‘’Tis My Father’s Fault’

Jenifer Buckley commences her analysis of Sterne from the notion, influenced by the findings of Leeuwenhoek, that the thoughts of a father at the point of ejaculation could positively affect the child that was produced. In contrast to the imaginative transit of the mother, which, it was believed, if negative or destructive during the period of pregnancy could result in birth defects, the male imagination bore the responsibility for producing hale and hearty offspring. Sterne’s satirical dismissal of such ‘imaginationist’ theories of reproduction proceeds through Tristram’s father, who bemoans his distraction at the moment of his son’s conception, which, he believes, was responsible for all his child’s failings. The comic calamities of this bullishness belies, for Buckley, a more serious debate about the relative male and female contributions to the domestic sphere, and about the workings of imaginative causation that would soon be more rigorously interrogated by the Romantic movement.