Beyond the Marriage Metaphor: Nation, Violence, and the Fallen Woman in The Canadian Brothers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In John Richardson's historical novel The Canadian Brothers (1840), Matilda Montgomery is constructed as sexually and morally fallen, and commentators have seen her merely as a demonic representation of the sinful United States. However, unlike most fictional fallen women, as characterized by scholars such as Amanda Anderson and Nina Auerbach, Matilda finds power in her condition; her representation challenges dualistic nineteenth-century stereotypes about women, as well as suppositions about nationalism. In large part, this interrogation is accomplished by the novel's challenging of the conventions of national allegory, especially what Carl Murphy calls the marriage metaphor, in which a man and woman of different nationalities join in a romantic union, suggesting a similar international harmony. Matilda shows both gendered and national identities to be performative, in Judith Butler's sense, and demonstrates how the fallen woman has the potential to subvert sexist and nationalist claims.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.054 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".