"An Oblique and Slovenly Initiation": The Circumcision Episode in Tristram Shandy

Among the many misfortunes that befall the young Tristram Shandy, one of the worst is an injury to his penis at the age of five. One night when Tristram is unable to find a chamber pot the maid tells him to "**** *** ** *** ******" [piss out of the window]; as he does the sash falls and does unspecified damage to his penis. The maid cries, "Nothing is left," and thereafter refers to the incident as "the murder of me." ¹ The ensuing comedy of family confusion and medical incompetence is full of absurdity, but it confirms Sterne's construction of Tristram's father, Walter, as an impractical theorizer far detached from the realities of human need; of the medical profession as a pack of gnomic bunglers; and of his readers as sensible people like Uncle Toby, who would regard any mutilation of a boy's penis as just about the worst thing that could happen to him, especially if it involved circumcision—for that is the subject to which the incident causes Shandy senior to direct his latest researches.

In this brief essay I suggest that previous commentators have not fully understood the falling window incident and have been uncertain or mistaken about whether Tristram really was circumcised. Melvin and Joan New, Leigh Ehlers, and Arthur Cash have concluded that he was "circumcised" by the falling window; except for the startled and perhaps exaggerating maid, however, no one says anything was cut off, and the nature of the accident would not automatically imply such a surgical result. ² In his study of themes relating to castration and impotence, Calvin Thomas is more concerned with mental than corporeal processes and does not discuss the episode in any detail; but he correctly notes that Tristram suffered a wound on his foreskin and that this was one of several injuries affecting the males of the novel, particularly in their manly parts. ³ In offering a different explanation of this episode I suggest that previous interpreters have been misled by applying mid-twentieth-century conceptions of circumcision to eighteenth-century Britain, where the operation was viewed in a very different light; and also by failure to appreciate the significance of Dr. Slop's reference to phimosis. As with circumcision, the eighteenth-century understanding of phimosis was quite different from that prevailing in the twentieth century, but Slop's reference provides the key to the vital question of whether the young Tristram lost his foreskin.

In today's global village, when circumcision of young males (for "health" or "family" reasons) is still common in some English-speaking countries, and controversy over circumcision (both male and female) among African peoples and Islamic cultures is daily news, it is difficult to recapture the shudder of horror that the idea would have aroused in eighteenth-century England. Understood as a defining characteristic of such alien people as Jews and Turks, circumcision was regarded as a mutilation that left the victims aesthetically disfigured and partially emasculated. English literature offered many reminders of the contest between Christianity and Islam, which had made several determined assaults on the West between the eighth and the seventeenth centuries, beginning with the Saracen invasion of Spain. For Edward Gibbon, the prospect that "the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet" was the greatest of the "calamities" from which the genius of Charlemagne delivered Europe. ⁴ When, in the 1870s, Richard Burton remarked that "Christendom practically holds circumcision in horror," the observation was ceasing to be true, but it was certainly the case in the eighteenth century. In this context the foreskin was viewed as an integral part of the penis and vital to the sexual pleasure of both male and female. In the previous century William Harvey had commented that "the circumcised are affected with less pleasure in...