Freedom on the Frontier: Sharon Butala’s Novel <i>Wild Rose</i> as Existential Autofiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Wild Rose (2015), the seventh novel by Canadian prairie author Sharon Butala, the protagonist—young wife and aspiring homesteader Sophie Hippolyte—expresses profound anguish, rejection of upbringing and religion, and headstrong desire to remake herself on the prairie frontier of southwestern Saskatchewan in the mid-1880s. The novel marks a turn in Butala’s fiction toward atheistic existential philosophy, a progression from a questioning to a rejection of organized religion and an emphasis on complete freedom. This turn was prompted by her suffering and questioning as Butala dealt with the rather sudden death of her husband, the loss of her way of life on, and intimate connection with, the prairie landscape, and the need to remake herself. Indeed, Wild Rose can be considered “existential autofiction” in which Butala fictionalizes her experience of loss and her rejection of religion (specifically Catholicism) via Sophie, one of her most resilient characters, who seeks freedom on the frontier.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.014 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".