Bibliographic record
Abstract
Juliette Merritt. Beyond Spectacle: Eliza Haywood's Female Spectators. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2004. Pp. 154. $45.00. The number of texts exploring work by eighteenth-century women writers has grown exponentially since the early 1990s. 'Scandalous' authors such as Eliza Haywood have acquired respectable reputations denied them in their own historical moment as feminist scholarship investigates the consequences of women writing and publishing their work. Many now consider Haywood a subversive author who criticizes the societal constructs imposed upon women in her time, yet works within the confines of the social order that governed her publication, her livelihood, and her public persona. Beyond Spectacle situates itself solidly within this body of recent feminist scholarship on Haywood. In her introduction, Juliette Merritt admirably summarizes recent Haywood scholarship. For the uninitiated, this introduction serves as a useful entry into important critical debates surrounding Haywood's work. She includes a brief outline of several issues, including the public sphere of the literary marketplace, commercial aspects of publication, and women's roles within these spaces. Haywood scholars might find this comprehensive background familiar, but the information proves useful as Merritt frames her own assertions. Rather than insisting upon a narrowly focused thesis, Merritt uses the eighteenth-century woman and her relationship with the male gaze as an entry into an investigation of elements of eighteenth-century spectacle found in Haywood's fiction and their influence on women's daily reality. Merritt is interested in the visual/linguistic nexus for its capacity to increase women's access to knowledge and (9), and Haywood's treatment of this nexus to establish agency. In an era when men gaze and control while women are gazed at and controlled, Haywood's appropriation of this spectacle rein-scribes a level of power, and therefore agency, to female protagonists. The opening chapter analyses Haywood's first novel, Love in Excess, the amatory novel that made her famous. Merritt brings together ideas of female sexuality and visual desire and explores them in the framework of contemporary scientific discourse, which relied on rational, objective observation. She notes Haywood's rejection of such discourse as exclusively masculine in order to achieve political resistance for her female characters. In Haywood's fiction, women as well as men exhibit desire by directing their gaze in particular directions. Merritt's discussion focuses on the binaries of feminine/masculine, object/subject, spectacle/spectator and the moment of power resulting from the protagonist's ability to take advantage of the inherent instability of such categories and to move between the two realms. The second chapter shifts to masquerade and the performance of the female gaze in Haywood's Fantomina. Immensely popular in the eighteenth century, masquerades were extravagant balls open to those who could afford the price of admission and an ornate costume. Liberated from everyday societal constraints by masks, those who attended masquerades practiced an otherwise unknown abandon in opulent surroundings. Underlying this seemingly harmless entertainment was the fear that such disguise would escape from the ballroom into everyday life for the purpose of deception, as occurs in Haywood's Fantomina. Throughout the text, Fantomina constantly changes her identity in order to pursue a fickle lover. Merritt argues that Haywood's use of masquerade is a literal use of costuming and mannerisms in order to shift the female character from a position of object to that of subject. The protagonist becomes the spectacle, but through a choice that accords her a measure of power over her own sexuality. Intertwined with this complex model of sexual identity are questions of class and social mobility. Merritt examines the complications that arise from the protagonist being a gentlewoman with the means to support a disguise that imitates women of lower classes. …
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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 | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.005 |
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".