ABSTRACT
Shortly after sharing in the sorrows of Maria in Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, Yorick attempts to vary his emotional diet by plunging into the local festivities of the French countryside, but finds himself hampered by the indelibility of the young woman’s doleful image:
The haunting picture of Maria acts as a counterweight to Yorick’s tendency toward buoyant emotion, a reminder of the melancholy lurking beneath the surface of his own character. The passage also reflexively exploits visual conventions and, through Yorick’s confession of the impact of Maria’s image on him, simultaneously suggests the power of visual language. When this verbal pictorialism is conjoined with pathos, the visual sense (evoked by words) acts as a conduit to the object of pity-a technique Sterne brings to bear repeatedly and effectively throughout his work.1 This is only one of several instances in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey when Sterne describes the character of Maria using compelling visual language, creating a strong sense of both her identity and location; the pictorial quality of the text augments her depiction, a depiction which in turn inspired many additional verbal and pictorial renderings for over 100 years beyond its initial publication. This visual technique is especially evident on Tristram’s, and later Yorick’s, arrival, when Maria is “framed” by scenic elements that serve to isolate and emphasize her as a lone figure who magnetically attracts the attention, and consequently the sympathy, of the narrator (and thus of the reader). Approaching Maria, Tristram is struck by her appearance, which he describes simply, directly, and with earnest feeling:
Maria’s first scene in A Sentimental Journey, though portraying a changed character, continues the tone of the initial description:
The elements of the latter scene-the specific aspects of Maria’s dress, in addition to the tree and brook-were to become standard, instantly recognizable features in the visual portrayals of Maria, traits that immediately identify a rendition of a seated young woman as Sterne’s character. In both instances, the verbal picture helps to forge a sympathetic bond between the character and the reader. Edward Mangin, an Anglican minister and accomplished amateur critic, was an early observer of Sterne’s visual cues and, in his discussion of A Sentimental Journey, is inspired to describe a variant portrait of Maria himself. He notes that Sterne’s
Mangin describes Sterne’s passage as if it were a vivid painting in his mind’s eye, a meticulously imagined entity that supplements (or possibly completes) Sterne’s verbal picture. In the imagination of Mangin, and many other readers, Maria had coalesced into a fully-formed entity from the suggestions of Sterne’s words, conveying a physical and spiritual presence beyond the verbal text.
