In or Out? The Existential Dilemma of Homosexuals in Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honorable Defeat
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A Fairly Honorable Defeat is one of Iris Murdoch’s best acclaimed novels. Critics generally regard it as a triumph of the evil over the good, as embodied in characters Julius King and Tallis Browne. It could also be read from a different perspective as a fairly honorable defeat of the heterosexual love by the homosexual love. But Simon and Axel only win a narrow victory. Their non-normative sexuality still entangles them in gender, social and moral dilemmas. A detailed and close reading of the novel shows Murdoch’s concern not only about how the existential dilemma of homosexuals has shaped their gender identity and limited their moral vision and choice, but also about the underlying social problems of power and violence. By bringing into conversation Goffman’s theory of stigma, Butler’s theory of gender performance and Foucault’s view of male friendship, the article argues that Simon and Axel have to struggle between secrecy and disclosure of their sexual identity because of the large homophobic social environment. The insecurity and anxiety engendered by their sexual identity makes it difficult for them to associate with others in sincerity. Their moral weakness and failures are largely occasioned by the social environment.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it