Eros and Exchange Alley: Speculative Desire in Eliza Haywood’s <i>Memoirs of a Certain Island</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the philosophical stakes of Eliza Haywood’s confrontation with a topical economic crisis: the South Sea Bubble of 1720. In Memoirs of a Certain Island (1725), Haywood recalibrates her theory of erotic desire to the conditions of the market. Her project intersects in two ways with John Locke’s arguments in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690–94). First, Haywood follows Locke in using the category of desire to relate personal experience to social formation. In her hands, desire accounts for speculative investment as well as erotic coupling. Second, Haywood shows that the desire licensed by modern finance threatens the “self-consciousness” that, for Locke, defines personal identity. Desire works differently in Memoirs of a Certain Island than it does in Haywood’s more familiar writings, such as Fantomina (1725). Rather than promoting self-consistency, speculative desire disorders the minds of people that it actuates. Haywood articulates the solution, as well as the problem, through the idiom of sexual passion. Her vision for recovery depends on the salutary potential of another species of erotic attachment, passionate love.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".