Caught by the Throat: Anti-slavery Assemblages in <i>Paul et Virginie</i> and <i>Belinda</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Extending the observations of literary critics who draw connections between Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788) and Maria Edge-worth’s Belinda (1801), this essay examines how Bernardin’s novel informs Edgeworth’s racial politics in Belinda via cultural artifacts. Edgeworth re-imagines the iron collar featured in Paul et Virginie as an Angola pea necklace in her novel, communicating through the necklace a message of cross-cultural tolerance. Along with the merchant ship Saint Géran in Paul et Virginie and the necklace’s remains in Edgeworth’s 1810 revision of Belinda, the jewellery and slave collar partake in an assemblage that infuses these authors’ novels with Black history. Focusing on these artifacts’ material legacies as presented in their respective novels, I argue that Paul et Virginie evokes connections to Mauritian Maroons’ traumatic past and that Belinda advocates for domestic tolerance of interracial marriage. These objects resonate through out these texts, offering a more nuanced and material understanding of Black culture than most critics have heretofore allowed these works.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 |
| 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".