Compulsory Heterosexuality and Male Power in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones Anonymous College

According to 18th-century feminist writer Mary Montagu, “Men, biased by custom, prejudice, and interest, have presumed boldly to pronounce sentence in their own favor, because possession empowered them to make violence take place of justice.” Over two centuries after Montagu published Woman Not Inferior to Man, the source of these words, feminist writer Adrienne Rich published her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” In writing this essay, Rich intended to explore the ways in which the same male violence, power, and heterosexuality that Montagu describes disempower women in addition to challenging the erasure of non-heterosexual experiences from literature. Although it is unlikely that the non-heterosexual experience was within the scope of Montagu or any other 18th-century writers, the characteristics of male power that Rich identifies in this essay are applicable to a wide range of literature from that era, including Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. According to literary scholar Ian Watt, the novel as a literary form established by 18th-century writers such as Fielding is rooted in realism, which attempts to capture the rawest aspects of the human experience, from sexual appetite to the need to steal to blind...