Between the Town and the Mountain: Abortion and the Politics of Life in Edith Wharton's <i>Summer</i>
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the early twentieth century, American laws focused on women's reproductive capacities and were coalescing into the ethical and moral frameworks that subtend American reproductive politics today. Edith Wharton published her 1917 novel, Summer, at a time when anti-abortion sentiment was widespread in American culture. Through a reading of Summer, the article provides a theoretical and historical framework for understanding this new American obsession with the judicial regulation of women's reproductive options. In particular, I situate the novel's presentation of abortion within the tension between the carefully defined laws of North Dormer, the town in which the majority of the story takes place, and the lawlessness of the Mountain, a place that looms throughout the story as the protagonist's birthplace and a location of utmost abjection. The novel's profound insight is that power does not function unilaterally and individually but through and on the population. Furthermore, Wharton leaps ahead by recognizing that life is not simply that which lives but that which is recognized and embraced by the law. This realization, one that Wharton must have come to terms with through her painful work with World War I refugees, shapes Charity's character and her understanding not only of how reproduction is regulated but also of how living within this regulation and control generates the norm and offers the only possibility for a liveable and legible life.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.009 |
| 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 it