MIRRORING SPACES OF WILDERNESS AND OBSESSION IN ALICE MUNRO’S “VANDALS”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Short stories by Alice Munro merge autobiographical themes with remarkable language and stirring imagery. This paper analyzes the impact of ‘wilderness’ and mirrors the complexities of the obsession with the human psyche in the lives of the characters of Alice Munro’s short story “Vandals”. She portrays the evil and the threat that prevails in the wild and its hazardous impact on the psychology of its characters where they face cognitive clinical manias. The objective of the present paper is to read “Vandals” with reference to Bertrand Westphal’s theory of ‘geocriticism’ as proposed in his book Real and Fictional Spaces (2007) to identify the psychic disorders that Ladner, Bea, and Liza possess in the story. The wilderness that is constantly set against civilization or the urban space, distorts perception and selfperception, which metaphorically is an intrusion into the mental space of an individual. The characters are driven by intrusive thoughts and dysfunctional beliefs which lead to the suppression of their thoughts and psychological obsession after encountering the wilderness of Canada. This essay analyses Alice Munro’s depiction of this Gothic setting through the Canadian environment and the character’s preoccupation with the wild. The significance of the wilderness as a place, both in its ‘physical’ and ‘abstract’ representations in Munro’s stories, has been attempted to be discussed.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".