Sex, Love, Revenge, and Murder in "Away Down in Jamaica": A Lost Short Story by Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton)
Notice bibliographique
Résumé
Tucked between advertisements for Ever Ready Dress Stays ("Impervious, Pliable, Durable, Reliable"), Jonas' Flavoring Extracts ("Perfectly Pure Extracts of Choicest Fruits"), and Bovril Fluid Beef ("A Genuine Social Reform") in the Montreal women's newspaper the Metropolitan from 19 March 1898 is an unknown and previously unrecovered story by Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton, 1865-1914) with a decidedly unladylike content. "Away Down in Jamaica" details a love triangle or even quadrangle between four people. Kathleen Harold (a white woman) spurns Phil Everett (a white man), instead agreeing to marry Wickliff Walker (a white man) who has had an affair with and cast aside a Jamaican ("brown" [4]) woman with the symbolically weighted name of Clarissa. Eventually Everett dies from love, Clarissa vanishes after poisoning Kathleen Harold, and Wickliff Walker is left bereft. Set against the dramatic backdrop of Jamaica, with its "magnificent sea of fire" caused by the "mingling together in great numbers of phosphorescents" (4), and obsessed with its themes of interracial sex, magic, magnetism, betrayal, murder, and revenge, the story would seem to be extremely unusual in the corpus of Sui Sin Far's fiction. Perhaps even more odd is the placement of this story in the socially upright ladies newspaper the Metropolitan, with its ornate masthead of angels and cherubim (see illustration), and its advertisements for respectable businesses. Further deepening the mystery surrounding the story is its location at the Southwest Museum in Los Angeles among letters between Sui Sin Far and her mentor and editor, the well-known and influential Californian publisher of Land of Sunshine and Out West, Charles Fletcher Lummis. What was Sui Sin Far's purpose in writing this story? And what was her goal in sending it to Lummis? I found this story in the archives at the Southwest Museum while doing research at both the Southwest Museum and the Huntington Library on how Sui Sin Far's publishers attempted to shape her literary identity and capitalize on her appeal as an "exotic" Asian American writer. "Away Down in Jamaica" was among letters that probably had not been part of this archive at the Southwest Museum (the Marion Parks Collection) until the late 1990s. Marion Parks was a librarian at the Southwest involved in the project of trying to save the Lummis homestead. According to the current archivist at the Southwest Museum, Kim Walters, [End Page 85] The short story that you referred to came in with other letters from Edith Eaton about 4 years ago [in 1998]. It is not in the part of the Lummis collection that everyone else has published previously. You will be the first. As far as I can tell Marion Parks, the woman that had all of the Lummis correspondence, worked here at the Museum briefly in 1927-1928, [and] she continued to be affiliated with the Museum, and with the Charles F. Lummis Foundation, which did not last very long. This would have been in the early 1940's when people were trying to save El Alisal (Lummis' home).... I have a feeling that this woman just went through and picked up bundles of Lummis papers and correspondence. We left the papers organized the way they were donated, because they were tied up with string, with Lummis' handwritten notes on each group. From some other things that we found in Marion Park's personal files, I think she had intended upon writing a biography of Lummis which she never did. This may mean that other new materials—such as new letters written by Sui Sin Far to Lummis—are now in this archive at the Southwest Museum. Based on what I know about the correspondence, I surmise that Sui Sin Far sent a copy of this short story to Lummis with a letter, as was her frequent practice. However, it is unclear...
Récupéré en direct depuis OpenAlex et désinversé. Les résumés ne sont pas conservés dans cette base de données : les index inversés représentent 8,6 Go des 9,3 Go de texte de la base, et le serveur dispose de 13 Go libres.
Comment cette classification a été obtenuedéplier
Prédiction machine sur la base complète
Imitation des enseignantsNi prévalence calibrée, ni vérité terrain. Validation humaine à venir. Le volet Gemma est une étiquette directe du modèle pour chaque travail de la base, lue sur la notice réduite au titre. Le volet Codex est un classifieur appris des 10 348 étiquettes directes de Codex et calibré sur les taux pondérés de l'échantillon; les champs sans appui suffisant ne portent aucun appel Codex. Le mode candidate est l'union des deux volets; le consensus est leur intersection. Ces sorties portent le statut machine_predicted_unvalidated et ne sont pas des étiquettes humaines.
Scores du classifieur distillé par catégorie (deux têtes)
| Catégorie | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Métarecherche | 0,001 | 0,001 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens strict) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Méta-épidémiologie (sens large) | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Bibliométrie | 0,000 | 0,000 |
| Études des sciences et des technologies | 0,020 | 0,008 |
| Communication savante | 0,004 | 0,002 |
| Science ouverte | 0,001 | 0,003 |
| Intégrité de la recherche | 0,004 | 0,007 |
| Charge utile insuffisante (le modèle a refusé de juger) | 0,006 | 0,001 |
Scores machine (provisoires)
Les deux têtes enseignantes du modèle étudiant, lues sur ce travail. Un score ordonne la base pour la relecture; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie, et le statut de validation accompagne chaque rangée tel quel.
Scores de référence d'un modèle non mature (critères de maturité non atteints, 7 itérations). Un score ordonne; il n'affirme jamais une catégorie.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · tel quel depuis la passe de notation : score_only signifie que le nombre peut ordonner les travaux, et qu'aucune étiquette de catégorie n'en découleClassification
machine, non validéePrédiction automatique; un appel candidat d’une seule source (Gemma direct ou Codex distillé), pas un consensus.
Le détail, modèle par modèle et score par score, se trouve en fin de page sous « Comment cette classification a été obtenue ».