Henry Fielding’s The Female Husband and the Sexuality of Vagrancy

In The Female Husband (1746), Henry Fielding spins a fictionalized account of the real and sensational arrest of Charles Hamilton, tried for vagrancy after the discovery that Hamilton was (in the eyes of the law) a woman married to another woman. The logic naming a “female husband’s” crime as vagrancy connects eighteenth-century ideologies of labor and class mobility to the discourses and practices of gendered embodiment we now study under the rubric of the history of sexuality. When read alongside his writings on poor law and crime, The Female Husband reveals Fielding’s view of economic and sexual deviance as intertwined, mutually constitutive phenomena. Vagrancy is not incidental to this text; the logic of vagrancy law fundamentally structures the narrative and provides Fielding scope to speculate on the invisible forces that move bodies—whether those bodies are spurred towards industry or idleness, deference or criminality, sexual virtue or sexual deviance. By tracing vagrancy as a queer category, this essay proposes an approach to eighteenth-century histories of sexuality that refuses to understand sexuality in isolation from other interlocking modes of apprehending and disciplining bodies, desires, and animation.