Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Tristram Shandy, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Truth, Fiction, and Storytelling
Language and Comprehension
Travel, Space, and Time
Sexuality and Propriety
Science, Technology, and the Enlightenment
Summary
Analysis
Chapter 11. Widow Wadman loves Toby, who does not love her, leaving her with two choices: to keep loving Toby, or to move on. She refuses to choose, a disposition Tristram sympathizes with, and he curses a woman in his own life who will not make up her mind about him. Tristram wavers between pledges his love for the woman and cursing her. He curses his fur cap before remembering that it is an excellent cap, and then declares he will never have a finger in the pie, listing its disgusting ingredients and claiming he would “not touch it for the world.” Suddenly Jenny cries out for him, and he calls back to her before moving on to the next chapter of his book.
Tristram returns to the mystery of love, which, like other passions, cannot be explained or experienced rationally. In his empathy with widow Wadman Tristram quickly forgets himself and remembers his own amours. Despite the complex feelings they arouse him in, he remains deeply in love with Jenny.
Themes
Chapter 12. Tristram quotes his own claim that he would “not touch it for the world” and is amazed by how much he has inflamed his own imagination.
Tristram is surprised at the way that human emotions can bring people to do the strangest things. He’s also surprised at the power of storytelling to inspire these unpredictable emotions.
Themes
Chapter 13. Tristram laments the exasperating and confusing nature of love. He lists off his ABCs of the qualities of love, most of which are negative. Meanwhile, in the story about Toby’s love affair, widow Wadman waits for Toby, refusing to take action or move on.
Tristram’s poetical denunciation of love contradicts his earlier assertions that he will not reveal his own opinion of it—but perhaps he is just venting his frustration.
Themes
Chapter 14. Fate, Tristram argues, created an intricate chain of events making it impossible for Toby to have lived anywhere else but next door to widow Wadman, whose garden adjoins the bowling green. Tristram describes how Widow Wadman built a wicker gate next to Toby’s sentry box, allowing her to spy on him and, when the time comes “attack” Toby by surprise.
Tristram returns to the idea of fate and the chain of coincidences—he could just as easily say (and Toby might) that God willed it to be so. Tristram continues to describe widow Wadman’s plotting with military metaphors, foreshadowing this next and most unexpected of Toby’s “campaigns.”
Themes
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