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Fielding's Tom Jones, Sterne's Tristram Shandy

How Needs Make for One-Sided Conversations

 

Fielding and Sterne Satirize ‘Hobby-Horse’ Obsessions

 

If Fielding’s Squire Western and Sterne’s Tobias Shandy met in a parlor room their meeting might strike us as funny and/or sad but also revealing of the human condition. These two Eighteenth century fictional characters represent irrational single-mindedness and bizzare idiosyncrasies. Drawn from remarkably dissimilar works, Squire Western from Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Tobias or `Uncle' Toby from Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the two caricatures exemplify how we all as individuals have peculiar patterns of thought, speech and behavior.

 

Fielding and Sterne outrageously amplified human oddity and created Falstaffian originals who, because of their failings, prove to be the most enjoyable and perhaps most significant characters of all. The essential nature of Western and Shandy is that they both live in their own little worlds of personal preoccupations, so in our hypothetical meeting the collision between two such highly eccentric personalities would result in a total breakdown in communication. Parlor room introductions would scarcely have begun when one man might say `It's a lovely day' to which the other would reply `Odzookers!, the day is prime for fox hunting.' Henceforth conversation would collapse into hermetically sealed monologues.

 

18^th  C. Comic Types

 

According to the neoclassical literary theory characters should represent, not folly and foible but common sense and classical types; `the business of a poet,' says Imlac in Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, `is to examine, not the individual, but the species'(63). Eighteenth century comic novelists, however, opposed neoclassicism by counting the streaks of the tulip of human nature.

 

Ironically, the general and the universal actually is the subject of our two novels. Fielding and Sterne create characters who, like Rasselas, exemplify the way we all channel our thoughts according to set patterns. Rasselas thinks politically, for that his way to soothe his discontent, Uncle Toby thinks militaristically, for that is his way of dealing with personal problems, and Western keeps his thoughts in the field, for that is his way of avoiding personal problems. Each character reveals, in what they think, say or do, their own take on the world, which is all any of us ever have anyway.

 

The Silly Squire

 

Squire Western is Fielding’s foil for another character Mr. Allworthy who, as his name implies, has the mind and temperment of a saint—despite the latter’s inadvertent maltreatment of a boy who, in a comic reversal, later turns out to be his son. Allworthy banished poor Tom Jones and instead befriended the perfidious Blifil, a mistake clearly connected by the author with a overly optimistic view of human nature which fails to pierce disguised malevolence. At the wrong end of the satirical rapier, Western ignores his daughter and is blind to the budding romance between Jones and Sophia because his thoughts are `generally either in the field, the stable, or the dog-kennel,' a self-imposed ignorance that gave Tom "every opportunity with his daughter which any lover could have wished"(139).  Western seems a specimen of the "ignorant, hard-drinking Tory landowner"(Baker 123) so distorted as to become the subject of much humor:, as when it is said that "Mr. Western grew every day fonder and fonder of Sophia, insomuch that his beloved dogs themselves almost gave place to her in his affections" (166).

 

Western insists that Sophia take Blifil as a lover instead of Jones. Since the sympathy of the reader naturally lies with the young girl, the implication is that the old ogre is letting his three-fold ruling passion of the field--fox hunting, horses and hounds-- prevent him from attending to matters of much greater importance. Sophia, Jones, even Mrs. Western, all suffer as a result of Western's slavish indulgence of temperament. Of this the narrator says, perhaps echoing Fielding, "the wise man gratifies every appetite and every passion while the fool sacrifices all the rest to pall and satiate one"(237).

 

Not only must Sophia must compete with animals for the Squire’s good favor, she is treated like one when Western madly pursues her and her lovers on the road to London: "as soon as Western saw Jones, he set up the same holla as is used by sportsmen when their game is in view and immediately ran up and laid hold of Jones crying, ‘We have got the dog fox, I warrant the bitch is not far off.’ “ (464). Perhaps in language more shocking to us than to readers of Fielding’s day, nevertheless Western's  ruling passion is plainly being pilloried.

 

Fielding created Western, however, for more than just laughs. A strange pathos overshadows the comedy  in the climactic moment when a pack of hounds break out baying; "which the squire's horse and his rider both perceiving, both immediately pricked up their ears, and the squire instantly clapped spurs to the beast, who little needed it, having, indeed, the same inclination with his master"(528). Here we see the horse-sensical nature of Western in how he mimics the conditioned response of a horse trained for fox hunting. As soon as he hears the hounds, the Squire automatically forgets all about the Sophia hunt and goes off on the fox hunt. This is a comically exaggerated but tragically true reflection of typical human behavior. We all have similar, though less dramatic, psychological defense mechanisms which, depending upon our level of awareness, influence our behavior, distracting or diverting our minds from an unpleasant thought or life situation.

 

Western is unable, or unwilling, which amounts to the same thing, to accept his daughter's love for Jones. Instead of confronting this problem within himself, he runs away to the safe and secure reality of fox hunting wherein he is absolute master and in control of everything--the horses, the hounds, sometimes even the fox. Each animal can be seen as psychological symbols for things Western wishes he could control, and when he says "Pogh! D--n the slut" (528), surely we are to interpret this not as indicative of his lack of affection for his daughter but as a sign of a frustrated and lonely life.

 

At heart Western is a loving man capable of occasional insight, as when he laments `in very pathetic terms the unfortunate condition of men, who are, says he, "always whipped in by the humours of some "d--ned b--- or other"'(284). He belatedly expresses affection for Jones in terms which, given the man's love of dogs, sounds sincere: `I had rather hear thy voice than the music of the best pack of dogs in England!' (720). In fact Western appears even more fully human than the wooden Allworthy. Fielding seems to say "a man may yield to his weaknesses, but must not become a slave to vice. If he yields let him take the consequences cheerfully; and if he shows regard for his fellows, much will be forgiven."(136).

 

Western represents the sobering truth that, as John Locke suggested, our minds function according to patterns of associations which are as inevitable as they are inhibiting. Ingrained patterns of thinking are what interfere with the parlor room meeting of our two heroes. If Western said he would like to catch the fox who stole his daughter he could, not surprisingly, be misunderstood by his companion who might imagine some monstrous fox at large. Western allows his ruling passions of the field to dominate his mind, denying the possibility of effective interpersonal communication. The double twist to the conversation, of course, is that the Squire is  misunderstood not only because he sends bad messages, but also because there is a problem with the decoding of the messages at the receiving end, somewhere deep in the mind of Uncle Toby.

 

The Wounded Uncle

 

To turn to Tristram Shandy is to turn from Fielding's master plot and intricate methodology to Sterne's relatively pilotless and non-linear novel writing style. Here the unifying themes are not in the story itself but in the mind of the false author. Narrative flows from digression to digression in a literary demonstration of the Lockean principle of association. Thoughts and feelings flow in the form of spontaneous diction, complicated by the various points of view (ie character, narrator, author).

 

The action of a Fielding novel has finished before the book opens. It is therefore a generalization after the event. But Sterne is writing in the first person, he is thinking aloud-- he says "writing, when properly managed, is but a different name for conversation"(74). Here we have Sterne in first person engaged in the literary art of conversation, but later slipping into the voice of Tristram Shandy, who, in turn, also addresses the reader. Through manifold perspectives we read not, as the title page claims, of Tristram's own `Life and Opinions' but, more accurately, those of the Shandy household and of his uncle in particular. The speaker says "I will draw my uncle Toby's character from his Hobby-Horse"(64) and goes on to reveal the Uncle's bizarre psychological make-up by describing an active sensorium wherein ideas are lost or distorted in cul-de-sacs and twisted channels. So unique is Uncle Toby in his thought patterns that he makes us laugh and cry in wonder. 

 

It is comi-tragic to hear about the dismantling of the sash-windows. This act, intended to serve the Toby’s Hobby-Horsical need for military toys, results in devastating damage to the his body in the most sensitive place. With a grimace, a grin, or perhaps even both, the reader might conclude that Sterne's intention in inventing this scene was to illustrate the wrongfulness of Hobby-Horses. But Sterne as Tristram says “a great moral might be picked handsomely out of this, but I have not time”(299). Perhaps this is a call to notice the way in which rationalism is at odds with emotional and psychological needs.

 

Toby does not simply surrender his citadel of reason-- which to be sure it is well fortified with all sorts of defense mechanisms-- for no purpose at all but needs, like Rasselas, to give himself up to a ruling passion; not surprisingly, "twice did my uncle Toby forget his wound, and cry out, Le Fevre, I will go with thee, and thou shalt fight beside me!--and twice he laid his hand upon his groin, and hung down his head in sorrow and disconsolation"(341).

 

Although Toby's pathetic wound is highly singular in nature it represents any and all sorts of physical/psychological issues, and the bizarre behavior that frequently results. Sterne's character has the enduring quality of myth: more is suggested than actually stated by the exact nature of a sexual handicap. As Tristram implies, "there is something in it more of the manner of electrified bodies; - and that, by means of the heated parts of the rider, which come immediately into contact with the Hobby-Horse,-by long journeys, and much friction, it so happens that the body of the rider is at length filled as full as Hobby-Horsical matter as it can hold" (65). Repression and inhibition so closely associated with Hobby-Horses might make us all a bit like old ogres, but without Hobby Horses we could not cope with frustration. Like Rasselas, Western and Uncle Toby, we are all handicapped with unmet needs which, if it were not for psychological defense mechanisms, could cripple both the individual and society at large. Besides, "so long as a man rides his Hobby-Horse peaceably and quietly along the King's highway, and neither compels you nor me to get up behind him,-pray, sir, what have either you or I to do with it?"(15).

  

Bibliography

Allen, Walter. The English Novel. New York: E.P. Dutton. 1954.

Baker, Earnest A. The History of the Novel. Vol. 4. New York. 1954.

Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones. New York: Signet. 1963.    

Johnson, Samuel. Rasselas. New York: Penguin. 1985.

Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy. New York: Doubleday & Co. 1978.