_Fanny Hill_ (1749) is a female picaresque novel, like _Moll Flanders_ (1722) and _The Female Husband_ (1746).
***** Literature and Medicine 21.1 (2002) 56-77 "An Infallible Nostrum": Female Husbands and Greensick Girls in Eighteenth-Century England Bonnie Blackwell
. . . In 1746, Henry Fielding adapted a true story from a colleague's legal docket of one Mary Hamilton, a woman recently convicted of fraud for marrying a woman. Fielding made this case into a highly entertaining picaresque novella of a wandering trickster-a cross-dressing female husband. He drew the title of his novelette, _The Female Husband_, from the female warrior tradition of eighteenth-century popular ballads, of which there are dozens, including "The Female Soldier," "The Female Smuggler," "The Female Sailor Bold," and many more. 2 While borrowing both the titular formula and the "high-mettled heroine" dressed as a man from the ballads, Fielding departs from the ballads' "highly conventionalized" containment strategies, which dictate that the story end with a reinstatement of the status quo: without exception, the cross-dressing woman of the ballads renounces male drag to become an obedient wife to the man she followed to war. 3 Fielding's female husband, however, dresses as a man to practice medicine; moreover, she does not pursue one male lover, as the heroines of the ballads do, but entices many female lovers from among her patients. Most simply put, Hamilton adopts male dress to evade the conventional narrative of heterosexual courtship and marriage, usurping the male's literary genre (picaresque), his profession (medicine), and his love object (women). . . .
While expanding Hamilton's conquests and compounding her charms, Fielding claims-if only on the first and last pages of _The Female Husband_ -- to repudiate her "unnatural lusts" (p. 29). Since Fielding nominates Hamilton's personal and professional exploits as the most "surprising" in the entire pantheon of human perversions (p. 29), some readers characterize his representation of Mary Hamilton as "violently defensive" and as "outraged" by the female husband's ability to "belittle" legitimate ownership of the phallus. 7 His authorial disavowal locates The Female Husband within the eighteenth-century novelistic tradition of what John Cleland's Fanny Hill calls the "tail-piece of morality." 8 Indispensable for prostitution novels, this custom dictates that a scandalous book open and close with a brief rehearsal of regret and an assurance of reform. Outbid by the indelible pleasures offered by the narrative of The Female Husband, Fielding's frame calls into question his motivations for discovering and celebrating the "uncommon notorious Cheat" Mary Hamilton. 9 Fielding's claim that he memorializes Hamilton merely as an example "sufficient to deter all others from the commission of any such foul and unnatural crimes" (p. 51) is not convincing. The Female Husband's extended focus on female same-sex desire and female medical practice is surprisingly subversive of legal and medical attempts to curtail female independence by prescribing marriage as a bodily remedy to women in the eighteenth century. . . .
8. Fanny Hill explains how the vestigial moral looks to a canny reader who can spot the ruse: "You laugh perhaps at this tail-piece of morality, express'd from me by the force, of truth, resulting from compar'd experiences: you think it, no doubt, out of place; out of character: possibly too you may look on it as the paultry finesse of one who seeks to mask a devotee to Vice under a rag of a veil, impudently smuggled from the shrine of Virtue." John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. Peter Sabor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 187.
[The full text of the article is available at <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/literature_and_medicine/v021/21.1blackwell.html> and <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/literature_and_medicine/v021/21.1blackwell.pdf> if you have individual or institutional access to the Project Muse.] ***** -- Yoshie
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