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 6. When Tom arrives at the shop, it is empty except for a Black servant girl, who is swatting away flies with a cane tipped with feathers. Toby, listening to the story, is moved by this image of someone who has been persecuted refusing to harm others. Trim promises to tell more of her story another time and asks Toby if Black people have souls too. Toby says he does not know much about the subject but would assume so. He cannot understand why God would not give them a soul. Trim then asks why Black people are treated worse than white people, and Toby says he does not know. Trim suggests it is because they have no one to stand up for them, and Toby hopes that those in power will be kind and judicious. Trim continues his story with some difficulty, having lost his poise.
This scene is an explicit commentary on slavery, from an abolitionist perspective. Trim’s seemingly genuinely innocent question reflects the widespread scientific racism used to justify enslaving people of African descent, a practice that would continue in the British empire until the early nineteenth century. Toby’s answer likewise represents the progressive humanist position that only a series of coincidences led to European domination of the world and that domination does not give Europeans the right to oppress others. Toby finds it difficult to square this moral argument with his faith in the goodness of the world and its institutions, however.
Themes
Chapter 7. Tom continues into the shop past the Black servant girl and goes into the back to sit down with the Jew’s widow. (Trim comments that nothing is as awkward as courting a woman who is busy making sausages.) Tom begins by making small talk about the sausages, carefully steering the conversation toward love. (Toby, listening to the story, adds that many battles have been lost by the lack of such caution, and Trim agrees, comparing battles to marriages—both are God’s will. Toby wants to agree out of faith in God but hesitates because of his faith in military skill and stays silent.) Tom begins to help the widow make the sausages. She has already made up her mind to marry him but pretends to resist a while longer before consenting.
Trim’s story is full of sexual innuendo, emphasizing the resemblance of sausages to the penis. Both Toby and Trim continue to describe love with military metaphors, steeling themselves for the “battle” ahead—courting widow Wadman and Bridget—by preparing themselves with the language and ideas they know best and feel most comfortable with. Toby’s worldview is tested again, as he struggles to reconcile his simultaneous belief in God’s power and human free will.
Themes
Chapter 8. All women love jokes, Trim argues. The challenge for men is to tell the right kind of jokes, which they must identify by trial and error—Trim compares to aiming cannons on a battlefield. Toby likes the comparison, and Trim says it is because he prefers glory to pleasure. Toby responds that he loves mankind most and says that the goal of their sieges on the bowling green is to protect liberty from the ambitious. Toby and Trim march off down the road, away from widow Wadman’s house, confusing Walter and Mrs. Shandy. Tristram stops short of describing his parents’ reactions, arguing that he must press forward, as time is moving ahead even as he writes. He cries out to Jenny.
Trim’s battle metaphors are effective, filling Toby with the necessary confidence to approach widow Wadman. Toby repeats his belief that he fights not for personal pleasure or success, but to defend the rights and interests of those unable to stand up for themselves. This was a common framework used by the British, who had a constitutional monarchy and saw themselves as the guarantors of commercial freedom, to justify their wars against the absolutist Spanish and French. Toby and Trim are so fired up, however, that they march off on their regular route, not to widow Wadman’s house.
Themes
Chapter 9. Tristram says he “would not give a groat” what anyone thinks about his ejaculation.
Tristram once again dismisses his critics. Notably, his use of “ejaculation” is not sexual—that meaning of the word did not become common until the twentieth century.
Themes
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Chapter 10. Tristram’s story picks up with Mrs. Shandy and Walter walking to the corner of the garden wall where Obadiah collided with Dr. Slop, which is directly across from widow Wadman’s house. Walter suggests they wait and watch, but at that very moment, Trim is beginning the story of the Jew’s widow. Trim’s rambling story tests Walter’s patience. Tristram claims that once curiosity has hooked an observer, a sense of economy and then honor compels the observer to keep looking. Tristram dismisses the common attribution of this behavior to patience, insisting it is honor instead. Walter endures the waiting as best he can, but when Toby and Trim turn and march the wrong way, he cannot help himself from voicing his frustration.
Tristram retells the story of the previous several chapters from Walter and Mrs. Shandy’s point of view. Walter’s annoyance with Trim’s storytelling parodies the reader’s own annoyance with Tristram’s rambling digressions: neither of them is getting to the point. Tristram returns to the theme of voyeurism, arguing that it is a primal urge more powerful than mere curiosity that compels the observer to snoop on the scene in front of them.
Themes
