The Female Accomplice: Rape and the Servant Problem in <i>Roxana</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article evaluates the servant rape in Daniel Defoe’s Roxana (1724) against conduct literature on the “servant problem,” and particularly against Defoe’s multiple tracts on servants and supposedly promiscuous female domestic labourers. Like contemporary conduct writing, Roxana’s rape narrative expresses intersecting social anxieties among employer classes over commerce infiltrating the domestic sphere and uncertainty related to contracted servants’ virtue and obedience. Roxana specifically reflects conduct writers’ association of female servants’ disloyalty with sexual promiscuity. Yet, unlike Defoe’s conduct literature, which avoids discussing servant rape, Roxana reflects the normalization of rape of female domestics. I argue that the novel’s representation of rape deflects blame from male authority within the private sphere onto a female accomplice engaged in sexual labour beyond the bounds of the middle-class household. The narrative thus draws on the common occurrence of the rape of female servants but, at the same time, removes culpability from a readership whom Defoe protects as an ideologically moral employer class.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".