Autism and Refrigerator Mother Theory in Fiction: Pauline Holdstock’s Here I Am!
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Disability studies, in the beginning, focused on the visibility of impairments, and autistic characters, who do not show any visible symptoms, were disregarded. A multidisciplinary approach has recently resulted in integrating autism into humanities. Autism needs to be studied extensively in literary works since unjust representation is a major factor that causes neurotypicals to have fixed and prejudiced ideas about autistic individuals. Scientific studies, in the past, shaped and redefined people’s perceptions of autism. The term ‘refrigerator mother’, popularized by Bruno Bettelheim, was mentioned in Leo Kanner’s account of autism in 1943. The lack of motherliness was considered to be the cause of autism, which formed damaging clichés about autistic children’s mothers. Guilt-ridden mothers blamed themselves for their children’s autism. Autism, an inseparable identity, was treated as a negative effect of bad parenthood. Literary works, especially novels, may maintain or eradicate unjust perceptions of autistic children and their parents. This unfounded hypothesis called ‘refrigerator mother theory’ is not sustained today; however, in the past, it damaged the relationships between autistic children and their mothers. Popular opinion was convinced that mothers were to be blamed for autism. This study aims to discuss the relationship between an autistic child and his mother in the novel Here I Am! by Pauline Holdstock, a British-Canadian writer. It is clear that this unfounded hypothesis is not supported and reflected in the selected novel since the author offers the reader an intimate mother and son relationship in the novel which is in contrast with the typical cold and aloof mother with high intelligence and a needy child.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".