“He bears no rival near the throne”: Male Narcissism and Early Feminism in the Works of Charlotte Dacre
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For many critics, Charlotte Dacre is an essentially conservative author, whose female villains ventriloquize and thereby discredit early feminist thought. This essay disputes such readings by exploring her under-acknowledged criticisms of patriarchy. Dacre’s male characters are self-important narcissists, who disdain female education for the agency it gives women. If a woman is well-educated, she is less likely to submit, less likely to serve as an extension of her husband’s will alone. Patriarchy also encourages women to turn on one another, Dacre argues; her female villains uniformly value advancement among men over sisterhood, and they willingly destroy other women to attain their own ends. Dacre thus takes a pessimistic approach to women’s options at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Her female characters do not enjoy happy endings, regardless of marital status, level of education, or morality, because patriarchal systems are designed to crush women no matter how they behave. Far from mocking early feminism, then, Dacre criticizes it for being insufficiently radical in addressing problems with male behaviour.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".