A modernist meeting in Montparnasse: precarity and freedom in Jean Rhys’s <i>Good Morning, Midnight</i> and Cora Sandel’s <i>Alberta and Freedom</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When Jean Rhys was living in Paris in the years between 1918 and 1921 it is entirely likely that she at least saw the Norwegian writer Cora Sandel in the Dome café or elsewhere around Montparnasse, at Sylvia Beach's book store, or on the streets that form a character in both writers' Paris novels. Sandel, who was ten years older than Rhys, lived in Montparnasse between 1906 and 1921. Within just a few years of one another these two writers published achingly similar portraits of displaced women living in Paris among various cohorts of other foreigners. In gestures that decenter both the European hegemony that Rhys so resented and what Sandel saw as suffocating Nordic provincialism, both writers present a de-nationalized Paris that affords their characters certain radical freedoms while at the same time grinding them down economically and psychologically. This essay examines the precarity of the freedom that Sandel explores in Alberte og friheten (1931) [Alberta and Freedom] and the glimpses of rebellious freedom expressed in Rhys's portrait of precarity, Good Morning, Midnight (1939), as they mutually illuminate one another.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".