The monster in the dark: the monstrous maternal and abject black mother in Toni Morrison's Beloved
Bibliographic record
Abstract
[Introduction]: "Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) is centred on Sethe, a mother and an escaped slave.Through a non-linear narrative, the novel follows Sethe through her traumatizing memories of Sweet Home–the plantation in which she was a slave–as well as I24, her new home after her escape. Set in 1856 pre-abolition America, Beloved follows the aftermath of Sethe’s murder of her baby, Beloved, and the haunting of I24 by Beloved’s ghost. Sethe’s infanticide is revealed to the reader through a series of memories and stories from different neighbours of I24 and acquaintances of Sethe. Sethe is presented as a monstrous mother as she appears to her family and neighbours as detached from her maternal love and kinship. Throughout this essay, the research questions I will answer are the following: Who defines motherhood? How is grief exercised by a subject who is made abject? How is the concept of the monstrous maternal rooted in racial oppression Sethe’s murder of her child is seen as a cold and irrational act of violence; however, Beloved’s representation of black motherhood and slavery serves to complicate the narrative of the monstrous maternal."
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".