Interracial Sex and Narrative Crisis in <i>The Woman of Colour</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As an epistolary novel, The Woman of Colour (1808) sets certain formal expectations, but strikingly fails to fulfill them. At its climax, the letters of its biracial protagonist Olivia Fairfield come to an end and are replaced by a correspondence between the book’s editor and his friend. This essay argues that readers’ loss of access to Olivia’s innermost thoughts and feelings is the formal manifestation of the novel’s inability to imagine a future for her in English society. Its choice of a literary form already out of fashion by its publication in 1808 speaks to a desire to return to a notional time before the extent of empire’s moral costs, which included the sexual abuse of enslaved women like Olivia’s mother Marcia, were fully known. In search of plausible deniability about slavery and the operations of capital, the novel finally exiles knowledge of those costs from its domestic sphere back across the Atlantic, when Olivia returns alone to Jamaica.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 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".