A Case for Hard-heartedness: <i>Clarissa</i>, Indifferency, Impersonality
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reading Clarissa’s hard-heartedness through the lens of indifferency clarifies what is at stake in her still-puzzling and multi-layered defection. The phenomenon of hard-heartedness in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa is here re-evaluated through John Locke’s concept of “indifferency” and through contemporary theories of impersonality. Beginning with an account of the novel’s reception in which readers were unnerved by Clarissa’s refusal to marry her rapist, I locate an important counter-response in Anna Laetitia Barbauld, who valued precisely the quality of impassivity in Richardson’s heroine. In eighteenth-century thought, a similar form of disengagement is articulated by Locke’s notion of indifferency, an impartiality that risks alienation for the sake of understanding and autonomy. By featuring an impersonal Clarissa, I show how the novel’s theory of character, in which a hidden interiority underwrites personhood, contains its own critique of a depth-model of psychology. I conclude by examining a phase of Clarissa’s narrative not often discussed: her life as an urban rape survivor, an incarnation that offers the most challenging as well as the most promising possibilities for the impersonal person in the novel.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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 it