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.
