Mellifluent Sexuality: Female Intimacy in Ann Radcliffe’s <i>The Romance of the Forest</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Pamphlets like Onania (1716), whose rate of reprinting exploded during the eighteenth century, became docents for ironically teaching and demonstrating erotic pleasures to readers, rather than expurgating them, as intended. As a result, the possibilities for pleasure reading were varied and many. I offer Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Romance of the Forest (1791), as an extension of those autoerotic reading pleasures for an eighteenth-century audience. Radcliffe’s novel veils the possibility of a masturbatory narrative with music and instrumentality. The lute, an instrument with diverse and erotic resonances in the eighteenth century, mediates these practices for Radcliffe’s two heroines. In meditating on the lute’s depiction, I trace the early modern history of the lute in literature and art, reflect on its connections to embodiment and erotic performance, and consider the ways musical performance becomes a site of female intimacy and pleasure, which complicates readings of public and private spaces. For Clara and Adeline, the autoerotic lute enables the blossoming of transgressive sexuality, despite the heteronormativity offered by the novel’s ending.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".