Richardsonian Fiction, Women’s Raillery, and Heteropessimist Humour
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The fiction of Samuel Richardson is not fundamentally humourless. This article analyzes the rich vein of humour found in Pamela in her Exalted Condition (1745) and The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54) to show that Richardson was acutely aware of the interpersonal power of laughter and that he harnessed it for aesthetic and moral ends. Novelistic scenes of spontaneous conversation dramatize the various and often embodied effects of humorous performances. Using theories of gender and humour, I argue that Richardson critiques and modifies Restoration wit by using women’s raillery as the primary vehicle for novelistic humour. Richardsonian fiction thus feminizes the domineering tendencies of masculine wit and the adversarial harms of ridicule, replacing them with chaste female models of “satirical merriment.” Such pleasure does not equate to liberation or even subversion. Through Pamela and Charlotte Grandison, the novels generate a heteropessimist humour in which women’s dynamic wit ultimately promotes their marital subordination to flawed, disappointing men.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".