Abstract
From the 1770s onwards gravesites of characters from Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) and Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple: A Tale of Truth (1791) appeared across Germany and in America as a unique form of literary afterlife. This essay argues that graves of literary heroines, Maria and Charlotte, were a means by which readers could express the heightened sensibility characteristic of the sentimental novel tradition through communing with favourite dead characters and—whether through sociable pilgrimage or simply in imagination—other sentimental readers. Considering the characteristically tragic outcomes for female protagonists of the sentimental novel, the practice of grave-visiting described here depends on while also unpacking narratives which explore female sexuality and its relationship with death. Graves to fictional characters therefore facilitated readers’ quixotic mourning while holding the potential to provoke collective criticism of sentimental literary culture’s framing of female sexuality, other than that which conveniently concludes with marriage, as tragedy.
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Notes
- 1.
Laurence Sterne , 1978, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, Volume 2 of The Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. vol. VII, chapter 31, 628. Citations from now on will appear in text and comprise the volume, chapter, and page: VII.31.628.
- 2.
In the dissolution of boundaries Westover draws from Nico H. Frijda.
- 3.
Sterne, to Robert Foley (11th November 1764), in Sterne (2009), letter 141, 392.
- 4.
For a reliable English translation, see New et al. (1984, 484–85).
- 5.
W.G. Day states that it is internally dated 28th December 1774 (Day 2004, 254).
- 6.
By the time German author Friedrich von Matthison visited the gardens in 1785, uncle Toby had been also added to the cemetery. Friedrich von Matthison, Letter to the Hofrath von Köpken in Magdeburg of 17th October 1785 (in Hewett-Thayer 1905, 89). Unfortunately, on visiting these graves, Day found that they have largely disappeared.
- 7.
The copies I have consulted are ‘Sterne’s Maria’ (Dublin: Printed by J. Hill, 1787), National Library of Ireland, Joly Music 3409; ‘Mouline’s Maria: A Favorite Ballad taken from Sterne’ (Dublin: Published by E. Rhames, No. 16 Exchange Street), National Library of Ireland, Add. Mus. 838.
- 8.
See, for example, those documented by J.C.T. Oates (1971, 313–315).
- 9.
Originally published in the New York Sunday Despatch and reprinted as cited in The Sun, 3rd March 1846.
- 10.
See for example, advertisements in New-York Daily Tribune, 2nd May 1857.
- 11.
Presumably referring to the poet William Collins. The People, 7, 30th May 1857.
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Williams, H. (2021). Communing with the Fictional Dead: Grave Tourism and the Sentimental Novel. In: Domsch, S., Hansen, M. (eds) British Sociability in the European Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52567-5_4
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