Strong Women among ‘The Defenseless Christians’ : la place des femmes dans les romans mennonites Sweeter than all the World de Rudy Wiebe et A Complicated Kindness de Miriam Toews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Rudy Wiebe (b. 1934) and Miriam Toews (b. 1964) embody two generations of Mennonite writing in Canada. Although their works differ greatly in terms of style and content, both have written novels reflecting on the place of women in Mennonite society and their submission to patriarchal authority. This article proposes an analysis of Wiebe’s Sweeter than All the World and Toews’s A Complicated Kindness centering on the stylistic and generic strategies each novel deploys to address the topos of female victimhood. Wiebe relies on pathos to test the limits of sentimentalism and involve his readers in a community of feeling. As for Toews, she aims her wry humor at the unique apartness of the Mennonite community, using the incongruous as a discursive weapon to instill a sense of solidarity with the displaced and the marginal. Both novels are consequently fully resonant with the anxieties of a national culture that endeavors to conjugate within the same space the claims of its minorities with the ethical aspirations of an increasingly diverse majority.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".