Dancing in the "eye of the world" : voyeurism, performance, and the public text in Jane Austen’s scenes of dance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Life in Jane Austen's fictional world is carried on under the constant public scrutiny of the "eye of the world." The consciousness of being watched reaches its most intense for Austen's heroines during social dances, one of the only societally sanctioned opportunities for the sexes to intermingle openly. Austen is thereby enabled to use the dance scenario for an investigation of female response to a "surveillance society." In exploring aspects of the dancing-watching relationship (voyeurism; performance; public text), I have grouped the novels into three pairs, according to the aspect which seems to predominate. In Chapter I, I look at voyeuristic acts of observing dance in Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion. Marianne Dashwood, an avid dancer, represents the passive watched object; the other, "active" alternative for women is to watch -- both Elinor Dashwood and Anne Elliot relinquish dance, and thereby preserve themselves from the threats of the performative space. In Chapter II, I focus on performance in Northanger Abbey and Emma: for both Catherine Norland and Emma Woodhouse, awareness of audience becomes a requisite feature of relation to a spectator society, as Austen illustrates the responses of the innocent and the experienced female, respectively, to a performative environment. In Chapter III, I look at Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, where a close examination of Austen's construction of the dance scenes reveals clearly that she emphasises the powerlessness of watched females within the ballroom, and by extension within society. Austen uses the ballroom as a microcosm of a voyeuristic and performative society: the actions of her heroines during scenes of dance are therefore illustrative of the various ways in which a female may negotiate dancing -- and living -- in the eye of 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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".