Fictions of Obligation: Contract and Romance in Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay reads the short romances of Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn as complex responses to contract-based theories of obligation and the model of the political subject who enters into relationships of willing submission. Cavendish and Behn take up the subject of women’s contracts and obligations within the generic constraints of romance, but their romances belie the fiction of women freely and happily contracting with their romance heroes. Far from instancing willing submission, Cavendish’s heroines actively engage with law and go to war to subdue men who prove bad contractors and to model new forms of obligation. Behn’s romances, in contrast, teem with women who are bad contractors and whose flagrant violations of propriety and conjugality pose a sardonic challenge to conventional definitions of women’s obligations. Together, their works trouble the fiction of the willingly bound woman and attest to the diminishing power of romance to model women’s obligations in a time of continuing political crisis.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".