Narrating an Identity: Caterina Edwards’ The Lion’s Mouth, Mary Melfi’s Infertility Rites and Marisa De Franceschi’s Surface Tension
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Franceschi write about women searching for an identity.Their female protagonists are influenced by the gender roles they witnessed growing up while struggling to assert themselves as educated women.The search for identity-or the reconciliation of the selves-is well illustrated in the narration of Edwards' The Lion 's Mouth (1982), Melfi's Infertility Rites (1991) and De Franceschi's Surface Tension (1994).In different ways and in varying degrees, these novels depict the tension and the negotiation involved in defining a Canadian identity inscribed by an Italian heritage.The narratives are about defining, or focusing on, an identity by finding an equilibrium between opposing cultural forces.Each novel presents a main character who struggles to find her true self amid the duality of two cultures: her Italian heritage and the Canadian reality in which she was raised and educated.The tension between the components which make up the Italian-Canadian identity manifests itself differently in each of the novels.In Melfi's Infertility Rites, for instance, Nina DiFiore's struggle to distance herself from her Italian heritage, specifically as it is represented by her mother, culminates in a marriage to an Anglo-Canadian university professor -a sharp contrast to her uneducated immigrant mother.Eva C. Karpinski writes of Nina: "Unable to reconcile the tensions of her fractured identity, she is quite predictably haunted by a paralyzing sense of inadequacy and guilt.Her sense of herself as a woman is determined by her ethnic background, where 'Canadianness' rubs against 'Italianness'" (113).In De Franceschi's Surface Tension, the middle-aged Margaret Croff ponders her life, characterized by a constant tug of war between Italy and Canada, as represented by the two men in her life: the free spirited Italian lover, Daniele, and the conservative Jewish Canadian she marries, Steven Croff.Edwards' novel The Lion's Mouth
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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 | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it