Assuming Innocence: The Ingénue’s Satire in Frances Burney’s <i>Evelina</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For most readers, the primary satirist in Frances Burney’s first novel, Evelina (1778), is Burney herself, leaving Evelina a narratorial avatar for the author. Seeking to continue Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s project of pluralizing the ways in which we talk about innocence—especially feminine innocence—this article argues that Burney’s eponymous narrator Evelina is both ingénue and satirist, and that Evelina’s innocence is a vehicle for her satire. In so arguing, this article intervenes in the diegetic as well as decades-long scholarly debate about whether Evelina is innocent or cunning, new to the ways of the world or intelligent. When these binaries are challenged and Evelina’s innocence and intellect are read together, Burney’s first novel opens up for further feminist readings, as well as more productive avenues of thought about feminine subjectivity and epistemologies.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".