Henry Fielding's Whores

Abstract

The mercenary whore is a recurring character-type in Henry Fielding’s plays and early fictions. This thesis examines Fielding’s representations of the sex-worker in relation to popular eighteenth-century discourses surrounding prostitution reform and the so-called ‘woman question’. Fielding routinely confronted, and at times affronted his audience’s sensibilities toward sexuality, and London’s infamous sex-trade was a particularly contentious issue among the moralists, politicians, and religious zealots of his day. As a writer of stage comedy and satirical fiction, Fielding attempted to laugh his audience into a reformed sensibility toward whoredom. He complicates common perceptions of the whore as a diseased, licentious, and irredeemable social other by exposing the folly, fallibility, and ultimate humanity of the modern sex-worker. By investigating three of Fielding’s stage comedies—"The Covent-Garden Tragedy" (1732), "The Modern Husband" (1734), and "Miss Lucy in Town" (1742)—and two of his early prose satires—"Shamela" (1741) and "Joseph Andrews" (1742)—in relation to broader sociocultural concerns and anxieties surrounding prostitution in eighteenth-century Britain, this thesis locates Fielding’s early humanitarian efforts to engender a reformed paradigm of charitable sympathy for fallen women later championed in his work as a justice and magistrate.