“Whither doth this violent Passion hurry us?”: Hysterical Language and Desiring Women in Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews

Abstract

This article examines how Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) works within amatory and comic modes, and engages with eighteenth-century medical discourses of hysteria and the nerves. Lady Booby’s emotions, fashioned in the amatory mode, illustrate how women’s bodies were culturally overdetermined as incapable of practicing restraint; the novel’s depiction of her feelings reveal how the overlapping discourses of rigid virtue and medicine produced emotional, bodily, and existential distress. Emotional expressions of unfulfilled desire become entangled with the discourse of hysteria, for both are rooted in the mechanics of the passions and the perceived inability of a woman’s body to manage emotions. Amatory fiction’s focus on the body and its feelings makes it an especially fertile space for hysteria to rise to the level of cultural metaphor that posits women’s bodies as inherently pathological. These expressions of passionate excess centre woman as the bodily theatre in which the philosophical debates of emotion and reason are staged.