ABSTRACT
This chapter situates Henry Fielding’s hare-hunting tropes in relation to the redefinition of gender relations concomitant with the rise of companionate marriage and in the context of eighteenth-century hunting culture, specifically the 1671 Game Act, which reorganized human–animal relations in potent ways. Hare-hunting has served as an amatory trope ever since the love-struck Apollo first pursued the reluctant Daphne in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. To hunt a hare in eighteenth-century England was an expression of the power and privilege of the gentry, who from 1671 to 1831 held exclusive hunting rights that had historically belonged to the king. Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones reveal how, as the hunted hare of the Ovidian tale courses through the eighteenth century, it is reconfigured as a potent symbol of a landed gentry that jealously guards its place within a changing social order.
