Challenging sympathy in Mary Shelley’s fiction: <i>Frankenstein</i>, <i>Mathilda</i>, and ‘The Mourner’
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Several critics have noted Mary Shelley’s engagement with the medico-philosophical concept of sympathy in Frankenstein (1818) and, to a lesser extent, in Mathilda (written 1819; published 1959), but no one has observed that these texts – and I would add her critically neglected short-story ‘The Mourner’ (1830) to the mix – work together to explore sympathy as problematic, both between characters and in terms of readerly affect. Unusually for the Romantic period, when sympathy was almost always viewed as positive, all three of these texts show how and when sympathy can go too far and become destructive, travel beyond the bounds of social norms, or even become dangerous. These fictions should be understood as a triad that tests popular notions about sympathy as unproblematically good, showing that the challenge of sympathy is an intellectual problem Shelley investigates for over a decade in her fiction.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".