A Family Affair: Ennobling Suicide in Mary Shelley's <i>Matilda</i>
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mary Shelley's 1819 novella, Matilda was published for the first time in 1959. Most scholars point to the scandalous subject matter of father-daughter incestuous passion as the root of the problem for publication, but this essay argues that the scandalous incest plot is largely a vehicle Shelley uses to explore another shocking topic: the right to commit suicide. The incest theme of Matilda serves Shelley's main argument that suicide may be regarded as virtuous, honourable, and even socially beneficial. Through her delineation of the family drama in which a father desires his daughter, Shelley incorporates ideas from the broad cultural debate about the right to take one's own life as they are represented in the writings of members of her own family—and, in so doing, she enacts another kind of family drama. This essay focuses on Shelley's engagement in a philosophical conversation with members of her family, alive and dead, who, through their writings and lived experiences, represent various aspects of the Romantic-era suicide debate.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it