Polish or Work? Four Women Novelists and the Professionalization of Accomplishment, 1796-1814
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Polish or Work? Four Women Novelists and the Professionalization of Accomplishment, 1796-1814 examines the ways in which cultural models of accomplished, industrious femininity find expression in four novels written by women during the Romantic period: Amelia Opie’s The Father and Daughter (1801), Mary Brunton’s Self-Control (1811), Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1796), and Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814). This dissertation reads accomplishment as a pervasive and familiar cultural practice that writers use to interrogate domestic ideology and middle-class women’s position in commercial society within the space of popular fiction. I focus, specifically, on instances in which the genteel heroine turns privately honed artistic skills to remunerative labour, what I refer to as the professionalization of accomplishment. I do so in order to complicate the critical assumption that domesticity occupies a fundamentally antithetical relationship to work in Romantic-era fiction by women. Accomplishment, in these novels, assumes import as a specialized realm of knowledge, application, and self-fulfillment, and offers the rhetorical framework through which these writers narrate the heroine’s search for economic self-sufficiency, moral self-government, and social integration within but also beyond the confines of the private sphere and its ideology of domestic femininity. In doing so, this project challenges a critical heritage in literary studies, British women’s history, and art history that has long dismissed female accomplishment and the decorative arts as the distraction of leisure hours and the polish of ornamental femininity in the private sphere. Linking accomplishment to the Protestant ethic of self-regulation and self-improvement through work, these novels claim a place for their heroines in society as rational subjects, contributors to public, economic life, moral reformers, and creators of culture. Read collectively, these novels represent a broad feminist appeal for social justice in which individual merit and self-exertion supplant hierarchies of sexual difference in shaping the social, cultural, and economic relations of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".