The Huntress and the Holy Mother: Symbolic Integration in Berni Stapleton’s <i>The Pope and Princess Di</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the treatment of symbols in The Pope and Princess Di, a recent comic/satiric play by a renowned Newfoundland theatre artist, Berni Stapleton: their inherent organicism, their constant subjection to alteration and hybridization, and their destructive potential when viewed as sacrosanct. The essay examines crucial changes in the self-images of the play’s central characters, Bernadette and Diana, two women recently diagnosed with breast cancer.These changes arise fromthe reconfiguration and re-evaluation of deeply embraced religious, quasireligious, and cultural symbols as the two women provide each other with new insights necessary for their emotional and spiritual healing.The article draws on Christian and radical feminist analyses of Christian religious symbols and the relationship between symbolismand idolatry and is informed by feminist endorsements of an organic rather than fixed relationship with cherished or otherwise powerful symbols. The article also draws on a vision of historical process articulated by Alfred North Whitehead. According toWhitehead, the dominance over others of particular models of understanding is historically inevitable but is also dangerous because of the high likelihood of a stifling or destructive resistance to crucial new input among those most invested in the status quo.Though change will arise in any case, it will bemore humane and nourishing if both the necessity of the new knowledge and the best parts of the old are acknowledged. In accordance with a Whiteheadian vision of change at its best, Stapleton’s play challenges prevalent norms and symbols while keeping a critical eye on ways of understanding that would sweep in to replace them. In The Pope and Princess Di, the new symbolic order is tentative and rooted in the day-to-day perplexities of lived experience, rather than founded on elusive absolutes.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".