“Whither doth this violent Passion hurry us?”: Hysterical Language and Desiring Women in Henry Fielding’s <i>Joseph Andrews</i>
Bibliographic record
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".