Time in "Tristram Shandy"

It is amazing how self-reflexive the arts can be. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, published just in the middle of the century which saw the creation and development of the novel, already is able to manipulate, mock, and distort the novel’s still developing conventions. Even when in comparison to the small selection of novels we have read for this class, we can see how Tristram Shandy works to emphasis while still undermining novelistic conventions, such as linear time and storytelling. Linear storytelling is abandoned in favor of a story that not only continually leaves the plot in long digressions, but also skips between past, present, and future. Sterne experiments with time in so many ways that I cannot possibly give justice to all of his ideas in this blog is, but a few instances will highlight some of his varying uses of temporal relationships.

Time and the conventional revealing of a narrative plot work to complicate the story that Shandy struggles to tell. The use of time and temporal relations in the novel calls attention to both the creation of the novel and the reading of the novel in a completely different way than that used by Richardson and Defoe. By using the act of writing in a diary, both Defoe and Richardson present their novels as being written as the action is occurring, with very little time passing between the actions and the recording of those actions. Rather, in Tristram Shandy a number of years have passed between the actual action occurring and the recording of that action; indeed, a majority of the narrative occurs before Shandy’s birth. Shandy’s complicated storytelling methods convey that this story is already in his mind in various shambles but does not replicate itself in such an easy linear manner.

Yet, despite the fact that Shandy is commenting on these events years after they have passed, at times he writes of them as if they are happening concurrently with the writing. Thus, the narrative and the events are interlinked in the same temporal landscape. After a long digression interrupts a scene with his father and uncle Toby, Shandy comes back to the scene writing, “But I forget my uncle Toby, whom all this while we have left knocking the ashes out of his tobacco pipe” (47). Though this scene occurred before Shandy was born and, therefore, could possibly have a memory of it, the narrative works to suspend the action in an interesting connection between the written word and lived experience.

This manipulation of time appears, as many of the other characteristics of this novel, incredibly modern. In thinking through the use of time in Tristram Shandy, I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s use of time in To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves. Yet, here is Sterne exploring the same issues over 150 years prior to Woolf’s novels! The same ebb and flow of a fluid time, which develops into a subjective temporal experience that Woolf presents in her novels (especially Orlando), is seen in Tristram Shandy as well. Illustrating time as a personal and subjective matter, Sterne writes, “It is two hours, and ten minutes,—and no more,—cried my father, looking at his watch, since Dr. Slop and Obadiah arrived,—and I know not how it happens, brother Toby,—but to my imagination it seems almost an age” (137). Despite the insistence of conventional time as a fixed and universal objective quantity, time does not always fall into the laws of man and measurement. Rather, in this instance Walter Shandy feels and experiences time in a completely different reality than the two hours and ten minutes set aside. An age has gone by and perhaps it has in Walter’s own lived experience.

Nancy Armstrong and Desire and Domestic Fiction

In Desire and Domestic Fiction, Armstrong is primarily dealing with 18^th and 19^th century British literature that was written by and/or for women and the various aspects and results of such a category of text. She examines its connection with the rise of the English middle class, sexual relationships, political power, and how we think of ourselves and each other as individuals.

Three main points that Armstrong argues:

History of Domestic Fiction

1. Sexuality is a cultural construct and has a history
2. Written representations of self allowed the modern individual to become an economic and psychological reality
3. The modern individual was a woman

I will now post some excerpts from my essay, but please feel free to ask any questions that may not be adequately addressed here. Armstrong's arguments are detailed and interesting, and I could not include everything!

To understand the relationship between the sexes, Armstrong first employs Rousseau’s The Social Contract. This social contract becomes integral in domestic fiction when authors convert it into a sexual contract which requires the female to “relinquish political control to the male in order to acquire exclusive authority over domestic life, emotions, taste, and morality” (31). In these domestic fiction narratives, the female was awarded with economic security for her submission to the traditional role as a subordinate. It is important to note that in such a contract, despite the need for subordination, two parties are needed. Women are not completely removed from the process, but rather are a significant and vital part. Therefore, women are even granted power and knowledge completely unique from that of men: a control over the domestic realm and interpersonal relationships. In utilizing this sexual contract in texts, domestic fiction was able to incorporate politics in the sexual relationships while still residing in the feminine domestic sphere. However, like Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice or Richardson’s Pamela, the end of the novel will see the female protagonist still submissive to the male’s power and protection. Armstrong argues that in these male/female relationships, the social competition is sexualized and then suppressed while still being experienced.

An integral part to Armstrong’s argument is the importance she stresses on conduct books and their crucial role in the rise of an English middle class. Before conduct books of the seventeenth century, the ideal woman was different depending on class status. However, conduct books universalized the qualities that women should possess and provided detailed descriptions and breakdowns of a household budget so the prescribed type of living could be had by all. Yet, even though these conduct books may have encouraged a lifestyle equally attainable by those of varying incomes, they are united against the aristocracy. For example, conduct books criticized any indulgence in dress, house, spending, education, or even leisure activities, extravagances that would be associated with the aristocracy. Instead, the goodness of the female is in the moral depths beyond her surface and neither on her material body nor her class status.

Like Ian Watt, Armstrong is invested in the emergence of individualism as an important aspect in the rise of the domestic novel. By removing characters’ personality traits and motivations from their class structure, domestic novels separate gender from the political realm, and because the domestic was created in opposition to the political, the female was first differentiated from the male. These fictional characters were presented as unique individuals with distinctive moral and mental characteristics that were not indicative of their class or status, but rather of their own personal subjectivity. This was instrumental in the development of the novel as a genre and in its separation from romances. Fiction was now able to present characters that were uniquely different from one another, rather than just placeholders for themes.

This assertion of individual subjectivity is not just interesting in the psychological development of the modern subjectivity, but in its assertion of a completely independent and autonomous female subjectivity that exists outside of interpersonal relationships with men. Like many of Armstrong’s arguments and their implications, this applies readily to Pamela. Pamela’s body is hers before it is owned by Mr. B and she therefore has the power to withhold it from her master. Mr. B soon realizes Pamela’s autonomy and includes her in the negotiation of her body by presenting her with a contract. Armstrong writes, “By making the female party to the contract, Richardson implies an independent party with whom the male has to negotiate, a female self who exists outside and prior to the relationships under the male’s control” (113). Prior to the relationship with the male and thus prior to the emergence of a political realm, there is gender and there is desire. One is not made through these associations, but already exists as a complete and autonomous subjectivity. This has strong implications, as Armstrong writes, “If a servant girl could claim possession of herself as her own first property, then virtually any individual must similarly have a self to withhold or give in a modern form of exchange with the state” (118). This is a strong Lockian assertion, granting the power of self-government to not only women, but also to the laboring classes. The novel thus presents the trajectory of a unique individual that begins to play out in the burgeoning middle class and the power soon attributed to women.