Clothes without Bodies: Objects, Humans, and the Marketplace in Eighteenth-Century It-Narratives and Trade Cards
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While recent studies of the things of literature call attention to the narrative and psychological slippage between people and their possessions, this essay argues that rather than representing a loss for human agency, humans and things intermingle to the disadvantage of objects. I show how trade cards and object narratives engage with the same nexus of commercial culture, objects, and humans, and share a mutual resistance to “autonomous garments”—petticoats, shoes, gowns, and other garments depicted independently of the human form. Object narratives, read in tandem with trade cards, suggest that the growth of distance between persons and things, as opposed to their collapse into each other, constitutes a central narrative in the period's commodity culture and fiction. Object narratives, even as they transform coats, waistcoats, petticoats, slippers, and shoes into first-person narrators, actively work against the entanglement of human and material spheres. Together these genres place sartorial commodities under human control, emphasizing the human subject's agency over those items worn closest to the self.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".