Angels and Ingenues in Tennyson’s The Princess and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Princess Ida
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay argues that Tennyson’s “The Princess,” frequently attacked as an anti-feminist poem, is more nuanced and potentially feminist than many critics have acknowledged. The poem’s exploration of gender roles emerges as especially challenging and thoughtful in comparison to the extreme gender conservatism of Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical parody, “Princess Ida.” Where Gilbert and Sullivan shrink all aspects of female character to sexual desire, Tennyson treats the female aspirations in his poem with considerable seriousness and respect. Ultimately, the reversion of the characters in “The Princess” to traditional gender roles seems based not upon fear of a new kind of femininity but upon fear of a new kind of masculinity. Tennyson’s poem implies that women can develop intellectually without threatening men’s stature, but men cannot develop emotionally and spiritually without losing worldly power. In that implication lies a tacit admission of the emptiness of Victorian society’s claims that women could wield power through moral authority. Moral authority, Tennyson implicitly confesses, has no real force in the world.
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".