Adaptation, Fidelity, and the “Reek” of Aesthetic Ideology: Susan Sontag’s <i>Lady from the Sea</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT: This article considers Susan Sontag’s adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea (1888). Both Ibsen and Sontag break faith with older traditions in order to keep faith with amended and contemporary versions of aesthetic truth. Sontag considered Ibsen’s play to be deeply flawed, but I argue that the flaws Sontag perceived arose, instead, from the conflict between her romantic-modernist ideology and Ibsen’s counter-romantic and realist drama. By pairing down Ibsen’s dense world in favour of symbolism, her play expresses a starker critique of bourgeois marriage; her mermaid is a symbol for a poetics of sexual difference that resists the possibility of woman’s happy adjustment to a patriarchal world. Ibsen, on the other hand, uses his mermaid to acknowledge the simultaneous power and hollowness of romantic symbols, indicating how they can overshadow other aesthetic interests – including the complex and neurotic, late-nineteenth-century bourgeois housewife.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".