Viragoes, Spermatophagy, and Racial Degeneration: Cultural Contraventions in Josephine Butler’s Meditations on the Levite’s Woman
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The exponents of fin-de-siècle literary artistry painted New Woman a lascivious man-eating beast whose emasculating initiatives would check Western European ascent to civilization’s apogee. Unfettered by tradition, her intemperate spirit, blind to the fine(r) things of a “higher” cultural order, would return humankind to a primitive state. Literature and science, it seems, conspire along these lines to curb Late Victorian sexual-social anxiety. In this article, I situate Josephine Butler’s reading of the story of the Levite and his woman (Judges 19) in the stream of a broader challenge to the literary sensibilities of the time. Butler’s voluminous writings from the latter half of the nineteenth century brought a Christian acumen to bear upon a sustained critique of the androcentric and misogynistic persuasion at the heart of a cultural consensus on women’s character and sexuality. Her contention through an astute consideration of the Judges story is that a pervasive masculine animus of lust and rapine is the root of a crippling decline that is moral and religious, not strictly devolutionary. Yet, Butler’s favor for the tropes of the time—female salaciousness, mangled bodies, diseased members, and national degeneration—is resonant of language in the service of a broader consternation respecting the revisionary social-sexual movements afoot. Butler’s co-option of the cultural cadences in currency, I contend, is symptomatic of a shared ethos—that European dominance and splendor is the high-water mark of human achievement. In this respect, I propose, Butler’s critique of fin-de-siècle literary and scientific discourse is ambivalent. In rejecting and replacing the faddish cult of the inordinate woman with the scourge of the intemperate man, she stays, still, within the bounds of a British (and European) masterly optic on the non-European world.
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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 | 0.002 | 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".