The Wicked Weeping Woman: A Reconsideration of Women's Agency in the Lament
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Drawing on philosophical frameworks of agency, autonomy, and vulnerability as developed by feminist opera scholars, this paper examines the use of the lament in the expression of female unhappiness through a comparison of the representations of the sorceress Alcina in Francesca Caccini’s La Liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola d'Alcina, and George Frideric Handel’s Alcina. This paper begins by exploring how Caccini’s Alcina’s lament, “Ferma, ferma crudele,” exposes her journey through anger, confusion, and finally grief over her lost love. Alcina’s vulnerable expression of grief inspires another woman to join her in lamenting, an act which instills Alcina with greater emotional agency. The paper then considers Handel’s Alcina, suggesting that his Alcina’s aria, “Ombre Pallide,” functions as a lament rather than an invocation aria. The presence of lament characteristics following her abandonment of the musical conventions of the invocation aria see Alcina gain the freedom and autonomy to act without her self-destructive magical powers, showing that this loss of power is actually her liberation. Ultimately, these considerations question existing assumptions that composers reject lament conventions in order to lend agency to their women characters, and create space for nuanced understandings of women’s vulnerability and agency.
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 | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| 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".