Sentiment and Sexual Servitude: White Men of Feeling and <i>The Woman of Colour</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Woman of Colour (1808) refuses to provide its biracial heroine with “the usual meed of virtue— a husband !” This article argues that the novel’s dismissal of the marriage plot results from its scathing critique of white men of feeling. Olivia’s rejection of marriage acts as a Romantic-era version of Black women’s “culture of dissemblance”: a deliberate cultivation of privacy and dis-avowal of reproductive sexuality that is designed to evade the threat of sexual violation in a hostile society. Rather than abolitionist allies, sentimental men are shown to be self-serving and hypocritical: deploying benevolence, moral duty, and emotion to abuse and coerce. Sentimental paternalism entails white women’s conjugal misery, as the transatlantic marriage market secures British colonial networks at the expense of women’s happiness. Olivia’s white father facilitates his daughter’s exploitation at the hands of emotionally incontinent, self-absorbed, and sexually threatening white men of feeling whose behaviour discredits the authority of imperial masculinity and forces readers to evaluate the moral and political inadequacies of white abolitionism.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| 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".