A hungry tigress who, when she has traversed the wood in fruitless search… and prepares to leap on her prey.

Answer: These lines have been taken from Joseph Andrews, a famous prose satire by Henry Fielding. Here we get a pen picture of the savagery and brutality inflicted upon the simple Joseph by Mrs. Slipslop.

Mrs. Slipslop jumps upon Joseph just like a hungry hound to prey on him in order to satiate his sexual thirst. Even at the age of forty-five, she is full of sexual demands waiting to be met. The writer compared this lust with the hunger of a starving tigress. Mrs. Slipslop appears as an embodiment of typical and individual qualities. She is the personification of unlawful lust and affection of gentility and of coarseness and selfishness. Her physical appearance is not in the least attractive. She is rather repulsive. Her nose is, as Fielding narrates, too long and her eyes are too little. She entertains a lustful passion for the handsome youth Joseph. Her attempted seduction of Joseph is a parody of Lady Booby’s efforts in the same direction. She jumped on him forgetting her age and status in society. The mock-heroic simile is as amusing as it is appropriate for her characterization.

We may conclude that Mrs. Slipslop is the epitome of lust and sexual depression. She becomes blind to fulfill it at any rate forgetting what should be right and what should be wrong.