Becky Sharp’s Identity Pursuit in Vanity Fair From Lacan’s Theory of Mirror Stage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
William Makepeace Thackeray is one of the representatives of English critical realism in the 19 th century. Vanity Fair has been generally regarded as his masterpiece, which reveals human nature and universal self-identity pursuit. Based on Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, this paper probes into the protagonist Becky Sharp’s identity pursuit. First, the paper analyzes the awakening of Becky’s sense of identity pursuit. Although this sense is bitty and fragmentary in this period, it accelerates Becky’s steps for identity pursuit. Meanwhile, the appearance and state of this sense correspond to people’s state of pre-mirror stage. Next, the paper explores Becky’s identity pursuit. According to the mirror stage, the identity pursuit needs to be recognized by others, especially the mother. However, the early death of Becky’s mother leads to its primordial lack, so that Becky has to turn to others for recognition. Finally, the paper discusses Becky’s loss in her identity pursuit. Lacan points out that whether successfully distinguishes the specular image (Ideal “I”) from ego (Real “I”) or not is a key point of post-mirror stage. Living in the patriarchal society, Becky’s humble origin, economic quandaries and the requirements of ideal female image in the Victorian age cause her to encounter obstacles. Therefore, it is no doubt that Becky’s efforts for identity pursuing end in failure.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".