The representation of sexuality and gender in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper inquires into the dynamics of gender and sexuality in one of the most acclaimed nineteenth-century texts, William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair, as these issues are not sufficiently addressed in its extensive critical appraisal.While drawing on feminist and gender-focused critique, the paper explores Thackeray's representation of women , gendered power relations , sexuality as a site for power, and societal strategies that delimit female agency and exclude women from the public sphere.The discussion of society's ideas about genderspecific functional domains; cultural constructs of womanhood , motherhood, and propriety; stereotypes that enhance cultural normative structures; and recurrent literary iconic figures is instrumental in examining the ways in which Thackeray's female characters either break through the representational confinements of the nineteenth-century gender discourses, or find their agencies impended by and entrapped in the patriarchal law of Victorian culture .Thackeray positions his characters in a society that is clearly patriarchal , yet he exposes various human vanities and vices rather than intentionally offering a critique of the circumscribed role of women .However, issues of gender are compellingly epitomized in Thackeray's main character, Becky Sharp, the social upstart who consistently defies and transgresses nineteenth-century gender roles and thus unbalances established power relations.By representing Becky as a trespasser of societal norms, Thackeray himself violates social conventions, challenges traditional assumptions about women , and questions the Victorian ideal of domesticity.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".