Laurence Sterne and the ethics of sexual difference: chiasmic narration and double desire.

Kraft, Elizabeth

"Ethics has gained new resonance in literary studies during the past dozen years," announces Laurence Buell in his introductory essay to the January 1999 special issue of PMLA on "Ethics and Literary Study." As he goes on in the following pages to map the "distinctive contours" of this still imprecisely defined "movement," Buell is increasingly convincing that the "groundswell" of "ethically valenced" critical inquiry may be building to the "paradigm-defining concept that textuality was for the 1970s and historicism for the 1980s" (7). There is a problem, though, and Buell acknowledges as much. That problem is politics:

 Perhaps the touchiest single issue for both exemplars and critics of the
 ethical turn is the issue of whether it boils down, whatever the nominal
 agenda, to a privatization of human relations that makes the social and the
 political secondary. (14)

The vexed relationship between the political (social imperatives) and the ethical (privatized relations) is one that also characterizes the sentimental literature of the eighteenth century. Since the 1980s in particular, with the growth of politicized criticism informed by Marxist and feminist theory, sentimental literature has been read as a site of conflict that both exposes social problems resulting from economic and cultural iniquities and avoids articulating demand for large-scale reform through what could be called the rhetorical fallacy of the (individual) feeling heart. (1)

Laurence Sterne poses a special problem in terms of the political/ethical divide. While it is true that Sterne's scenes of sentiment feature power relations that place his male protagonists (Tristram, Yorick, Toby, and Trim) in sympathetic alliance with bird, ass, dwarf, slave, injured soldier, and fly, most such scenes involve a moment of sympathetic exchange between the male character and a young woman (usually a stranger). And, while sensual contact stimulates all moments of sentimental connection in Sterne's work, they do so to more ethically problematic effect when the Beguine "foments" Trim's knee or when Yorick counts the beats of the grisset's pulse than they do when Toby releases a fly or when Yorick responds to the cry of a caged starling. Acute sensitivity between men and women in Sterne's fiction seems driven, by Sterne's own design, as much by prurience as by innocence. Sterne's sentimental signature is ambiguity; however, political readings of these scenes of psychosexual attraction, readings that emphasize the presence of male sexual aggression, tend to find the ambiguity less real than imagined, less persuasive than convenient. In this essay I wish to reintroduce, as it were, an awareness of the earnest longing that imbues such scenes, not to deny their prurience but to recognize that their power derives as much from ethical sincerity as from political skepticism.

Levinas and the Female Other

There is "mounting evidence," Buell suggests, that Emmanuel Levinas is "the most central theorist for the postpoststructuralist dispensation of turn-of-the-century literary-ethical inquiry" (9). Levinas's insistence that obligation to the other takes precedence over being itself radically alters the politicized reading of relation. According to Levinas, the other has first claim on the self through difference that is never absorbed or dominated or totalized (to use the Levinasian vocabulary) by that self. If the political self needs the other for definition, the ethical self, according to Levinas, needs the other for transcendence.

A recent issue of The Eighteenth Century has demonstrated how the work of Levinas opens up the ethical dimensions of texts ranging from Aphra Behn's Oroonoko to Choderlos de Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereueses to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister; the same issue includes articles comparing the philosophies of Levinas, Baruch Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant. (2) It seems, in other words, that the philosophy of otherness and obligation articulated by Levinas resonates deeply with the literature and thought of the Restoration and eighteenth century, especially, considering the list above, with writers who engage in some way or another a sentimental reading of human nature. (3)

Sterne's brand of sentimentalism has posed a perennial critical problem for readers and scholars who seek to reconcile the ethical vision one would expect of an Anglican clergyman and the erotic nature of the imagination evidenced by Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey. (4) Levinas seems to help. Both Donald R. Wehrs and Melvyn New ("Reading Sterne") invoke Levinas to explain Sterne's ethical sensibility; his troubling manic bawdiness becomes less puzzling if linked to the Levinasian caress, touch that "is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search: a movement into the invisible" (TI 257-58). Both Wehrs and New convincingly demonstrate that in A Sentimental Journey Yorick's relationship with the others he encounters are moments of such union--moments that invoke infinity by presenting the face, prompting the caress, and preserving the "otherness" of the object of desire, be that object the approval of the monk or be it the affection (or more) of the fille de chambre. (5)

For Levinas, the other prompts a spontaneous recognition of responsibility in the ethical encounter that is represented by the words "here I am" (OB 141). This is Abraham's repeated response in Genesis 22 as he follows God's commandment first to sacrifice his child and then to stay his hand. It is the response of Isaiah to a vision of the Lord in which he hears the voice of the Lord ask, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" "Here am I; send me," answers the prophet. "`Here I am' means send me" asserts Levinas (OB 199n 11). The phrase represents a "responsibility for the other, going against intentionality and the will, ... [which] signifies not the disclosure of a given and its reception, but the exposure of me to the other, prior to every decision" (OB 141). It is Abraham's response; it is Isaiah's response. It is also Rebecca's response, Rachel's response, and the female lover's response in the Song of Solomon--and this, according to Jacques Derrida, Catherine Chalier, and Luce Irigaray, is the point that Levinas has missed. (6) It is not, I maintain, a point that Sterne fails to understand.

In other words, the fact of female desire is elided in Levinas's description of the ethical encounter. He does speak of the erotic encounter as an ethical moment, but he does so (understandably, of course) from the male point of view. As a result, according to his critics, Levinas restricts the female to her role as other-to-man--not the political other, to be sure, whose identity is subsumed into the male subject in the same way that objects of sympathy aggrandize the capitalistic individual in politicized sentimental narratives, but nonetheless she is denied her own entity, according to Levinas's critics. She is the object of male erotic desire and the means of transcendence through the birth of a son. The erotic caress, as Levinas explains it, leads to fecundity that produces the son, through whom the male `T' becomes an other and thereby transcends his own essence or identity. In this process the female beloved is left behind. In Irigaray's words:

 Although he takes pleasure in caressing, he abandons the feminine other,
 leaves her to sink, in particular into the darkness of a pseudoanimality,
 in order to return to his responsibilities in the world of
 men-amongst-themselves. For him, the feminine does not stand for an other
 to be respected in her human freedom and human identity. The feminine other
 is left without her own specific face. On this point, his philosophy falls
 radically short of ethics. To go beyond the face of metaphysics would mean
 precisely to leave the woman her face, and even to assist her to discover
 it and to keep it. Levinas scarcely unveils the disfigurements brought
 about by ontotheology. His phenomenology of the caress is still implicated
 in it. ("Questions" 113-14)

Derrida is not as harsh, but his insight is the same. In the voice of a woman he challenges the notion that only a son and not a daughter can represent the kind of transcendence Levinas seeks; in the voice of a woman he complains about the erasure of female desire and points to its traces in the very words Levinas uses to explain "responsibility for the other"--"I am sick with love." (7) These words are from the Song of Solomon, and--though Levinas himself does not acknowledge as much--they are the words of the female lover, words that speak of her desire. (8) In the voice of this woman Derrida ends his essay with a wail of protest (printed in all capital letters) at the erasure of the female in a concept of otherness that does not acknowledge the primacy of sexual difference. His point, like Irigaray's, is that to ignore the notion of sexual difference, to conceive of sexual otherness as less than primary and fundamental, is by definition to subordinate woman to the totality that is man. Derrida's words are clearer than mine: "To desexualise the link to the wholly-other, ... to make sexuality secondary with respect to a wholly-other that in itself would not be sexually marked ..., is always to make sexual difference secondary as femininity" (43).

The Chiasmus of Double Desire

The critique of Levinas offered by feminists and deconstructionists can be described as a confrontation between politics and ethics. Politically the various musings on sexual difference turn on or fall into essentialist definitions of "woman" which, however creative, tend to position her in opposition to man. Levinas avoids that trap but in doing so seems to have "affirmed as neutral what is in fact masculine" (Chanter 43). With regard to power relations, it seems impossible to avoid what is by now the conventional insight that, culturally, women are constructed as inferior to men and that escape from that construct is frustratingly difficult if not impossible. That these constructs are limiting and do not accommodate themselves to female desires is the political reality. The ethical imperative is the fact that, although it has proven problematic to do so, female otherness must be regarded as genuinely other. Masculine definitions will not do. Even so, without them, feminine otherness remains hard to pin down. And perhaps that is the very point, as Tina Chanter has suggested: "Even the phenomenological language of experience is rendered inadequate to describe the complexity of feminine otherness." "To put it negatively," she elaborates, "it is the exclusion of women from linear history which gives women their specificity" (43).

How, then, would an ethical portrayal of feminine otherness, of sexual difference, manifest itself in literary terms? To answer this question, we can begin with the meeting of self and other as described by Levinas. He invokes the figure of chiasmus to describe intellectual engagement with an other of his own, saluting Derrida in the following words: "In underlining the primordial importance of the questions posed by Derrida, we wished to express the pleasure of a contact made at the heart of a chiasmus." That pleasure is the "meeting with" an other "on his way," the "very modality," Levinas claims, "of the philosophical encounter" ("Wholly Otherwise" 8). Levinas's invocation of the chiasmic figure recalls the Greek [chi], as Simon Critchley explains. The lines of the figure represent two "readings," two voices: the point of crossing is really a moment of surrender, an admission of inadequacy or vulnerability, in which one voice demands of the other to "interrupt me" (Critchley 186). Critchley has described the Levinasian chiasmus as "a movement from the Same towards the other which never returns to the same" (164).

Not coincidentally, Irigaray has invoked the same rhetorical figure to describe the erotic encounter as a "chiasmus or a double loop in which each can go toward the other and come back to itself" (Ethics 9). Her version of the chiasmus is the mathematical [infinity] and is descriptive of the whole pattern of intimacy rather than the moment of intimate exchange. The fluidity of the Irigarayan double loop, where the lines of separate being clearly exist but where their separate existence cannot be clearly diagramed, stands in contrast to the ontological discreteness and phenomenological linearity of the Levinasian chiasmus. Both figures invoke the notion of a merging that is and is not being (for Levinas a momentary merging, for Irigaray a repeated and ever-repeatable event)--that is wholly otherwise and that in being wholly otherwise provides access to infinity. Hence, the difference between the Levinasian figure of chiasmus ([chi]) and the Irigarayan figure of chiasmus ([infinity]) is significant.

According to Irigaray, the ethical erotic encounter between lovers of the opposite sex must be fueled by "double desire," woman's desire as well as man's; otherwise the relationship is one of "possession, consummation, and disgust," rather than one of "surprise, astonishment, and wonder" The "forever unknowable" must be greeted with such awe in order to "maintain ... autonomy within ... difference," in order to keep "a space of freedom and attraction between them, a possibility of separation and alliance" (Ethics 13). "One sex," she says, "is not entirely consumable by the other" (Ethics 14). And the irreducible alterity between the sexes is, to Irigaray, the fundamental condition of ethics. Irigaray's chiasmus is the figure of infinity--the coming together, moving apart, coming together, moving apart, of intimacy that preserves integrity. It acknowledges an ethical responsibility for woman beyond her role as a bearer of sons. It allows the possibility of her openness to the demands of the other, her acknowledgment of obligation, her "here I am," her own transcendence into the irreducible infinite.

The Women at the Well

Sterne's tendency to conflate the sexual and the spiritual has seemed to critics as (at best) a satiric ploy or (at worst) evidence of his own moral turpitude. Much ink (including some of my own) has been spilled explaining or explaining away Yorick's and Tristram's erotic flights of fancy, which always seem to end in prayer, and their prayers, which always seem to lead to sexual encounters. The underlying question at the root of our failure to comprehend Sterne on this score is this: how serious can a spirituality rooted in sexual desire be?

Sterne's answer to this question is drawn from the Bible itself. Steeped in its narratives and its narratology by virtue of his profession as an Anglican priest, Sterne would have had a more difficult time separating the spiritual and the sexual than we of more secular minds have in bringing them together. As attested by the debate between Levinas and his various "others," the "here I am" moment of ethical obligation is central not only to the establishment and continuance of the covenant between God and the Hebrew people but also to various erotic exchanges that are crucial to the pursuit of this covenant. By turning to what we could call, following Robert Alter, the biblical betrothal narrative or "type-scene" (51-62), Derrida, Irigaray, and Chalier reveal what Sterne seems to have understood as well: the beginning of the erotic relationship is (or at least can be) a privileged spiritual moment as lovers respond to the demand of the other and through that response achieve a momentary transcendence that is neither self nor other, that is "otherwise than being" either. (9)

The first instance of such exchange in the Bible is the story of Rebecca and her betrothal to Isaac, recounted in Genesis 24. Abraham and his family are living among the Canaanites, and Abraham is old. It is time for Isaac to marry, but Abraham does not want a Canaanite woman for his son's wife. He sends a servant, probably Eliezer, to his own country to find a wife, but the servant has reservations about her wanting to follow him back to a strange land. (10) Abraham is insistent: Isaac must not accompany the servant; the woman must leave her home and follow him. The servant prays for aid:

 O Lord God of my master Abraham, I pray thee, send me good speed this day,
 and shew kindness unto my master Abraham. Behold I stand here by the well
 of water; and the daughters of the men of the city come out to draw water;
 And let it come to pass, that the damsel to whom I shall say, Let down thy
 pitcher, I pray thee that I may drink; and she shall say, Drink, and I will
 give thy camels drink also; let the same be she that thou hast appointed
 for thy servant Isaac; and thereby shall I know that thou hast shewed
 kindness unto my master. (Gen. 24:12-14)

And it happens just that way. Rebecca comes to the well; she responds to the request for a drink with the words, "Drink my lord ... I will draw water for thy camels also, until they have done drinking" (Gen. 24:18-19). And the servant knows that he has found the wife for Isaac. He accompanies her to her home where he is welcomed with a feast and where he informs Rebecca's family of the purpose of his journey and the miracle of finding the woman God intended for Isaac. The family is not opposed to the union, but they wish for Rebecca to delay her departure. Abraham's servant says that she must accompany him immediately. Her family leaves the decision to her: "Wilt thou go with this man?" She answers, "I will go" (Gen. 24:58; cf. "Here I am; send me").

For Chalier, Rebecca's gesture is "the disruption of being by goodness beyond maternity" (128). For Derrida, it is the chiasmic exchange by which he would force Levinas to recognize the seriasure of the feminine in an ethics that depends on her: "SHE DOESN'T SPEAK THE UNNAMEABLE YET YOU HEAR HER BETTER THAN ME AHEAD OF ME AT THE VERY MOMENT WHERE NONETHELESS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE MONUMENTAL WORK I WEAVE MY VOICE SO AS TO BE EFFACED THIS TAKE IT HERE I AM EAT--GET NEARER--IN ORDER TO GIVE HIM/HER--DRINK" (47). For Irigaray, more generally, the gesture (like the traces of female desire in the Song of Solomon) would speak to the importance of carnality to a just notion of the divine or to a notion of a just divinity. After all, Rebecca is not merely good; she is desirable as well: "And the damsel was very fair to look upon, a virgin, neither had any man known her" (Gen. 24:16). Further, when she lifts her eyes to meet the lifted eyes of Isaac, when she sees the face of her future husband, she immediately gets off her camel and veils herself, acts that speak of her own desire, of her own recognition of that desire. Irigaray's plaintive question to Levinas, "Why and how long ago did God withdraw from the act of carnal love?" ("Questions" 116), suggests that it is not really the feminine that Levinasian ethics (and Western culture in general) erases or buries or encrypts; it is the mutuality of the caress between beings wholly otherwise that this ethics does not face. Levinas recognizes desire but not the double desire of the true chiasmus that can exist between lovers of the opposite sex.

The ethical centrality of this erotic desire has been buried by our traditions, obscured by our laws, but it is recoverable in the foundational texts of our culture, as the provocative examination of biblical narrative by Levinas, Derrida, Chalier, and Irigaray suggests. To understand fully these narratives, however, it is necessary to recognize that they not only speak to the chiasmus of double desire but also figure that desire in chiasmic structures. (11) This point is an important one because the act of reading discrete linear moments is one way by which the feminine has been deprivileged in stories of male desire. The famous nonlinearity of Sterne's texts is part of his inheritance from the narrative art with which he, as an Anglican clergyman, was most familiar--the Old and New Testaments. (12) Central to these narrations are the various renditions of the story of the woman at the well.

Alter has identified many narrative moments in the Old Testament that allude to the general structural pattern established in Genesis 24. (13) In this first occurrence of the betrothal narrative, in fact, the central episode of the pattern is reiterated three times: the servant articulates the narrative as a sign to be fulfilled; Rebecca comes to the well, and the events unfold as he predicted; he recounts the episode to Rebecca's family at the feast to convince them of God's governance of the events. Further, the narrative's power is increased by the presence of a chiasmus at its center. This chiasmus is repeated three times, but here I quote from the actual meeting of the servant and Rebecca: "And the servant ran to meet her, and said, Let me, I pray thee, drink a little water of thy pitcher. And she said, Drink, my lord: and she hasted, and let down her pitcher upon her hand, and gave him drink" (Gen. 24:17-18). We can extract the chiasmus by paraphrasing: "Let me drink / Drink my lord." It is the exchange that precedes Rebecca's further generosity--that for which she is not asked, the watering of the camels. In Chalier's words, Rebecca's "ability to perceive the Other's demand as a demand that is meant for her ... is the ethical service ... [necessary] to stay inside the covenant" (127). That perception is chiasmic as self and other meet without possession; it is signaled in this narrative by a rhetorical chiasmus that emphasizes the importance of the exchange.

The story of Jacob's betrothal returns to this narrative pattern with significant variations. Isaac has given him the familiar injunction not to marry a daughter of Canaan, but Jacob's flight into the land of Haran is first a flight from the wrath of Esau whose blessing he has stolen. Jacob's discovery of a bride--or two brides, as it turns out--is incidental to this primary purpose. Nevertheless, he comes to a well like Eliezer before him, and he meets there a beautiful young woman who brings her father's sheep for water. It is Jacob, however, and not Rachel--the male traveler, not the female resident--who offers drink this time, for the well is protected by a heavy stone that takes several men to move it. Seeing Rachel, Jacob is inspired: he moves the stone by himself and "water[s] the flock of Laban[,] his mother's brother" and the father of Rachel (Gen. 29:10). The next verse is powerful: "And Jacob kissed Rachel and lifted up his voice, and wept." This betrothal, of course, is followed by many complications--the feast is replaced by fourteen years of servitude, the marriage to Rachel is postponed by marriage to her sister Leah, Rachel's barrenness and Leah's fecundity seem, for a time, to call the significance of the betrothal with regard to the covenant into question--but as the narrative unfolds it is clear that Rachel's position as matriarch is a privileged one, one whose significance is signaled by the presence of chiasma. While this betrothal narrative does not feature a rhetorical chiasmus of the sort found in Genesis 24, it does reveal the presence of two structural inversions--one linking it to the story of Isaac and Rebecca and one to the narrative of Esau and Jacob. Jacob's watering of Rachel's sheep is an inversion of Rebecca's treatment of Eliezer's camels; Laban's tricking Jacob into marrying his eldest daughter is an inversion of Rebecca's ruse to obtain Isaac's blessing for Jacob rather than Esau.

I believe that the betrothal type-narrative is as central to Sterne's ethical vision as it is to the story of the covenant in the Old Testament and to the linking of that story to Christ in the New Testament. (14) Throughout Sterne's works--his sermons, Tristram Shandy, and A Sentimental Journey, in particular--the search for spiritual sustenance and intense sexual longing often meet. To understand Sterne's ethical vision fully, and to appreciate the way in which he (unlike Levinas) finds sexual alterity the key to this vision, we must learn to read these meetings, these episodes, as resonant, chiasmic narrative moments. (15)

Sterne and Jacob

We have no record of Sterne's pulpit references to the originary betrothal narrative in Genesis 24, but his published sermons do include an examination of the story of Jacob. (16) It is a notable encounter between self and other in several respects.

The sermon begins with Jacob's suffering and Sterne's response to that suffering: "There is not a man in history, whom I pity more.... Of all the patriarchs, he was the most unhappy." For Sterne the pathos of Jacob's life is intensified by the blessing he had been promised by his father Isaac: "God should bless him with the dew of heaven, and the fatness of the earth" (204). Sterne admits that the promised blessings were "not altogether such as a carnal mind would expect; but that they were in a great measure spiritual." Isaac's prophecy, in other words, was fulfilled. That, however, is not what interests Sterne. He is far more concerned that "Jacob enjoyed [them] not; and was so far from being a happy man, that in the most interesting passages of his life, he met with nothing but disappointments and grievous afflictions" (205). That Sterne avoids the totalizing narrative in favor of the exigencies of Jacob's various sufferings is significant; in fact, he here rejects the traditional commentary for what we could call, following Levinas, a "face-to-face" encounter with Jacob. This encounter goes beyond sympathy; it goes beyond empathy as well. It is easy to feel for Jacob's sufferings as they result from "the avarice of a parent,--the unkindness of a relation,--the ingratitude of a child"; these evils, Sterne says, "hang over the heads of all." Because of this tendency to equate ourselves with Jacob, "we are apt to interest ourselves no otherwise, than merely as the incidents themselves strike our passions, without carrying the lesson further:--in a word--we realize nothing:--we sigh--we wipe away the tear,--and there ends the story of misery, and the moral with it." Sterne refuses to stop there: "Let us try to do better than this" he says (206-07).

Doing better involves recognizing Jacob's strangeness, not his familiarity--his alterity, not his oneness with us. The remainder of the sermon does better in this sense. It begins with a question: having experienced the wrath of Esau because of his mother's favoritism, why does Jacob favor Joseph and encourage the wrath of his brothers? Why could Jacob not see what would happen? "Why is every thing?" Sterne asks somewhat elliptically, seeming to mean "Can we know anything?" The question is unanswerable and remains unanswered in the sermon. It "pleases heaven" that we not fully understand, Sterne asserts, and so we do not fully understand (208). Comprehension, though, is replaced by something more valuable inasmuch as it speaks to the notion of transcendence, and that something is trust in God: "I will trust myself and the issue of my journey to thee, who art the fountain of joy,--and will sing songs of comfort as I go along" (209).

Sterne arrives at this point of transcendence through his encounter with Jacob's alterity. Alterity is at the heart of the next section of the sermon as well, a section devoted to examination of Jacob's marital disappointment: "the imposition of a wife upon him which he neither bargain'd for or loved." Jacob's discovery that he is married to Leah rather than Rachel is not unlike modern marital disappointments, Sterne asserts. The common complaint of the unhappily married is that "`they were mistaken in the person'" (209). The cause of such a mistake, Sterne says, is either disguise (on the part of the woman) or self-deception (on the part of the man). The remedy is the face-to-face encounter of two separate beings in place of "conquering" by pretending to be someone one is not or falling victim to romantic fantasies that prevent one from seeing the lover for herself. "Love aims at the Other," Levinas says; "it aims at him in his frailty. Frailty does not here figure the inferior degree of any attribute, the relative deficiency of a determination common to me and the other. Prior to the manifestation of attributes, it qualifies alterity itself. To love is to fear for another, to come to the assistance of his frailty" (TI 256). To offer drink, we might add. To "be open--be honest: [to] give yourself for what you are; [to] conceal nothing--[to] varnish nothing," as Sterne puts it in his summation of the lesson of Jacob's marriage to Leah (209).

From the meditation on the significance of Jacob's marriage, Sterne returns to Jacob's sufferings. Certainly Jacob's days were, as he himself asserted, "few and evil" (Gen. 47:9; Sermons 204). Sterne says, however, that, if one looks at the world, one sees "riches and plenty which flows [sic] in every channel, not only to satisfy the desires of the temperate,--but of the fanciful and wanton--every place is almost a paradise, planted when nature was in her gayest humour." Jacob, Job, and Solomon have given us "one section of the globe"; Sterne, he says, has just presented another. The truth "lieth betwixt-- ... good and evil are mixed up together." The good will preponderate, maintains Sterne, if we learn to embrace joy and cease the self-tormenting that is the source of so much sorrow: "I pity the men whose natural pleasures are burthens, and who fly from joy ... as if it was really an evil in itself" (212). Jacob has not been portrayed as such a self-tormentor; his sufferings are the legitimate object of the sermonist's pity. However, it is a "pity that is complacent, a pleasure, a suffering transformed into happiness--voluptuosity" (TI 259). Those words are Levinas's description of the phenomenology of eros, but the sense is Sterne's as well; the path of his encounter with Jacob leads from pity (for Jacob's suffering) to complacence (because of Jacob's own complicity in that suffering) to pleasure (the erotic truth revealed by Jacob's marital disappointment) to voluptuosity (celebration of sensual pleasure as natural and good). Significantly, in this sermon the erotic relationship provides the key to transforming sorrow into joy.

Sterne's encounter with Jacob as other follows the trajectory of the Levinasian chiasmic exchange: it moves "from the Same towards the other which never returns to the Same" (Critchley 164). The union at the heart of the chiasmus occurs in the shift from Jacob's marital woes to the disappointment Sterne himself had suffered in his private life--in his recognition that he had married a Leah, not the Rachel he had expected. (17) The contemplation of this disappointment, however, has a surprisingly heartening effect. At the end of the sermon the preacher who had begun the discourse in sympathetic sadness has been changed through his contemplation of Jacob's sufferings: he now celebrates the fullness of life; its joys and pleasures seem more profound to him than its sorrows. He has changed, but in the changing, in the transcendence of his earlier state of being, he has left Jacob behind. Jacob, like the woman in Levinas's phenomenology of eros, is discarded in the vision of infinity that he inspires.

In a sense he is discarded because the woman is embraced. At the heart of Sterne's encounter with Jacob, right at the moment of chiasmic exchange--the point of interruption where the otherness of the other is recognized as irreducible and untranslatable--Sterne perceives the ethical necessity of another alterity. In fact, he is in the process of reducing and translating Jacob's experience into contemporary analogy when he confronts the strangeness that cannot be reduced and translated without violence to self or other--the "strangeness" of sexual difference. And at this point he insists on the maintenance of that alterity: do not try to be what you think he wants you to be but give of who you are, he exhorts the woman; look at your lover for what she is, not for what your imagination would have her be, he instructs the man. Sterne says nothing of male giving and female receiving in this sermon (he does so, by the way, in his sermon on the Levite and his concubine); and, of course, his fiction illustrates time and again the persistence of self-delusion that results in the near impossibility of either complete openness or complete understanding of an other. This sermon, like all sermons, articulates a spiritual ideal, and the fact that he places the erotic exchange at the center of this meditation on suffering, sympathy, and the relationship between self and other is telling in terms of his ethical vision. In his fiction Sterne turns and returns to this fundamental encounter between beings wholly otherwise as points of transcendence, as finite moments in which we glimpse infinity through the movement of double desire.

The Fille de Chambre and Double Desire

Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey both feature journeys (flights from death, to put it Sterne's way) that are punctuated with moments at inns, the eighteenth-century equivalent of the well at which travelers stopped in biblical times. At these inns Tristram or Yorick meets the inevitable flue de chambre, the eighteenth-century (or at least the Sternean) version of Rebecca, Rachel, or, more generally, the woman at the well. It is at an inn that Tristram meets Janatone in Volume 7 of Tristram Shandy, and here Sterne establishes the narrative pattern for his rendition of transcendent erotic desire. These are not betrothal narratives per se, but the episodes are resonant with thematic echoes of and narratological similarities to Genesis 24 and 29.

It is important to note that, while these chance encounters provide moments of ethical illumination, they do not advance behavioral codes; they do not represent apology or confession or repudiation. (18) Instead, they document the arousal of desire, reciprocal or double desire that is non-consuming if not unconsummated desire. And it is here that we must make a clear distinction between ethical illumination and political enlightenment. Sterne's acute sensitivity to alterity does not suggest his ability or desire to translate ethical perception into political action. The "fille de chambre" episodes are not informed by the kind of idealism that stimulates social change. Indeed, while they resonate with echoes of divine purpose, they also reflect the gender and class inequities of eighteenth-century life, inequities complacently presented as such, not as arguments for reform. These scenes, however, do complicate political readings doggedly determined to see a victim and a victimizer, for they accord the female lover her own desire. The scenes do not deny (in fact they rather expose) that such desire may arise from complicated factors, one of which is likely a response to the power differential. The young girl in question does seem aroused by the "foreignness," the age, and the money of the traveler in question, whereas he (Tristram or Yorick) does seem flattered by her youth, her sexual allure, and, perhaps most of all, her seemingly genuine responsiveness to his broken, sick body. There are political observations to be made about such an exchange, to be sure, but there is this observation to be made as well: whatever else it is, such an encounter in Sterne's world is inevitably going to be a sexual one, a mutual one, and, therefore, an ethical one.

When Tristram meets Janatone at the Montreuil inn, she mends a stocking in his presence, flirtatiously placing it on her knee. She is young, perhaps virginal still, but as "she has been eighteen months at Amiens, and six at Paris," there is some sense of sophistication (TS 2:588). We do not think her stocking-mending entirely innocent. She is a bit religious, but that probably enhances her openness, Tristram asserts. He presents her portrait to encourage other travelers to stop at the inn for a glimpse of Janatone before time or events rob her of her desirability or her desire. The sight of her obviously arouses Tristram's sexual hunger, but it also provokes a meditation on the transience of life and, by implication (and an allusion to belief in Christ), the importance of eternity. The encounter fluctuates between a celebration of mutual desire and a demonstration of conventional sexual attitudes based on a double standard that encourages male "predation" and exacts social penalties for female "capitulation." (19) Tristram's description of Janatone suggests that she is a possible conquest; there is the chance, he says, that she will "go off like a hussy and lose herself"--and be no longer an object of desire (TS 2:590). His attitude speaks to the social realities of eighteenth-century life, but he also celebrates Janatone's beauty, her playfulness, her coquetry. The sense is that without the reciprocity of double desire this encounter would lose its significance.

When Yorick encounters Janatone in A Sentimental Journey, the conflict between conventional attitudes and reciprocal desire is again at issue, and this time the intensity and importance of the conflict is signaled with a rhetorical chiasmus. Yorick arrives at the inn lamenting the fact that he has no servant to attend him. The landlord says he is sure that finding a servant will be no problem as Yorick is an Englishman. When Yorick asks why that should matter, he is informed that Englishmen are generous: "It was but last night, said the landlord, qu'un my Lord Anglois presentoit un ecu a la fille de chambre." Yorick's response is the conventional interpretation: "Tant pis, pour Mademoiselle Janatone" (SJ 121). The landlord objects, informing Yorick that he "should not have said tant pis--but, tant mieux. Tant mieux, toujours, Monsieur, said he, when there is any thing to be got--tant pis, when there is nothing" Yorick replies, "It comes to the same thing" (SJ 122). Yorick assumes that Janatone has been given money in expectation of sexual favors. Perhaps the landlord approves of such exchange, or perhaps he considers the money a tip for the legitimate care an innkeeper's daughter takes of the travelers who stop at the inn. Yorick's response that it comes to the same thing replaces the "double standard" evident in Tristram Shandy with a double reading that hinges on a chiasmus, suggesting the possibility of double desire. Janatone is not there to speak for herself, but a later rifle de chambre, and another invocation of chiasmic structure, will elaborate the implications of this exchange.

The episode to which I refer is the episode that Wehrs examines as part of his Levinasian reading of A Sentimental Journey, the episode that he finds ethically responsive and responsible in that Yorick refuses to exploit the rifle de chambre, respecting her alterity by an avoidance of consummation (321). His reading, however, fails to take into account the possibility of her own desire. Interwoven in the fabric of her social identity--her relative powerlessness, her youth, her acculturation that perhaps suggests that her best hope for survival is to allow herself to be sexually exploited for financial gain--is the thread of the fille de chambre's own desire, her own responsiveness to an other, her impulse to give and to take the metaphorical drink of water.

The initial encounter between Yorick and the fille de chambre is structurally chiasmic (SJ 187-91). It can be diagramed thus (20):

A. Yorick is alone in bookshop when a young woman enters looking
 for The Wanderings of the Heart.

 B. They walk out together talking.

 C. He takes her purse and puts a coin in it, telling her to
 protect her heart.

 D. She tells him who she is: I am fille de chambre to Madame
 R****.

 D. He reveals connection: I have come to see Madame R****.

 C. As she holds her pocket open, he puts books in.

 B. They join hands and walk.

A. Then part--God bless you.

The significant exchanges--the placing of the money in her purse, the invitation to put a volume of The Wanderings of the Heart into the fille de chambre's open pocket and the act of doing so--are suggestive to say the least. They are symbolically sexual, and they emanate from desire--from the fille de chambre's desire (she opens her pocket, she takes Yorick's arm) as well as Yorick's own desire (he opens her purse, he is on the verge of asking the fille de chambre to take his arm when she does so of her own accord). The heart of their chiasmic exchange is in the recognition of relation, their joint connection to Madame R****. As they walk arm in arm, Yorick in fact says: "I felt the conviction of consanguinity so strongly, that I could not help turning half round to look in her face, and see if I could trace out anything in it of a family likeness" (SJ 190-91). His impulse to kiss her as they part is replaced by "what amounted to the same thing--I bid God bless her" (SJ 191), suggesting a verbal caress, a Levinasian movement toward the infinite from the "contact made in the heart of a chiasmus."

The second meeting is initiated by the fille de chambre (SJ 234-38). Its chiasmic structure is more intricate than that of the first meeting. It features two parts and a double chiasmic exchange in the second, a signal of intense and prolonged contact between the desiring subjects. The episode can be diagramed as follows:

I

A. Yorick alights at his hotel to discover that

 B. The fille de chambre has been inquiring after him.

 C. They enter his room so that he can write to Madame R****.

 D. She blushes.

 D. He blushes.

 C. He cannot write the card because of trembling desire.

 B. The fille de chambre holds the pen and offers to hold the ink.

A. Yorick leads her to the door and tells her to remember what
 he told her about virtue.

II

A. The fille de chambre gives Yorick both her hands, folded
 together, placed inside his hands.

 B. They sit on the bed.

 C. She searches in her pockets for a purse she is making to
 hold the coin he gave her.

 C. He holds the purse with his hand resting on her lap.

 D. She sews a tear in the gathers of his stock.

 D. He repairs the buckle on her shoe.

 B. They lie on the bed (presumably the fille de chambre is
 thrown off her center).

A. They leave the room, and he puts the key in his pocket.

The complex chiasmic structure of this episode speaks so eloquently to the intensity of the erotic exchange that Yorick's impassioned conclusion seems appropriate and its ambiguity fully justified:

 Wherever thy providence shall place me for the trials of my
 virtue--whatever is my danger--whatever is my situation--let me feel the
 movements which rise out of it, and which belong to me as a man, and if I
 govern them as a good one, I will trust the issues to thy justice--for thou
 has made us, and not we ourselves. (SJ 237-38)

Here, in a sense, we see the merging of the Levinasian chiasmus of double reading (the language is so thoroughly ambiguous that it is impossible to say with certainty whether or not Yorick's conquest is sexual or spiritual) and the Irigarayan chiasmus of double desire signaled by the interchangeability of the sexual symbolism. The fille de chambre holds Yorick's pen; she places her folded hands into his hands that contain them; she sews the tear in his stock. Yorick cannot hold a pen or dip it in ink; he holds the fille de chambre's purse in her lap; finally, though, he does buckle her shoe; he places the key to the door in his pocket; he leads the fille de chambre to the gate of the hotel. The shifting symbolic sexualities speak to reciprocity; they do not suggest masculine dominance or female submission--or feminine dominance or male submission, for that matter. Neither do they assert possession or the obsessional "sameness" that New has identified in Sterne's Journal to Eliza ("Reading Sterne"). Instead, the interchange of sexual symbolism suggests that the ebb and flow of aggression and passivity in erotic relationships is not gendered behavior but the rhythm of mutual longing. The encounter between Yorick and this fille de chambre is fueled by female desire as much as it is stimulated by male desire. Its rhythm is the rhythm of double desire.

Sterne's narratives partake of the culture in which he lived and wrote, and it was a culture in which the idea of sexual difference and the relationship between beings wholly other had been thematized, as they always are, by codes of conduct, economic realities, religious or moral ideologies, social practices and prejudices. It is the culture in which we still live, to some degree, in the sense that it does not accord full measure to the fact and expression of female desire. The woman as desiring subject has yet to be fully written, though her traces are present in the stories of Rebecca, Rachel, and the female lover in the Song of Solomon, as they are in other texts ancient, modern, and in-between.

I hope that the foregoing argument has suggested that the woman as desiring subject is not only present in but also central to the works of Sterne. She is sometimes disappointed in her desire, as is the Widow Wadman; she is sometimes confused by it, as is Mrs. Shandy who cannot separate the idea of lovemaking from the winding of the clock (21); she is sometimes so thwarted in her desire that she goes mad, as does poor Maria of Moulines. Sometimes she has to settle for less than she wants, as does Jenny during Tristram's period of impotence; in this case, however, she is fortunate in her lover, for he so respects her desire and so values his own that he undertakes a course of goat's-whey to regain his prowess and add years to his life through the recovery of his own sexual hunger. There are female desiring subjects in Sterne's world whose generosity and sympathy and sexual appetite are indistinguishable. Trim seems particularly drawn to such women, the Beguine and Bridget being both of that sort. There are female desiring subjects whose own suffering seems part of their sensual appeal. The sausage-maker's widow whom Trim's brother Tom marries and Madam de L--whom Yorick encounters at the outset of his sentimental journey seem two such suffering, sexual women. There are women who make mistakes and remain desirable--the Levite's concubine from the sermons, most notably. There are women who more successfully control their desires in accord with social expectations or the accepted definition of virtue, such as the woman with whom Yorick shares a room at the close of his narrative.

In closing, it must be said that not all encounters between a desiring male and a desiring female in Sterne's fictional worlds can be read, in the end, as fully realized chiasmic ethical exchanges. Sexual longing is sometimes complicated by a mediating presence that prevents mutuality and that consequently muddies the ethical waters, so to speak. For example, while both Tristram and Yorick experience an erotic sympathy in the presence of Maria of Moulines, their (and our) responsiveness to the young woman is rendered uncomfortably voyeuristic by the literary self-consciousness of each scene and disturbingly exploitive by their (and our) awareness that Maria's own desires are centered on absent others--her faithless lover in the first instance, and her faithless goat in the other. (22) Nevertheless, even Maria illustrates my general assertion: the fact of female desire is not only one that Sterne recognizes; it is one he venerates as well.

In moments of mutual erotic exchange in Sterne's works "both angel and body [are] found together." These are Irigaray's words describing what she calls the fundamental requirement of "a sexual or a carnal ethics" (Ethics 17). A world based on such ethics does not now exist, Irigaray maintains; if it is to exist, it must reinscribe what has been erased: the fact of double desire. Sterne would agree. He recognizes mutual desire as an ethical necessity in the meeting between beings of irrefutable alterity. Perhaps we can see the political implications as well. Mutual subjectivity ("Give me to drink") and mutual generosity ("Drink") would seem to be a hopeful step toward rectifying imbalances of power that deny otherness and insist on the totality that is male desire. If not exactly a call to arms on the subject of gender equality, Sterne's meditations on the relationship between sexual desire and spiritual longing are at least predicated on the presence of female as well as male desire. To his credit he does not give the woman lover words with which to express her desire. He documents it instead in the narrative pattern he adopts from biblical accounts of mutual longing and in echoes of other echoes of women's desire. (23)

NOTES

(1) The significant discussions of the limitations of sentimental literature and moral-sense philosophy in addressing the social injustices of eighteenth-century society include Maclean, Markley, Spacks (114-32), and Mullan (147-200). While these critics, to a greater or lesser degree, see eighteenth-century sentimentalism as politically evasive, Ellis argues the centrality of "political debate" to the sentimental novel in particular (4). He admits, however, that, in Sterne's Sentimental Journey "sentimental scenarios work by being personalised, unique and discrete, so as to place the maximum pressure on the relation between the subject and the viewer; yet manage or mystify that pressure so as not to threaten the position of the viewer" (72).

(2) This 1999 issue, Emmanuel Levinas and the Eighteenth Century, includes essays by Edith Wyschogrod (on Spinoza), Laura Wyrick (on Behn), Colin Davis (on Kant and Diderot), Gary D. Mole (on Laclos), Peter Atterton (on Kant), and Donald R. Wehrs (on Goethe).

(3) Obviously Behn's work does not answer this general description, though in its early invocation of the humanist response to the dilemma of slavery it anticipates the later abolitionist attacks that were indeed leveled from the vantage point provided by sentimentalism.

(4) Horace Walpole and Anna Letitia Barbauld are two early commentators whose disapproval of Sterne seems to have been based at least partly on the perceived incongruity between his profession and his writing. In the twentieth century the subject of Sterne and sexuality continues to provoke something akin to moral outrage. Passionate charges against and equally passionate defenses of Sterne on the subject of his fictional depiction of women characterize one strand of twentieth-century commentary; stemming primarily from the treatment of sexuality and gender relations in Tristram Shandy, articles by Ehlers, Perry, Loscocco, and McMaster examine the extent to which Sterne reflects, endorses, or combats misogyny. Other twentieth-century critics have opted to approach the problem by historicizing the attitudes reflected in Sterne's fiction. In doing so, they present a Sterne who himself struggled to come to terms with the conflicting impulses generated by sincere spiritual belief and avid sexual appetite (New, Free Spirits 106-112; Kraft "Pentecostal"; Cash, Early Years 61-62) or a Sterne whose sexual ethics and gender anxieties emerge from and illuminate the contradictions of eighteenth-century culture (Mullan 147-200; Battestin; Hunter).

(5) Probably the most important book published on Sterne in recent years, Sterne's Fiction and the Double Principle, while not a Levinasian reading, anticipates many of the insights to be gleaned by reading Sterne through Levinasian ethics. Lamb's celebration and elaboration of Sterne's equivocal style is a model of the ethical approach to fiction in general. His chapter on "Originality and the Hobby-Horse" is especially helpful in thinking through the conundrum at the heart of sentimental literature in general: "the baffling nature of local virtue" (32).

(6) De Beauvoir was perhaps the first to make the point that Levinas does not envision a role for women beyond the conventional cultural position she has been assigned for centuries. The more recent critiques have involved a radicalized rereading of the biblical texts that provide, the theorists claim, the evidence of female agency and desire that Levinas has missed. Chalier's response to Levinas focuses directly on the story of Rebecca's betrothal; Derrida and Irigaray draw primarily on the Song of Solomon (though the conclusion of Derrida's essay alludes powerfully to the betrothal narrative's final word: "BOIS" [47]). All of these readings follow de Beauvoir in that they position themselves as correctives to Levinas. For an exoneration of Levinas on the subject of sexual difference, see Chanter.

(7) Levinas's sentence reads: "To this command continually put forth only a `here I am' (me voici) can answer, where the pronoun `I' is in the accusative, declined before any declension, possessed by the other, sick, identical" (OB 142). He footnotes "sick" and refers us to the verse in the Song of Solomon.

(8) For Derrida, Levinas's footnote reference to the Song of Solomon 6:8 "open[s] up and deport[s] the original text." Moreover,"it is torn from the mouth of a woman [the speaker in the Song of Solomon], so as to be given to the other." "Why," asks Derrida, "doesn't he [Levinas] clarify that in this work?" (19). Irigaray too invokes the Song of Solomon to challenge Levinas's concept of woman as other. In the Song of Solomon, she points out, man and woman are both lover and beloved; for Levinas, woman is always beloved. "He knows nothing" she says (with, I believe, some deliberately histrionic petulance), "of communion in pleasure" ("Questions" 110).

(9) I would like to acknowledge Dabney Hart for drawing my attention to these narratives and Alter's discussion.

(10) Chalier identifies the servant as Eliezer, as does traditional biblical commentary that cites the authority of Genesis 15:2 in which Eliezer is identified as the steward of Abraham's house. The servant in Genesis 24 is said to be the "eldest servant of [Abraham's] house," which would suggest but does not unambiguously assert that the two are the same. Alter scrupulously refers to the servant in Genesis 24 as "the servant" (52-54). I follow Chalier and tradition.

(11) According to Welch, "one of the most salient developments in the study of ancient literature over the past few decades is the growing awareness of the presence of chiasmus in the composition of ancient writings" (9). As a structural principle chiasmus or "inverted parallelism," as Welch calls it, produces an "intensification ... both by building to a climax at the center [of the structural unit] as well as by strengthening each element individually upon its chiastic repetition" (10).

(12) Elsewhere I have objected to the notion of "nonlinearity" in Sterne, preferring instead the notion of multilinear resonance. For this argument and the relationship of multilinearity to biblical narratology, see Laurence Sterne Revisited 65-79.

(13) In fact, significantly, he notes that this first occasion is the only one in which "the girl, not the stranger, draws water from the well" (54). Alter's reading of what he calls a "divergence from the convention" (53) focuses on the significance of Rebecca, for she "is to become the shrewdest and the most potent of the matriarchs, and so it is entirely appropriate that she should dominate her betrothal scene" (54). As Rebecca's betrothal is the originary narrative of the type-scene, however, we might more profitably view the reversal and the repetitions of this reversal as a Derridean seriasure--repetitions of the same that would obscure the presence of the other were it not for the disruption that "dislocates the Same toward the Relation" (24). The betrothal narrative may become the story of male desire, but Genesis 24 records the fact of female desire in the initial erotic encounter just as powerfully as it is documented in the Song of Songs. After all, as Alter points out, the bridegroom is not even present in this instance of the betrothal type-scene; it is Rebecca's desire that forwards the action and determines the outcome (53-54). Other betrothal scenes discussed by Alter include those between Jacob and Rachel (Gen. 29), Moses and Zipporah (Exod. 2), Ruth and Boaz (Ruth 2), David and Michal (then Abigail and Bathsheba, where marriages are preceded by bloodshed rather than the drink of water), and two aborted betrothal narratives--one involving Saul (1 Sam. 9) and another Samson (Judg. 14).

(14) Although it is unnecessary to elaborate the New Testament passage, I would like to note that the linkage to which I refer occurs in the story of Jesus and the woman at the well (John 4), a narrative of complex chiasmic structure as well as deep resonance with the earlier betrothal narratives.

(15) On the resonance of biblical image, narrative, and metaphor, see Frye who explains that "through resonance a particular statement in a particular context acquires a universal significance." To illustrate, he refers to"the tremendous vision of a blood-soaked deity treading the winepress alone in Isaiah 63" which has "haunted us ever since with its terrible beauty; through `The Battle Hymn of the Republic' it entered the American consciousness, and a title such as `The Grapes of Wrath' testifies to its continuing power" (217). I am arguing that a similar resonance reverberates outward from the biblical betrothal scenes to (and, if we can come to understand them properly, potentially through) Sterne's fiction.

(16) New notes that in this sermon "Sterne goes against the usual commentary that justifies Rebekah's partiality as based on her `assured confidence in the Divine oracle and promise,'" and he comments further that Sterne's reading of Jacob's favoring of Joseph "comes close at times to naturalizing (secularizing) the text, one of the few instances in the Sermons where this happens" (Sermons: Notes 243-44).

(17) New seems to authorize an autobiographical reading of this sermon's comments on marital woe (Sermons: Notes 242). For a full rehearsal of Sterne's uxorial trials, see Cash, Early Years 83-86, 133-36; Later Years 152-75, 182-83.

(18) For a brief summary of the problematic ethics/morality distinction, the one being an "ethical sensibility or orientation" and the other "a code of rules," see Buell 14.

(19) This fluctuation speaks more to Tristram's confusion than Sterne's. I agree with Thomas that Tristram Shandy "undermines its own misogynistic gestures by exposing the male characters' projections onto women as precisely that--projections that spring from the male characters' own feelings of anxiety and lack" (56). See also McMaster: "Tristram Shandy is about misogyny, and against it" (458). For the opposing argument, see Perry.

(20) In diagraming chiasmus in the following discussion, I follow the method of the contributors to Welch's volume.

(21) Of course, as Hunter has pointed out, Mrs. Shandy may just be euphemistic (playfully? demandingly? solicitously?) in asking, "Have you not forgot to wind up the clock?" "`To wind the clock' came to mean to Sterne's contemporaries to have sex, or, more particularly, for the male to be sexually stimulated and satisfied.... Did it already mean something like that to Mrs. Shandy? Was the metaphor already realized within the moment that the book memoralizes?" (178). As usual in Sterne, the possibility for double reading certainly exists.

(22) It is interesting to note that the dominant rhetorical figure employed by Sterne in both Maria episodes is parallelism, not chiasmus, though in A Sentimental Journey Yorick and Maria do link arms in what could be termed an image of chiasmic exchange. For a persuasive reading of the Maria episodes as parodic allusions to Marvell's "Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Faun," see Keymer who argues that the reference to Marvell intensifies the bathos of Maria's "predicament" by drawing attention to the inconstancy, betrayal, and suffering involved in the experience of human love as opposed to the pastoral ideal that shored up the sentimental reading of the scenes preferred by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers.

(23) An abbreviated version of this essay was delivered at the 1999 ISECS conference in Dublin and published in that form in The Shandean 11 (1999-2000): 55-62.

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Elizabeth Kraft is Professor of English at the University of Georgia. Her books include Character and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Comic Fiction (1992) and Laurence Sterne Revisited (1996), as well as editions of Anna Letitia Barbauld's poems and Charlotte Smith's novel titled The Young Philosopher. She has contributed articles to such journals as Restoration, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ELH, and Literature and History.