Madness, Masculinity, and Magic in Robertson Davies’ Fifth Business : A Tale of Hysteria; or, ‘the Suffocation of the Mother’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Fifth Business is obsessed with straying wits, wandering women, female and male tramps, and boys who run off to the war and to the circus. Tramps and tramping threaten to destabilize the gender roles that secure settled bourgeois life in the fictional Ontario town of Deptford. These crises of mobility are often aligned with madness and, more specifically, with the disease of hysteria, the latter having been identified since antiquity with aberrant sexuality, pathological wandering, and sex-role conflict. With its portrayals of hysterical wandering, sex-role conflict, role-playing, and hypnosis, the novel recalls nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century conceptions of hysteria. But, as well as presenting familiar images of female hysteria, Davies, in his portrayal of his protagonist, also sheds light on the lesser-known form of male hysteria. Showing Davies’ debt to Freud and to hysteria studies, and presenting homosexual and lesbian alternatives, the narrative ultimately conveys the message that male mental health and masculinity can be secured only by the performance of heterosexuality.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".