The Glove as Fetish Object in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and Culture

Abstract

This essay focuses on eighteenth-century women’s gloving practices and representations of women’s gloves in the period. Through close readings of the gloving scenes in William Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (1732), Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48), and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), this essay argues that eighteenth-century fictions promoted the erotic fetishization and feminization of gloves. Through a conjoined analysis of real-life and fictional gloving practices, this article demonstrates how the fetish emerged as not only a problem about the relationship of subjects to objects, but also a problem about the social value of the sense of touch in the eighteenth century.