(De)composing Gothicism: Disturbing the (eco-) Gothic in Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Bibliographic record
Abstract
hile Shirley Jackson's novels often use gothic elements (including omens, large and stately houses, a supernatural presence, and horror), We Have Always Lived in the Castle differs from other texts in Jackson's body of work: the last completed novel before her death in 1965, it is one of few works with a first-person protagonist, Merricat Blackwood, who subverts gothic tropes by being less victim than victimizer. 1 From Merricat's first appearance, we learn of her fondness for the death-cap mushroom, 2 a highly toxic fungus that is responsible for the majority of fatal mushroom poisonings each year: she explains, "My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, . . . I like my sister Constance . . . and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead." 3 From the very beginning, Merricat embodies the intersections of gothic and natural imagination, equating her sinister love of poisonous mushrooms to the maintenance of her quiet, sheltered life with Constance.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".