Beyond Repression: German Women's War History and Hysteria in Mavis Gallant's "O Lasting Peace" and "An Alien Flower"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines how two of Mavis Gallant’s German stories, “O Lasting Peace” and “An Alien Flower,” engage with questions of Aryan German women’s culpability for the Nazi past and the longevity of fascist sentiment in domestic spaces in Germany after the war. Using recent feminist historical scholarship on Aryan women in the Third Reich and the postwar period, the paper reveals how Gallant’s main female characters are not simply innocent victims of the past and outlines the multiple and often differing ways that they continue to enact their guilt. Yet, by using hysteria as a primary trope in both stories, Gallant also opens a space for her characters to express their ambivalence about their roles, thereby offering a more complicated view of the roles and responsibilities of German women in the Nazi and postwar periods than simple notions of guilt can encompass.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".