sensibilities and affections. The turn in his subject matter

reflects a turning in Tristram himself. As the last volume ends,

Tristram says his father was a man “whose way was to force every

100

event in nature into an hypothesis, by which means never man

crucified Truth at the rate he did” (9.32.586). This observation

marks a decided shift from his account, in the first volume, of

his father as “an excellent natural philosopher, and much given

to close reasoning” (1.3.7). The turn has been foreshadowed in

his hesitant advice to his readership, explaining that in his

father

there was a seasoning of wisdom unaccountably

mixed up with his strangest whims, and he had

sometimes such illuminations in the darkest of

his eclipses, as almost attoned for them:—be

wary, Sir, when you imitate them. (5.42.363)

Across the text, his construction of his father and their

relationship shifts: from the shadow of what he must become—a

wealthy, capitalist gentleman, confident of both economic and

cultural dominance—to a figure against which he might evaluate

himself independently as a man of feeling, less concerned with

achieving a static masculinity than with connecting to other

genteel folk through humor and sensibility. Conceiving writing as

a conversation, Tristram engages in the creation of an affective

101

community in which readers may be constituted as genteel through

mutual recognition.

Tristram’s narrative struggles between the linear plot for

which convention calls and the non-linearity of a thinking mind

and feeling heart—marking the narrative as decidedly present.

Tristram’s resistance to this linearity in narrative images his

resistance to his father’s rigid and mechanistic codes in terms

of character. Throughout, it dramatizes the making of multiple

meanings as a mind riddled with echoes—of his father, of Locke,

Bacon, Burton, the Greeks, etc.—attempts to narrate itself into a

singular, self-possessed subject, a life of its own with its own

opinions. As Walter uses mechanic regularity, joining the

mechanical clock and spousal duties, in his project of self-

stabilizing, Tristram uses the irregularity of his narrative,

grounded on affective recognition, to produce a multiple, mutable

self.

102

4. Conclusion

Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne’s texts depict in detail the

processes that led Burke to claim both “heart” and

“understanding” as crucial to the “wardrobe of a moral

imagination” (192), qualities conspicuously absent in Pope’s

Essay on Criticism. Fielding proposes a fallible genteel masculinity

that relies on charm and social approval to establish its social

status, and Sterne offers a first-person account of becoming what

the mid and late eighteenth century understood as a gentleman—not

“nobody in particular,” somehow “representative” of “everyone”

(Lynch 2.82), but instead a man of feeling.

The reflexive anxieties that fret genteel masculine identity

in mid to late eighteenth-century Britain evolved the figure of

the man of feeling and a politics of sentiment as grounding

participation in a capitalist system. Figures like Tristram

Shandy, Tom Jones, and Joseph Andrews deal primarily with the

privileged white male using received notions of masculinity to

bid for cultural dominance. At a later time, though, establishing

a politics of sensibility as outlined by Adam Smith’s Theory of

103

Moral Sentiments enabled men like Olaudah Equiano to earn “enough

from sales of his [autobiography] to permit him to live on its

proceeds, his inheritance, and his investments, which together

were ample enough to justify [his] calling himself a gentleman in

his will” (Carretta x). Equiano’s autobiographical project is

similar to Tristram’s in its aim of producing a self-possessed

capitalist subject. The two texts differ in tone, of course,

given the material implications of each project—for Tristram,

social respect; for Equiano, life as a free man.

Olaudah Equiano—“or Gustavus Vassa, as he almost always

referred to himself in public and private” (Carretta ix)—

published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavis

Vassa, the African. Written by Himself in two volumes in 1789. Before his

death in 1797, the text went through nine editions. Equiano

begins with his birth in Nigeria and narrates his suffering on a

slave ship to London, being sold to a plantation in the West

Indies, and eventually earning enough money to buy his freedom

and return to England, where he established himself as a

gentleman, as his will reveals. The shift from a genealogical to

a social model of gentility—intimately depicted in Tristram’s

104

first-person narrative—enabled subjects without noble birth to

possess themselves as genteel citizens through their dress,

speech, and taste.

The frontispiece for Equiano’s text shows him groomed and

dressed in the manner of a gentleman of the time. He wears a

formal coat with a double breasted waistcoat and a ruffled

necktie, and holds a bible open to the book of Acts. The multiple

meandering selves that Tristram brings into fruition on the page

are superficially unified in dress and speech that mark him as a

gentleman. Similarly, Equiano makes use of a unified appearance,

a “Nature to advantage dress’t” (Pope 297), or a “decent

drapery,” to “cover the defects of our naked shivering nature”

(Burke 192), under which he may deploy a multitude of narrative

voices ranging from the reformative abolitionist to the Christian

missionary and the British gentleman of feeling, under the guise

of a recognizable, genteel appearance.

The cultural shift depicted in British novels of the mid

eighteenth century enabled othered subjects to self-fashion

within the discourse C. B. Macpherson calls possessive

individualism.

105

Its possessive quality is found in its conception

of the individual as essentially the proprietor

of his own person or capacities, owing nothing to

society for them. The individual was seen neither

as a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social

whole, but as an owner of himself. [. . .] The

individual, it was thought, is free inasmuch as

he is proprietor of his person and capacities. [.

. .] Society consists of relations of exchange

between proprietors. (3)

Self-possession is true of both Equiano’s and Tristram’s self-

fashioning project, but the stakes of Equiano’s narrative are

much more concrete, not least because Equiano was a living

person, and Tristram, a figment of Sterne’s imagination. The

inclusion of “Written by Himself” in Equiano’s title echoes Addison’s

response to that “Curiosity, [. . .] so natural to a Reader”

(1.1), regarding whether a writer “be a black or a fair Man, of a

mild or cholerick Disposition, Married or a Batchelor, with other

Particulars of the like nature.” It establishes him as an author

and therefore eligible for a particular milieu—literate,

Christian, and cultured.

106

Equiano’s text resembles Tristram’s in several telling ways.

Both echo and quote canonical European thinkers: for Tristram,

most notably Locke, Burton, and Bacon; and, for Equiano, Milton’s

Paradise Lost. Both address the reader for the creation of a

conversation grounded on affective recognition, as when,

describing the horrors of the slave ship, Equiano calls out,

O ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask

you, learned you this from your God? who says

unto you, Do unto all men as you would men do

unto you? Is it not enough that we are torn from

our country and friends to toil for your luxury

and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling be

likewise sacrificed to your avarice? (61)

The shift from a rigidly genealogical system of hierarchy towards

an interior, affectively grounded gentility allowed narratives

like Equiano’s to be not only published but widely read,

maintaining him and his family at the time, and to extend their

affective influence to readers today. The multiple voices raised

by Tristram in his construction of selfhood are seen in Equiano’s

prose producing a language in which they can affirm their

107

selfhood in many voices, binding together assimilative as well as

more jarring voices into a single volume, with a well dressed

gentleman for a frontispiece.

108

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