Carol Shields and Simone de Beauvoir: Immanence, Transcendence, and Women’s Work in A Fairly Conventional Woman, The Stone Diaries , and Unless
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many of the female protagonists in Carol Shields’s fiction are defined by the daily slog of their domestic work, ostensibly doomed to what Simone de Beauvoir famously called “immanence.” However, Shields does not view women’s domestic work with the same terror as de Beauvoir. Shields equips the female protagonists in A Fairly Conventional Woman (1982), The Stone Diaries (1993), and Unless (2002) with some sort of artistic or creative work that allows them the “expansion of existence,” or transcendence, that de Beauvoir saw as only possible for men. Considering Shields’s fiction in light of de Beauvoir’s theories not only illuminates Shields’s own feminist philosophy but also situates her in the larger feminist community by demonstrating that she does indeed use a feminist approach to her recognition of women’s work as a potential (and necessary) source of transcendence.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".