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Record W4280642740 · doi:10.16995/wwe.3375

A Quest for ‘Feminine consciousness’ in John Cowper Powys’s 'Porius'

2022· article· en· W4280642740 on OpenAlexaff
Robin Wood

Bibliographic record

VenueInternational journal of Welsh writing in English · 2022
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicReligious Studies and Spiritual Practices
Canadian institutionsMemorial University of Newfoundland
Fundersnot available
KeywordsConsciousnessWorshipMythologyChristianityNarrativePhilosophyLiteratureArtPsychoanalysisHistoryTheologyPsychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

John Cowper Powys’s last major novel Porius (1951) is a complex polyphonic narrative. However, its main concern is the spiritual growth of the eponymous protagonist. Porius matures through an increasing understanding of ‘feminine consciousness’, which Powys suggests is ‘deeper’than that of men and ‘contains a clue to the most basic understanding of reality’.  The novel is set in Wales in AD 499, just prior to the end of the Roman occupation, with a Saxon invasion impending. Powys began writing Porius in 1942, when Britain again faced an invasion,and he sees the twentieth century as a second Dark Age with Christianity being replaced by the worship of science and materialism, and Hitler’s Germany reflecting this trend in the extreme. Porius explores the idea that idea that evil originates from ‘some obscure struggle between men and women’ and Powys suggests that a bias toward ‘masculine consciousness’ leads to war, sadism, and violence.  The patriarchal aspects of Christianity are condemned by Powys, and he prophesises its replacement with the worship of the Mother Goddess. Mythology is a major element and the characters include King Arthur’s magician Myrddin (Merlin), his lover Nineue, Tennyson’s Vivien, and survivors of a race of giants. Powys’s ideas about ‘feminine consciousness’,were particularly influenced by C. G. Jung, various women in his life, and the novelist Dorothy Richardson, who represents for him an ideal of this consciousness.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.001
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.700
Threshold uncertainty score0.649

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.001
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.024
GPT teacher head0.284
Teacher spread0.259 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2022
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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