This thesis is an analysis of one characteristic aspect of Fielding`s satire, that is, his serious social satire through the `beau` characters and cases of sex reversal. Sex reversal is apparently the primary device by which Fielding casts Joseph Andrews as yet another parody of Richardson`s Pamela after Shamela. He has Lady Booby in place of Mr. B and Joseph the footman in Pamela`s shoes, thus reversing the man/master v. woman/servant relationship in Pamela. He also renders an equally intriguing case of sex reversal towards the end of Book IV, in which `Beau` Didapper narrowly escapes rape by the formidable Slipslop, only because Parson Adams mistakes him for a `soft-skinned` woman. In neither case, however, is sex reversal simply a parodic or farcical device. Lady Booby and Beau Didapper, the woman displacing a man and the feminized man, both from the beau monde or high society, are the characters that best reveal Fielding`s concerned satire at the failure and impotency of contemporary patrician classes. Beau Didapper, along with his precursors Lord Dapper in The Historical Register for the Year 1736 and Eurydice Hissed and young Squire Booby in Shamela, typifies in burlesque the patricians who, preoccupied with gratifying private desires and self-interests, totally disregard what Fielding believed to be their public obligations in preserving good morals and culture of the age. Didapper`s characteristic action of admiring his own self in the looking glass betrays not just self-indulgent effeminacy but implicit sexual impotence, too, which Fielding renders representative of patricians` impotency at all levels, political, moral, or cultural. Likewise, it is significant that Fielding`s Lady Booby, especially from the opening of Book IV onwards, appears as a failed `Patroness`, a typical eighteenth-century absentee landowner, not simply an amorous middle-aged woman. Her take-over of the Booby estate aptly represents the `fatherless` world of Joseph Andrews where all fathers, except Parson Adams, are dead, missing, or neglectful, which is eventually the consequence of patrician classes` deserting their paternalist duties as it is embodied in Lady Booby. Both Lady Booby`s and Beau Didapper`s cases evidence that the gist of Fielding`s social satire, at its most intriguing, is cast in the language of sex reversal and sexual (im)potence.