‘The bloody fingers … bear witness’: Sign Language and the Mute Detective in <i>Susan Hopley</i> and <i>The Trail of the Serpent</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In her examination of signing characters in works of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Jennifer Esmail highlights deaf characters’ absence in Victorian fiction. Mutism is more common, for example, in the character of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's working-class, fingerspelling Detective Peters (70, 10n24). Even so, sign language – seen as ‘primitive’ and ‘lacking [in] intellectual […] rigor’ – was rarely represented (Esmail 3). Dickens, Collins and Braddon, proto-detective novelists themselves, were preceded by Catherine Crowe, whose 1841 novel Susan Hopley features Julie le Moine, a female, cross-dressing sleuth whose mutism does not prevent her from testifying using ‘signs’ and ‘the finger alphabet’ (III.100, 125). Julie's undercover work not only crosses class, gender, and genre boundaries, but her non-verbal evidence challenges women's exclusion from ‘“masculine” systems of representation’ symbolised by legal parlance (Irigaray 85). When detective fiction pits the private eye against traditional jurisprudential structures, the courtroom becomes a space where classed and gendered hierarchies inform testimonial evidence, reinforcing exclusionary principles that disenfranchise the ‘Other’. The sign language, fingerspelling and lip-reading of Julie le Moine, Joseph Peters and Richard Marsh's Judith Lee expose ableist and sexist barriers that seek to expunge the detectives from the legal record by excluding them from public speech.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".