An Interpretation of Jane Austen’s Emma by Lacan’s Theory of Mirror Stage
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Emma is honored as the most mature work by Jane Austen. It centers on Emma Woodhouse, the heroine, and reveals the complicated love relationships among Frank Churchill and Harriet Smith, Mr. Elton and Jane Fairfax, and Mr. Knightley and Harriet Smith. This thesis intends to probe into the inner world of Emma and uncover her intricate feeling of match-making for others to self love seeking from the perspective of Lacan’s Mirror Stage and Three-Order Theory. From the theory, a number of crises among Emma and her father, Miss Taylor, and her other friends arise, which all contribute to her loss of complete ego. The split Emma, like a new-born infant, returns to the front of the mirror and begins to see her split ego in it. The Imaginary is the first realm of Lacan’s three Orders. The illusions from Harriet’s obedience, Frank’s deliberate deceiving, and the subtle relationship between Harriet and Mr. Knightley all lead Emma to irresistible self-seeking. Emma seeks out her ego under the Law in the Symbolic Order. In the constraint of Phallus, Emma eventually realizes her true emotion to Mr. Knightley and abandons the thought of match-making for Harriet. She breaks through the obstacles of herself in the Symbolic at last. After undergoing this self recognition, Emma reaches the Real Order, the last realm of ego seeking. Everything before all helps her sublimation in the Real.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".