Women, Role Failure, and the Nuclear Family in Stephen King’s The Shining
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While Stephen King’s The Shining (1997) features a hotel haunted by ghosts, the main female character Wendy Torrance is much more haunted by her fear of failing to fulfill her gender role within the structure of the traditional, white, American nuclear family. In this paper, I analyze how the fear of being an unsuccessful wife and mother illustrates structural problems within the nuclear family that are detrimental to women. Not only do they produce persistent insecurity and anxiety, but they also reinforce the delegation of power to a sole patriarchal authority figure. The Shining reveals how these issues become especially problematic in situations of abuse. However, it also presents an opportunity for women to escape from both abuse and the fear of role failure: completely abandoning the structure of the nuclear family. Thus, The Shining illuminates inherent flaws within the nuclear family’s roles and suggests that women cannot find autonomy, freedom, or happiness within its confines.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| 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".