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This essay explores the fetishism of mourning and mourning jewellery as fetish in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa. Following some historical background on mourning jewellery fashioned with human hair and a definition of fetishism as it relates to mourning jewellery, I discuss Clarissa herself as fetish. I also examine Clarissa's bequests of mourning jewellery by exploring how these fetishized bequests offer psychic compensation to the wearers, allow access to the virtues associated with Clarissa, and assure remembrance of the dead. Finally, I argue for the centrality of mourning to the realization of Richardson's moral, didactic, and aesthetic intent.

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This paper argues for the feminine status of Orlando Faulkland in Frances Sheridan's Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. In his constant display of excessive emotion; in his passivity and helplessness; in his silence and his being silenced; in his foreignness; and even in his one-time lapse of sexual control, the character displays his feminine standing within the novel. More particularly, his emasculation by various women within the novel confirms this status. Even Faulkland's so-called acts of masculine activity and power are undercut by signs of weakness and/or by their association with the genres of romance and comedy.

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