Sarah Daniels’ Hysteria Plays: Re-presentations of Madness in <i>Ripen Our Darkness</i> and <i>Head-Rot Holiday</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the most intriguing features of the oeuvre of playwright Sarah Daniels is the high incidence of female characters who have madness ascribed to them. Best known as a dramatist whose work engages with contemporary themes, primarily from a feminist perspective, Daniels writes plays that are predominantly realist and combine darkly comic humour with frequently polysemic word play. Her interest in mental illness is one that mirrors wider feminist attention to the subject and especially the identification of madness as what Elaine Showalter famously describes as the “female malady.” The concatenation between women and madness has provided fertile ground for feminist inquiry, with the labelling of women as mad seen as a manifestation of misogyny. For Jane Ussher, “the discursive practices which create the concept of madness mark it as fearful, as individual, as invariably feminine, as sickness […] [I]f madness is shameful and fearful, as it is within our current discourse, the woman is stigmatized and made an outsider” (12). The examination of hysteria’s clinicians and patients is a distinct and thoroughly examined strand of this area of feminist analysis and reassessment. In the words of Mark Micale, “From its alleged origins in the writings of ancient Egypt and Greece to present-day psychiatric writings, hysteria may be interpreted as a key medical metaphor for la condition feminine […] The wildly shifting physical symptomatology of the disease was thought by many observers to mirror the irrational, capricious, and unpredictable nature of Woman”
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".