Sexual Violence and Ghostly Justice in “The Lady's Maid's Bell” and “Kerfol”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Edith Wharton's “The Lady's Maid's Bell” (1902, 1904) and “Kerfol” (1916) share a concern with sexual violence, isolation, and psychological abuse experienced by women. I argue that the stories depict irruptions of a spectral women's history into naturalized gender relations. I describe Wharton's mixing of Gothic, realist, and naturalist modes to depict a character type she found most interesting, one whose “fate is settled beyond rescue,” to support my contention that we should recognize the continuity of these stories with those aspects of her “major fictions, [which] taken together, constitute perhaps the most searching—and searing—feminist analysis of the construction of ‘femininity’ produced by any novelist in this [the twentieth] century.” Most assessments of the stories are not comparative. Thus, I draw here on the critical response to each story to advance the claim that by apposing them we find overlapping concerns with sexual violence, the historical contingency of gender, and the difficulties of achieving justice for women.
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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 | 0.000 | 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) | 0.001 | 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".