Castration, Circumcision, and the Fear of Impotence in Laurence Sterne

 

Norman Simms

 

 

July 24, 2009

 

Almost two decades ago I published a little article on the missing Jews in Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy.¹ The novel seemed to be obsessed with circumcision. Sterne, I suggested, was alert to the general mania that accompanied the so-called "Jew Bill" of 1752 to give a select number of Jews naturalization when newspapers and street speakers stirred up fears that, should Jews gain citizenship, these aliens would force all Englishmen to undergo circumcisions.² The author looked with scorn at this popular anti-Semitism stirred up by the debates, but he used the occasion to mix into his bizarre novel a number of traditions pertaining to circumcision and castration. Tristram Shandy, for example, whose name alludes to Aristotle's dictum, postï¿ coitu tristram est, after coitus there is sadness, had his nose crushed by forceps at delivery. A few years later the maid allows the toddler to pee out the window and the casement falls, so that little Tristram has his lower nose crushed.

Sterne, in the first flush of the book's success (it was to come out two volumes per year until the hero died; and in the event, there were nine volumes published), identified himself with his fictional narrator, Tristram, and contemporary readers rightly and often had difficulty separating the author from his literary works. Arriving from obscurity in Yorkshire to be the talk of the town, London, Sterne played up this confusion. Correspondence when the novel was appearing, as well as the subsequent parts of the novel and later works by Sterne, however, may be indicators of the novelist's unconscious in the original plan.

On 30 January 1760, Sterne reacted strongly to criticism that Tristram Shandy wantonly encourages female unchastity. He writes, he claimed, "not to be fed, but to be famous."³ That is, he disavowed any intention of pandering to popular lurid or salacious tastes, but to a more honorable desire to be classed among the noble authors of past and present. Then this same letter moves into expressing a different kind of anxiety deriving from his own fears about masculinity, not just those of the man on the street worrying about a Jewish conspiracy to subject all English males to circumcision, in itself a euphemism for castration, which he makes explicit in an effort to defend himself by comedy from the real thing:

An author is not so soon humbled as you may imagine no, but to make the book better by castrations, that is still sub judice. and I can assure you, upon his chapter, that the very passages and descriptions you propose that I should sacrifice in my second edition are what are best relished by men of wit, and some others whom I esteem as sound critics so that, upon the whole, I am still up, if not above fear, at least above despair, and have seen enough to shrew me the folly of an attempt of castrating my book to the prudish humours of particulars. I believe that short cut would be to publish this letter at the beginning of the third volume, as an apology for the first and second.

 

Psychological resistance in this epistolary text turns to defiance, even aggression. The terms mount up: sacrifice and cut short move him from fear to despair. Why should Sterne have seen the charge striking at his maleness? As in dreams, the negative disappears into the positive light of anxiety where nothing can be unsaid or unseen; as soon as it is recognized as unimaginable or inconceivable, it has been imagined and conceived. The pen/penis motif runs through literary history, as does the notion that an author's books are his offspring, so threats to them are attacks against maleness.

A little later, Sterne was still in a state of mind where these unconscious fears impinged upon his concern to be seen in a good light by his readers, particularly the powerful critics of his day. In April 1760, in a letter to David Garrick, a small pain is displaced from his penis to his finger.

 

Dear Sir,

 

'Twas for all the world like a cut across my finger with a sharp pen-knife. I saw the blood give it a suck wrapped it up and thought no more about it.⁴

 

Then the associations (Lockean psychology that plays so crucial a part in the conception of Tristram Shandy, to the point where The Essay of Human Understanding becomes nothing less than Tristram's History of Human Misunderstandings) led him towards something more ambiguously expressed:

 

But there is more goes to the healing of a wound than this comes to: a wound (unless it is a wound not worth talking of but by the bye, mine is) must give some pain after.

 

But there is also perhaps Sterne's knowledge from whence we as yet do not know his awareness of the critical stages in the mohels (the rabbinical circumciser's) ritual: the folding back of the foreskin, the cutting away of the flesh, and the sucking out of a drop of blood.

This threat that Sterne felt so profoundly seems to derive from a sore place where creativity and potency meet, and where the figure of a threatening and protecting father of his literary creations collides with anxieties over criticism. Such anxiety and confusion is focused, in the novel, less on Tristram himself, who is hardly even born in the narrative, but his Uncle Toby, wounded in the groin at the Battle of Namur. Toby, a man of exquisite sensibility and delicate sentimentality who would capture a fly and set it loose outside rather than squash it to death hides his anxieties behind the hobbyhorse of battle-re-enactments in an elaborate miniature model of the scene and talks endlessly, when he isn't whistling Lillubullaro, of the events that led up to his incapacitation. More nervously, his innocence and naiveté are displayed as he tries to parry the inquiries of his neighbour, the Widow Wadman, herself eager to find out where exactly he was wounded before pursuing her campaign of seduction of the retired gentleman and officer. Double-entendre and obliquity are de rigeur in these scenes of battle and courtship, and Tristram, with Sterne not too far behind in the wings, plays out his own fears of castration.

In this same letter to Garrick, Sterne rejected rumours that he was planning to give Tristram a tutor based on Bishop Warburton,

The report might draw blood from the author of Tristram Shandy but could not harm such a man as the author of the Divine Legislation.⁵

 

This passage is tied to what happened when Moses tried to enter Egypt with his uncircumcised son, Gershom. An angel stood in the road blocking his way, forbidding him to proceed because his son was not entered into the briht, the covenant between Israel and God; the prophet was stunned, but Moses's wife, understanding the situation, took an archaic stone knife and circumcised the baby; at that, the angel stood aside and the family entered the Land of Egypt.⁶ In this dream-like text, Warburton becomes the angel, Sterne the infant and Moses, and the public the female-circumciser.

Once Sterne was established in his literary career with a steady income, the "castration complex" suddenly disappeared from his letters. But the anxiety is present always, lurking in the last books of the novel, in events such as Tristram's impotent journey through France.7 We see it too in Uncle Toby's futile wooing of Widow Wadman, and the "truncated" conclusion, which is nothing but "a cock and bull story." It also appears in The Sentimental Journey and in further letters and sermons collected by his daughter Lydia Sterne de Medalle many years later.

 

 

NOTES

1 Norman Simms" "The Missing Jews and Jewishness in Tristram Shandy" The Shanndean 4 (1992) 135- 152. Many of the background details to the argument put forward here were noted and referred to in this article.

2 Samuel Richardson, another novelist, for instance, wrote to Elizabeth Carter on 17 August 1753 of "the foolish, the absurd Cry" raised in the past few years against the Jews; cited by T .C. Duncan Eaves and Ben O. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biographv (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 549.

3 The letters are edited by Sterne's daughter, Lydia Sterne de Medalle and published in The Works of Laurence Sterne (London: George Rutledge and Sons, n.d.), p. 561.

⁴ Works, p.562.

⁵ Warburton's Divine Legislation of Moses was one of the key texts in trying to accommodate Christianity (the Law of Moses transformed into the New Testament of Jesus) to Deism. Warburton was therefore a controversial figure in the debates over orthodoxy in mid-century.

⁶ How Sterne came to know of these rabbinical midrashim and debates is partly explained in my article mentioned in Note 1 above.

⁷ Arthur Cash calls Tristram Shandy "the first novel in our literature which gives a central place to the theme of impotence" (Laurence Sterne: The Later Years [London and New York: Methane, 1986], p. 258, n.).